Category Archives: UK

Johann Hari and his friends

Posted on by Bob Pitt

johann hari 2Johann Hari has found a new hero: “Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22-year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the ‘right’ to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and an end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: ‘We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in’.”

Independent, 25 October 2007

That would be this Ehsan Jami, would it – the ally of Dutch far-right racist Geert Wilders?

In the same article Hari happily refers to “my friend Maryam Namazie” – the Iranian sectarian nutter who discredited this year’s International Day Against Homophobia in London by launching into a paranoid rant accusing the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to execute gay men in Trafalgar Square.

But the main subject of Hari’s piece is Namazie’s fellow member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran, Mina Ahadi, who has just been awarded the title of Secularist of the Year by the National Secular Society. Ahadi received widespread publicity when she launched her so-called Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, including an interview in Der Spiegel in which she stated “I know Islam and for me it means death and pain” and defended the display of racist anti-Muslim caricatures at a German carnival.

How long, you wonder, before Namazie and Ahadi join their chum Ehsan Jami in forming an open alliance with the extreme Right? If they do, they’ll evidently be able to count on the support of Johann Hari.

Update:  For Johann’s response, see here

‘Every street in Britain could look like this in 50 years time’, warns Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Every street could look like thisIn an article headed “Britain will be scarcely recognisable in 50 years if the immigration deluge continues”, Stephen Glover writes:

“The only question that interests me is whether a country that is recognisably British will survive in 50 or 100 years. British culture, whatever it represents, is evidently not worth preserving in the view of some on the Left.

“It is a curious paradox that some of its adherents believe that foreign cultures are worth safeguarding, but … when our own indigenous culture is threatened, we are told that it is parochial and small-minded to think about trying to defend it….

“Preserving one’s own culture is at least as important as preserving one’s infrastructure. Actually, it is even more important, because new hospitals, houses and roads can, with a struggle, be built – but culture, once it has been undermined, cannot be recovered.”

Daily Mail, 25 October 2007

And note the photograph chosen to illustrate Glover’s piece (reproduced above). It prominently features a Muslim woman wearing the niqab and is captioned: “Every street in Britain could look like this in 50 years time.”

Return of the Muslim other

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumaya Ghannoushi2“In a few days time a cluster of far-right groups under the name the Stop the Islamisation of Europe alliance will hold rallies in London, Copenhagen and Marseilles to demand an end to what they call ‘the overt and covert expansion of Islam in Europe’. Although the events are likely to attract no more than a handful of protesters, their message resonates widely. On Saturday the rightwing People’s party, notorious for its virulent hostility to ethnic minorities and Muslims, emerged as the victor in the Swiss elections, taking 29% of the vote, the best electoral performance by a party in the country’s elections since 1919.

“The far right is on the ascendancy in many parts of Europe. Beyond its explicit party political expressions, this assumes a more worrying form. What had been traditionally confined to the margins of dominant political discourse is progressively penetrating its mainstream, with parties of the centre absorbing much of the far right’s populist rhetoric. This underlies the complaint by Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of the racist National Front, that Nicolas Sarkozy had ‘stolen his clothes’. Across the Channel, the Tory candidate for the London mayoralty, Boris Johnson, believes that ‘to any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam – seems a natural reaction’….

“Beyond all the noise about Europe’s ‘Muslim problem’ lurks a growing unease about the changing texture of European society. Gone are the days of pure white, Christian Europe. Now Europe is multi-ethnic, multireligious and multicultural, a fact which many find hard to swallow. Muslims are part of this evolving reality, but the idea that the continent is being Islamised is a figment of the right’s imagination.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 24 October 2007

Mohammed Atif Siddique sentenced to 8 years in prison

Posted on by Eddie Truman

When we wrote about Mohammed Atif Siddique’s conviction for terrorist related offences in September we commented that without the amended Terrorism Act of 2000 it was unlikely that the Crown would have been able to make a breach of the peace charge stick.

Today Siddique was sentenced to 8 years in prison on 3 terrorism charges, all of which are related to documents available on the internet.

During the trial there was no evidence produced that Mohammed Siddique was involved in planning any violence; a spokesman for Central Scotland Police said there was “no evidence that Siddique was involved in an actual terrorist plot”

In the days after he was found guilty the Scottish press carried ever more sensational claims about what Siddique was going to do if he had not been arrested and repeatedly referred to him as an “al-Qaeda-linked terrorist”.

