Category Archives: UK

EDL animals object to being treated like animals

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The leader of the far-right English Defence League has vowed to stage a large national protest in Dewsbury after complaining that supporters were treated like “caged animals” at a demonstration in the town on Saturday.

A protest by 400 EDL supporters passed off without serious incident but leader Tommy Robinson was angered that the protesters were contained within high steel barriers. He said the EDL should have been allowed to protest at Dewsbury Town Hall, rather than a tightly cordoned area of the railway station car park.

Mr Robinson said Saturday’s protest was a regional demonstration but the next one in would be national and “the EDL bandwagon will be coming back to Dewsbury in our thousands”.

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Harry’s Place applauds LSE for offering platform to anti-Muslim bigot who supports ethnic cleansing

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Benny MorrisOver at the Islamophobic blog Harry’s Place Michael Ezra can scarcely contain his excitement at the news that Israeli historian Benny Morris will be speaking at the London School of Economics tomorrow at the invitation of the LSE Middle East Centre. The organisers state: “The lecture will look at various aspects, some of them innovative, of the 1948 War, the first between the Arabs and Israel.”

Benny Morris is the man who, in a notorious interview with Haaretz in 2004 entitled “Survival of the fittest”, supported the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and only regretted that the Zionist leadership had not gone further.

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Nottingham University spies on students

Posted on by Bob Pitt

University of Nottingham logoConfidential documents relating to a suspected Islamic bomb plot have revealed that security staff from a leading university have been secretly filming students on campus as a method of monitoring potential extremists.

More than 200 university documents – along with material from the Met’s counter-terrorism command, Special Branch and the Crown Prosecution Service – detail the controversial techniques being deployed to monitor students.

The documents, published on the website Unileaks, follows the government’s publication of its Prevent -terrorism strategy, which is aimed at targeting radicalisation in universities but has sparked concerns that it could fuel Islamophobia.

The material charts the consequences of the May 2008 arrest by counter-terrorism officers of Nottingham student Rizwaan Sabir and of Hicham Yezza, who worked as an administrator at the university’s school of modern languages.

Sabir had downloaded an al-Qaida training manual as part of research for a dissertation, and had sought Yezza’s help in drafting a PhD proposal because of his position as editor of a political magazine. Although campaigners say the manual was available in the university’s own library and that versions are available from retailers Blackwell’s, Waterstone’s and Amazon, university officials alerted the police. Both men were released without charge six days later.

Even so, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the arrests were mentioned in a report, cited by the Home Office, called Islamist Terrorist Plots in Great Britain: Uncovering the Global Network.

They also reveal how university security staff kept a log of Middle East-related activities on campus, including details of talks and seminars revolving around Palestine and other issues. Nottingham University admitted that it “routinely” filmed students who protest on campus, and recorded a demonstration last month in connection with the arrests.

Staff and students who spoke out in support of Yezza and Sabir were logged by a Whitehall counter-terrorism unit called the Research, Information and Communications Unit, which is embedded in the government’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. Shami Chakrabarti, director of pressure group Liberty, said: “Is it right that universities are taking on policing duties?”

Last month, Nottingham University lecturer Dr Rod Thornton was suspended for writing an article criticising the university’s treatment of Sabir. In a paper prepared for the British International Studies Association, he alleged the university “refused to apologise to the men” and attempted to smear them. He wrote: “Untruth piled on untruth until a point was reached where the Home Office itself farcically came to advertise the case as a ‘major Islamist plot’.”

The university responded by suspending Thornton, who lectures on security issues and is a former infantryman who served in Northern Ireland. That prompted an international outcry in which 67 academics, including the renowned US scholar Noam Chomsky,demanded his “immediate reinstatement”. The group described the original arrests as “indicative of a growing tide of Islamophobia”.

Thornton, speaking after his ninth disciplinary hearing on Thursday, said: “It’s about academic freedom, but also the wider issue of the way Muslim students are treated. Suspicions are being raised when they should not be.”

Observer, 12 June 2011

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Muslims call for action against hate crimes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MCB banner

Britain’s largest mainstream Muslim organisation will today call for “robust action” to combat Islamophobic attacks amid fears of growing violence and under-reporting of hate crimes.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) will challenge the “ethnic profiling” of members of its community, claiming that minorities are 42 times more likely to be targeted under the Terrorism Act.

