Category Archives: UK

‘How Britain has given in to religious fanatics’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Mohammad Sidique Khan grew up in Dewsbury, a little town where 18 years earlier the parents of 26 indigenous Yorkshire children were demonised by the chattering classes for withdrawing their children from the local primary school because it had become largely Muslim.

“Here is encapsulated the enormous fissure between the kind of people who bomb a train and the kind who want England, and Christianity, to continue as they were before mass immigration began.”

The Daily Mail publishes excerpts from A.N. Wilson’s new book, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II, which claims that “mass immigration and political correctness have turned Britain into a haven for Islamic fanatics”.

‘Review mega-mosque in wake of bomb trial’ say Tories

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Neville-JonesMinisters should review plans to build a “mega-mosque” in the East End in the wake of the airline bomb plot trial, the Tories urged today.

Shadow security minister Dame Pauline Neville-Jones said the case had shown that the group behind the mosque may have given cover to extremist activity.

Tablighi Jamaat, which describes itself an Islamic missionary organisation, is pushing for the mosque to be built next to the 2012 Olympics site in Stratford. But the group was revealed in court as having links to some of the terror suspects, with several having passed through other mosques run by the group.

The organisation, which has 80 million followers worldwide, insists it is a peaceful, apolitical revivalist movement that promotes Islamic consciousness among individual Muslims. But intelligence agencies have cautioned that its ability to radicalise young men could lead to jihadist terrorism

Dame Pauline, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said today:

“The news that the terrorists convicted of the liquid bomb plot attended Tablighi Jamaat mosques is very disturbing. This is not the first time this has happened. Those convicted of the 7/7 bombings read Tablighi Jamaat sermons. Tablighi Jamaat claims to be solely a missionary organisation with a religious and charitable purpose.”

But Dame Pauline believes it gives cover to extremist activity. She said: “This must be taken into account when considering the planning application for the Tablighi-Jamaat mosque in east London.”

Evening Standard, 9 September 2008

Update:  See also “Patrick Mercer MP calls for investigation into orthodox religious group” in the Times, 10 September 2008

And “Airliner bomb trial: Fears raised over fundamentalist Islamic group in Britain” in the Daily Telegraph, 10 September 2008

SIF cleared over grants

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Islamic organisation with close connections to the SNP has been cleared by public spending watchdog Audit Scotland for the way it won Scottish Government grants. The Scottish Islamic Foundation is led by Osama Saeed, a Westminster candidate for the Scottish National Party, with an SNP researcher at Holyrood doubling as its spokesman.

Lord George Foulkes, a Labour MSP for Lothian, wrote to Audit Scotland asking it to investigate the grants. Auditors found that an application for running an event to celebrate Islamic culture and promote Scotland in Muslim countries was dealt with by officials in the Race, Religion and Refugee Integration Grant Scheme and met the criteria.

Herald, 4 September 2008

Let Muslim women speak

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The last few weeks have been particularly eventful for Muslim women on Comment is Free. We would have felt extremely exhausted by all the excitement, were it not for the fact that – with the notable exception of Samia Rahman and Reefat Drabu – we were spared the ignominy of having to participate in the debate ourselves.

“AC Grayling started us off by equating the headscarf with an iron shackle and stating that Muslim women are complicit in their own oppression. In the process of attacking the abhorrent denial of freedom that Muslim women can wrongly suffer, Grayling (in)advertently takes away the very same freedom of choice to decide to wear the hijab if we choose.

“Julie Burchill bigged up Christianity, and in the process scathingly dismissed Islam and Muslim women. The only “Muslim” women she suggested as role models – Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji – were those she claimed had rejected Islam and were no longer Muslim….

“Islamic theology has a strong framework for a blueprint of gender equality…. we may say, believe and do things which don’t fit in with the caricature of a Muslim woman who would be desperate to be ‘liberated’ from Islam if only she knew it.

“You may find our voices reverberating with the view that we like being Muslim women, we just want to make our lives better and in line with true Islamic principles. It would be nice if those who debate vociferously about Muslim women would therefore move over and give us the seat at the table that we’re demanding.”

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed at Comment is Free, 2 September 2008

Muslim wrongly accused of being a terrorist wins £14,000 compensation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim police worker who was “maliciously” reported to the anti-terrorist squad by colleagues after the July 7 bombings has been awarded almost £14,000 compensation.

Mohammed Hussain, 30, was investigated by the Met’s specialist counter-terrorism command after false accusations from co-workers that he was an Islamic extremist.

He told an employment tribunal that he was made to feel “isolated and lonely” when colleagues “conspired” against him, especially after the July 7 attacks on London. Mr Hussain, a researcher in the Metropolitan Police’s forensic analysis unit, said he was made to feel like “a pariah”.

Daily Telegraph, 3 September 2008

See also the Daily Mail, 3 September 2008

BNP church fire comment ‘despicable’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fat fascistA top Lincoln Tory has branded the words of BNP leader Nick Griffin as “despicable” after he commented on a fire at a church in the city which was about to be converted into a mosque.

