A Philadelphia judge says a Muslim firefighter who refuses to shave his beard on religious grounds should keep his job for now while his legal case unfolds. Robert Spencer denounces this example of “political correctness and spurious tolerance”, and implies that an insistence on growing facial hair may not be the only threat this firefighter poses to public safety.
Category Archives: Right wing
‘Islam’s double standard’ poses ‘threat to United States’
“Islamic countries apply a double standard when it comes to the treatment of ‘holy books’ and people who differ in faith and practice from Islamic dogma. While Islamic groups in the United States are engaged in ‘sensitivity training’ sessions for non-Muslims that have included federal workers, the Ohio National Guard and U.S. Air Force Academy, there are no such training sessions directed at Muslims to teach them tolerance for non-Islamic faiths. Quite the contrary.
“While the slightest verbal or physical slight of any Muslim in America is immediately condemned by activist groups and sometimes the U.S. government, the denigration of Jews and Christians throughout much of the Islamic world is theological and political business as usual. Jews are regularly referred to as ‘apes and pigs’, mostly because that is what the Koran calls them…. To accept this Islamic double standard creates a significant threat to the United States.”
Cal Thomas at Townhall.com, 2 June 2005
Bush says Amnesty report ‘absurd’
US President George Bush has dismissed as “absurd” an Amnesty International report that said the US was setting back the cause of human rights. The human rights group described the US Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba as “the gulag of our time”. There have been allegations that guards at the camp had desecrated the Koran, prompting protests in Muslim countries. But Mr Bush said on Tuesday: “The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.”
Earlier, US general Richard Myers has described Amnesty’s report as “absolutely irresponsible”. How do you handle people who … who aren’t part of a nation-state effort, that are picked up on the battlefield … that if you release them, or if you let them go back to their home countries, that would turn right around and try to slit our throats, our children’s throats?” he said.
Cf. the evidence of former US Sgt Erik Saar who stated that, of the 600 prisoners held at Guantánamo, no more than a few dozen were “hardcore terrorists”. He added: “The US Government portrays Guantánamo as a place where we are sending the worst of the worst, but this is not true. Guantánamo … set a precedent in labelling people as enemy combatants, blurring the line between right and wrong. You can see it as the seed that may well have led to the naked human pyramids in Abu Ghraib.”
Still, Michelle Malkin has read Saar’s account of abuse at Guantánamo, and declares herself impressed by “just how restrained, and sensitive to Islam – to a fault, I believe – the officials at the detention facility have been”.
For Amnesty’s reply to Bush, see here.
Discover the terrorist-supporting commies
“The detention facilities at Guantánamo, including Camp X-ray and Camp Delta, were constructed specifically to house individuals apprehended in the war on terror. Enemy combatants held at the camp must be foreign nationals who have either received training from al Qaeda, or who have been in command of 300 or more military personnel. They are among the world’s most brutal and committed Islamist enemies of the United States. By incarcerating and interrogating them, the U.S. hopes to gain crucial intelligence that could thwart future terrorist attacks against America and to keep them from returning to the terror war against the United States.”
Well, that’s reassuring. Thank God for Discoverthenetworks.org, is all I can say. They also provide a useful exposé of the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission, succinctly defined as a “human rights group committed to defending Islamic jihadists captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan and being detained at Guantánamo Bay”.
The piece continues: “The GHRC was founded by actress Vanessa Redgrave, a Trotskyite with a venomous hostility towards the state of Israel, and her brother, actor Corin Redgrave. A founder of the Marxist Party and a supporter of the Communist Workers Revolutionary Party, Ms. Redgrave has a long history of supporting terrorists…. GHRC co-founder Corin Redgrave is also a committed Communist and an apologist for terrorists.”
Discoverthenetworks.org, 1 June 2005
Discoverthenetworks deserve credit for exposing this plot against the free world. As a glance at its website reveals, the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission includes among its sponsors such notorious figures as Peter Bottomley, Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Margaret Drabble, the Bishop of Oxford and other well-known supporters of Islamist terrorism.
