Category Archives: UK

‘Another milestone in our slide towards national suicide’ – more hysteria over Sharia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Leo-McKinstry“The Govern­ment’s craven appeasement of militant Islam is plumbing new depths. Under the guise of promoting tolerance, Ministers are tearing apart the legal fabric that was once part of the bedrock of our civilised society.

“In a shameful move, Jack Straw’s Ministry of Justice has announced that the Muslim sharia code, notorious for its oppression of women, is to be endorsed by the British judicial system for the first time….

“This new act of surrender to the ideology of Islamic separatism runs counter to all the assurances that Labour politicians have given in recent months.

“When the Daily Express reve­aled last year that sharia courts were informally operating in Muslim areas of London and northern England, we were accused of ‘scaremongering’….

“It is inevitable that there will now be a vast expansion of the role of sharia courts within Muslim areas. This creation of a parallel system of justice makes a mockery of the essential principle, stretching back to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, that everyone is equal before the law….

“This is not the road to tolerance but the very opposite – in place of integration we will see distrust, suspicion and antagonism as Muslim hard­liners ruthlessly expand sharia’s role, creating enclaves of bigotry and oppression….

“The Government has adopted this stance entirely for reasons of cynicism and fear. On the one hand, Labour is desperate to win the votes of the two-million strong Muslim community. It is no coincidence that more than a quarter of the voters in Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency are Muslim. On the other, like all too many Western governments, Labour is fearful of standing up to the zealots as every Muslim demand is accompanied by the clenched fist of violence or the finger hovering over the bomb control device.

“That is why the creeping Islamification of Britain will continue – not because Muslims have overwhelming numbers but because our leaders are unwilling to defend our values. The adoption of sharia is another milestone in our slide towards national suicide.”

Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express, 27 October 2008

Nick Clegg attacks Policy Exchange for ‘offensive’ and ‘underhand’ briefing

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has attacked thinktank Policy Exchange over its call to boycott the upcoming Global Peace and Unity event in London. The thinktank had circulated a dossier questioning apparent extremist background of several of the events speakers. However Mr Clegg, who is due to speak at the event accused the thinktank’s director of “bizarre and underhand behaviour”, and questioned the validity of the evidence.

Liberal Democrat Voice, 24 October 2008

Read the Policy Exchange dossier here.

Update:  See also The Green Ribbon, 26 October 2008

ENGAGE launches FREE Pocket Guide to Media and Politics

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Engage pocket guideENGAGE will launch its FREE full colour “Pocket Guide to Media & Politics” at the Global Peace and Unity exhibition this weekend. Don’t miss this opportunity to pick up your copy!

After too many years on the sidelines of political and public debate on Islam in Britain, ENGAGE will enable Muslims to find their voices and places in the public sphere; in the media and in politics, by promoting participation through training seminars and indispensable resources that every engaged Muslim can’t do without.

The ENGAGE Pocket Guide is the handiest, most useful resource in the wallet of any Muslim committed to engaging with British society. ENGAGE have produced a 100,000 copies of the laminated, full colour pocket guide for free distribution around the UK.

The guide will be available at the GPU and at the ENGAGE community presentations that will begin in November. See “ENGAGE in the Community” for more details on the presentations.

Visit the ENGAGE stall at the GPU (stall number M03) and pick up your pocket guide this weekend! See www.theglobalunity.com for details and tickets to the event at London’s ExCel Exhibition Centre, Saturday 25 – Sunday 26 October.

Engage, 24 October 2008

Teenage bomb plot accused cleared

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two teenagers who were accused of discussing a plot to blow up British National Party members have been cleared of terror charges. Waris Ali, 18, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, was found not guilty of three counts of possession of an article for a terrorist purpose. His school friend Dabeer Hussain, 18, was acquitted of one count of the same charge at Leeds Crown Court.

Friends and family of the two men hugged in the public gallery as the jury returned their verdicts after deliberating for two and a half hours.

During the trial, the court heard that the two men had discussed a plan to spy on and blow up members of the BNP. They were both accused of possessing a terrorist manual on their computers, called the Anarchists’ Cookbook, and researching bomb-making techniques from “recipes” on the internet.

Mr Hussain, of Clarkson Street, Dewsbury, said he had been sent a copy of the Anarchists’ Cookbook but had not read it and was not interested in politics. Speaking outside the court after the verdicts, Mr Ali said he was “extremely relieved” that he had been cleared of the charges but was angry about how he had been treated.

“I believe that if I was not from a Muslim background, I would not have been prosecuted,” he said. “I have had to live in fear of being branded a terrorist. I feel it was completely obvious once the police looked up the evidence that I had nothing to do with terrorism at all. Silly teenage chat and things I said at school were taken out of context and presented as if it was evidence that I was an extremist.”

