Category Archives: Right wing

How Daniel Pipes witch-hunts Middle East scholars

Posted on by Bob Pitt

US watchdog group hounds Middle East scholars

by Sarah Richards

Globe and Mail, 8 January 2005

Like any émigré to the United States, Tariq Ramadan was dependent on the stamp of somebody, somewhere, deep inside the Department of Homeland Security. His life was governed by waiting for one letter to set things in motion – packed bags, plane ticket, new job teaching at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

But after waiting seven months in vain for a visa, Mr. Ramadan decided to throw in the towel. “You know, I have kids here,” he said. “We are in limbo, we don’t know what will be our future, and I said, ‘Okay, it’s not going to work like that.'”

Mr. Ramadan was speaking from his apartment in Geneva in December. He had resigned his two Notre Dame positions, including one as the Henry R.Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace building at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

He never saw a student or even made it to the United States, because his visa was revoked days before he was to arrive in August. A second visa application proved fruitless.

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Monitor non-violent Islamists, says Pipes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniel Pipes applauds the crackdown on Muslim communities in Germany. Pipes is particularly taken with the proposal by Uwe Schünemann, the CDU interior minister in Lower Saxony, to make radical Islamists wear electronic foot tags: “Doing so, he says, would allow the authorities ‘to monitor the approximately 3,000 violence-prone Islamists in Germany, the hate preachers [i.e., Islamist imams], and the fighters trained in foreign terrorist camps’.”

But Pipes feels that this doesn’t go far enough: “If hate preachers are tagged, why not the many other non-violent Islamists who also help create an environment promoting terrorism? Their ranks would include activists, artists, computer gamers, couriers, funders, intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, lobbyists, organizers, researchers, shopkeepers, and teachers. In short, Schünemann’s initiative could lead ultimately to the electronic tagging of all Islamists.

“But electronic tags reveal only a person’s geographic location, not his words or actions, which matter more when dealing with imams and other non-violent cadres. With due allowances for personal privacy, their speech could be recorded, their actions videoed, their mail and electronic communications monitored. Such controls could be done discreetly or overtly. If overt, the tagging would serve as a modern scarlet letter, shaming the wearer and alerting potential dupes.

“The Schünemann proposal points to the urgent need to develop a working definition of Islamism and Islamists, plus the imperative for the authorities to explain how even non-violent Islamists are the enemy.”

Front Page Magazine, 3 January 2005

It’s reassuring to know that Pipes is willing to make “due allowances for personal privacy”.

Pipes favors concentration camps … for Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes concentration camps

“That the Revisionist-Zionist extremist Daniel Pipes has fond visions of rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps isn’t a big surprise. That a mainstream American newspaper would publish this David-Dukeian evil is. Of course, this is also a man that President Bush appointed to a temporary vacancy at the United States Institute of Peace, after the Senate understandably balked at a regular appointment for him.”

Juan Cole on Pipes’ plans for incarcerating Muslims.

Informed Comment, 31 December 2004

Read Pipes’ article here.

Plan for Muslim cemetery met with fear

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SOMERVILLE, Tenn. — Muslims planned to turn an old sod farm near Memphis into a cemetery, but angry neighbors protested, complaining that the burial ground could become a staging ground for terrorists or spread disease from unembalmed bodies.

It was not the first time a group faced opposition when trying to build a cemetery or a mosque, but the dispute stood out for the clarity of its anti-Muslim rhetoric.

“We know for a fact that Muslim mosques have been used as terrorist hideouts and centers for terrorist activities,” farmer John Wilson told members of a planning commission last month.

Similar disputes have arisen elsewhere when Muslim groups sought to develop mosques or cemeteries, which are often the first Islamic institutions in some communities.

Rabiah Ahmed of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said she noticed more protests of Muslim building proposals after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, so she was not surprised by the cemetery critics near Memphis. “It’s not shocking, but it is discouraging,” Ahmed said from the council’s headquarters in Washington.

Opponents told the Fayette County planning commission in November that power lines would be prime targets for terrorists in the region about 20 miles east of Memphis.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you may think this is far-fetched, but that is what the Jewish people thought when the Nazis started taking a small foothold, a little at a time, in their community,” Wilson said.

Belinda Ghosheh, owner of the five-acre plot being considered for the cemetery, said a meeting of planning officials drew such a hostile crowd she feared for her safety. One woman yelled, “We don’t need bin Laden’s cousins in our neighborhood.”

Associated Press, 27 December 2004

Do we want the Turkish peasantry here? Torygraph racist thinks not

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… one of the symptoms of the chronic immigration syndrome is that the intelligentsia of the host-country refuses to discuss, or even permit discussion, of its long-term consequences. Instead there is much witless, liberal maundering about the unassailable virtues of a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-ethos society.

“Well, my little liberal friends, it hasn’t turned out like that. Opinion polls show that 11 per cent of Britain’s two million Muslims approved of the attacks of 9/11, and 40 per cent support Osama Bin Laden. Nearly 1,200 British Muslims have been trained in terror camps in Afghanistan; three British Muslims have become suicide bombers. British police are – finally – investigating 122 possible ‘honour killings’ of women in immigrant communities.”

Kevin Myers in the Sunday Telegraph, 19 December 2004

More Daily Telegraph Islamophobia by Charles Moore

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“It will be said, and it is true, that the MAB does not represent moderate Muslims. But one has to wonder, different though their tone undoubtedly is and personally decent though most of them clearly are, whether moderate Muslims really disagree with the extremist doctrines. I have not been able, for example, to get the MCB (the main moderate organisation) unequivocally to condemn the killing or kidnapping of British soldiers in Iraq.”

Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, 18 December 2004

Christian pastors found guilty of vilifying Islam in Australia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Christian evangelical pastors Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot have been found guilty of condoning and promoting racist and vilifying remarks against Islam and the Muslim community. They were convicted in the Australian state of Victoria under a law against inciting religious hatred.

Scot told a seminar in 2002 that the “Muslims’ Qur’an is promoting violence, killing and looting and that Muslims were liars and demons”. He further claimed that Muslims are drawing up a plan of violence and terror to overrun the western democracies, warning that Australia would be turned into an Islamic nation over the increasing numbers of Muslims in the European country

Nalliah wrote that Muslim refugees were being granted visas to Australia while Christians who suffer persecution in Islamic nations were refused refugee visas. He also referred to the high birth rate among Muslims in Australia at a time the birth rate in general was dropping.

Islam Online, 17 December 2004

CNS News, 17 December 2004

We need protection from the pedlars of religious hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain replies to Charles Moore, in defence of the proposed law banning incitement to religious hatred.

Daily Telegraph, 14 December 2004

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer is not impressed: “What this law does is make Muslims a protected class, beyond criticism, precisely at the moment when Britain needs to examine, honestly and thoughtfully, the implications of having admitted into the country a large number of people with greater allegiance to the Sharia than to the present British state. The long night for Britain is just beginning.”

Dhimmi Watch, 15 December 2005