Category Archives: UK

Diversity – ‘a recipe for anarchy’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The sharp increase in Scots who feel distanced from Muslims, as revealed in a survey conducted before the foiled attack on Glasgow Airport in June, has produced remarkably similar responses from members of the Scottish establishment. Communities Minister Stewart Maxwell has promised ‘leadership’ to fight prejudice and Osama Saeed of the Muslim Council of Britain has called for ‘educating the wider public’.

“Can the fact that 50% of Scots are uncomfortable with more Muslims coming to the country be ascribed wholly or mainly to racism or Islamophobia? Might it have something to do with certain Muslim leaders demanding more special rights or demands for ethical autonomy that are incompatible with the western design for living? …

“I was shaken by the insistence of Morag Alexander of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that it is necessary to ‘create a Scotland that is at ease with all aspects of diversity’. This is a recipe for anarchy….”

Letter from Tom Gallagher in the Herald, 15 December 2007

Poisonous and dangerous

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Seumas Milne“This week’s forensic exposure by the BBC programme Newsnight of the apparent fabrication of evidence underpinning an inflammatory report into British Muslims by the Tory-linked think tank Policy Exchange has revealed the soft underbelly of what has become an increasingly poisonous and dangerous campaign.

“Throughout this year, a steady stream of hostile and sensationalised stories about the Muslim community in both press and television – often based on research by apparently reliable think tanks – has helped feed anti-Muslim prejudice to the point where Britons were found this summer by a Harris opinion poll to be more suspicious of Muslims than Americans or citizens of any other major west European country.”

Seumas Milne at Comment is Free, 15 December 2007

Muslims are also Scots, so treat us the same

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“The reality is that parents are getting very jumpy about their kids getting involved in any kind of Muslim activity no matter how mundane for fear of them ending up on some watch, and that is dangerous, because when there is anger about foreign policy there needs to be an outlet, and that has effectively been shut down by the atmosphere and the approach to the Muslim community.

“Young Muslims are feeling angry at what is going on in the world with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is vital is that these people are channelled into the democratic process, where they can air their views and make change.”

Osama Saeed interviewed in The Scotsman, 13 December 2007

Osama’s blog is here.

Policy Exchange exposed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On the basis of the evidence presented by Newsnight, what we appear to be dealing with here is not flawed methodology, errors or inconsistencies, but wilful distortion and fabrication committed not against an individual, or an institution, but against an entire social group. The consequences go beyond the community in question to the wider society, given the report’s exploitation by the media and political class, and aggravation of the existing climate of tension, anxiety and suspicion…. Coming on the heel of another report on on extremism among British Muslim youth, the report is yet another attempt to erase distinctions between mainstream and extreme Islam. Targeting mosques is no coincidence.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at BLINK, 13 December 2007

The rights of women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It was Katha Pollitt, writing in The Nation last month, who made me see it. Pollitt, a noted feminist writer, wondered why the American liberal-turned-neocon David Horowitz – founder of the bizarrely named Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week – had suddenly developed an interest in the rights of women. Specifically, Muslim women. ‘Life is not a picnic for women in China, India, Africa and Latin America’, wrote Pollitt. ‘Why no interest in them?’ She speculated that by focusing on the oppression of women, Horowitz had found an easy way to target the Muslim world.

“In his ‘age of horrorism’ essay last year, Martin Amis also developed a feminist sensibility. Amis, whose novels so often feature flat, cartoon-like women, connected the failure of Islamic states with the ‘obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people … the suppression of its women’. Well, there is definitely work to be done regarding the rights of Muslim women, but a lot also needs to be done for all the non-Muslim women oppressed around the globe.”

Noorjehan Barmania in the Guardian, 14 December 2007

Evidence of extremism in mosques ‘fabricated’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Euston MosqueA rightwing thinktank which claimed to have uncovered extremist literature on sale at dozens of British mosques was last night accused of basing a report on fabricated evidence.

The report by Policy Exchange alleged that books condoning violent jihad and encouraging hatred of Christians, Jews and gays were being sold in a quarter of the 100 mosques visited. But BBC2’s Newsnight said examination of receipts provided by the researchers to verify their purchases showed some had been written by the same person – even though they purported to come from different mosques. Several receipts also misspelled the names or addresses of the mosques where the books were supposedly sold.

The report, the Hijacking of British Islam, was based on the work of four teams of two researchers each who visited 100 mosques. They claimed to have found the controversial material in bookshops attached to 25 mosques, including one at Regent’s Park, London, and others in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Oxford and High Wycombe.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “Policy Exchange produced a report that was given a lot of publicity, and Newsnight deserve credit for exposing the incredibly shoddy and dubious methodology that Policy Exchange have resorted to. It would seem that Policy Exchange had already decided what they wanted to say about mosques and just went out to find or should I say invent the evidence to justify their prejudices.”

