Category Archives: UK

Police call for ‘Guantanamo-style’ powers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police CallPolice call for ‘Guantanamo-style’ powers

By Louise Nousratpour

Morning Star, 16 July 2007

CONCERNS about overt political campaigning by police bosses mounted on Sunday, after chief constables demanded the power to lock up “terror suspects” indefinitely.

Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) president Ken Jones inflamed the debate over detention without trial when he called for more police powers to hold suspects for “as long as it takes.”

He complained that police were “up against the buffers on the 28-day limit,” which is already the longest period of pre-charge detention in any Western country, including the United States.

The matter was reportedly discussed in meetings between Prime Minister Gordon Brown and senior police officers.

The new Premier, who has already signalled his desire to extend the draconian 28-day limit, is believed to be supportive of the ACPO proposals.

His predecessor Tony Blair was defeated in the Commons two years ago when he tried to introduce a 90-day detention period, which was also floated by notorious Metropolitan Police chief Ian Blair.

The ongoing politicisation of senior police officers in recent years has alarmed politicians and civil rights groups alike, who told the force on Sunday to “stay out of politics” and “remember your place” in a democratic society.

They warned that the latest police proposals would amount to Northern Ireland-style internment of the 1970s and would lead to the creation of a Guantanamo Bay-type prison on British soil.

Within 48 hours of the introduction of internment for IRA members in August 1971, mass protests broke out which left 17 dead. Violence and protests continued throughout that year and peaked on January 30 1972 – known as Bloody Sunday, recalled campaigners.

Britain last used internment during the first Gulf war to harass Iraqi exiles accused of links with Saddam Hussein’s state apparatus.

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Hijab ‘special’ given warm beat welcome

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rukshana BegumA special constable who is the first officer in Cambridgeshire to wear a Muslim hijab on duty is receiving a warm welcome on the beat. Rukshana Begum, 23, who was featured in the News after deciding to wear the headscarf, said the reaction from the public has been “confidence-boosting”.

She said: “I have had so many members of the general public saying it’s really good to see someone doing this and representing their group. People are also saying good luck and I hope it goes well. When I went on duty without the hijab I got ordinary looks, but now people recognise me from the newspaper and have congratulated me. When they say ‘all the best’ and ‘good luck’ it boosts your confidence.”

She said: “I never thought I would get any negative response. Even if I was to think hard, I could not think of why the general public would want to be negative. As I expected, people have been really welcoming and have accepted it. Britain is a multi-racial and multi-religious society now.”

Cambridge Evening News, 16 July 2007

‘Fears grow over mega mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Gordon Brown is under pressure to block a £75 million ‘mega mosque’, amid claims one of the suspected Glasgow Airport bombers belongs to the radical Islamic group behind it. More than 200,000 people have signed a Downing Street petition calling on the Prime Minister to intervene over plans for the mosque near the Olympics site in east London. It is being funded by the fundamentalist Tablighi Jamaat sect. One member of the sect is said to be Kafeel Ahmed, who was engulfed in flames when a Jeep laden with gas canisters crashed into a Glasgow Airport building two weeks ago.”

Sunday Express, 15 July 2007

In an accompanying editorial (“Probe this mega-mosque”) the Express insists that “the Government must call a halt to plans to build a mega-mosque in East London” and calls for a judicial inquiry to assess the “potential security issues”.

Of course, the Express fails to mention that the petition against the mosque was initiated by a BNP supporter named Jill Barham who blogs under the name of “English Rose”.

So, farewell then, David T

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at Comment is Free yesterday, Madeleine Bunting posted a reasoned response to Martin Bright and David T of Harry’s Place over their attacks on an earlier piece she had published on CiF. She wrote:

“I simply cannot see the point of a witch-hunt against anyone who has ever read Qutb or Mawdudi. This is McCarthyism of the worst kind. We might as well hound out of British politics anyone who has read Lenin. The kind of scenario David T paints of an entryist Islamism trying to establish a ‘perfect Islamic state’ is a fantasyland and I can’t understand why a serious journalist such as Martin Bright endorses it.”

