Category Archives: UK

Sookhdeo calls for ban on Qur’an

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Noble Qur'anPatrick Sookhdeo talks to the Telegraph:

“The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work – yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops. It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book. Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.”

Sunday Telegraph, 19 February 2006

The reference is evidently to a translation of the Qur’an by two Sufi scholars, Abdalhaqq and Aisha Bewley, which has been praised in the Middle East Quarterly for its “excellent, readable English”. (The MEQ, if you didn’t know, is published by the Middle East Forum, whose director is Daniel Pipes.) And Sookhdeo proposes, in all seriousness, that the government should ban it!

This proposal, predictably, is enthusiastically endorsed by the BNP, who (as we have noted before) are great admirers of Sookhdeo. As usual, though, the fascists feel that he fails to draw the necessary conclusions: “we believe that nothing but total separation of the majority of Muslims from the secular and Christian West will ensure the latter’s survival…. The pattern of very recent mass migration from the Islamic world into the west must be at first halted and then reversed.”

BNP news release, 19 February 2006

More self-promoting stupidity from Tatchell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

OutrageWe have already covered the ludicrous, divisive and objectively pro-Nazi campaign waged by Peter Tatchell and Outrage against the participation of the Muslim Council of Britain and its general secretary Sir Iqbal Sacranie at yesterday’s Unite Against Fascism conference (see here and here). As it turned out, Sacranie had another engagement, and his place was taken by Daud Abdullah, assistant general secretary of the MCB, who addressed the opening session of the conference.

Tatchell, whose capacity to delude himself about his own importance evidently knows no limits, announced that Sacranie’s absence was all down to his campaign. “This climbdown is a victory for humanitarian values over homophobic prejudice,” he pontificated. “We believe the organisers realised they could not secure the acceptance of a homophobe at an anti-fascist conference, so they dumped him.” (Outrage press release, 18 February 2006)

In fact, the demand that Tatchell and Outrage had raised was for the MCB as an organisation to be banned from the conference platform. “Sir Iqbal is leader of the anti-gay Muslim Council of Britain (MCB)”, they declared. “Sir Iqbal’s homophobic views, and the MCB’s opposition to gay equality, echo the prejudice and discrimination of the BNP…. We urge you to withdraw your invitation to Sir Iqbal and the MCB…. The MCB is not a liberal, progressive organisation. It represents only conservative, reactionary opinion. It is not a suitable partner organisation for the movement against fascism.” (Outrage press release, 14 February 2006)

Yet, in the outcome, the invitation was not withdrawn and the UAF conference was addressed by an assistant general secretary of the MCB, rather than by its general secretary. So, a bit of a limited victory there then, eh Peter?

90% of UK Muslims ‘loyal’ to Britain: poll

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A sweeping majority of 91 percent of British Muslims are “loyal” to Britain and 80 percent still want to live in and accept Western society, a new poll showed on Sunday, February 19. The ICM survey, which has been conducted for Britain’s Sunday Telegraph on 500 British Muslims, also found that some 80 percent of them want British troops pulled from Iraq immediately.

Nearly two thirds further thought the recent video of British troops beating Iraqi youths was symptomatic of a wider problem in Iraq. Half did not think the soldiers would be “appropriately punished.” A video obtained by Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper News of the World showed UK troops dragging four young protesters off a street and into an army compound where they were ruthlessly punched, kicked and hit with batons.

Labour MP Sadiq Khan said the main single issue that respondents objected to was the government’s foreign policy – notably towards Iraq.

The survey found that 99 percent of British Muslims believe the July 7 bombers were “wrong” to carry out the atrocity. A fifth, however, showed sympathy with the “feelings and motives” of the four bombers who attacked London’s underground system last July 7, killing 52 people. Only one percent felt the attacks were “right.”

Islam Online, 19 February 2006

Contrast this with the coverage in the Torygraph itself, where the poll is reported under the headline “Poll reveals 40pc of Muslims want sharia law in UK”.

Sunday Telegraph, 19 February 2006

Full poll results here.

Use of ‘stop and search’ terror law alienating Muslims, warns Yard

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch yesterday admitted that police use of controversial stop and search powers under the terror laws needs to be much more tightly focused. Peter Clarke told a London conference of security experts there had been difficulties with the use of powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act after warning that anti-terror measures which alienate the Muslim community were fundamentally misguided.

Guardian, 17 February 2006

Judge’s anger at US torture

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A high court judge yesterday delivered a stinging attack on America, saying its idea of what constituted torture was out of step with that of “most civilised nations”. The criticism, directed at the Bush administration’s approach to human rights, was made by Mr Justice Collins during a hearing over the refusal by ministers to request the release of three British residents held at Guantánamo Bay.

The judge said: “America’s idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations.” He made his comments, he said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantánamo should be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried out there.

Guardian, 17 February 2006

Another racist provocation from the fascists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP turban cartoon (3)The nazis of the BNP continue to take advantage of parliament’s decision to sabotage the religious hatred bill, and the acquittal of führer Nick Griffin and his sidekick at Leeds Crown Court.

