Category Archives: Right wing

Pope Benedict XVI: Enemy of Jihad

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. ‘Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,’ historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots ‘if it truly wants to survive’.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch holds out hope that the new Pope may mark an improvement on his predecessor who “kissed the Qur’an and pursued a consistent line of conciliation toward the Islamic world”.

Front Page Magazine, 20 April 2005

Melanie Phillips welcomes this as “a typically informed and thoughtful piece by Robert Spencer”. She agrees that “it is only if Christianity manages to retake the lost continent of Europe and revive its abandoned faith that the moral relativism behind whose banner Europe is marching steadily towards the cultural precipice will be defeated – and with it the colonising ambitions of Islam to fill the void”.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 20 April 2005

For Muslim concerns about the Pope’s vision of a “Christian Europe”, see Islam Online, 20 April 2005

This Pope is Catholic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Powerline: The real beef with Ratzinger, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Pope is Catholic.

Aardvark: The real beef with Qaradawi, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Islamist is Muslim.

The ever-excellent Marc Lynch exposes Western double-think when it comes to Catholicism and Islam.

Abu Aardvark, 19 April 2005

Muslim feminism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Toronto Star last week ran a gushing profile of Indonesian Muslim feminist Musdah Mulia, exulting that she ‘blames Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity’ in the Islamic world. This is closely related to a large-scale and continually growing problem: analysts attribute the actions of the global terrorist movement to a hijacking of Islam, without caring or daring to look squarely at what exactly it is about Islam that gives rise to fanaticism and violence.”

Yes, you probably guessed – another Islamophobic rant from Robert Spencer.

Front Page Magazine, 14 April 2005

“Spencer portrays himself as a scholar of Islam, and that he is not. He misquotes verses of the Qur’an, takes things out of context, and shamelessly lies.” Khaleel Mohammed replies to Spencer. (Errs on the side of mildness, if you ask me.)

Front Page Magazine, 18 April 2005

Met chief issues fresh terror warning

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britain’s most senior policeman has issued a new warning about the threat of al Qaeda terrorists targeting the UK. Sir Ian Blair is calling for new laws to tackle terrorist conspiracies and has asked for the introduction of ID cards to be given further consideration. His comments came in an interview broadcast on the Breakfast with Frost programme. And they follow the jailing of Kamel Bourgass for murdering a policeman and conspiring to cause a public nuisance after police unravelled an al Qaeda ricin poison plot.”

Sky News, 17 April 2005

Ian Blair did go on to say that Bourgass is “one individual, not the whole Muslim community” and that “99.9% of Muslims … are law-abiding people and we’ve got to support them in that and understand the difference”. He raised the question: “What is it that drives a tiny number of young men and women into extreme violence?”

This talk of extremists comprising a tiny minority of Muslims is the sort of wishy-washy liberalism that really irritates Robert Spencer: “99.9%? What was it, then, that made Al-Muhajiroun, a group that openly supported Al-Qaeda and spoke freely of wanting to see ‘the black flag of Islam’, that is, the flag of jihad, ‘flying over #10 Downing Street’, Britain’s largest Muslim group?”

Jihad Watch, 17 April 2005

Anyone who’s loopy enough to believe that the minuscule and marginal Al-Muhajiroun sect (which formally dissolved itself last year) is “Britain’s largest Muslim group” isn’t going to be taken too seriously, though. A bigger threat comes from those who make reference to Islamist extremists being a tiny minority and then use an almost certainly non-existent terrorist plot in order to call for repressive legislation that will impact on all Muslims.

For a response by civil rights organisation Liberty see BBC News, 17 April 2005

SWP: A pro-fascist party (say Jim Denham and David T)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David T at Harry’s Place has discovered (with the assistance of Jim Denham of the AWL) that “the SWP has become a pro-fascist party” – on the grounds that it “has chosen to ally itself with bigots with slightly brown skins”. (No doubt these bigots also cook strange foods and fail to observe Germanic standards of hygiene.) David T explains: “allying itself with organisations – like the MAB – which are essentially theoconservative, if not theocratic, is pro-fascism”.

Bear in mind that Harry’s Place recently featured in a Tribune list of left-wing blogs. And I suppose in a sense that’s an accurate categorisation, because the views expressed there do represent a section of what passes for the left. Just as the pressure of the Cold War stampeded some socialists into a bloc with right-wing anti-communists, the present rise in anti-Muslim hysteria has resulted in certain self-styled leftists losing their bearings and embracing the ideas and arguments of the Islamophobic right.

Harry’s Place, 15 April 2005

Al-Qaida ricin plot? Or not?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

After Kamel Bourgass was convicted for his part in an alleged Al-Qaida poison plot, while four other men were acquitted and charges were dropped against a further four, questions were raised as to whether there was in fact any plot at all.

Azad Ali of the Muslim Safety Forum, where top police officers and Muslim leaders discuss terrorism and other issues, said: “The ricin plot was part of government thinking and public justification in bringing in control orders. This will confirm the feeling in the Muslim community that it is being victimised on the basis of intelligence that was not tested in anything like a court, and when it is, it is thrown out.”

Guardian, 14 April 2005

Gareth Peirce, the solicitor for three of those found not guilty, called on the government to justify its claims about an Islamist terror plot: “There was never any ricin, there were no poisons made. There seems to be a pathetic, clumsy, amateurish attempt to make some by a man who was conceded, I think by all, to be a difficult, anti-social loner.”

BBC News, 14 April 2005

Richard Norton-Taylor points out: “The ricin claims were seized on most strikingly by Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, in his dramatic but now discredited speech on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programme to the UN security council on February 5 2003, five weeks before the invasion. Insisting ‘every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources’, Mr Powell spoke of a ‘sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network’.”

Guardian, 14 April 2005

The Islamic Human Rights Commission noted: “Over 90 arrests were made in the anti-terror sweep that netted the men with 9 charges and only a single conviction. Yet, sensational reporting by the media coupled with almost daily prejudicial statements by the government and security services create an environment of fear which fuels racism and Islamophobia.”

IHRC press release, 13 April 2005

The Telegraph, though, remains convinced there was an Islamist terrorist conspiracy, assisted by lax immigration controls: “An illegal immigrant trained by al-Qa’eda to be one of its top poisoners was jailed for 17 years yesterday for leading a plot to terrorise Britain with ricin and cyanide.”

Daily Telegraph, 14 April 2005

Unholy alliance: the ‘peace left’ and the Islamic jihad against America

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Horowitz and John Perazzo claim that the anti-war movement in the US has allied itself with Islamic terrorism. They present “the first in a series of articles and visual maps describing the unholy alliances that have been formed between American leftists and radical Islam, unlikely allies who have joined efforts to oppose America’s defensive War on Terror and its war of liberation in Iraq. These are mainly (but not exclusively) de facto alliances, much as the Hitler-Stalin Pact was an alliance of convenience based on a common interest”.

Front Page Magazine, 13 April 2003

Now what does that remind me of? Well, it’s almost identical to the nonsense we hear about the left in Britain from Nick Cohen, Harry’s Place et al.