The question is posed in a letter to the East London Advertiser by a Labour Party member, one Stuart Madewell, who is evidently stupid and bigoted enough to believe that the way to win back Bethnal Green & Bow for Labour is to promote BNP-style racist fantasies about the threat of an Islamic state being established in a country where Muslims make up 3% of the population. In fact Madewell’s letter has been posted approvingly on the fascist discussion list Stormfront.
Category Archives: UK
‘Mega-mosque’ debate
Islamic Circles Presents
TERROR MOSQUE, OLYMPIC MOSQUE OR WEST HAM MOSQUE
Date: Friday 7th September 2007
Time: 6.15pm–8.30pm
Venue: Ithaca House, 27 Romford Rd, Stratford, London E15 4LJ
A debate with Abdul Khaliq Mian (Newham Respect Coalition) and Councillor Alan Craig (Newham Christian People’s Alliance).
Far away from the oil fields of the Middle East, in the early 1990s, members of the Anjuman Welfare Trust (Tablighi Jamaat) through sheer sweat and hard work in the rag-tag factories of East London, managed to purchase a disused and contaminated area of land near Abbey Mills from Newham Council with an intention to serve the growing needs of the Muslim community in East London and beyond, by building a mosque and community centre.
If we now fast forward to 2007 – post 9/11, 7/7, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the announcement that the 2012 Olympic Games are to be held in London, we have a situation where this non-descript piece of land in East London has become the subject of intense controversy, capturing the attention of both local and international media.
Nearly 1 in 8 Londoners consider themselves to be Muslim. Up to half of those living near the area where the Olympic Games will be taking place are Muslim. Up to a third of the countries participating will be Muslim majority nations. So why is it that certain individuals supported by neo-con think tanks and Zionist inclined newspapers have decided to target this project, whose administrators are affiliated to Tablighi Jamaat, a worldwide movement known for being apolitical? Why is this mosque project being labelled as a potential source of terrorist activities just because some of the individuals involved happen to share similar theological roots as the Taliban?
Is it not ironic that this is happening now despite all the talk of diversity and multiculturalism – one of the principal reasons why London won. Note the hijab wearing children on the TV screens when London’s victory was announced in contrast to the recent French experience of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. What is all the fuss about? Will the area become an “Islamic Emirate of Stratford” or perhaps something more akin to a Cordoba of the past – a shining example of genuine tolerance, diversity and civilisation?
To debate the issue we have Abdul Khaliq Mian who has been an active member of the community in Newham over the last 30 years. He has contributed significantly towards the development of the West Ham mosque project and is currently a member of the Respect Party. His counterpart will be Alan Craig, councillor for the Canning Town South ward in Newham. He is leader of the Christian People’s Alliance group and has actively campaigned against the mosque claiming that the Tablighi Jamaat are funded by the Saudis and have terrorist links, and that the project would damage community relations if it were to go ahead.
All welcome and free entrance – just turn up.
Rail/Tube: Stratford Station
Directions: 5 min walk from Stratford Station, close to Ibis Stratford Hotel.
For more details and to attend please contact: Tel: 07956 983 609 E-mail: info@islamiccircles.org
Hate crime yobs target Muslims
Revolting thugs urinated on to shoes and clothes belonging to worshipping Muslims. Police are treating the incident as a hate crime against Bath’s Muslim community and say they are determined to track down the perpetrators. The two male offenders entered the lobby of the Bath Islamic Centre in Pierrepont Street during evening prayers, before urinating on clothing and shoes left in the entrance by worshippers. Their mindless vandalism has disgusted members of the mosque and left the belongings of five people damaged.
Imam Rashad Amazi, a leader at the Bath Islamic Centre, said the victims were disgusted by the crime. He said: “They felt disbelief and they were horrified. While they were doing their prayers they heard very loud shouting inside the building. They couldn’t break their prayers but they were terrified. As soon as they’d finished, they ran to the ground floor where they thought the shouting was coming from. By that time the people had left. They smelled the alcohol and the urine and then found there was urine in their shoes and on the carpets.”
Rosco Jones, from Bath and North East Somerset Racial Equality Council, said he was concerned that other victims of hate crime were keeping quiet about their experiences in an effort to evade more attention. He said: “The main concern is that not as many victims of hate crime resulting from the heightened concerns around Islamic-based terrorism are coming forward to say they’ve been attacked. People on the whole are just keeping the information to themselves. That is quite bad. The police and authorities such as ourselves need to be aware so we can take normal community safety preventative action.”