MCB secretary-general Farooq Murad will tell the council’s AGM in Birmingham that there must be more monitoring of anti-Muslim crimes in response to incidents including violent assaults, death threats and the desecration of graves. He will also complain that not enough is being done to encourage communities to report crimes to the police.

The calls, supported by leading academics, a counter-terrorist think-tank and Muslim groups, come as the Metropolitan Police confirmed a total of 762 Islamophobic offences in London since April 2009, including 333 in 2010/11 and 57 since this April. A spokesman said the Met was aware of “significant” under-reporting of hate crime, and acknowledged “missed opportunities” to keep victims safe.

Despite rising concerns about the impact of hate crime on all communities, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said that data on such offences are not collated centrally as this would be an “overly bureaucratic process for local forces”. Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, who leads the police on hate crime, was unavailable for comment.

In his speech, Mr Murad is expected to warn that attacks are increasing. “Islamophobic attacks, on persons and properties, are committed by a tiny minority, but the number of incidents is increasing. Robust action is necessary and this means we must have a systematic manner of recording, monitoring and analysing such attacks. Only a small number of police forces record anti-Muslim hate crimes.”

He will claim that figures collated from only two police forces indicate 1,200 Anti-Muslim crimes in 2010, as opposed to 546 anti-Semitic crimes from all the police forces in the UK.

Muslims from across the country have reported attacks on imams and mosque staff, including petrol bombings and bricks thrown through windows, pigs’ heads being fixed prominently to entrances and minarets, vandalism and abusive messages.

Mr Murad will tell the gathering at the Bordesley Centre: “It is not a piece of cloth on someone’s head or face, the shape of someone’s dress, a harmless concrete pillar on a religious building or even not speaking a common language that creates alienation.”

Dr Robert Lambert, co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre and research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter University, said a decade of research will report before the 10th anniversary of 11 September. His report will provide comprehensive figures on attacks on mosques, Islamic organisations and Muslim institutions, while avoiding confusion over race-related or random attacks.

Dr Lambert, a former counter-terrorism police officer, said problems over data collection stemmed from a lack of political will, rather than from the police efforts – and that the onus was on Muslim communities to emulate the “outstanding” data collection around anti-Semitic crimes conducted by the Community Security Trust.

He added: “When I was working in the police, some of the notable spikes in incidents came after terrorist events such as 9/11 and 7/7. We have more than 50 incidences of fire-bomb attacks and we have yet to reach the 10-year anniversary. But no leading politician has seen fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with mosque leaders. That is quite something.”

Some 40 to 60 per cent of the mosques, Islamic centres and Muslim organisations in the UK have suffered at least one attack since 9/11.

Independent on Sunday, 12 June 2011

‘Spooks unmask burka death squads’ – Daily Star announces a ‘world exclusive’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Brit spooks have stopped SIXTY terror plots involving Black Widow bombers. Many of the Muslim women who were pulled in were carrying explosives, we can reveal. Other radicals as young as 17 had bomb materials stashed in their homes across the country.

The operation started when a dozen women in the London and Greater Manchester areas were picked up in security sweeps but allowed to go free. They were put under surveillance and led the spooks to more than 30 terror group leaders. But it is feared there are at least 20 of the Black Widow bombers still at large and ready to carry out their deadly missions.

A senior security source said: “The terrorists rely on a woman in a black flowing dress not being stopped. They can’t be searched easily because of their strict rules and it’s hard to see what they are hiding under their robes. A lot of people would think twice about searching them for fear of offending religious rules or being accused of sexual harassment or indecency.”

A senior security source has revealed that in the past year between 50 and 60 attacks have been averted after spies infiltrated Muslim terror cells.

Female suicide bombers have been used by the Taliban and rebels in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and by groups including the Tamil Tigers and Hamas to target civilians and soldiers.

Last year, two women bombed two Moscow subway stations killing at least 38 people and injuring over 60. Chechen “shahidkas” or Black Widows attacked Russian troops in Chechnya and were among a group that took 850 hostages in the Moscow theatre siege in 2002. The stand-off lasted two-and-a-half days. Russian forces killed 38 attackers and at least 129 hostages.

Daily Star on Sunday, 12 June 2011

Yet another anti-Muslim scare story from the Star. Of course, they provide no evidence at all that the security services have uncovered “sixty terror plots involving Black Widow bombers”. And if you read to the end of the report, the only quotes the Star‘s intrepid reporter can get from the police give no support to the story at all.

