Category Archives: UK

MP calls on YouTube to remove racist videos

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shahid MalikA Muslim MP has demanded YouTube removes a series of racist items from its website after a video alleging he was a “pervert” remained available for three weeks.

The video featured footage of Shahid Malik, before a written message stating: “This scum thinks he can mess with the big boys.” Then, before an image of the Labour MP’s face covered with blood, a new message appeared: “He better not or he will end up like this.”

Earlier in the posting, which has now been removed from the site by administrators, another subtitle stated: “A pervert just like his f***ing prophet.”

Malik suggested that a member of the British National Party could be behind the video, which also featured pictures of BNP leader Nick Griffin.

Scotland on Sunday, 10 June 2007

Rendition flights still using UK

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The CIA seems to be still using British territories to fly terror suspects to secret prisons in countries notorious for using torture, The Mail on Sunday revealed on Sunday, June 10. Quoting eyewitness, the British paper said a plane linked to the CIA’s infamous rendition program landed at the Royal Air Force station of Mildenhall in the county of Suffolk last week. It substantiated the report with a photo taken by spotters of the CASA-212 Aviocar plane as it prepared to land. Flights records show that the plane was given landing rights by the Ministry of Defense although there was no record of passenger lists or details of the flight purpose. No sooner had the plane landed in the British military base than it was secured by four US security men armed with M16 assault rifles, according to eyewitnesses.

Islam Online, 10 June 2007

‘They threatened my life. But I will still speak out’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Talk of execution will not cow me; I will carry on.” The courageous Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and one of Melanie Phillips’s favourite Muslims, confirms his intention to speak out. Except that … nobody directly threatened his life at all. The whole thing is based on a friend of Husain’s warning him that his safety would be endangered if he attended a certain mosque (unnamed, but clearly the East London Mosque). And that’s it. That’s the sole basis for Husain’s hysterical talk about facing execution. What a plonker.

Observer, 10 June 2007

See also Indigo Jo Blogs, 10 June 2007

Faisal Alam interview

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The rhetoric of Islamophobia from the ‘gay’ press after 9/11 was incredible. We were hearing things from conservative columnists that one could not imagine before. After I spoke publicly about not supporting the US war in Afghanistan, soon after 9/11, there were Op-Eds in the gay press that denounced me as a ‘unpatriotic’. One writer went as far as to say that I should be stripped of my American passport and be shipped off to Guantanamo. I was writing responses almost on a daily basis confronting the Islamophobia being perpetuated by these columnists.”

Lavender magazine interviews AlFatiha Founder Faisal Alam.

Livingstone ‘plays the Islamophobia card’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

nss2Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society is not impressed by the coalition to defend religious freedom launched at City Hall in London earlier this week. Sanderson opines that “there is very little in the way of aggression towards Muslims beyond the racism that all minority communities suffer”. Well, Sanderson and the NSS – who in the past have called for the publication of racist anti-Muslim cartoons and happily repeated denunciations of “Muslim foreigners who have forced themselves on us” – would know all about that.

NSS news report, 8 June 2007

The NSS has the backing of Robert Spencer over at Jihad Watch.

Muslim immigration and the destruction of Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stanley Kurz reviews Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe at National Review Online:

“In combination with Europe’s demographic decline and guilt-laden multiculturalism, says Laqueur, unchecked immigration has created a massive and growing population of unassimilated Muslims, hostile to their own countries and determined to transform Europe beyond all recognition, through a combination of violent and non-violent means…. Laqueur’s extended critique of ‘Islamophobia’ as an explanation for failed Muslim assimilation in Europe is devastating. Laqueur doesn’t hesitate to say that the fundamental problem of Muslim assimilation is cultural – rooted in traditional Islam, and in the strange blend of Muslim mores and ghetto street-culture that nowadays shapes Europe’s angry young Muslim men.”

An injury to one is an injury to all – Bruce Kent defends religious freedom

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Virtually everybody in Britain today accepts that the right to freedom of religion and expression is a fundamental pillar of any democratic society. Yet in practice that freedom is under threat, at least for some of our communities – notably British Muslims. And we all need to understand that, because human freedoms are indivisible, if we allow such rights to be undermined for any one group, they will be undermined for all of us.”

