Category Archives: UK

‘Fury over Halal Christmas dinner’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fury Over Christmas DinnerParents expressed outrage last night over a school’s plans to serve pupils a Muslim Christmas dinner.

The headteacher announced that she intended to replace the children’s traditional turkey meal with halal chicken. She explained that eating poultry which had been slaughtered in the Muslim way would create an “integrated Christmas”.

But furious parents accused the school of undermining the Christian faith. They were backed by Labour MP Denis MacShane who demanded to know why the children were not being offered a choice.

After Mr MacShane’s intervention, Jan Charters, head of Oakwood School in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, backed down and youngsters will now be offered a choice of halal chicken or a traditional turkey dinner, costing £1.75.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “Headteachers and school governors should not make this sort of mistake in the first place. There are a lot of these silly people around who undermine British culture.”

Daily Express, 18 November 2006

OutRage! leader backs Israel’s assault on Lebanon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Brett LockBrett Lock of OutRage! applauds the fact that “… the governments of the US and the UK haven’t been hoodwinked by those pushing the ‘Israel is a Terrorist State’ bullshit. Hezbollah attacked Israel, Israel responded. The Lebanese government admits it’s impotent to deal with Hezbollah, so Israel is. It’s really as simple as that. Those peddling the meme of the day ‘collective punishment’ are only able to do so because they have long internalised their own infantilising of Middle Eastern Muslims.”

Lock’s position is that Israel should not simply punish Hezbollah – “what’s the point of punishing those who never learn” – but should completely destroy it.

Harry’s Place, 17 July 2006

Sweep aside stereotypes and ask what really matters

Posted on by Bob Pitt

exhibition catalogue“Islam. When you hear that word, what immediately comes to your mind? A masked terrorist? Osama bin Laden? Fanatical young men with explosives strapped round their waists? These are certainly the images that leap from the newspapers and the television screens. The notion that Islam had a high culture when Britain was living in dark times seems to be off our radar screens. Islam is a religion with great richness at its heart. Terrorists and suicide bombers have hogged the headlines, but they no more represent Islam than football ‘casuals’ represent the clubs they claim to support. Yet in today’s global media village, Islam is almost exclusively associated in the western public mind with lethal fanaticism.”

Ron Ferguson on the exhibition of Islamic art which has opened at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.

The Herald, 17 July 2006

Al Muhajiroun banned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two UK-based Islamist groups are to become the first to be banned under laws outlawing the glorification of terrorism, the home secretary has said. John Reid said he was taking action against Al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect. Under an order put down in Parliament, it will be an offence to belong to the groups, encourage support for them or wear clothes suggesting support. Mr Reid said the move sent a signal that the UK would not tolerate people who supported terrorism. The groups are both thought to be offshoots of Al Muhajiroun, which was founded by controversial cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.

BBC News, 17 July 2006

Quite what will be accomplished by banning the few dozen idiots who make up the membership of these groups is difficult to see. And an offence of “wearing clothes suggesting support” sounds open to abuse to say the least. However, it looks as though press reports that Hizb ut-Tahrir would be illegalised were inaccurate – for now. Asked about Hizb, a Home Office spokesman said: “This does remain a group about which we have real concerns and we are keeping the situation under review.”

For Inayat Bunglawala’s comments, see Islam Online, 18 July 2006

Speccy backs Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Governments come and go, but there still is such a thing as the British official mind. From our colonial days comes a Foreign Office belief that in any tricky situation, especially one involving religion and politics, one must make friends with the extremists and find, like needles in a haystack, the ‘moderates’ in their midst. This was the strategy that led us to encourage the Arab Higher Committee in pre-war Palestine, under the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Nazi-supporting Haj Amin al-Husseini, to ‘deliver’ Muslim opinion. The concept achieved apotheosis in the approach towards terrorism in Northern Ireland, which systematically broke all the genuine moderates Terence O’Neill, Brian Faulkner, David Trimble and the SDLP and advanced Sinn Fein on the grounds that it held ‘the key to peace’. Now the two biggest parties in Northern Ireland are Sinn Fein and the Paisleyites, so extremism is seen to pay off and the Province’s sectarian divisions are as a great as they have ever been.

