Category Archives: UK

Boris thinks Muslim voters are fools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee draws our attention to a leaflet supporting Boris Johnson’s mayoral candidacy that was distributed outside Palmers Green Mosque last Friday. In an attempt to counter the Muslims 4 Ken campaign, the leaflet assures the Muslim community: “You have been lied to. In recent weeks, Ken Livingstone’s cronies have been visiting mosques in London to circulate offensive material about Boris Johnson. They have been misleading you with leaflets suggesting that Boris Johnson is anti-Islam ….”

For Johnson’s real views on on Islam, see here, here and here.

Boris Islam leaflet

‘St George’s Day parade scrapped – in case it upsets Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A march to celebrate St George’s Day has been axed – because the authorities fear it could spark race riots. About 1,500 children were due to take part in a parade to commemorate the patron saint of England on Wednesday. But council bosses in Bradford, West Yorks, have ditched the event over concerns it could upset the Asian community, many of them Muslim.”

Daily Star, 21 April 2008

The new generation of renegades

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Edgar“Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s…. Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance – justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism – with the far right.

“The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq….

“Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation – on these understandable grounds – to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.

“For, let’s be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object – the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities – is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he’s declaring war on the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, but his ‘thought experiment’ about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) ‘until it hurts the whole community’ makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque. Cohen is careful to point out that ‘Islamism has Islamic roots’, and, clearly, the group that he dubs the ‘far right’ goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami.”

David Edgar in the Guardian, 19 April 2008

‘Reject the support of Islamists’ urges Toube

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Harry’s Place blogger David Toube argues that politicians should reject endorsements from the Muslim Association of Britain.

“Like the BNP, the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood is desperate to participate in mainstream politics, and to be recognised as the pre-eminent moderate Islamist voice, capable of acting as a bulwark against al Qaida. That is rather like turning to the BNP in the hope that they’ll help hold back fascist terrorist groups like Combat 18…. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party should move quickly to make it clear that mainstream politics can do without the support of fascists.”

London mayoral election: It’s really no contest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GEORGE GALLOWAY argues why the choice facing Londoners couldn’t be clearer.

Morning Star, 19 April 2008

Any doubts about the topography of the battlefield in the race for London Mayor ought to have been dispelled this week with the shrill escalation of the Evening Standard’s attacks on Ken Livingstone.

Hundreds of billboards across the capital repeated the front page headline, “Suicide bomb backer runs Ken’s campaign.” It was a masterful piece of propaganda straight out of the playbook of the 1930s fascist propagandists whom Associated Newspapers were so attached to at the time.

The story actually amounted to little more than the fact that the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), an organisation that has co-hosted the major anti-war demonstrations, is working with others to ensure a large turnout of Muslim voters in the capital and is strongly advocating a vote for Livingstone for mayor.

The BMI is also calling for a vote for myself for the assembly and for Respect’s candidate in the City and East London constituency, Hanif Abdulmuhit.

Now you might have thought that Muslim activists arguing for democratic political engagement and taking part in lobbying, meetings, leafleting and all other activities that attend elections in Britain would receive plaudits from the self-styled defenders of the mother of parliaments. But no – the worthy aim of getting hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters to turn out at the polls is apparently evidence of a sinister, anti-democratic plot.

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Binmen in Muslim areas ordered by police to snoop in residents’ rubbish bins

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police chiefs ordered binmen to act as spies by sifting through rubbish to look for pamphlets produced by Islamic terror groups. Town halls responsible for areas with large Muslim populations were summoned to London and told to get their refuse collectors to search bins for discarded documents or material that might identify and incriminate Islamic extremists. But the bin-searching instruction was deemed so potentially damaging to community relations that councils simply refused to carry out any sort of spying.

Bradford City Council leader Kris Hopkins said: “We were asked to snoop on our own residents by getting our binmen to rummage around people’s rubbish. But the idea that our binmen should be rooting around a wheelie bin to see if they can spot dodgy bits of paper or funny wires is ridiculous. Our binmen aren’t there to act like the secret police. They’re there to empty our bins. It goes without saying that if any of our staff spotted something illegal they’d call the police. But our job is to bring communities together, to help our communities live side by side, not do the dirty work for MI5.”

Mail on Sunday, 19 April 2008

Colleagues jailed for race abuse

Posted on by Bob Pitt

McDermott, Skett and MelaneyThree men have been jailed for three years for a campaign of racial harassment against a Muslim colleague.

Amjid Mehmood was tied to railings and force-fed bacon while a rucksack with protruding wires was put on his locker, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

Fellow road maintenance workers Lee McDermott, of Rowley Regis, and Sean Melaney and Phillip Skett, both from Birmingham, admitted racial harassment.

The nine-month campaign of abuse came to light when Mr Mehmood told police.

McDermott, 31, from Blue Stone Walk, Sean Melaney, 28, of Steatham Grove, Kingstanding, and Skett, 39, of College Road, Erdington, were each jailed for three years.

BBC News, 17 April 2008