Category Archives: State Oppression

Cross party coalition says no consensus on anti-terror law

Posted on by Bob Pitt

United CommunitiesOn the day the government published its anti-terrorism bill, a broad cross-party coalition met to challenge a number of the government’s proposals.

The coalition says that the concessions announced by the government do not go far enough so that in its present form the legislation will not command the cross party and cross community consensus which is essential for it to be successful.

The coalition brings together the Mayor of London, the Scottish National Party, the Liberal Democrats, Labour MPs, the Green Party, major trade unions, Liberty, lawyers, the main Muslim organisations, Sikhs, Christians, the peace movement and many others.

The coalition held its first meeting on Wednesday 12 October, at Central Hall Westminster with one of the broadest platforms ever brought together around a single issue. Around one thousand people attended the meeting.

GLA press release, 13 October 2005

This law won’t fight terror – it is an incitement to terrorism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… as the mayor of London pointed out yesterday, support for Nelson Mandela, the wartime resistance and any number of anti-colonial liberation movements would all have been crimes under this bill. In practice, of course, the law is intended to be used selectively: it is aimed not just at those who praise bomb attacks on the London tube, but at Muslims and others who believe that Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans and others have a right to resist occupation.

“If there were any doubt about that, Blair’s stated intention to use this bill to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir – reaffirmed this week by the Home Office – should dispel it. There is little love lost among many Muslims – let alone non-Muslims – for Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for a restored caliphate (or unified Islamic political authority) throughout the Muslim world and against participation in elections. Although it denies being anti-Jewish, the organisation had on its website until recently a statement which by any reckoning crossed the line from anti-Zionism into anti-semitism.

“But there is also no evidence at all that it is involved in terrorism – it condemned both the London bombings and the 9/11 attacks. It does not, however, condemn armed resistance in Iraq and Palestine, which is how the government plans to catch it. Along with the criminalisation of support for resistance movements, such a ban on a non-violent political party would be unprecedented in modern British history. When set against the toleration of the routinely violent and relentlessly racist British National party, it is scarcely surprising that Muslim opinion is overwhelmingly hostile to all the main planks of the legislation.”

Seumas Milne in the Guardian, 13 October 2005

US chaplain condemns ‘war on Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim chaplain working for the US Army in Guantánamo Bay condemned his country’s “war on Islam” yesterday. James Yee told BBC radio that Islam is currently seen by US forces as the “religion of terror.”

When soldiers saw the chaplain practising the same faith as the prisoners that he ministered, he was treated with great suspicion and eventually arrested for “espionage,” he revealed. Mr Yee was accused of adultery and storing pornography on a government computer and was locked up in solitary confinement for 76 days, before all charges against him were suddenly dropped.

He spoke yesterday of the “atmosphere of hostility” toward all Muslims at the torture camp. “We say that the war on terror is not a war against Islam. But that is not how it felt most days at Guantanamo,” Mr Yee said.

“Every man behind the steel mesh wire of the cages practises the same religion, a religion that many people who work inside the prison understand only as the religion of terror. I was praying like the Muslims prisoners prayed. That must have meant to many people there that was somehow connected to extremism or terrorism,” he said.

All of the British citizens locked up at the US outpost in Cuba have been brought home, but one British resident remains there, in limbo and on hunger strike, because the Foreign Office refuses to help him. Libyan refugee Omar Deghayes lived in Britain for 20 years but never registered as a British citizen, so the government says that it has no duty to intervene on his behalf.

Independent peace campaigner Rachel Critchley will stage a 12-hour peace walk through London tomorrow, dressed in a bright orange Guantánamo-style boiler suit and shackles, to raise awareness of Mr Deghayes’s plight.

Morning Star, 13 October 2005

See also Islam Online, 13 October 2005 

Dutch unveil the toughest face in Europe with a ban on the burka

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Netherlands is likely to become the first country in Europe to ban the burka, under government proposals that would bring in some of the toughest curbs on Muslim clothing in the world.

The country’s hardline Integration Minister, Rita Verdonk, known as the Iron Lady for her series of tough anti-immigration measures, told Parliament that she was going to investigate where and when the burka should be banned. Mrs Verdonk gave warning that the “time of cosy tea-drinking” with Muslim groups had passed.

The proposals are likely to win the support of Parliament because of the expected backing by right-wing parties. But they have caused outrage among Muslim and human rights groups, who say that the Government is pandering to the far Right.