BBC News, 23 October 2008

Veiling and security

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Metro niqab pictureThe Metro carries a story on the comments made by Admiral Lord West, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter Terrorism, to the Commons Defence Committee meeting yesterday on “UK national security and resilience” where he said that ending radicalization among young British Muslims could take up to 30 years.

The newspaper complements the news item with a picture of Muslim women in niqab. Is it any surprise that some Muslim women have had their veils forcibly torn from their faces when newspapers allude to connections between forms of Muslim dress and stories on terrorism and security?

You can write to the newspaper via email: mail@ukmetro.co.uk or post: Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT.

Engage, 22 October 2008

Can we take the opportunity to give a big plug to this excellent new website.

‘Using Halal meat is just insulting’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“I write expressing my concern at the report regarding Halal meat to be on the menu and served at Derby Schools (Evening Telegraph, October 10). England prides itself on the high quality of good meats used and served in our English schools. It is absolutely stomach-turning to even think of Halal meat, and to expect white, English Christian children to eat such unhygienic meat is an insult to our children and our schools.”

Letter in the Derbyshire Evening Telegraph, 21 October 2008

Posted in UK

Senior Anglican boosts hysterical campaign against Newham ‘mega-mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Building a mosque next to the Olympic site could create a breeding ground for extremists, a senior Church of England official has warned. Dr Philip Lewis, an interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said that the plans threaten to establish a ghetto of Muslims taught to embrace jihad.

In the first intervention by a Church figure over the controversial project, Dr Lewis raised fears that a 12,000-capacity mosque in London would lead to a segregated Muslim community. The mosque would be four times the size of Britain’s largest cathedral. “Tablighi Jamaat does not try to engage with wider society so there must be clear worries that such a mosque would lead to a ghetto,” he said. “The danger is that this becomes a self-contained world, which would be vulnerable to extremists.”

His comments follow a private meeting of Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy earlier this month who fear that the mosque could have a negative effect on east London, the proposed site for the building. Councillor Alan Craig, who leads the Christian People’s Alliance and organised the meeting, said that Dr Lewis’s contribution to the debate was a great boost to the campaign to block the mosque.

He said: “For someone of Philip Lewis’s stature and experience, who has good relations with Muslims, to make these comments is a great help to our campaign. It shows that this is a reasoned campaign against the mega-mosque and is not built on Islamaphobia, but on facts and evidence.”

Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008

Frankly, you’d have thought Philip Lewis would know better. It’s a matter of days since he was himself denounced for his connections to another Deobandi organisation, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Britain (JUB), which has been attacked in similar terms to Tablighi Jamaat.

Update:  For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 20 October 2008

No hijab at schools: UK minister

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasOnly two weeks in his post, Britain’s new immigration minister believes that hijab should not be allowed at British schools. “People wear veils for different reasons: some out of religious conviction. some because they’re forced to. It should be up to them,” Phil Woolas told The Times on Saturday, October 18. “But at school you shouldn’t wear one. It’s harder to get a good education if you wear a veil as you’re more cut off.”

Islam Online, 18 October 2008

Islamophobia Watch hesitates to defend Phil Woolas, but to be fair we think he was talking about a ban on the niqab rather than the headscarf (not that we’d support that either, of course). But he should be asked to clarify his remarks.

Incidentally, we can’t help noting that Woolas’s Times interview, with its call for “a tougher immigration policy” and unpleasant talk about “putting British people first” and “not pandering to Hampstead liberals” over immigration, is reproduced with evident approval by Searchlight on their Stop the BNP site. Presumably they, like Woolas himself, think that the way to stop fascism is to adopt the fascists’ own rhetoric.

BNP claims credit for preventing further Islamification of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne

Posted on by Bob Pitt

newcastle-patriot-oct-2008.PDFThe British National Party in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne has claimed credit for the reversal of a scheme to build a mosque and a development dubbed “Asia Town’ in the west end of that city.

“We fought long and hard against this further destruction of Geordie culture,” said Ken Booth, North East Regional Organiser and tireless BNP campaigner in the city. “The decision by the council to reverse the plans to build the mosque is undoubtedly down to the massive Newcastle BNP’s ‘Say No to Asia Town’ campaign and the second place in Elswick in the May local elections,” he said.

BNP News, 16 October 2008

Death for apostasy?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Reading AC Grayling’s latest article and listening to the protestations of the Council of Ex-Muslims, you would think that the death penalty is being gratuitously and frequently applied to those who renounce Islam or harbour thoughts of apostasy. As a Muslim who has lived most of my life in Muslim countries, this picture is hard to recognise.”

Nesrine Malik at Comment is Free, 17 October 2008