Category Archives: UK

Economist misreports ‘mega-mosque’ controversy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The current issue of the Economist carries a report on the controversy over the proposed Islamic Centre at Abbey Mills in East London. It would be difficult to fit more inaccuracies and distortions into a single article.

The estimate of the size of the proposed development is evidently based on the old design by Mangera Yvars, which has of course been scrapped. The new architects have yet to produce their replacement design, so the claim that the mosque will be “Britain’s largest religious building and almost five times the size of St Paul’s” lacks any basis in fact.

The article doesn’t mention that the 10 Downing Street e-petition against the Abbey Mills development was posted by a BNP supporter. It refers to the earlier Sunni Friends of Newham/Minhaj-ul-Quran petition against the mosque but omits to mention that they have since suspended their campaign.

It says that Christian Peoples Alliance councillor Alan Craig, who has headed the local agitation against the mosque, “plays down fears of terrorism” – whereas in reality this has been a central plank in his scaremongering campaign.

It concedes that Tablighi Jamaat is not a political movement but concludes: “There is endless panic about political Islam. Is apolitical Islam much better?”

Straw words ‘sparked veil attack’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A leading Muslim has blamed Jack Straw’s comments for an attack in which a woman’s veil was torn from her face. The woman was attacked in Liverpool by a man shouting racist abuse, the day after the former foreign secretary criticised veils that cover the face. Mohammed Akbar Ali, ex-chairman of the Liverpool Islamic Institute, said Mr Straw should have known better.

Merseyside Police, who say the attack was a hate crime, met Muslim leaders on Saturday to hear their concerns.

Mr Akbar Ali, who was involved in the campaign to free Liverpool hostage Ken Bigley in Iraq, said the attack was no coincidence. “I put the blame squarely and without any hesitation on Jack Straw,” he said. “He’s a responsible member of the government and is in a constituency with a large number of Muslims – he should have known better than make such a statement.”

Mr Straw, Labour MP for Blackburn and leader of the House of Commons, said he believed covering faces could make community relations more difficult. He said watching facial expressions was an important part of contact between people. Mr Straw said he asked Muslim women meeting him at his constituency surgeries to remove their veils.

BBC News, 12 October 2006

Fear of fundamentalism hinders attempts to set up faith schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Public opposition is hampering plans to expand the number of state-funded Muslim schools, a leading Muslim headteacher said yesterday, as the Government confirmed plans to encourage the growth of faith schools.

Mohamed Mukadam, the chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools, said that while there was a “huge demand” in the Muslim community for more state schools, local Muslim organisations encountered “a lot of negativity” when proposing to set up new schools. The perception that Muslim schools could be a breeding ground for fundamentalists could make negotiations with local authorities “quite difficult”, he said.

Times, 11 September 2007

Posted in UK

The Talibanization of Britain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Labour Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, supports Tablighi Jamaat’s intentions to build a ‘mega-mosque’ in east London, adjoining the site of the 2012 London Olympics, even though a quarter of a million people have signed a protest petition on the government’s website…. Multiculturalism, by its very nature, is a policy of segregation, where multiple ghettoes sit beside each other in urban communities, but not integrating. Labour has promoted this divisive policy, encouraging it by continually swamping Britain with new waves of uncontrolled immigration….

“It is the Labour party and its leftist cronies in the media who are the ones who are slowly turning parts of Britain into Talibanized ghettoes. All too eager to please the ‘sensitivities’ of new arrivals on Britain’s shores with its policies of multiculturalism, the government has neglected the sensitivities of those already here. The Islamists only do as they please because Britain’s weak-kneed authority figures have allowed them to.”

A characteristic rant from Adrian Morgan at Family Security Matters, 11 September 2007

The Godson approach to political warfare

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dean GodsonTom Griffin identifies parallels between the psychological warfare employed during the Cold War and the methods used by right-wing propagandists against Islam today, and draws attention to the role played by Dean Godson of Policy Exchange.

“‘During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers’, Godson wrote in The Times last year. ‘For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves.’