“Sorry to praise the New Statesman in these pages, but its political editor, Martin Bright, has just produced an excellent pamphlet for Policy Exchange, the think-tank of which I am chairman, called ‘When progressives treat with reactionaries’. It is about how the British government has sought to deal with Muslims in this country (and abroad) by flirting with Islamists rather than helping empower the unfanatical. The pamphlet reprints a dozen leaked official documents which promote the oxymoron, expressed in one of them, of ‘moderate Islamist tendencies’. The Foreign Office has as its adviser a young man called Mockbul Ali, who wrote, after September 11, about how the ‘non-white world has been terrorised in the name of freedom’. He is revealed advising the Foreign Office to support the admission into this country of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious leader who supports Taleban ‘jihad’ against British troops, the execution of homosexuals and female genital mutilation. He also wanted Hossain Sayeedi, a Bangladeshi MP, let in. Sayeedi thinks our troops deserve to die for opposing the Taleban and has compared Hindus in his own country to excrement.”

Charles Moore in the Spectator, 15 July 2006

Florida: pastor denounces mosque plan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Plans to build a mosque in a predominantly black neighborhood in Pompano Beach, Fla., have led to angry protests from some local ministers. Islam is a “dangerous, evil” religion “that preaches hatred and killing,” said the Rev. O’Neal Dozier, pastor of the 2,400-member Worldwide Christian Center, which is leading the opposition. “We live in a post-9/11 world, and the people who blew up our buildings that day were Muslims.”

Although Mr. Dozier said he has received “hundreds of phone calls, e-mails and faxes” from people all over the country who share his concerns, he does not have the support of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. William L. Lawson III, president of the North Broward NAACP, told city commissioners last week: “We cannot allow religious intolerance.”

Washington Times, 16 July 2006

Government to carry out threat to ban Hizb?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HizbA number of radical Muslim groups are to be proscribed despite concern that this will drive them underground where they cannot be monitored. As part of the Prime Minister’s 12-point plan to tackle terrorism, announced after the London bombings on 7 July last year, the government is to unveil a list of organisations it wants to ban under the Terrorism Act 2006. The list is expected to include Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Shortly after the 7/7 bombings, Tony Blair signalled his intention to proscribe this group. But such a move will prove highly controversial. Hizb ut-Tahrir claims to oppose violence and it has condemned the 7/7 bombings, as well as the atrocities in Madrid and Bali. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has questioned the merits of banning the group, as have human rights lawyers. “The Prime Minister correctly said fighting terrorism is an ideological battle,” said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. “How are we to fight the war of ideas if non-violent political groups are driven underground?”

Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “We have major differences with Hizb ut-Tahrir, in particular its non-participation in the democratic process. Having said that, we think banning it is entirely wrong. It is non-violent.”

Observer, 16 July 2006

‘I am no Islamophobe’ claims Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Martin Bright complains: “It seems I have been labelled an Islamophobe by the Muslim Council of Britain. This stock response to any criticism of MCB leadership is becoming as tiresome as Zionist cries of anti-Semitism when the state of Israel is put under any kind of scrutiny.”

Comment is Free, 14 July 2006

As we have already pointed out, Bright told a FOSIS conference last year that he had no problem describing himself as an Islamophobe. Now he gets all indignant when the MCB applies that term to him.

For right-wing support for Bright’s programme, see the Daily Ablution and Jihad Watch.

The Foreign Office and radical Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sunny Hundal gives another boost to Martin Bright’s Channel 4 programme.

Pickled Politics, 14 July 2006

For the MCB’s reply to to Bright – “Martin Bright is part of a circle of pernicious Islamophobic commentators that includes Nick Cohen, Michael Gove, John Ware and Melanie Phillips, among others, who have tried to use the 7/7 atrocities as an opportunity to advance their anti-Muslim agenda” – see here.