They have produced a new anti-Muslim leaflet, featuring the most offensive of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, in which the Prophet is shown wearing a turban shaped as a bomb. “Only the BNP had the backbone to publish the cartoons”, the fascists boast (which is a little unfair on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty). “Now we go one step further in releasing a brand new leaflet for download and distribution featuring the turban as time-bomb cartoon.”

BNP news release, 17 February 2006

In an accompanying article, Griffin asserts that Muslims “do not have the right … to march in our streets demanding that we change our laws to suit their own religious sensibilities. Why do they not have that right? Because to grant them that right is to accept that, sooner or later, freedom of speech – the cornerstone of our democracy – will be curtailed, cut-down and in the end abolished as the values of Islam come to predominate over ours…. on the streets of London over the Saturdays of February, the Clash of Civilisations is precisely that – an argument over which culture’s highest value is to prevail. Will it be Islam’s uncompromising Eastern stand for the dignity of its Prophet, or what used to be our uncompromising Western stand for intellectual freedom and freedom of expression?”

LGBT organisations support UAF, oppose Tatchell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Community supports maximum unity in the fight against the far right

LGBT organisations who are participating in and supporting the Unite Against Fascism campaign and its conference on Saturday 18th February have issued the following statement:

Unite Against Fascism – an alliance with all those who face the threat of the far right

As Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) organisations and individuals we support the principle that unity against fascism can only be effective by working with all those who face the threat of the far right.

The British National Party (BNP)’s politics of hatred includes attacking Muslims, the denial of the Holocaust, the aim of an “all-white Britain”, which could only be achieved through violent means, and campaigns of homophobia: They have run a gay pub landlord out of business in Burnley, liken gay men to paedophiles and have recently promoted a campaign attacking LGBT history month, describing it as an “atrocity”. They stand in the tradition of the Nazis, whose rise to power resulted in the deaths of millions of Jewish people, lesbians and gay men, disabled people, black people and trade unionists as well as others.

We cannot afford to underestimate the mortal threat that growing fascism poses to all of our communities or to be divided in the struggle against it. This means bringing together all those who are threatened by and opposed to fascism within a united anti-fascist framework. Muslim communities are a major target of BNP hate campaigning.

It is a regrettable reality that leading figures of most major religions have reactionary attitudes to homosexuality. We obviously disagree with these views. However we believe all those who oppose the BNP must be engaged with and that in turn can open a dialogue in which we seek to change such views.

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‘Extremist’ Muslim groups to be banned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HizbExtremist Muslim groups who “glorify” terrorism are likely to be banned in Britain as early as this summer after Tony Blair yesterday overcame his second backbench rebellion this week to impose new laws designed to clamp down on the celebration of terrorism in speech, placards or on the internet.

MPs voted by 327 to 279, a majority of 38, to reinstate the laws banning the glorification of terrorism, a phrase untried in the legal battle against terrorism in Europe or the US. Only 17 Labour backbenchers rebelled yesterday, 10 fewer than the last time MPs debated the issue in November. Two of the prominent groups likely to be banned are Hizb ut-Tahrir and Omar Bakri’s al-Muhajiroun, groups already named by Tony Blair.

Guardian, 16 February 2006

The BNP is riding the wave of racism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The BNP is riding the wave of racism

By Sabby Dhalu

Morning Star, 16 February 2006

The events of the last few weeks have clarified the serious threat that the growing climate of racism in Britain and the rest of Europe poses to us all.

The BNP has announced its intention to make the forthcoming local elections a “referendum on Islam,” riding on a wave of Islamophobia and rising racism.

BNP leader Nick Griffin and party activist Mark Collett were acquitted recently on half of the charges for incitement to racial hatred. The publication and republication of the so-called Danish cartoons have led to protests across the world.

Racism towards Muslims is being presented under the banner of “freedom of speech.”

All these events indicate a legitimisation and deepening climate of racism.

The use of cartoons to create or strengthen grotesque racist stereotypes of entire peoples is nothing new.

In 1930s Germany, the nazis systematically used such so-called cartoons depicting Jewish people in the most dehumanising manner for the sole purpose of creating caricatures that justified their programme of mass extermination of the Jewish people.

Black people have also been subject to such caricatures and depiction by racists and white supremacists in many parts of Europe and north America.

If published, any such images today rightly receive widespread condemnation.

It is incumbent on all anti-racists and anti-fascists to condemn unreservedly the publication of these racist images, for exactly the same reasons as the cartoons in the 1930s needed to condemned.

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The anger at racist cartoons continues

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Trafalgar Square rally (3)From London’s Trafalgar Square to Ramallah in Palestine, from Lebanon to Austria, the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, first printed in a Danish paper, have sparked rage.

Some 20,000 protesters filled Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday of last week for a rally against Islamophobia and incitement. The event was called at short notice by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and others in the wake of the cartoons row.

The protest was also supported by the Stop the War Coalition and CND. Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War, was warmly received by the crowd when she spoke at the rally. She noted that it wasn’t only Muslims who find the cartoons offensive: “They offend me because they offend my politics – they are racist provocations from a racist newspaper.”

Socialist Worker, 18 February 2006

See also the editorial comment, “Cartoon row: standing firmly united“, in the same paper.