“In fact there is reason to believe that Cold War methods of psychological warfare are already shaping the debate about Islam and the war on terror in Britain. Dean Godson himself may be one the most successful practitioners….

“He is better known in Britain as the former chief leader writer of the Daily Telegraph, and as a research director for the Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange. In the latter capacity, he has been at the forefront of the debate about the British Government’s engagement with the Muslim community. He has been particularly critical of Government contacts with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which he describes as an ‘Islamist front group’.

“In July 2006, Godson sponsored the publication of When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, in which New Statesman editor Martin Bright denounced the Foreign Office’s attempts to engage with political Islam, notably the Muslim Brotherhood. The pamphlet featured copies of twelve high-level Whitehall documents leaked to Bright by a Foreign Office official.

“The individual responsible has reportedly been arrested under the Official Secrets Act, but Policy Exchange can nevertheless claim some success in influencing Government policy. In October last year, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly called for a ‘fundamental rebalancing’ of the Government’s relations with Muslim organizations, a move that was widely seen as a repudiation to the MCB.

“There are good reasons to be concerned about Dean Godson’s role in bringing about this change in policy. He has made no secret of his own advocacy of ‘political warfare’.”

Spinwatch, 4 September 2007

Police arrest two far-right Belgian leaders at anti-Islam 9/11 protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stop IslamisationBRUSSELS, Belgium: Police arrested two leaders of a Belgian far-right party Tuesday for staging an illegal protest against the “Islamization of Europe,” six years to the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Police scuffled with some of the 200 people who converged on two squares in the EU district of Brussels to protest against what they perceived as the rise of Islam as a significant political force across Europe. Officers handcuffed two leaders of the far-right Flemish Interest Party, which is very critical of Muslim immigrants, and took them away in police vans.

The Italian Foreign Ministry said it was protesting the detention of an Italian member of the European Parliament, Mario Borghezio, who attended the demonstration. Borghezio is from the Northern League, an Italian regional party with an anti-immigrant stance. Italian state TV showed footage of Borghezio yelling as police were taking him away that he is a member of the European Parliament. He was later released.

Protesters sought to use the Sept. 11 anniversary to point out that Islam threatens democracy and the rule of law in Europe. The demonstration was initially planned by Stop Islamization of Europe, a loose alliance with roots in Germany, Britain and Denmark, which had predicted that 20,000 people would come to Brussels from all over Europe. Brussels Mayor Freddy Thielemans banned the protest last month, calling SIOE an inflammatory group and its proposed demonstration a threat to public order. An appeals court upheld the ban Aug. 29.

Only 200 or so protesters showed up Tuesday for a protest lasting only 30 minutes. The demonstrators faced more than 100 police, backed up by water cannons and helicopters, who closed off streets around the EU headquarters.

“We support the goals of the demonstration to protest against the lack of freedom of expression in this country,” said Frank Vanhecke, the head of the Flemish Interest Party, before he was bundled off to the police station. “And we also we fully agree that the rise of Islam in Europe poses a risk to our values.”

Associated Press, 11 September 2007

The British National Party declares its solidarity with its far-right co-thinkers in Brussels, and warns: “Europe looks set for more of these kinds of protests as decent European patriots become more and more frustrated and angered by the endless appeasement by liberal-leftists in positions of power and influence.”

BNP news article, 11 September 2007

Mad Mel on Islamism, jihadi terror, appeasing the Muslim lobby etc etc

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Londonistan“Despite a hardening of the public mood against Islamism, the British establishment is still sleepwalking toward cultural surrender. The essence of the problem is that although it understands it is fighting an unprecedented terrorist threat, it still does not understand the religious ideology driving the threat. It still believes, instead, the Islamist propaganda line that the root causes of jihadi terror are poverty, discrimination, or foreign policy – in other words, that terrorism against the West is the West’s own fault.