David T then proceeded to post his own “reasoned response” to Bunting, which concluded: “you, Madeleine Bunting, are an absolute disgrace. Your participation in this debate has been entirely malign. You seem to see your role as being to cover up for, and whitewash, political extremists and bigots of the worst sort. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Then, when the CiF moderators deleted this, David T started bleating about censorship. (And this from a man whose website repeatedly blocks links from Islamophobia Watch, with the result that we have to redirect them via tinylink.com.)

Eventually CiF editor Georgina Henry was forced to step in and close the thread down because of the repeated posting of “abusive attacks on the original author” – no doubt by the same right-wing bigots who frequent the comments section at Harry’s Place.

And now David T has announced that he will no longer be blogging at CiF. He objects to the fact that CiF allows Azzam Tamimi of the British Muslim Initiative and Taji Mustafa of Hizb ut-Tahrir to post there but not far-right white racists like Nick Griffin or David Duke: “Islamists and jihadists are part of the ‘big debate’, but other fascists are not.”

Well, I imagine most CiF readers will be breathing a sigh of relief. David T will now be free to wallow in his own hatred of liberals and the Left at Harry’s Place, along with his co-thinkers drawn from the racist right who enthusiastically back him up with their vile anti-Muslim rants. Frankly, they deserve each other.

Another day, another ex-Islamist calling for a ban on HT

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“By focusing almost exclusively on violent extremism, the government has got it wrong. It has failed to appreciate how the general culture of extreme Islamist dissent can, and often does, give rise to terrorism itself. Islamist groups thrive on preaching a separatist message of Islamic supremacy, which concerns itself with reversing the temporal decline of Islam and challenging the ascendancy of the west by reviving a puritanical caliphate….

“Although groups like Hizb insist that their activities are merely intellectual, the movement is no paper tiger. It is an active revolutionary organisation with tentacles spread across the world. And its culpability in inspiring terrorists cannot be denied. Hizb has consistently raised the temperature of Islamist anger across Britain by issuing inflammatory leaflets aimed to agitate and provoke.”

Shiraz Maher in the New Statesman, 13 July 2007

There appears to be an ever-expanding market for former members of HT who are willing to endorse a right-wing agenda about the supposed threat from non-violent Islamism and encourage the state repression of their former associates.

For an alternative view, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 July 2007

‘Scotland’s nationalist-Muslim embrace’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Well, at least this makes a change from the usual “Left-Islamofascist alliance” nonsense. Tom Gallagher has identified an equally dangerous political bloc in Scotland between the SNP and “unapologetic advocates of hardline Islamism” like Osama Saeed. According to Gallagher, this raises the nightmare prospect of an independent Scotland becoming “a northern version of Ken Livingstone’s left-leaning multicultural metropolis in London”.

Open Democracy, 11 July 2007

Ed Husain completely loses the plot

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HizbSo who’s responsible for comparing Hizb ut-Tahrir to the Nazis and issuing the hysterical warning that we must consider HT “a subversive fifth column in our midst, awaiting instructions from a coming caliph before they turn to mass suicide bombings”? Mad Melanie Phillips, perhaps? Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch? Nah, it’s Ed Husain, author of The Islamist, writing at Comment is Free. But what can you expect from a man who refers approvingly to Channel 4’s The War on Britain’s Jews? as “Richard Littlejohn’s excellent television documentary”?

You might ask why Husain, a man who became an Islamist for a few brief years as a confused teenager during the early 1990s, hasn’t been active in any Islamist organisation since leaving HT around 1995, and spent most of this century living abroad, should suddenly be adopted as the media’s favourite self-styled expert on Islamism in Britain. Well, of course, it’s because he tells them what they want to hear. Echoing the arguments of Martin Bright and John Ware, Husain enthusiastically contributes to the prevailing Islamophobic discourse. And he seems to be building a successful career out of it.

