That’s the headline to an Evening Standard story which reports the possible redevelopment of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in terms that echo the propaganda of the BNP: “Officially it would be known as a ‘multi-faith’ cemetery but it is likely that it would principally answer calls for a Muslim graveyard in the largely-Asian East London borough. The local newspaper has been bombarded with letters from historians and nature lovers declaring: ‘There is no way we’ll allow them to dig up our ancestors’.”
Category Archives: UK
No more torture in our name
No more torture in our name
By Louise Nousratpour
Morning Star, 10 October 2007
AMNESTY International UK launched a hard-hitting campaign on Monday against human rights abuses in the name of the “war on terror.” The human rights organisation called on people to make a stand against terrorism and against civil liberties being eroded by governments claiming to fight al-Qaida. The billboard and internet campaign is called Unsubscribe, after the process that internet users use to reject unwanted emails.
Speaking at a launch event in Birmingham, Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: “Unsubscribe is about rejecting the false choice between terrorism on the one hand and abuse of human rights on the other.” She stressed people’s opposition to the government’s detention without charge or trial of terror suspects under the pretext of national security. “They believe people have a right to know why they are being detained and they believe in the right to have a fair trial if someone is suspected of a serious offence,” Ms Allen added.
As part of the campaign, Amnesty has launched a powerful new two-minute drama film depicting the suffering of a hooded prisoner undergoing “stress and duress” torture by an unnamed man in plain clothes. In the film, which is called Waiting for the Guard and can be seen online at www.unsubscribe-me.org, the prisoner is seen stripped to his underwear in an underground chamber and forced to sit with his head a knee level.
Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said that the Unsubscribe film brought back unpleasant memories. “You cannot imagine that happening to anybody, let alone yourself,” said Mr Begg, who was held without charge for two years at the notorious US prison camp. “The way that I tried almost to tackle it was to say that it didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else.”
Mr Begg said that worse abuses of human rights go on in “ghost” detention camps, referring to widely reported secret CIA “torture camps” that are scattered across the world. “These kinds of things continue to exist. Perhaps they don’t happen at Guantanamo any more, but there are other sites that people have to pass through,” he warned. “By the time I was sent to Guantanamo, I was looking forward to it.”
National Union of Students president Gemma Tumulty said that the campaign would give millions of students in Britain a voice to their “instinctive feeling that something has been going badly wrong in the ‘war on terror’.”
Amnesty will also display a series of hard-hitting billboard posters across the country. They will reproduce some of the most infamous images of human rights abuses from the “war on terror”. The images include an Abu Ghraib prisoner in Iraq being attacked by a dog and a Guantanamo Bay detainee being abused. The posters all bear the message Unsubscribe and will be displayed during October on the streets of Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.
Laughing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’
“An ex-senator that opposes individual rights of women; a pundit that calls people ‘faggots’ and considers Islam a ‘cult’; a Christian scholar who is considered a ‘polemicist’ and an ‘Islamophobe’ by conservative Christians themselves; and an intellectual who has received millions from ‘far right’ organizations since 2001, are rising up for the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities in the Muslim world. This laughable spectacle is called the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It will be coming to a university near you on October 22-26.”
Ali Eteraz at the Huffington Post, 8 October 2007
Rebuking obnoxious views
Terry Eagleton explains his recent much-publicised polemic against Martin Amis and replies to critics:
“In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published last month, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. ‘The Muslim community’, he wrote, ‘will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…’
“Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic….
“Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.”
Here at Islamophobia Watch we are of course rooting for Professor Eagleton. However, in the interests of accuracy, we should point out that Amis’s disgraceful comments in fact appeared in an interview with Ginny Dougary published in the Times Magazine in September 2006.
Jon Gaunt rallies to the defence of ‘our tolerant society’
Yes, I know. It’s a bit like the Ku Klux Klan speaking out in support of equality.
Fanatical docs make me sick
By Jon Gaunt
Sun, 9 October 2007
LAST week Muslim zealots were refusing to sell alcohol in Sainsbury’s but this week the lunatics have really taken over the asylum. We now learn that some Muslim trainee doctors are refusing to treat people with drink or sexual problems.
These pious prats won’t be allowed to qualify as doctors if they refuse these aspects of their training, so instead of dithering and wasting our taxes on any more education for these fanatics we should simply tell them to fit in or ship out.
We should also not fall into the trap of thinking this is just an isolated incident, especially after the capitulation of Sainsbury’s over alcohol and now the news that Boots are allowing Muslim pharmacists the right to refuse to dispense the morning-after pill.
All of these zealots think they can get away with these outrages because we have singularly failed to tell people who want to live in this great country that they have to fit in with our way of life.
Even after 7/7 this Government still has the backbone of a blancmange when it comes to dealing with Muslims. Forget concerns about Islamophobia – we should be more concerned with how Muslims seem to be treated with kid gloves.
While the rest of the majority population are told to understand and tolerate their religion, certain members of the Muslim community seem to have carte blanche to walk all over our customs and traditions.
This week the amoebas in Government failed to ban outright the full veil in classrooms, leaving the decision with individual head teachers rather than laying down the law as they have done in France.
Some say we should ban all religious symbols in school but I disagree. This is a Christian country and 72 per cent of us in the last census professed to being Christian and there is a world of difference between a crucifix, a turban, a skullcap and the veil.
This face covering is not a religious symbol but is clearly a sign of repression and oppression. A woman can look modest without resorting to looking like a Dalek and almost becoming invisible in our modern liberal, tolerant society.