The Scotsman suggested he “may” have been planning an attack in Canada while the right wing tabloids were absolutely sure he was going to behead the Canadian Prime Minister.

BNP candidate Robert Cottage was recently found guilty of possessing bomb making chemicals and was sentenced to 2 and a half years.

Mohammed Atif Siddique has been sentenced to 8 years in jail for being in possession of documents that one of the expert witnesses, Evan Kohlmann, has available on his website.

The conviction of Mohammed Siddique under the amended Terrorism Act and his 8-year prison sentence should concern every individual in the UK who questions the foreign policy of the British government; this is a piece of legislation that can be used to send people to prison without any evidence that they have actually done anything wrong.

‘Too many mosques’ in UK, says self-styled ‘communist’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Azar Majedi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran is interviewed by the French secularist magaizine Riposte Laïque (translation in Scoop). In response to the question “Que penses-tu du projet de Grande Mosquée du maire de Londres, Ken Livingstone?” Majedi replies: “Je m’y oppose complètement. On n’a pas besoin d’autres mosquées. Il y en a déjà trop.”

Too many mosques? Now where have we heard that before? Ah yes, it was here.

Smith creates ‘climate of fear’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Smith Creates Climate of FearSmith creates ‘climate of fear’

By James Tweedie

Morning Star, 23 October 2007

HOME Secretary Jacqui Smith appeared before the Commons home affairs committee on Monday for questioning on government plans to extend detention without trial for terror suspects.

The government is considering increasing the limit the current 28-day limit to 56 days – or even to an indefinite period with judicial oversight.

It is also examining the use of phone tap and other “intercept” evidence, imposing “enhanced” sentences for non-terrorist offences committed for a terrorist purpose and broadening the definition of terrorism to include acts carried out for racial and ethnic as well as political aims.

Ms Smith told MPs that the “time is right” for extending the maximum period beyond 28 days. But she admitted that there had not yet been a case where longer than the current four-week limit has been required.

Committee chairman Keith Vaz warned that extra detention power could disproportionately affect Muslims. “The worry about this is that we then stigmatise whole communities and, in my view, that is the road to ruin,” he said.

Human rights campaign Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti also warned that Britain was heading for a state of “permament emergency”.

“The Home Secretary’s revelation that the case has not been made for extending pre-charge detention will be met with considerable surprise,” she said. “There has been so much posturing by so-called experts that few people have remembered to ask for the hard evidence before any change is made.”

Fellow campaigners Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a briefing paper on counter-terrorism measures yesterday, entitled UK: Counter the Threat or Counterproductive? HRW associate Europe and Central Asia director Benjamin Ward said: “Locking up suspects without charge for months at a time is wrong in principle and wrong in practice. It violates the basic right to liberty and risks alienating British Muslims.”

The HRW paper pointed out that less than half of those detained under counter-terrorism powers have been convicted. It says:

“Adopting powers that allow terrorism suspects – many if not most of whom would doubtless be British Muslims – to be detained without charge for months at a time would be deeply damaging to the government’s efforts to win ‘hearts and minds.’ Judicially supervised pre-charge detention without time limits would amount to the reintroduction of internment, a policy widely acknowledged to have alienated communities in Northern Ireland.”

Mr Ward noted that Counter-terrorism Minister Tony McNulty has acknowledged that “the rules of the game haven’t changed” on civil liberties. “The government is finally saying the right things about human rights and security, but the proof will be in the policy,” he said. “If the government is serious about playing by the rules, it should shelve extended pre-charge detention.”

Campaign Against Criminalising Communities spokesman Les Levidow added: “The analogy with Northern Ireland is entirely correct. That is why we have always called detention without trial internment. It’s punishment without trial. The proposals to extend pre-trial detention and introduce post-charge questioning by police are designed for political harrassment.”

“These powers have been disproportionately targeted against Muslims. Clearly, the political aim is to intimidate these communities,” Mr Levidow continued. “These powers are not needed to protect us from violence. They are part of the government’s political aims of suppressing freedom of speech and creating a climate of fear.”