The case for mistrusting Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… despite friendly and long-lasting relations with many Muslims, my first reaction on seeing Muslims in the street is mistrust…. The fundamental problem is this: There is an asymmetry between the good that many moderate Muslims can do for Britain and the harm that a few fanatics can do to it…. And the plain fact of the matter is that British society could get by perfectly well without the contribution even of moderate Muslims…. their cheap labor that we imported in the 1960s in a vain effort to bolster the dying textile industry, which could not find local labor, is now redundant. In other words, one of the achievements of the bombers and would-be bombers is to make discrimination against most Muslims who wish to enter Britain a perfectly rational policy.”

Theodore Dalrymple in the Los Angeles Times, 8 July 2007

Bright holds out hope for ‘process of reform’ at MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Blimey. Martin Bright graciously concedes that there may yet be hope for the Muslim Council of Britain.

True, as you might anticipate, Bright attacks Madeleine Bunting’s article in yesterday’s Guardian for capitulating to Islamofascism – “treating international Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami as if they are the primitive products of third world victims of colonialism rather than sophisticated totalitarian movements”, as he puts it. Bright also declares himself “delighted” at the thought that his anti-MCB propaganda may have resulted in the government cold shouldering the most representative Muslim organisation in Britain and transferring its support to an utterly fraudulent outfit like the Sufi Muslim Council (yes, well done there, Martin).

But, credit where it’s due, Bright does believe that, as far as the MCB is concerned, “the process of reform is beginning”. Which does represent a rather more liberal stance than the one adopted by the rabid anti-Islamist bigot Dave T over at Harry’s Place. Admittedly, that isn’t difficult.

Postscript:  David T is not happy about being characterised as a “rabid anti-Islamist bigot”, which he describes as “a rather strange turn of phrase”. Well, how else would you characterise someone who has described Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain as “a piece of scum” and Osama Saeed of the Muslim Association of Britain as a fascist? The recent juvenile abuse of Salma Yaqoob is one of the milder examples of the obsessive and ceaseless attacks on politically engaged Muslims by Harry’s Place.

Scroll down through the comments and you’ll find Martin Bright asserting that “Islamophobia is a daft term”. Odd, then, that Bright told a FOSIS conference in August 2005 that he had no problem describing himself as an Islamophobe “because there is a lot in Islam to be fearful of”. Bright also wants to know “why calling the Sufi Muslim Council a ‘fraudulent outfit’ doesn’t count as Islamophobia. Or don’t Sufis count as Muslims?” They certainly do, but they never elected Haras Rafiq and Azhar Ali as their representatives. Even the government has evidently reached the conclusion that the SMC is a waste of space and has now shifted its patronage to Khurshid Ahmed’s British Muslim Forum.

Combating terrorism – conference at Islamic Cultural Centre

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, delivered the opening address at the Islamic Cultural Centre conference on Saturday.

MCB news report, 9 July 2007

See also BBC News, 7 July 2007

Over at the Sunday Telegraph Alasdair Palmer informs his readers that the conference’s call for co-operation with the police and security services came as “a surprise because, in the past, the MCB has seemed to be somewhat lukewarm about encouraging British Muslims to go to the police or security services with any suspicions they might have about friends or acquaintances who they think might be involved in terrorism. It is, after all, only nine months since Mr Bari issued a scarcely veiled threat to the authorities: he said that if the Government and ‘some police officers and sections of the media’ continued to ‘demonise Muslims… Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists, 700,000 of them in London’.”

Of course, the MCB has repeatedly urged the community to co-operate with the police in countering terrorism. As for the “two million Muslim terrorists” nonsense, which is based on the Sunday Telegraph‘s own distorted presentation of a September 2006 interview with Dr Bari, the MCB replied to this at the time. But never let facts get in the way of an anti-Muslim story, eh Alasdair?