Bruce Kent, chair of the Coalition to Defend Freedom of Religious and Cultural Expression, writes at Comment is Free, 7 June 2007

‘Time to confront the Muslim conspiracists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Something is seriously wrong. A quarter of British Muslims believe the government and security services were involved in the July 7 suicide bombings in London, according to a poll for Channel 4 News…. Conspiracy theories abound in the Muslim community, many of them piggy-backing on an underlying notion of an American-Israeli bogeyman. In themselves, these ideas might be regarded as mere folly, but they are terrifyingly dangerous because they fertilise the ground in which more hostile projects can take root. Government and establishment rhetoric that continually presents our current difficulties as emanating from a ‘small extremist fringe’ does not help. It only provides cover for pernicious ideas which have very much wider currency, as the polls show.”

Zia Haider Rahman in Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2007

But what can you expect from a writer who describes himself as an opponent of “multiculturalism, the race relations industry and the peculiar culture of celebrating diversity”?

Coalition to defend freedom of religious and cultural expression launched

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Coalition launchPolitical figures, religious leaders, trade unionists and human rights campaigners are amongst the individuals that have signed up to a new coalition aimed at defending freedom of religious and cultural expression.

Speakers at the launch included the Mayor of London; peace campaigner and activist Bruce Kent; writer Ismail Patel from the British Muslim Initiative; Dr Daud Abdullah, Deputy General Secretary, Muslim Council of Britain; Edie Friedman, Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality; Andrew Stunell MP; and Steve Sinnott, National Union of Teachers.

The coalition is being set up in the light of continuing media and other claims that different communities and faith groups openly expressing their culture or faith threaten community relations in Britain. Such claims have been most recently and strongly directed at the Muslim community, particularly focusing on the right of Muslim women to wear the veil.

A Greater London Authority commissioned report into Islamophobia in the media showed that 90 per cent of reports on Islam were negative. However, the majority of Londoners – 94 per cent – support freedom of thought, conscience, speech and religion.

The coalition will put the case that that multiculturalism, especially in London, enriches society and that division will flow from repression of these rights, not their expression. And that it is necessary for individuals and different communities to come to gether to defend freedom of religious and cultural though that have been established over hundreds of years.

The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said: “I am proud of London’s reputation as the most diverse city in the world where the contribution all communities is celebrated and people’s freedom of religious expression is respected as it is one of the most essential of our civil liberties. Attacks on the rights of Muslim people to express their faith as they choose are ultimately a threat to everybody’s rights to freedom of religious and cultural expression.”

GLA press release, 6 June 2007

See also British Muslim Initiative website.

British Muslims and 7/7

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Today’s papers are filled with articles reporting the Channel 4 poll of British Muslims. Typical headlines read “Muslims: MI5 behind 7/7” (Daily Mirror), “25% of Brit Muslims think 7/7 bombers innocent” (The Sun), “7/7 bombs staged by agents say one in four Muslims” (Daily Telegraph) and “24% of Muslims think 7/7 raids were MI5 plot” (Daily Express), while the Daily Mail goes with “59pc of UK Muslims believe there was a cover-up over 7/7”.

The background to the poll – not least the fact that the fraudulent propaganda used to justify the Iraq war has destroyed the government’s credibility among Muslim communities – is of course omitted from most of these reports. The Mail does at least quote Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, who puts the findings into context:

“Most people who would examine the facts with a level head would realise that this (7/7) is not some conspiracy. But as with the assassination of JFK, regrettably these kind of incidents become a cause celebre for conspiracy theorists. I think that this particular government has also engendered a lot of distrust. Some people will always be determined to believe that Muslims could not have been behind such an act of mass murder and to this end they are vulnerable to conspiracy theorists. The Muslim Council has always asked for a public inquiry into the July 7 bombings and that inquiry would have put this scepticism to bed for good.”