Mirror pays damages for Al Qaeda slur

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A leading Malaysian politician has accepted substantial undisclosed libel damages from the Daily Mirror over his wrongful identification as the third in command of Al Qaeda.

Abdul Hadi Awang, who is currently the president of Malaysian opposition party PAS, was caused great embarrassment and distress by the incorrect use of his photo in the Daily Mirror in May as part of a series concerning a number of terror plots in the UK, his solicitor-advocate, Adam Tudor, told Mr Justice Eady at the High Court on Friday.

Solicitors Carter-Ruck said later that Hadi Awang’s complaint was one of a number it had brought over the past 12 months on behalf of Muslims falsely accused of involvement with terrorism. To date, these had led to the payment of more than £700,000 in damages plus legal costs.

The article stated that Mr Hadi Awang was third in command of Al Qaeda, and was being held in Guantanamo Bay following his capture, he said. Trinity Mirror plc, the newspaper’s publisher, acknowledged that Hadi Awang had no involvement whatsoever in Al Qaeda – on the contrary, he had always been vehemently opposed to its “barbarous acts”.

The newspaper had explained that the photograph, which was published in error, was intended to refer to the suspected Al Qaeda terrorist, Abdul Hadi Al Iraqi, with whom Hadi Awang had no connection. It had published an apology and had agreed to pay Hadi Awang substantial damages and his legal costs.

Press Gazette, 22 October 2007

Amis finds another supporter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Henry Porter joins the likes of Ruth Dudley Edwards in rallying to the defence of poor misunderstood Martin Amis:

“Amis prefaced his remarks with: ‘There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it too? – to say…’ He was confessing to an urge that millions of people felt after the 7 July attacks or the attempts to blow up a nightclub full of young women in the summer. He was not recommending a campaign of persecution but owning up – bravely, as it turned out – to what amounted to a revenge fantasy. This is what writers are meant to do – to experiment, to give vent to the things so many of us feel but do not express, to allow reason to assert itself and to come out the other end with a view.”

Observer, 21 October 2007

For Amis’s actual words, see here. You’ll note that, in the same interview, Amis also came out with a “Muslims are outbreeding us” line that was plainly inspired by paranoid right-wing fantasists like Mark Steyn: “They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.”

But that’s par for the course with Amis. Just over a year ago, to take another example, he wrote an article for the Observer containing formulations that were indistinguishable from the sort of bigoted nonsense that appears on sites like Jihad Watch:

“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam…. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it…. Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century.”

Racist bus passenger avoids jail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A bus driver who has been in this country for more than 40 years and driven a bus for 35 of them was told by a drunken passenger: “You are from Pakistan. You are a terrorist and you are blowing the f…… country up”.

Kurshidahmad Saiyed told Isleworth Crown Court: “I was very distressed at being abused like this. I have been a loyal public servant for so many years.” His tormentor, 42-year-old Anthony Cosgrove of Popes Lane, Ealing, was found guilty by Brentford magistrates of racially aggravated harassment, on August 28 last year.

Cosgrove was arrested in October and denied the charge, which was tried earlier this year. He was already subject to a suspended sentence for possessing firearms while prohibited.

Telling him he was very lucky not to be going straight to prison, Judge Hezlett Colgan suspended a six-month sentence for two years and told Cosgrove not to change his address for six months and to be under the supervision of the probation service. He said:

“You caused a bus driver harassment and distress and in doing that you used racist language. That is almost always an offence that means an immediate sentence of imprisonment. But you owe a great debt to your counsel who has just persuaded me not to send you to prison.”

Richmond & Twickenham Times, 20 October 2007

Posted in UK

Centre for Social Cohesion witch-hunts ‘Islam is Peace’ campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On 24 September, posters stating ‘Islam is Peace’ and ‘Proud to be a British Muslim’ appeared on London buses, London Underground trains and in airports around Britain – the latest phase in a campaign by the group Islam-is-Peace to ‘address the negative perceptions and stereotypes of Islam and British Muslims’, according to the group’s website. But although Islam-is-Peace presents itself as independent, its only known senior members are also prominent figures in the Muslim Association of Britain – a Hamas-linked group whose founder and a chief ideologue have publicly defended Islamic terrorism.”

Centre for Social Cohesion press briefing, 18 October 2007