“The good news is that the mood is beginning to change among British Muslims. Debate has been electrified by the decision of a few young Muslims to renounce Islamist radicalism. Accounts such as Ed Husain’s book The Islamist have blown apart all the usual excuses for Islamist terror. Husain said the cause was nothing other than religious fanaticism; and he called for Hizb ut-Tahrir – the jihadi organization to which he had belonged – to be banned….

“The bad news is, in brief, that the British government is choosing to look the other way. It should be making it crystal clear that there is no place for Islamist extremism in Britain. Not only is it refusing to do so, however, but its response to Islamism remains one of appeasement. Although much about the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, remains studiedly ambiguous, the dynamic of British politics – with its visceral hostility toward Israel and America, and with Muslim voters steadily increasing their political influence – means he may yet put Britain and the West at even further risk.

“Indeed, there are worrying signs that Brown will actually go further than the government has already gone in appeasing the Muslim lobby. He is refusing to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir – which is radicalizing countless young British Muslims, particularly on campus. He is refusing to ban the building of what is intended to be the largest mosque in Europe on the site of the 2012 Olympic village in east London – a mosque funded by the Tablighi Jamaat, said by the FBI and French intelligence to be the ‘antechamber to al-Qaeda’ in Europe…. Whereas the Blair government finally started to treat the (supposedly representative) Muslim Council of Britain as the Islamist extremists that they are, Brown has brought them back in from the cold.”

Melanie Phillips at National Review Online, 11 September 2007

‘Neither Washington nor mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thus the title to a blog post by Labour Party member and longtime leftist Dave Osler marking the anniversary of 9/11. What he means is that the Left should back neither US imperialism nor Al-Qaida terrorism. The word “mosque” is used as a synonym for the latter, thereby identifying all practising Muslims with the atrocities carried out by a minuscule minority – a theme more usually associated with the racist Right.

Outlining his proposals for combating the threat of further terrorist attacks, Osler writes that “Islamist networks can and must be infiltrated and smashed” – which would mean infiltrating and smashing Hizb ut-Tahrir, presumably. Since when did socialists support the right of the state to infiltrate and smash legal and non-violent political organisations? In fact, on the generally accepted definition of “Islamism” as a politicised version of the faith, organisations like the British Muslim Initiative would also fall victim to Osler’s “anti-terrorism” strategy.

Osler even charges the left with “regarding al Qa’eda as somehow allies of convenience in an imagined common anti-imperialist struggle”. As a contributor to the comments section of his blog points out, this echoes the right-wing idiocy peddled by the likes of Martin Amis who claims that “given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi”.

What significant tendency on the left adopts the position of treating the 9/11 terrorists as anti-imperialist allies? None, so far as I know. Where can we find left-wing publications putting forward that argument? Nowhere.

See Dave’s Part, 11 September 2007

The latest from Taj Hargey and friends

Posted on by Bob Pitt

You might have thought that any Muslim organisation would welcome as a victory for civil rights the decision to lift a ban on veiled women voting in elections in Quebec.

Not the so-called Muslim Canadian Congress. In a press release headed “Allowing masked voters a rude joke, says MCC President” the MCC complains that “enabling voters to conceal their identity represent a compromise of the democratic process”, warns that “such allowances will embolden Islamists and their supporters to seek even greater concessions in the future” and expresses concern that “the current trend to appease fundamentalist forces may be symptomatic of a larger problem forcing governments to capitulate to the bullying tactics of Islamists”.

Mind you, this is the outfit that denounced fellow Muslims who demonstrated against Israel’s attack on Lebanon as “Canadian supporters of Hezbollah”.

The MCC, you may also recall, is the group who gave financial assistance to Taj Hargey in his campaign against the right of British school pupils to wear the niqab. And in today’s Times we find Mr Hargey himself, congratulating the paper on its scaremongering campaign against Deobandi influence in UK mosques: “Your Deobandi exposé is welcomed by progressive Muslims. Sadly, most British Muslims, through ignorance or fear, cannot resist the insidious designs and dogmas of this secretive and reactionary sect and its many dangerous offshoots in this country.”