Guardian, 13 December 2007

For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 December 2007

The Newsnight investigation concentrated on mosques in and around London but, as Osama points out, questions about the credibility of the Hijacking of British Islam report were raised at the time by the Edinburgh Central Mosque – where nobody had come across the literature that Policy Exchange claimed to have discovered on their premises.

For some useful background on Dean Godson and Policy Exchange, see Tom Griffin’s article at SpinWatch.

Huge rise in Scots with racist prejudices

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“Scots are becoming increasingly prejudiced against Muslims, according to a wide-ranging survey carried out after the terror attacks of July 2005 but before the strike on Glasgow Airport this summer.

“Half of those questioned in the government study said Scotland would lose its identity if more Muslims come to the country – up on the 38% who said the same in 2003 when a similar survey was taken.

“The number of Scots who would be unhappy if a relative formed a close relationship with a Muslim was also up over the three years, from 20% to 24%, but while almost one-third of Scots believe there is sometimes a good reason to be prejudiced – an attitude which is on the rise – the number of people who are prejudiced against gays and lesbians is decreasing.”

The Herald, 12 December 2007

See Attitudes to Discrimination in Scotland 2006.

To believe in a European utopia before Muslims arrived is delusional

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It has become a Europe-wide habit to refer to Muslims in particular and migrants in general as though they are barbarians who must either be civilised or banished, before they pollute the egalitarian societies in which they were either born or now live. Lacking all sense of humility, self-awareness and historical literacy, Europe’s political class acts as though these communities not only manifest homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, political violence and social unrest, but also as though they invented them and introduced them to an otherwise utopian continent….

“Herein lies the problem with Enlightenment values, as they have been promoted in recent years. The values are fine. But those who champion them most fervently also do so most selectively. They embrace Muslim women campaigning against sexism, but ignore those fighting racism, Islamophobia or war. They attack Muslim fundamentalist homophobes on housing estates, but align themselves with Christian fundamentalist homophobes in the White House. They demand secularism and assimilation, but view every action by Muslims and immigrants as essentially foreign or religious.”

Gary Younge in the Guardian, 10 December 2007

‘Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Sunday Telegraph interviews a young woman who was shamefully treated by her family after she converted from Islam to Christianity. With the assistance of such “experts” as Maryam Namazie and Patrick Sookhdeo – of, respectively, the ultra-left sectarian Worker Communist Party of Iran and the right-wing evangelical Barnabus Fund – the case is used to illustrate the supposedly barbaric culture that prevails within Muslim communities in the UK.

Namazie offers her opinion that “many of the deaths classified as ‘honour killings’ are actually murders of people who have renounced Islam”. Needless to say, the Torygraph doesn’t ask her to provide any evidence for this claim. Nor is there any attempt to demonstrate that hostility towards those who change their religion is any more prevalent among Muslims than in other faith communities.

No, the predictable line is that violent hatred of apostates is rooted in Islam. And Sookhdeo is on hand to provide the appropriate quote: “Most Muslim scholars say that Muslim religious law – sharia – requires the death penalty for apostasy.” The Torygraph concludes: “Given the acceptance by some that Muslim religious law does indeed require that apostates be killed, it is hardly surprising that many ordinary Muslims think that it is their religious duty to carry out that punishment – or at least to threaten it.”

Martin Amis can’t be trusted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When an audience member last week returned the writer to the delicate question of his controversial 2006 remarks, he explained that they came shortly after the revelation of an Islamist plot to blow up 10 transatlantic flights in transit, saying: ‘You can pretend to be a pious post-historical automaton and not have these responses or you can admit to having transient retaliatory urges.’

“But against whom precisely are these ‘transient retaliatory urges’ experienced, if they must later be denied? I have retaliatory urges myself when I hear of Islamist terror plots, but against the planners and perpetrators of the potential carnage: I wish to see those people pursued, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to lengthy imprisonment. These urges are not transient in the least: they are constant.

“I do not, however – and I don’t mean this piously – wish at any point to retaliate against the pleasant Pakistani man who works all hours in our local dry-cleaners, or the Turkish bank teller down the road. To do so would clearly be obscene. Yet the lingering notion of an entire community’s culpability sporadically crops up among Amis’s ‘urges’….

“There is a world of difference between encouraging a minority community … to help defeat terrorism originating from fanatics within its ranks, and holding it communally accountable for that terrorism. The former may well provide our police with a tip-off that averts the next British suicide bomber; the latter will trigger attacks upon elderly Muslims who have never espoused jihadism.”

Jenny McCartney in the Sunday Telegraph, 9 December 2007