You do wonder what point there is in Richard Desmond formally distancing the Star from the English Defence League when this sort of irresponsible journalism feeds the culture of ignorant bigotry in which the racist far right can thrive and grow.

Casuals United Daily Star burka death squads story

‘Police covered up violent campaign to turn London area Islamic’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Undeterred by the fact that his shoddy journalism recently led to his employers apologising to the East London Mosque and removing his inaccurate report from their website, Andrew Gilligan returns to promoting his fantasy about the “Islamification” of Tower Hamlets in today’s Sunday Telegraph.

Predictably, this latest episode in Gilligan’s witch-hunt has been taken up by the EDL:

EDL Andrew Gilligan

Here are some of the comments from EDL supporters that the article has inspired. Gilligan must be really proud of himself.

EDL comments on Gilligan's Telegraph article

Islamaphobia, middle class journalists and the Pim Fortuyn List?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Terry Stewart of Out East has responded (in a personal capacity) to the statement/open letter by LGBT activists reported in yesterday’s Guardian.

Islamaphobia, middle class journalists and the Pim Fortuyn List?

Far be it from me to quote Conservative Chairs, but Sayeed Warsi is more progressive than the individuals who drafted the Guardianletter, when it comes to the issue of Hate.

“Islamophobia has now crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability. It is a socially acceptable form of bigotry, often dressed up in the clothes of liberalism.”

One look at the letter and you begin to see a pretty nasty scenario unfolding, if not opposed by people who are genuinely opposed to all forms of hate, whether it is racism, homophobia, Transphobia and Islamaphobia.

The LGBT community are not alone when it comes to attacks upon our community simply for daring to be who we are and living an open and loving life with the person of our choice, dressing or choosing our identity in what way we want.

Trans people are constantly in fear of their lives, whilst on the street or in their homes, yet one members of this list, has made it her life’s ambition to be as hateful as is possible to the Trans community.

One look at the murder rate of Trans people World wide and you begin to see that the highest murder rate of Trans is in Latin America and not in the Middle East or countries which practice the faith of Islam.

Look at the figures of hate crime against the LGBT community in the London area and again we see that the highest rates are not in Tower Hamlets or communities with a high density of Muslim people. The figures speak for themselves:

21% increase in Tower Hamlets,
26% Westminster,
26% Lambeth,
29% Brent,
60% Islington,
60% Croydon,
62% Sutton,
75% Enfield,
83% Havering,
83% Kingston-upon-Thames,
125% Harrow.

Actual numbers of reported homophobic crime are, 21% rise in Tower Hamlets is a total of 81 cases in the last year, an additional 14 cases. 88 cases in Islington in the previous year before, a 60% increase to 131 cases. It equals the 82 cases in Camden achieved after a 13% reduction. It is significantly less than Westminster’s 148 cases and Lambeth’s 132.

I remember in the 80’s the Rev George Hargraves (Who produced the Gay anthem of the period Macho macho man song by Sinita) from a Hackney Evangelical church, making some of the most horrendous homophobic statements. At no stage did we see this as the voice of the Black community, simply the rantings of an individual homophobe, who was also happy to pick up the royalties generated by his Gay anthem.

The statements which were made on the Homophobic stickers were also just the rants of a small group of Homophobes and again most of the LGBT community in East London felt the same.

So why are a small group of Journalists, Writers, Rag Tag and Bobtail pushing the story that the Muslim community in Whitechapel is baying for the blood of the East London LGBT community?

Tower Hamlets is not alone when it comes to a small section of the LGBT community linking in with the Far Right. Look at other cities in Europe and you see members of the far right along with member of the LGBT community marching into Immigrant communities and attacking those communities and the argument of Homophobia is used as the reason for such actions.

This is also reflected in the political arena, with a sizeable section of the LGBT community falling into line with this racist and Islamaphobic right. We seen this in the Netherlands with the rise of The Pim Fortuyn List.

As I said at the beginning we are not alone in the LGBT community when it comes to hate crimes. Many Muslims across the country are being terrorised by racist thugs and yet we hear nothing about it.

Young women are spat on in the street, Mosques are attacked and fire bombed. Even the dead are not allowed to rest. Graveyards have been desecrated. From Leicester to Scunthorpe this has been the experience of the Muslim community. Yet if the group who signed the article are serious about hate crime, then they have to extend that support to the Muslim community, something they not only fail to do, but end up becoming part of the mob.

