Category Archives: UK

Absorption or exodus: The future legacy of British anti-terror laws

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“‘We will kill every f***ing one of you Muslims’. One could be forgiven for believing this to be an excerpt from a BNP Party Political Broadcast. It is not. In fact, it is the horrifying taunt hurled by armed police officers with guns drawn at 34-year old London Underground worker ‘Abdul Rahman’ as he knelt before them cringing in fear for his life. Moments earlier, ‘Abdul Rahman’ had been pushed to the ground by 3 armed officers who subjected him to physical and verbal abuse, having intercepted him on his journey home from work. It was about half past four on a bright summer afternoon in full view of on-lookers.”

Fahad Ansari writes: BLINK, 22 May 2007

The Muslim cricket test

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ruth KellySchool teachers are to force Muslim children to take sides with lessons involving imaginary terrorist plots. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly wants to change the national curriculum so that pupils will be asked where they stand if a friend wanted to launch a “holy war” attack on a local supermarket.

Community leaders are outraged by ministers plans to target Muslim schools with questions to kids about what they would do if Islamic extremists sought to buy fertilizer for a bomb plot. The proposals raised fears of a creeping surviellance culture in which teachers could come under pressure to reveal the identities of Muslims children who sympathised with terrorism.

Critics pointed out that the government did not seek to “educate” Catholic children in Northern Ireland about the dangers of sectarian violence but instead moved to achieve a political settlement. The government needed to deal with real causes of terrorism, such as the war on Iraq and Afghanistan and segregation caused by economic policies, rather than brand young kids as terrorist sympathisers. Muslim organisations voiced concerns that the plans are based on an assumption that Muslim schools are teeming with budding terrorists.

Lester Holloway reports: BLINK, 23 May 2007

Islamophobia doesn’t exist, claims ex-leftist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Furedi“In recent years the term Islamophobia has been frequently invoked to silence criticism of Islam. Criticisms of any aspect of Islam are looked upon as expressions of a new form of racism. In reality, critics of Islam are questioning the values associated with the religion rather than the racial status of Muslim people. Today, promoting the concept of Islamophobia is about setting up Islam as a criticism-free zone. Recent claims about an ‘epidemic of Islamophobia’ are based on very impressionistic and subjective methodology.”

Frank Furedi, formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party, in Spiked, 21 May 2007

Perhaps Furedi should have a word with BNP führer Nick Griffin who last year recommended that the fascists should seize “a great political opportunity to surf our message into the public mind on the back of a media tsunami of ‘Islamophobia’.”

Mad Mel explains Islamism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Londonistan“Islamism is the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam. I’m well aware of the argument that there’s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that’s a theological argument for others to have….

“The Islamist goal is to destroy the virus of freedom and modernity before it infects the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam. That is the core of the profound threat it poses to the west, a threat mounted through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover. This cultural takeover, or the aim to Islamise the west, was explicitly laid out in a programme of subversion for Europe by the Wahabbi [sic] Muslim Brotherhood almost 30 years ago….

“And for Islamists there is no room in a liberal society. True liberals never thought they had a duty to accommodate fascism. True liberals always fought it. So must we do with religious fascism.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 18 May 2007

Bernard Lewis’ latest call to arms

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Bernard Lewis’ op-ed piece in the May 16, 2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal deserves swift rebuttal. This is the same man who advised President Bush prior to the Iraq war that the only language Arabs understood was the language of force. While Presidents may self-select advisors who tell them what they want to hear, these advisors bear as much responsibility, specially when they pose as ‘experts’…. Lewis’ op-ed article is a call to arms against Islam.”

Badruddin Khan writes in Counterpunch, 17 May 2007

In an article entitled “Islam’s War for World Mastery” Efraim Karsh takes up Lewis’s arguments. He writes:

“Mr. bin Laden and other Islamists’ war is not against America per se but is rather the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire, the umma. As the preeminent world power for quite some time, and the only remaining superpower after the collapse of the Soviet empire, America blocks the final realization of this goal and hence is a natural target for aggression. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.”

New York Sun, 18 May 2007

‘US opens door to millions of Muslims’, right-wing blogger warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The new immigration bill will allow hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Muslims to come into the United States over the next decade. Many of them have been indoctrinated all their lives to hate the United States, but that’s not on the immigration qualifications. Nobody asks newcomers ‘have you been taught to hate the United States?’ But that is exactly how France and Britain created their domestic terrorist threat: By importing hundreds of thousands of unassimilated people under the guise of multicultural love and peace. Almost all vote for the Left.”

Thoughts Of A Conservative Christian, 18 May 2007

Note also the citing of Christopher Hitchens’ recent Vanity Fair article.

Man found guilty of mosque arson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A man has been convicted of deliberately setting fire to a mosque in West Sussex. Richard John Hall, 29, from Westbourne Avenue in Worthing, was found guilty of burglary and arson at Chichester Crown Court on Friday.

The court heard that Hall, who has learning difficulties, set fire to the Islamic Cultural Centre on Ivy Arch Road, Worthing, on 11 March 2005. He has been released on bail to be sentenced next month.

The fire was discovered by two members of the Muslim community on their way to prayers at the mosque.

Hall was linked to the crime after his DNA was found at the scene.

BBC News, 18 May 2007

Update:  See “Man who set fire to mosque jailed for three years”, The Argus, 11 June 2007