The National Secular Society rallies to the defence of poor Sarah Desrosiers, the hairdressing salon owner who refused to employ a young Muslim woman who wears a headscarf. Now, where is it we’ve come across that argument before? Oh yes, it was here.
Category Archives: UK
Muslims ‘let down by race law’
Anti-Muslim prejudice is dealt with less seriously than other forms of discrimination, a university study found. The research conducted at Bristol University examined 30 years of Government legislation and legal rulings to distinguish the difference between prejudice towards race, ethnicity and religion.
In the study, Dr Nasar Meer, research associate in the Department of Sociology at Bristol, found that Muslims are let down by race legislation because being a Muslim is recognised as a lifestyle choice or a “voluntary identity”. Dr Meer says other religious identities – such as Sikh and Jew – have had race law applied in their favour in a way not extended to Muslim communities. He said many Muslims view their faith as an “involuntary identity” as they are born into the religion.
He said: “We explored what legislation exists to help protect people with what we call an involuntary identity. People with an involuntary identity shouldn’t be disadvantaged by others’ views. The legislation should offer them support and make sure they’re not discriminated against. Muslims have been totally missed out of the protection offered by race-relations legislation because it treats Islam as a religion and not a race.”
Dr Meer said he has come across various examples of when hatred towards Muslims was dismissed but hatred towards other religions had not been tolerated.
Press Association, 31 January 2008
Download Dr Meer’s article here.
See also University of Bristol press release, 31 January 2008
Rector attacks mosque call to prayer
The rector of one of Oxford’s largest Anglican churches last night called plans to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer from the city’s main mosque “un-English”. Charlie Cleverly, of St Aldate’s Church, in a seven-point statement to his congregation, called on the Central Mosque, in Manzil Way, to drop its plans to broadcast the messages.
He said: “I feel it is un-English and very different from a bell. When such an area is subject to such a call to prayer, it may force people to move out and encourage Muslim families to move in…. Bells are just a signal and have been around for 1,500 years. They are a terribly English part of our culture. I do not believe in the imposition of another culture on our country.”
Muslims ‘lay siege to Australian hospital’?
At his Holy Smoke blog, Telegraph leader writer and Catholic Herald editor Damian Thompson recycles a story from Robert Spencer’s Dhimmi Watch site:
“After the death of a young Muslim man in a car crash in Sydney last month,” Thompson writes, “an Islamic crowd invaded a hospital in order to stop medical tests being carried out on the body in contravention of Sharia law, according to the Dhimmi Watch website. If the report is true, then this is another example of a global campaign by fundamentalist Muslims to replace civil law by Sharia – a process that has already taken root in British cities.”
Thompson goes on to quote the report from Spencer’s site: “The antecedent to the Muslim incursion on the Hospital came about on Monday the 17 December last, when a young Muslim male was airlifted to the Liverpool Hospital’s emergency ward by helicopter. The 19-year-old had been in a serious car accident, his car left the road and crashed into a tree … he died of his injuries, and it seems he and his hijab-wearing girl friend had been celebrating the end of Ramadan.”
The Australian blog Austrolabe comments: “If the victim and his ‘hijab-wearing girl friend’ were, as the anonymous author claims, celebrating the end of Ramadan when they had a serious car accident, why did this obviously critically injured young man wait two months before he was admitted into a hospital? In 2007, Eid ul-Fitr (the celebration marking the end of Ramadan) was on the 11th of October. This man was supposedly admitted into Liverpool Hospital on 17th December, 2007. We know that waiting lists at Liverpool Hospital are long, but that long?”
Update: Thompson has recanted. See Austrolabe, 31 January 2008
It’s time to herald the Arabic science that prefigured Darwin and Newton
In this era of intolerance and cultural tension, the west needs to appreciate the fertile scholarship that flowered with Islam, argues Jim Al-Khalili.
Muslims in London: challenge Boris Johnson tonight!
“Boris Johnson will be answering questions on the BBC London (94.9FM) drive-time show at 5pm this evening. If it follows the same pattern as Ken Livingstone’s last week, the interview will happen at 6pm. The hosts are Eddie Nestor and Kath Melandri.
“Boris Johnson has been challenged many times about his remarks about Africans (piccaninnies etc) and on one occasion told the interviewer he was sick of talking about it. However, nobody has challenged him about his record as editor of the Spectator. In response to the July 2005 bombings and to the riots in Paris and elsewhere later that year, he printed articles only from non-Muslims hostile to Islam: himself, Mark Steyn and Patrick Sookhdeo….
“This man must be challenged! The number for the station is 020 7224 2000; email eddieandkath at bbc.co.uk or text 07786 200 949.”
Yusuf Smith at Indigo Jo Blogs, 30 January 2008
Cameron seeks ‘hate preachers’ ban
Conservative leader David Cameron has called for a ban on “preachers of hate” entering the United Kingdom. Mr Cameron accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of dithering over the case of Islamist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, following press reports that he is to be granted permission to come to London for medical treatment.
The Tory leader branded Mr al-Qaradawi – and the head of Hezbollah’s TV station Ibrahim Moussawi, who recently spoke in Manchester – “dangerous and divisive” and said they should not be allowed in the country. And he called for a complete ban on Islamist political movements Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Hezbollah.
Speaking at the first meeting in London of a working group between the Conservatives and the main German centre-right party the CDU, Mr Cameron is due to say: “It’s clear for reasons of our security that we must expel or refuse entry to those who preach hate, pit one faith against another and divide our society.
“So I call on the Government to confirm that it will not be giving al-Qaradawi permission to enter this country and that it will not repeat the mistake of last December and make clear that Moussawi is not welcome in the UK.”
Press Association, 29 November 2008
See also Pink News, 28 November 2008
Mick Hulme gets it wrong again
“Islamophobia? It seems as if we are suffering more from Muslim-mania – an unhealthy obsession with all things Islamic, and a paranoid fixation with looking at the world from behind a veil…. Jacqui Smith has even officially renamed Islamic terrorism as ‘anti-Islamic activity’. Never mind walking Hackney’s mean streets, the Home Secretary appears most scared of treading on Muslim toes.”
Salma and sectarian hatred
“Salma Yaqoob’s entire political career has been devoted to stirring up sectarian hatred.”
Another Melanie Phillips style rant from David Toube, the barking bigot from Harry’s Place.
Amis and the untermenschen
William Dalrymple reviews The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s new collection of essays and short stories about the post-9/11 world:
“Only in one place in the book does Amis actually come across a living Muslim. Arriving at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem after it has closed for the night, he tries to talk his way into the enclosure, and is rebuffed by the guard. ‘I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face’, he writes, ‘when I suggested … that he … let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant.’ This hysterical reaction, and the strong whiff of racial prejudice it gives off, is smelled again and again throughout this book.
“Islamists, in Amis’s view, are not people with a political complaint against the West and its foreign policy. Instead, they are all ‘irrationally abstract’ in their hatred of America, ‘haters of reason’ whose ‘armed doctrine is little better than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide’, ‘fanatics and nihilists’ who have created ‘a cult of death’ and wish to ‘eliminate all non-Muslims’.
“It is the lack of nuance that is most alarming. For Amis, all Islamists are the same, whether mass-murdering jihadis, or completely non-violent but religiously conservative democrats. Nor is it just the militant Islamists he dislikes: ordinary Muslims are regarded with equal contempt. He writes, with deep distaste, of ‘the writhing moustaches of Pakistan’ and ‘the shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood’ that Christopher Hitchens encounters in Peshawar. It seems, to Amis, that people’s religion and ethnicity can remove them from rational discourse, and relegate them to the position of untermenschen.”