‘Army forks out for 95 hijabs’
“Politically correct MoD officials are to issue free hijabs to female Muslim troops – while front line soldiers are having to buy their own kit. Under new service dress regulations, six of the Islamic hijabs will be given to each Muslim servicewoman wanting them. But it has sparked fury amid an MoD cash crisis. Squaddies also claim the hand-out is unfair as they pay out of their own pockets to observe strict military dress rules.”
‘Islam is Peace for Britain?’ Robert Spencer thinks not
The Islam is Peace campaign has failed to impress the proprietor of Jihad Watch. Robert Spencer complains:
“There is not one word about fighting against the jihadist ideology of Islamic supremacism within English mosques and Islamic schools. Instead, point one of the campaign is to fight against undefined Islamophobia, as if the only reason why anyone regarded Muslims with suspicion was because of bigotry and hatred by non-Muslims. Well, I’ve got news for you. If ‘Islamophobia’ actually exists at all, it is a result of the over nine thousand violent attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam since 9/11.”
See Jihad Watch video here.
Note Spencer’s use of an interview with Anjem Choudary to illustrate the mainstream Muslim view concerning attacks on innocent people. Spencer does not of course mention that Choudary is the leader of a tiny group of extremist nutters who represent next to nothing within Islam in the UK. But, to take the charitable view, it may well be that he doesn’t even know that. After all, this is the same Robert Spencer who once assured his readers that Al-Muhajiroun was “Britain’s largest Muslim group“.
Fascists resist the ‘creeping Islamification’ of death
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is considering a proposal to re-open a disused cemetery as a multi-faith burial ground. Predictably, the British National Party has responded with a typical piece entitled “Tower Hamlets: Our dead to be dug up to make room for Muslims?”
According to the fascists: “hundreds of thousands of British bodies may be exhumed if Muslim-friendly Tower Hamlets council gives the go-ahead…. Apparently the local Islamic community ‘need’ a specific burial site – as cremation is not for them. And, in the best traditions of appeasement, the local council is determined that they shall have one…. Labour’s environment spokesman in Tower Hamlets, one Abdal Ullah, said: ‘To preserve the respect and dignity for everyone, I think most of the graves would have to be cleared out and we’d start afresh.’ And the remains of our British ancestors dumped where exactly Abdul? … Even in death, apparently, we are not free from creeping Islamification.”
BNP regional voices, 8 October 2007
Update: Readers will be pleased to hear that the threat to Western civilisation has apparently receded. The BNP now reports that it has received a communication from Denise Jones, leader of Tower Hamlets Council, who states: “With regards to Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, there are currently no plans to re-open it as a cemetery.”
The English Defence League: not suited but booted
Anindya Bhattacharyya provides a useful summary of the campaign by anti-racists against the English Defence League. He notes: “the fact that racist groups such as the EDL have taken to the streets with an explicitly anti-Muslim agenda has clarified what is at stake. Arguments about the nature of Islamophobia that had until now been primarily ideological are now being played out on the streets”.
‘Fear of giving offence is killing our culture’
Minette Marrin complains that the struggle against the civilisation-sapping ideology of multiculturalism is not over yet:
“For at least 20 years there was a debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty self-loathing…. Even the phrase ‘host culture’ was considered unacceptable. We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure….
“It might seem, superficially, that the Victoria Climbié report and the massacre of 7/7 in London, among other shocks, have brought us back at last to our cultural senses and our cultural self-respect. Not entirely so, unfortunately…. A week ago The Sunday Times reported that some Muslim workers in Sainsbury’s are refusing to check out purchases of alcohol on the debatable ground that it’s against their religion.”
Well, actually, it was just the one Muslim worker in a single branch of Sainsbury’s. But why quibble over figures when the very future of “our” culture is at stake? Marrin continues:
“This is preposterous and a depressing sign of the times. But the painful truth is it would be just as preposterous to blame the Sainsbury’s Muslims. For years now ethnic minorities have been encouraged to insist on their cultural differences and on their human right to have these differences respected and actively promoted….
“Surely the fault lies with Sainsbury’s, for cultural funk. And it lies with all those others who out of some strange abandonment of common sense – such as the government’s laissez-faire guidelines on wearing Muslim veils in schools last week – bottle out.”
Elsewhere in the same issue, the paper follows up last week’s exposé of cultural surrender at Sainsbury’s with another article, “Muslim medical students get picky“, which claims:
“Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex.”
“Some … some … a small number” – and how many Muslim medical students, roughly, might that be? Of course, we’re not told. Although, to be fair to the Sunday Times, its intrepid reporters have come up with a further shocking revelation: “At a Sainsbury’s store in Nottingham, a pharmacist named Ahmed declined to provide the pill to a female reporter posing as a customer”. So that makes one Sainsbury’s employee who opts out of selling alcohol, two who’ve been given exemption from stacking the drinks shelves, and one who avoids selling the pill. Clearly, the foundations of Western civilisation are under mass assault from the Muslim hordes.
Meanwhile, over at the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance, one Mark Alexander (who’s apparently the author of a book entitled The Dawning of a New Dark Age: A Collection of Essays on Islam) offers his take on the Sunday Times report:
“This latest story about the obstreperousness of trainee Muslim medical students should alarm us all. It is a harbinger of the nightmare that awaits us all in the West as a result of allowing far, far too many Muslims into the Judeo-Christian West…. If something isn’t done about the Muslim problem, then it is only a matter of time before blood will be shed. Not in the operating theatres, but in the streets.”
And the fascists of the British National Party (who are becoming great fans of the Sunday Times) present the report as evidence that “the country moves unceasingly and unchallenged to becoming part ofDar-ul-Islam (the world of Islam)”.
BNP news article, 7 October 2007
Cf. The letter of appreciation to Sainsbury’s from Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain.
See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 8 October 2007