Bath Chronicle, 3 September 2007
The British National Party are not happy: “The police, instead of treating it as a stupid misdemeanor, are pulling out all the stops to track down the two culprits, for no other reason than to curry favour with Bath’s growing Muslim community.”
Police defend Muslims rather than chase criminals
“John O’Sullivan was not exaggerating when he said that the police are more interested in sniffing out racist or Islamophobic attitudes than in investigating crime. When I reported to police the theft of my cheque book and attempted theft of £1,500 from my account, I was told ‘the police do not investigate such cases’. On the wall of the police station was a poster inviting me to ask for my Anti-Islamophobia Action Pack.”
Letter in the Sunday Telegraph, 2 September 2007
Fascists protest against mosque in Fareham
The British National Party reports that it organised a day of action in Fareham, Hampshire, against the proposed contruction of a mosque and community centre in nearby Wickham. The fascists’ local organiser claims that they distributed 4,000 leaflets which boasted : “Only the British National Party speaks out against both Muslim extremist terrorism and the threat that ‘mainstream’ Islam poses to our British culture, heritage and way of life.”
Islam, Christianity and ‘double standards’
In the US earlier this week a controversy broke out over the decision by the Washington Post not to publish (at least in its printed edition) Sunday’s instalment of the cartoon strip “Opus,” in which a character appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend that she wants to become a radical Islamist. (Fox News report here, link to the actual cartoon here.)
Reports have pointed out that a recent episode of the same cartoon strip ridiculed the late right-wing Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, yet no attempt was made to ban it. Predictably, the right-wing blogosphere has leapt on this issue, accusing the media of applying double standards and discriminating in favour of Muslims (“Christians are fair game, Muslims aren’t“).
Whether the Washington Post was correct to spike the cartoon is a matter of debate (see for example Sheila Musaji’s comments at The American Muslim). But what should be rejected outright is the stupid notion that reinforcing stereotypes about a minority ethno-religious community which is already the object of a poisonous right-wing propaganda campaign is the same as taking the piss out of a white Christian evangelist like Jerry Falwell.
Far from being a beleaguered minority, the Christian Right in the US is politically close to the Republican Party and a leading figure like Falwell was even in a position to place demands on would-be presidential candidates in exchange for electoral support (see, for example, here). If there’s one thing Jerry Falwell emphatically wasn’t, it was oppressed. In fact, he was prominent among the ranks of the oppressors – so notorious was he for his Islamophobic views that the Anti-Defamation League publicly dissociated themselves from his more egregious anti-Muslim remarks.
That right-wing US commentators should be unable to make a distinction between the position of Muslims and Christians in western society is hardly surprising, but the same sort of argument is regularly trotted out by people who in other respects hold broadly progressive views and should be expected to know better.
For example, we’ve already covered Maryam Namazie’s Islamophobic rant at the International Day Against Homophobia, as reported in the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association’s magazine Gay Humanist Quarterly, in which she accused the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to hang gay men in Trafalgar Square. But we have not dealt with the contribution from another platform speaker at the IDAHO reception – Darren Johnson, who is one of the Green Party’s two members on the London Assembly. In the same issue of GHQ George Broadhead of GALHA reported:
“In his speech, Darren Johnson cited those on the political left who were reluctant to criticise Islamic homophobia. ‘Many on the left are perfectly comfortable denouncing homophobia if it comes from the lips of right-wing Christian fundamentalists’, he said, ‘but get strangely queasy if it is espoused by Muslim fundamentalists.”
Christianity, it seems to have escaped Johnson’s attention, is the religion of the white majority in the West, whereas Islam is the religion of non-white minorities. Attacks on the belief system of Muslims therefore can and very often do serve as a cover for racist propaganda. Why else do right-wing newspapers like the Express and the Mail, and far-right groups like the BNP, devote themselves to obsessively attacking the Muslim community?
The point is – you can’t just ignore social context. This is usually pretty obvious when it comes to the Jewish community, who are of course another minority ethno-religious group with a long history of racial and religious oppression. Denouncing Judaism and Jews is not all the same thing as denouncing Christianity and Christians. Even the most rigid of secular rationalists can usually see that.
The politics of mosque-building
In many Western cities, plans to erect mosques often stir more passion than any other local issue – and politicians are leaping into the fray. The Economist reports.
Hypocrisy needs a kick it out campaign
“Much as one hates to pre-empt the outcome of another of those famously sabre-toothed FA inquiries, the stench of inaction is already beginning to hover around the fact that a significant number of Newcastle supporters racially abused Mido during their side’s 2-2 draw with Middlesbrough on Sunday.