I think the authors of the letter need to address the whole communities’ experience of hate, rather than attacking and undermining the very valuable work carried out by the East London LGBT Community, Tower Hamlets Council, The Metropolitan Police and the East London Mosque, in our attempt to deal with Homophobia, Transphobia, Islamaphobia and all hate crime in our community.

We have and will continue to challenge Homophobia, from which ever quarter this comes including all faith groups and it is for this reason that Rainbow Hamlets and other held a conference on Faith and Homophobia, here in Tower Hamlets last month.

We will be having a festival for the whole community specifically around hate and our priority will be aimed at making sure the LGBT community is totally included in every aspect of community life here in Tower Hamlets.

Editorial Note: This excellent article is taken from the Facebook group East London is a Hate Free Zone.

Trade unionists and youth unite against racist EDL in Dewsbury

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Trade unionists came together with Muslim young people to oppose the racists and fascists of the English Defence League in Dewsbury today.

Around 200 people from Dewsbury and neighbouring areas of West Yorkshire showed their support for multiculturalism and their opposition to the EDL thugs at the event organised by Kirklees UAF and supported by the local Unison branch, other trade unionists and faith leaders.

The antiracist demonstrators included trade unionists from the Unison, NUT, CWU and GMB unions among others, plus a large and lively contingent of young Muslims, standing up proudly against the Islamophobic EDL.

Speakers at the rally included NUT rep Martin Jones, Pat Jones of Kirklees Unison, CWU rep Simon Midgely, Ashiq Hussein, chair of We are Bradford, and UAF joint secretary Weyman Bennett.

The EDL mobilised across the North of England and the Midlands to bring between 300 and 400 to their racist “protest”, with racist and fascist thugs coming from as far afield as Leicester, Newcastle and Merseyside.

They had attempted to assemble in nearby Bately before heading for Dewsbury, but were gathered up by police and escorted on buses into their assigned spot in a Dewsbury car park.

UAF news report, 11 June 2011

EDL demonstration: counter-protesters rally at Maidenhead Mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Maidenhead Mosque counter-protestCounter-protesters staged a demonstration at Maidenhead Mosque today following a march by the English Defence League (EDL) in Maidenhead’s town centre.

The EDL held a protest in the town from about 10.30-1pm today, against the Islamic Trust’s plans for a new cultural centre near Maidenhead Mosque.

Police lined the town centre streets during the demonstrations today. They also patrolled surrounding areas including Moor Lane in the North Town area of Maidenhead, where about 100 Muslims, Unite Against Fascism members (UAF) and residents, staged a counter march – heading their way towards Maidenhead Mosque.

UAF members, many of whom were not Muslim, went inside Maidenhead Mosque at about noon before sitting inside – where members from the Muslim community prayed.

Talking outside the mosque, members of the crowd said they were there to defend the place of worship. “Many of us are worried that EDL members will come here and try to deface or ruin the mosque. It is our place of worship so we are here to defend it if we need to,” said a 22-year-old man who wished not to be named through fears he will be targeted.

Maidenhead Advertiser, 11 June 2011

See also “EDL protest: Protesters march and make speeches in town centre”, Maidenhead Advertiser, 11 June 2011

French Muslims use our cash to fight burkha ban (not)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Express had two of its perennial bugbears – immigration and Europe – in its sights this morning when it reported that a Muslim couple that had settled in Britain were to use taxpayers’ cash to fight France’s burkha ban in the European Court of Human Rights.

Its headline boldly declared that: “French Muslims to use our cash to fight burkha ban.” The first paragraph fleshed this out in more detail: “A French Muslim couple sparked fury yesterday by using a free legal service paid for by British taxpayers to challenge their country’s controversial burkha ban.”

However readers able to splutter their way through to the end of the article might have noticed a slight problem: none of the story as told in the bulk of the article was actually accurate.

The Express includes a cursory quote at the end of its article explaining that the couple concerned were not actually receiving public money, as was loudly proclaimed in the headline.

It read: “But a Legal Services spokesman said that even if taxpayer-funded IAS lawyers were representing the couple, that service would not be paid for by legal aid. He added that they only gave legal aid to cases involving British law and concerned with immigration.”

While the Express no longer subscribes to the Press Complaints Commission, we hope its editors would agree that articles such as this mislead and misinform the paper’s readers. We will therefore be asking the Express to print a correction.

Full Fact, 10 June 2011

EDL swallows Express fairytale