Times, 13 October 2005

See the comment by Yusuf Smith, who points out the misapplication of the term “burka” to any form of Islamic veil – which is in fact what Verdonk is proposing to ban. He also takes on the raving Islamophobes at Harry’s Place. And he introduces us to the term “jafi“, which I think should enjoy wider currency.

Indigo Jo Blogs, 13 October 2005

Target Muslims says Daniel Pipes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes“The detailed texture of Mr. Bush’s speech transforms the official American understanding of who the enemy is, moving it from the superficial and inadequate notion of ‘terrorism’ to the far deeper concept of ‘Islamic radicalism’. This change has potentially enduring importance if finally … it convinces polite society to name the enemy. Doing so means, for example, that immigration authorities and law enforcement can take Islam into account when deciding whom to let into the country or whom to investigate for terrorism offenses. Focusing on Muslims as the exclusive source of Islamists permits them finally to do their job adequately.”

Daniel Pipes in the New York Sun, 11 October 2005

Marc Lynch reports on Pipes’ performance on al-Jazeera: “Bush’s speech, according to Pipes, indicates that the American government is worried about what is in the Arab media, and that the governments and institutions running those media should expect greater American pressure to behave responsibly. (He does have a point, you know: it’s hard to argue that al-Jazeera doesn’t give a platform to extremists when Pipes keeps getting invited back…)”

Abu Aardvark blog, 12 October 2005

Ministers ban 15 ‘terror groups’

Posted on by Eddie Truman

Fifteen international groups believed to be terrorist organisations are set to be banned, the Home Office has said.

These are on top of 25 international organisations already proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000, and a further 14 already banned in Northern Ireland. They include groups with links to Iraq, Uzbekistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Morocco.

The government is also planning to change the law so that it can ban groups which glorify terrorism. Being a member of a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 can be punished by a 10-year prison term.

BBC News, 10 October 2005

Egyptian reveals fresh Guantánamo horrors

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Egyptian man freed from Guantanamo detention camp has revealed that US guards in the notorious facility “took pleasure” in torturing the inmates, who have been held for over four years without charge or trial. “The torture I suffered in the military camp left me crippled in a wheelchair,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Sami Al-Leithy as telling the Egyptian television Sunday, October 9, night. “They used to grab me by the arms and then hurl me on the floor, on my back. They took pleasure in torturing us,” he said.

Islam Online, 10 October 2005

Jihad Watch on the ‘clash of civilizations’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The phrase ‘clash of civilizations’, made famous by Samuel Huntington, is misleading. In Huntington’s formulation (he owed an unacknowledged good deal to Adda Bozeman, who taught at Sarah Lawrence in the days when Kurt Rausch taught painting to well-bred young women and Randall Jarrell was taking notes for ‘Pictures from an Institution’), there are the Sinic, the Orthodox, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Western, and so on. And these are all potentially clashing. But this is nonsense. There is only one clash that counts: that of Islam with all of non-Islam.”

Hugh Fitzgerald give his take on the “clash of civilisations” thesis.

And what solution does he propose? “… to put a complete stop to Muslim immigration, and to find creative ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens. These two measures would be accompanied by the creation of an environment where the practice of Islam is made not easy but difficult. Meanwhile, authorities would engage in wholesale efforts to explain, both to the population of Europe and to the Muslims in its midst, the real nature of Islam. They would explain why it is encourages despotism … economic paralysis … intellectual failure … and moral failure.”

Jihad Watch, 9 October 2005

Set Farouq Kamara free

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BLINK today launches a campaign to free Farouq Kamara from behind bars where he is languishing after defending his family from attack.

Devout Muslim Mr Kamara blames police for failing to protect his family during six years of racist and Islamophobic abuse. They were forced to flee the Hampshire village of Stubbington. Mr Kamara, 45, was jailed for five years after admitting carrying a loaded gun. The IT specialist, who did not produce the gun or threaten to shoot anyone, said he intended to kill himself in front of his persecutors.

The case contrasts starkly with Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, who became a right-wing cause célèbre after shooting dead 16-year-old gypsy burglar Fred Barras at close range. Unlike Mr Martin, who was released in August 2003 after serving three years behind bars, Mr Kamara has never touched his persecutors.

BLINK news report, 4 October 2005