Category Archives: UK

Sir Salman’s long journey

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salman Rushdie“Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’.

“The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.

“Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on ‘humane’ grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as ‘petulant anti-Americanism’ and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as ‘giving the lie to official facts’.”

Priyamvada Gopal in the Guardian, 18 June 2007

Muslim officer is first on the beat donning hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rukshana Begum is, without question, one of a kind. This week, the 23-year-old will become the first police officer ever to wear the Muslim hijab, or headscarf, on duty in Cambridgeshire. And she can’t wait. “I’ve struggled to get where I am,” she admits. “But I feel that my generation is the one which is going to break barriers. I hope that people will look at me and think, ‘If she can do it, so can I’.”

Cambridge Evening News, 18 June 2007

Launch of the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

namazie and racist placards 2Maryam Namzie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran is pleased to announce: “A British branch of a new Europe-wide phenomenon is to be launched on Thursday 21 June in London. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain is building on the stunning success of other branches already operating in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The British Humanist Association and National Secular Society are sponsoring the launch and support the new organisation.”

A comment on Namazie’s blog indicates the support that the new organisation can expect to attract: “Congratulations to this new group. I hope that you have much success and contribute to the end of Islam in Europe. Islam, like facism [sic] and totalitarianism, has no place in a modern Europe. These dead ideologies must be swept aside so that we can all move together into the future. A world without Islam is a world much closer to peace. Thanks for standing up and providing hope for the millions of people who are held captive by Islam – freedom is possible!!”

Maryam Namazie’s blog, 18 June 2007

Muslims under attack at centre

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims are being pelted with eggs and stones in anti-Islamic attacks on the South Woodford Muslim Community Centre seven years after it was destroyed in a petrol bomb attack.

“A few weeks ago there were people throwing eggs at children leaving the centre,” said Qaiser Malik, secretary of the Qurani Murkuz Trust behind the centre in Mulberry Way. “People have thrown eggs and stones from the flyover. They spit on our doors and have left ham and bacon on the doorstep. Apparently the same things are happening to people at bus stops in Woodford.”

Dr Mohammmed Essam El-Din Fahim, head Imam and chairman of the South Woodford centre, said Islamic hatred has been stirred up by BNP leaflets being distributed in the area condemning Islam and the mosque.

Wanstead & Woodford Guardian, 14 June 2007

Anti-Muslim protest by Master Race flops

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NF Islam Out of BritainThe Al Muhajiroun demonstration against “British Oppression” in Downing Street on Friday apparently passed off without incident. Reports indicate an attendance about 150, while the counter-protest initiated by Terry Blackham of the National Front attracted about 30 protestors according to the fascist website Stormfront – though photographs suggest it may have been even fewer.

Evidently expecting a huge response to his call for an anti-Islamist demonstration, Blackham had originally intended to march the vanguard of the White Race over to City Hall at the end of the demo to stage a mass protest against Ken Livingstone, so given the pathetic turnout he was well advised to abandon that idea. And over at YouTube you can watch an excerpt from Blackham’s inspirational address to his troops in which he predicts “world media attention on this event today”. Another slight misjudgement there, eh Terry?

On a more serious note, in a further speech to the demonstrators Blackham objected to the fascists being separated from the Al Muhajiroun protestors and declared that in future, instead of co-operating with the police, the NF will take direct action against Muslim communities: “This fucking barrier is a joke…. Let’s not have it…. You lot organise with me and we’ll turn up and we’ll oppose these [Muslims] at their mosques. I can’t wait until we can take their mosques down brick by brick.”

Surely there are grounds for Blackham being charged under the Public Order Act? Or are far-right racists – unlike Islamist extremists – immune to prosecution for inciting violence?

‘We cannot compromise with the cultures that are creating terrorism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Basing himself on Shiv Malik’s “exceptionally penetrating article” in Prospect magazine – based on “research” that the BBC had the nerve to reject as “anti-Muslim” – Alasdair Palmer asserts that the problem of home-grown terrorism arises from allowing people from backward barbaric cultures into “our” liberal secular society:

“The central fantasy has been that immigrants from very different cultures to our own share our commitment to tolerance, personal freedom and the separation of politics from religion that has evolved in this country over the past 300 years…. One of the remarkable things about Mr Malik’s piece is that it is based around a recognition that it is impossible to explain how Khan, Tanweer and Hussain became suicide bombers without examining the culture from which they came…. Mr Malik’s article shows in arresting detail how a conflict within the culture of an immigrant group can lead to the radicalisation of the next generation. British foreign policy, which has been blamed for the creation of home-grown Islamic terrorists, has had very little to do with it…

“The reality is not all doom and gloom. The right to pursue happiness will surely eventually take root in a less violent and more liberal form among people from cultures that are inimical to it…. There are things that can be done to speed up the rate at which that happens, such as … ensuring that new arrivals learn English. Education is not an immediate panacea, however: the fundamentalist, tribal mentality has a remarkable ability to persist even after a successful education….