Guantánamo torture claims – ‘straight out of the Al-Qaida handbook’
“An al Qaeda handbook preaches to operatives to level charges of torture once captured, a training regime that administration officials say explains some of the charges of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp…. If captured, the manual states, ‘At the beginning of the trial … the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison’.”
There is an unholy alliance – Horowitz
“British Laborite and progressive George Galloway calls for a formal uniting of the left in the West with the Islamic jihadists in the war on terror. Lawyers led by anti-American, pro-Communist, jihad sympathizer Michael Ratner descend on Guantánamo.”
David Horowitz claims vindication for the thesis presented in his book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left that “the progressive left in the West was in a de facto alliance with the Islamic jihadists”.
Evening Standard’s ‘provocative and sensationalist’ reporting: MCB writes to London mayor
The Muslim Council of Britain has written to Ken Livingstone, asking for his support in combating “the often provocative and sensationalist style of reporting of Muslim affairs in the London paper, Evening Standard”.
The MCB is particularly concerned by the Standard’s misleading account of the recent protest outside the US embassy against the desecration of the Qu’ran at Guantánamo. The MCB includes a selection of the abusive and threatening emails it has received as a result of the Standard‘s irresponsible journalism.
Why pick on Pipes?
In a recent email to Islamophobia Watch, George Carty writes: “…why have you included a lot of stuff about Daniel Pipes – a pretty bog-standard neoconservative – but nothing about far more extreme Muslim-haters such as Ali Sina (http://www.faithfreedom.org) or Jamie Glazov (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=3)? It pains me to see Glazov’s sexualized ranting, or the warmongering of Victor Davis Hanson, go unrefuted. By the way I suggest you link to LGF Watch at lgfwatch.blogspot.com and Warblogger Watch at warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com.”
I suppose the reason for picking on Daniel Pipes is that he does exercise (or has done in the past) some influence on mainstream politics in the United States. Although Pipes now seems to have been rather sidelined by the administration, in 2003 Bush asserted his presidential powers to ensure Pipes’ appointment to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, overruling objections by a Senate committee. Last year, through his widely published articles on the issue, Pipes played an important role in justifying the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to withdraw Tariq Ramadan’s work permit and prevent him taking up his post at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
The other figures mentioned by George have received some coverage on Islamophobia Watch, and perhaps should have received more. But there is the question (and the same consideration applies to reporting the postings on Jihad Watch) as to whether comprehensively covering the ravings of individuals from the lunatic fringe of the US Right gives undue weight to their views. See for example yesterday’s demented rant by Ali Sina on FaithFreedom.org.
Of course, I lack any in-depth knowledge of US politics, and perhaps people like Sina have more influence than I attribute to them.
If anyone feels we’ve missed out on any relevant material please email us the details at editorial@islamophobiawatch.co.uk
Jihad Watch goes UK
“Political correctness is turning lethal. Stockport Council is now using resource packs provided by the Muslim Council of Britain to teach schoolchildren about Islam, an initiative which is to be extended across the nation.” Melanie Phillips in another frothing-at-the-mouth attack on the MCB.
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 30 May 2005
Here’s a further reason why it would be a mistake to dismiss Robert Spencer as a politically marginal fruitcake. Mad Mel (whose views reach a mass audience via her Daily Mail column) not only bases her article on a post from Spencer’s blog (see here), she even borrows the title for her article from him – “Dhimmi Britain”.
Spencer, for his part, reciprocates with a tribute to “the incomparable Melanie Phillips”.
For a reply to Phillips by Yusuf Smith, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 30 May 2005
Spencer spells it out
“I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.” Robert Spencer spells it out.
This is the man who has also written: “Islam is not a monolith, and never have I said or written anything that characterizes all Muslims as terrorist or given to violence.” See here.
So, while it’s tempting to dismiss Spencer as an irrelevant right-wing crank, his pious declarations that he doesn’t regard all Muslims as terrorists, accompanied by more hardline statements that this is exactly what he does think they are, presents in a particularly crude and transparent form the sort of double-talk we hear from more sophisticated Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes.
Update: For Spencer’s response, see here.