Category Archives: UK

‘Faith crimes’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Liberals have lost some important battles in the struggle to preserve democratic standards in the face of extremism. One was lost here in Britain, and by my profession, namely the decision by all British newspapers not to reprint the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The papers’ decision was encouraged by the Labour government and accompanied by a good deal of sage self-congratulation that wisdom had prevailed. The fact that journalism’s central task is to relate or show to people what is happening was put to one side, even though in this case what was happening was, inter alia, murders, burnings, riots and boycotts. Now that the smoke has literally cleared, we can see more clearly what that decision was: a disastrous miscalculation.”

John Lloyd in the Financial Times, 17 June 2006

And how can we see this more clearly? Apparently because “complaint backed by believable threat of violence, laced with the undertones of cultural guilt” has only encouraged calls for censorship from other minority communities, such as the Hindus who protested about the London exhibition of the paintings of Maqbool Fida Husain.

In other words the Nick Cohen line, which fails to distinguish between causing offence and promoting racism.

Daniel Johnson on Forest Gate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniel Johnson offers his take on the Forest Gate police raid for the benefit of US readers:

“At a press conference on Tuesday, the two Muslim suspects [sic] were flanked by ‘civil liberties heavyweights’. They included Gareth Pierce, a left-wing lawyer who also represents Guantánamo detainees and sundry other extremists, and Asad Rehman, a former sidekick to George Galloway (founder of the Respect Party) and self-appointed spokesman for every anti-Western, anti-war, anti-capitalist cause. Looking slightly out of place among the shaven-headed, bushy-bearded Islamists was Canon Ann Easter, a dean of the Church of England. Canon Easter had turned her church into a television studio for the benefit of this leftist-Islamist media circus. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the local mosque had declined to do this. The Islamists disapprove of women priests, but they presumably see in Canon Easter what Lenin called a ‘useful idiot’ who can reassure the infidels. Unfortunately, Canon Easter is by no means untypical. England’s established church has a deplorable record of ‘internalizing the hatred of the West that defines the shared universe of radical Islamism and the revolutionary left’, as Melanie Phillips puts it in her book Londonistan.”

New York Sun, 15 June 2006

Forest Gate – it was a terrorist plot (according to Mad Mel)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips thinks that the Forest Gate police raid may have involved terrorism after all. She suggests that Al-Qaida could have fed false information to the authorities in order to “lead the security forces up the garden path. This is because it is a core al Qaeda strategy to use dissimulation and false trails to confuse its terrorist targets. Drawing on the Islamic principle that lies or omissions for the ‘greater good’ of Islam are permissible, al Qaeda training manuals carry detailed instructions on the use of deception…. The aim of sowing such confusion is to produce precisely what is now happening in Britain. The security services are humiliated and made to look incompetent, with the result that people increasingly conclude that the terrorist threat is exaggerated. Warnings of the severity of such a threat are thus increasingly disbelieved, and with the nation’s guard lowered it becomes far easier to mount a truly deadly attack.”

Daily Mail, 12 June 2006

Raided, arrested, released: the price of wrong intelligence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Forest Gate protestorsYesterday anti-terror investigators were again having to defend their tactics after two men arrested in the Forest Gate operation in east London were released without charge. While police insist these kinds of raids are necessary to prevent another July 7, many of the innocent men and women caught up in them have had their lives changed, or lost their businesses.

Guardian, 12 June 2006

Observer boosts Ann Coulter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A correspondent writes: “Think it’s worth mentioning that the latest Observer‘s review section is basically a huge plug for Ann Coulter’s new book. Her visage dominates the front page and there’s a gushing two page interview inside. Her nauseating racism is presented as ‘controversial’ bravery, ever-so-witty, she’s-got-a-point-y’know – all the usual trashy excuses that petit-bourgeois fuckwits trundle out for bigotry. Seems to me that the paper has made a strategic editorial decision to line itself up with this kind of Liberal Islamophobia and is pushing it systematically. Hardly surprising given its Bomb The Darkies position over the war, but still worth noting.”

Quite right, we should have posted on this. See the Observer, 11 June 2006

Jihad Watch on Dr Bari

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Newly elected general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohammed Abdul Bari, has given an interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he puts over a characteristically restrained and moderate message. But this is just not good enough for our friend Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. He takes it as evidence that Dr Bari “holds to the same goal as that of the Al-Ghurabaa types, but is just slicker about it”. As for Dr Bari’s suggestion that relations between the police and Muslim communities in London would be improved by the recruitment of 3,000 more Muslim policemen, Spencer comments sarcastically: “Foxes Guarding the Henhouse Alert.”

Dhimmi Watch, 10 June 2006

‘England afraid to fly its own flag’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

One of our readers has drawn our attention to an article by one Modi Kreitman that recently appeared in the Israeli online publication YNet News. It is headlined “England afraid to fly its own flag”, and Kreitman writes: “Following warnings by extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, in which the group said that the red cross in the England flag symbolizes the ‘blood thirsty crusaders’ and the occupation of Muslims, some of the largest companies in England have ordered their workers not to wave the flags.”

The origin of the YNet News report is an article in the Sun newspaper which contains the following passage: “Anjem Choudary, a former leader of the Islamic extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, claimed the St George flag symbolised a bloodthirsty past. He said: ‘The cross does represent Christianity and for Muslims it also represents a crusader history of occupation and murder’.”

If you read the original piece, you can see how Kreitman has distorted it. In the Sun article, Choudary’s comment is given as an example of how some British Muslims refuse (for perfectly legitimate reasons, I would say) to wave the St George flag. There is no suggestion that Choudary issued any threats, nor does the Sun claim that the various companies that they say have banned the St George flag did so in response to threats from Choudary or anyone else. The Sun‘s argument is that the ban was motivated by the view that the flag is associated with racism and it blames “political correctness” for the decision.

So, basically, the YNet News article is a pack of lies.

Observer apologises to Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Owing to an editing error last week, we failed to make clear that a letter from Chris Doyle, carried in response to our publication of an extract from Melanie Phillips’s new book Londonistan, was written in his capacity as director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding. That extract (Comment, 28 May) may have given the impression that Ms Phillips’s book connects all British Muslims to a campaign of violence, whereas she stresses that the vast majority are peaceful and law-abiding. She also draws a distinction between Islam, which should be respected, and Islamism, which, she believes, is the use of that religion for violent ends.”

Editorial statement in the Observer, 11 June 2006

Evidently written in response to a complaint by Mad Mel herself. Readers of Islamophobia Watch can make up their own minds as to whether this characterisation of Phillips’ attitude to Islam is accurate.