“Soho Square has begun an investigation, and is talking of banning orders if the police identify the culprits, but Middlesbrough will not be demanding an apology. Quite unforgivably, meanwhile, Newcastle have refused to comment. And already, we have been treated to the views of apologists for the fans who persistently chanted ‘Mido, he’s got a bomb you know; Mido’s got a bomb’ at the Egyptian striker, along with other Islamophobic abuse that somehow contrived to be even less artful.
“Speaking to this newspaper, one Ian Cusack of the Newcastle fanzine Players Inc described the chants as ‘unsavoury’. ‘But I don’t think they were racist’, he went on. ‘Newcastle have Muslim players. Emre is a Muslim … The chants should be placed in the context of local rivalry.’ It takes a special sort of idiotic blindness, really, to downgrade racism to something that can be excused on account of geography….
“Newcastle’s failure to issue a statement at the very least condemning Islamophobia in football speaks volumes. The FA making the chanting a police matter should not be used as an excuse to let the club’s distasteful mulishness slide. It doesn’t help that Mido was booked for holding his finger to his lips in front of the abusive fans, who will inevitably go largely unpunished….”
Marina Hyde in the Guardian, 30 August 2007
The media and Islam – another ‘balanced’ discussion
On Radio 4’s “The Message” last Friday there was yet another example of the media’s incapacity to provide a balanced discussion of their own unbalanced depiction of Islam.
More4 News editor David Mapstone and media commentator Stephen Glover were brought in as media experts. And who did the BBC settle on to represent a Muslim viewpoint? Yes, you guessed it, they chose Islamism’s answer to Whittaker Chambers, Ed Hussain, who asserted that the “bandying around of this terminology of Islamophobia” is used to “shut down debate”. Husain assured listeners that the British media “bended over backwards to ensure that it doesn’t really offend most Muslims”.
Stephen Glover, for his part, took up the case of the discredited Channel 4 documentary “Undercover Mosque”. Did he raise this issue in order to express concern about media distortion of Islam? Don’t be silly, of course he didn’t. According to Glover, “what is worrying about this story is that having looked into it the police and the Crown Prosecution Service have referred the programme to OfCom on the basis that it manipulated the facts … so we have the media going out to find what is happening in some mosques, it does so, and it is criticised – unjustly I believe – for what it does”.
Let us recall that CPS lawyer Bethan David, who examined 56 hours of footage of which only short extracts were used in the programme, stated unequivocally that: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.”
Media “expert” Stephen Glover thus joins the likes of the Sun, Leo McKinstry, Dean Godson, Carol Gould, Adrian Morgan and the British National Party in rejecting the findings of the CPS. None of them, of course, has actually seen the footage on which the CPS based its criticism of “Undercover Mosque”. But never let facts get in the way of anti-Muslim prejudice, eh?
Even David Mapstone – who was prepared to concede that the media give disproportionate coverage to isolated extremists like Omar Brooks, and that organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain do have “representational legitimacy” – asserted that “good, high quality” television documentaries about Islam have been broadcast … featuring notorious Islamophobes like John Ware, Martin Bright and Richard Littlejohn.
‘Meet the shadow minister for militant Islam’
“The biggest risk to David Cameron’s leadership to date has been his appointment of Sayeeda Warsi as the shadow minister for community cohesion.
“Warsi’s rise makes Cameron’s ascent from freshman MP to leader in four years look almost sedate. In just two years she has gone from failed parliamentary candidate to being responsible for, perhaps, the most sensitive portfolio in opposition politics. Add in her history of making injudicious statements about anti-terror laws, talking to extremists, and Iraq – combined with some distinctly unCameroon views on homosexuality – and you have a pretty volatile cocktail. Especially as having staked his reputation on her judgment, Cameron cannot sack her.
“Even among those who are normally sympathetic to the Cameron project, Warsi’s appointment was viewed as a stunt too far. After all, she has observed that the government’s anti-terror proposals were ‘enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalised fanatic’ and said that if ‘terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?’ These concerns were assuaged, to an extent, by the naming of Paul Goodman as the Commons spokesman for her brief. Goodman, a former comment editor of the Daily Telegraph, has developed robust views on the need for the political class to wake up to the threat posed by extremist Islamist ideology.”
Actually “the shadow minister for militant Islam” refers to Goodman rather than Sayeeda Warsi … I think.