The leader of the far-right party sent a statement to the Echo in the wake of a blaze at St Matthew’s Church. Griffin, who lives in Wales, said: “Perhaps a local householder was driven mad by the thought of being engulfed by a miniature version of Lahore.”

Lincolnshire Echo, 3 September 2008

Update:  Meanwhile, over at the BNP website, Voice of Freedom editor Martin Wingfield advances the bizarre theory that the Muslim community itself is responsible for the fire! “It’s a scorched earth policy which starts with the destruction of the places of worship of non-Muslims and it is happening in towns and cities across Britain where Islam is on the offensive.”

Mind you, Wingfield’s grip on reality is a bit weak generally when it comes to Islam. He goes on to warn his readers:

“The growing influence of Islam within Britain continues apace and the silence that greets this colonisation by stealth is deafening…. In those areas where Muslims are now the majority, they have moved from claiming ‘equal rights’ with the host population, to imposing their demands on the non-Muslim population….

“In many areas of Britain, it is we, the British, who are now the minority! From London boroughs such as Tower Hamlets and next door Newham (where over 75% of births are of babies not of British origin) to towns and cities such as Peterborough, Luton, Leicester, Bradford, and Birmingham, entire districts have been Balkanised by the ever increasing Muslim population creating within Great Britain, ‘Greater Pakistan’, ‘Greater Bangladesh’, and even ‘Greater Somalia’!

“Within these semi-autonomous areas there is no ‘host community’ for the colonists to integrate with – the ‘host’ British have been ethnically cleansed. Hence the new ‘majority community’, these very colonists, are now re-engineering local society to replicate the Muslim societies they ostensibly left behind in Pakistan, or wherever, when they came to Britain.”

The 2001 census puts the Muslim population in Tower Hamlets at 36.40% and in Newham at 24.31%. Further east, in Barking & Dagenham – where the BNP has been gaining ground by appealing to paranoid fantasies about Christian civilisation succumbing to the spread of “Muslim majority” areas – the figure falls to 4.36%, compared with a Christian population of 68.99%.

‘Decents’ on the Muslim threat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Why is this man regarded any more favourably than Pat Robertson or Stephen Green’s Christian Voice?”

The question is posed by one Max Dunbar in the current issue of Democratiya, house journal of the “decent left”, and the man in question is Tariq Ramadan.

This sort of thing does our job for us. As we’ve remarked in the past, those who promote the view that Professor Ramadan represents some sort of fundamentalist threat to Western society discredit themselves more effectively than we ever could.

Continue reading →

MPs too scared of Muslim voters to challenge forced marriage, claims Cryer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ann CryerPoliticians are too scared to speak out against forced marriage in case they lose valuable Muslim votes, according to a veteran Labour MP.

Ann Cryer said politicians in areas with high Muslim populations, many of which are Labour heartlands, should be at the forefront of the campaign to stop young couples being made to wed against their will by their families. Mrs Cryer said:

“There still is a nervousness to talk about this, especially those MPs in constituencies affected by these issues.They should be fighting on the front line, but they are the ones keeping quiet on the issue because they don’t want to lose votes.

“Some of the Muslim leaders in my area are doing their communities a disservice and trying to keep them in the backwoods. They don’t seem to have any understanding about the importance of having integration and cohesion, or to promote women to leadership roles in the community.”

However Mrs Cryer’s claims have been dismissed by Khalid Mahmood, the Muslim Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. He claimed that MPs would not be so easily swayed by the perceived opinions of their constituents, and pointed out that many politicians supported the war in Iraq despite opposition from Muslim voters.

Mr Mahmood said: “In terms of being scared, I think that’s complete nonsense. Most MPs will speak their minds because that’s what they’re there for and most of them are strong enough characters. People do things because they believe in them, not because of this cynical reason. If that was the case, MPs would have stood up against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.”

He added: “I’ve been adamantly against forced marriage and people have supported me in that. We’ve also got a rigid system with the embassy in Islamabad now and although it is an issue, it’s not an epidemic as Ann sometimes makes it out to be.”

Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2008

Fascist applauds Channel 4 documentary

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The BNP’s representative on the London Assembly applauds “Undercover Mosque – The Return”, broadcast by Channel 4 – who, as Barnbrook puts its, “unlike other media outlets, do not exhibit the customary subservience to the religion of multiculturalism”:

“For those who did not catch this programme you can see the whole Saudi-orientated shooting match by accessing Channel Four’s excellent catch-up facility here.  It details literally thousands of Islamic facilities being set up in this country by the use of £billions of Saudi money. Not wishing to spoil the context of the documentary I can tell you that on the proposed agenda in a Sharia Britain, would be the stoning to death of adulterers and death sentences for those wishing to leave the religion of peace.”

Richard Barnbrook’s blog, 2 September 2008