“The conflict between our culture and one that insists a father is obliged to kill his daughter if she marries outside her tribe, or which says that democracy should be forcibly replaced by theocracy, is a conflict for which there cannot be a compromise solution…. Government policy still seems based on the myth of multiculturalism: denying that the conflict is real. The Government has not even found the heart to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that openly recruits Muslims to violent jihad. It may even be on the receiving end of a government grant.”

Sunday Telegraph, 17 June 2007

For an alternative view of the causes of terrorism, see the Scotsman, 17 June 2007

Torygraph columnist applauds Kelly’s commission

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Commission on Integration“The message from the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is loud and clear. Multiculturalism has not worked…. For too long, local authorities have had a free hand to promote a multiculturalist agenda, wreaking untold harm on race relations…. The commission also recommends the withdrawal of funding for groups that represent only one particular ethnic group, religion or race, unless there are compelling reasons to do so…. The Government must now catch up with what many of us have been arguing for years; that many of Britain’s ethnic minorities are adrift in ghettoes and that some are proving to be incubators of radicalist tendencies and havens for criminals.”

Zia Haider Rahman in the Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2007

Cf. Lee Jasper’s comment on the CIC report: “This report fails to identify gross racist stereotypes and whipped up fear now targeted at Muslims and asylum seekers as a source of social conflict. Instead, without any basis in fact, it dangerously turns the blame onto the victims.”

Blink news report, 14 June 2007

And on the Matthew Bannister programme on Radio 5 yesterday morning, the featured speaker on the issue of integration arising from the CIC report was the BNP’s Nick Griffin. Listen here.

Catholic bigots denounce composer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John Tavener“John Tavener is a gentle sort of chap … but his latest choral work, to be premiered at Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday, seems to have stirred up a hornets’ nest of angry Catholics.

“The work, The Beautiful Names, is a reflection on the 99 names for Allah and its production at the cathedral – a venue suggested by Prince Charles, who commissioned the work – has caused outrage among those of the faithful who think the building is being taken over by Islamists. One letter writer, Daphne McLeod, has spluttered about the cathedral being desecrated and honouring a false god.”

Guardian, 15 June 2007

Indeed, in her letter to the Catholic Herald Ms McLeod demands: “Can we be told what arrangements have been made to reconsecrate our Cathedral to the Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord after this defilement?”

See also Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2007 and Sunday Telegraph, 9 June 2007

Alien nation?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On Thursday the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is finally expected to publish its findings, but the project is based on some big misunderstandings. There is a widespread anxiety that we are ‘sleepwalking into segregation’, as Trevor Phillips put it in 2005 when he was chair of the Commission for Racial Equality….

“The whole debate about race in this country has shifted from multiculturalism, tolerance and anti-racism to integration and this sticky notion of cohesion. The onus of responsibility has shifted from tackling the white community’s racism to assessing the ethnic minority community’s state of integration. The latter is supposed to indicate the likelihood of extremism – the most dubious connection of all in this debate riddled with misconceptions – after all, Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the 7/7 bombers appeared to be ‘integrated’ with a job in a primary school, a wife and child.

“This anxious, nervy debate has little connection to the evidence being turned up by UK demographers. Academics like Ludi Simpson, Danny Dorling and Ceri Peach say that the UK is going through a process of desegregation as established ethnic minorities move out of inner-city neighbourhoods into surrounding suburbs.”

Madeleine Bunting at Comment is Free, 13 June 2007

Read Commission on Integration and Cohesion report Our Shared Future here.

For the controversy surrounding one member of Ruth Kelly’s commission, Ramesh Kallidai, see Andrew Gilligan’s article in the Evening Standard (reprinted here). The issue is not so much Kallidai’s alleged association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh but rather that he has deployed Hindutva myths about Muslims forcing young Hindu women to convert to Islam in the UK. It seems that while Kelly excludes representatives of the Muslim community on the basis of links with Jamaat-e-Islami or the Muslim Brotherhood, even though these links have no adverse impact on community relations in this country, she has no problems working with a Hindu admirer of the fascist RSS.