Category Archives: UK

UK Muslims held at US customs, forced to miss conference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim leaders who gathered Saturday to discuss their role in combating extremism within the Islamic community complained that two scheduled speakers missed the event after being detained at Los Angeles International Airport.

“People are upset,” said Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which organized the conference. “On one hand the U.S. government is asking us to do more, but on the other they are preventing us from doing our work.”

British citizens Mockbul Ali and Waqqas Khan had arrived on a flight from London at 4 p.m. but only cleared customs after 8 p.m., said Erin Robertson, a spokeswoman for the British Consulate-General in Los Angeles. Robertson said the reason for the delay was not clear.

Associated Press, 18 December 2005

That would be Mockbul Ali, the foreign office’s adviser on Muslim affairs, and Wakkas Khan of FOSIS. Unbelievable. (Mind you, after the experiences of Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf Islam and Zaki Badawi, perhaps they should be thankful they were allowed in at all.)

Thug jailed for anti-Muslim racism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A racist who branded a Muslim shopkeeper a terrorist on the day of the London bombings has been jailed.

James McKeown, 37, of no fixed address, launched a tirade of abuse after spotting Mohammed Mahmood, who was wearing traditional Muslim dress, as he walked along Victoria Road, Cambridge, on July 7. McKeown shouted: “Look what you’ve done to London you terrorist, go back to your own country”, before following him along the road hurling further abuse and threatening him with violence.

Police said the incident was an unprovoked attack on a “very calm, quiet man”, and welcomed McKeown’s prison sentence. The 37-year-old was convicted of racially aggravated harassment at Cambridge Crown Court and jailed for 130 days.

However Mr Mahmood, who has lived in Cambridge for 39 years and run the Nasreen Dar store in Histon Road since 1979, said racist abuse was not uncommon in the city. He said: “In Cambridge if every incident was reported you would see it has happened hundreds of times since 9/11 and the July 7 attacks.”

He said he feared for his safety, and the safety of his wife and sister-in-law who were waiting for him when McKeown climbed out of a window of the hostel at 222 Victoria Road and began to insult him.

He said: “It was very aggressive, so I began to walk away, but this is my home so I can’t run – where would I run to? Even so I would have excused him if he said sorry and promised not to behave like that again, but the courts felt he deserved a prison sentence and I do believe those who commit crimes should be punished.”

Cambridge Evening News, 16 December 2005

Posted in UK

Nazis back Pentagon over Muslim threat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP paperThe fascists have picked up on the leaked Pentagon briefing paper warning of the Islamic threat to western civilisation:

“As the Pentagon finally sees the light, and has now begun to view the religion of Islam for what it is, when defining strategic plans in the War on Terror, will the New Labour government follow suit? Of course not. The pandering to the Muslim minority in Britain will continue. The British people, in four years time will have to face the indomitable truth. That truth is a simple choice – do we, as a once proud people lie down and accept foreign rule from a medieval and barbaric religion or should we make a stand? Should we fight to win against the forces of Jihad? Should we try and win back our country from those that would steal it from us?”

BNP news article, 16 December 2005

Mosque plan dropped

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ministers yesterday dropped plans proposed by Tony Blair as part of his 12-point anti-terror plan in the wake of the July bombings to close mosques that are used to foment extremism after criticism from the police and religious leaders. The home secretary, Charles Clarke, proposed the police should have the power to secure a court order requiring trustees of a mosque or other place of worship to stop the activities of extremists or face a temporary closure.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that mosques were being “misidentified and stereotyped as incubators of violent extremism, while the social reality is that they serve as centres of moderation”. He said the bombers had been indoctrinated in a sub-culture outside the mosque and the notion of “influential back-door mosques” was a figment of the imagination. He noted that the Finsbury Park case was resolved by existing laws.

His concerns were shared by the government’s Muslim working parties which told ministers that the proposal was arbitrary and open to misuse with whole congregations being penalised by the actions of a few fanatics.

In the face of such a critical reaction, Mr Clarke said: “I will not seek to legislate on this issue at the present time, although we will keep the matter under review.”

Guardian, 16 December 2005

More racist ‘Eurabia’ fantasies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer introduces a new regular column, “Eurabia Watch”, written by one “Emily Bradford, who lives in Europe”. In her first post, Bradford polemicises against the EU for failing to confront “Europe’s most urgent problem: millions of unassimilated Muslim immigrants, thousands of imams preaching Islamic supremacism, and self-proclaimed mujahideen bombing subways, raping teenagers, and torching cars and churches”.

Dhimmi Watch, 14 December 2005

You don’t suppose “Emily Bradford” could be a pseudonym for Melanie Phillips, do you?

A history lesson from the fascists … courtesy of Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Islam has indeed played an important role in British history for several hundred years although not in the positive way the apologists for multi-culturalism claim. The southern coasts of England, Cornwall and Wales were throughout the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries particularly attractive to sea faring Muslims from north Africa. Their intent was not to settle and integrate, not to settle and build mosques but to steal away the population; forcing women and girls into sex slaves and the menfolk into becoming galley slaves and taken to markets in what is now Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco to be sold, exploited, abused and to face a life of agony and mental suffering from which death was the only escape. This dark period of British history has been swept under the carpet in recent years as the recounting of the horrific stories makes uncomfortable reading for those declining numbers of supporters of multi-culturalism.”

BNP website, 14 December 2005

Hang on, I recall reading this somewhere else. Now, where was that? Ah yes, it’s coming back to me. It was here.

Enemies of the state?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Four men deprived of their liberty for four years on suspicion of being international terrorists disclose today that they have not once been questioned by police or security services since being arrested.

The four, who were among 16 suspects detained without trial under post-11 September terror legislation, later overturned by the law lords, give harrowing accounts of the treatment they have suffered. All are now under virtual house arrest. Although three face deportation, The Independent has learnt that there is no prospect of the men ever being questioned over the offences they are alleged to have committed.

In interviews with Amnesty International, the four – three Algerians and a Palestinian – say their detentions have harmed their physical and mental health. They also complain that their treatment has had a devastating impact on their wives and families.

The men were interned in Belmarsh jail in south-east London – which has been called Britain’s Guantanamo Bay – and other high security prisons in conditions consistently condemned by human rights organisations. Their detentions were ruled illegal by the law lords a year ago and they have since been released on control orders with tough restrictions on leaving home.

Three were re-arrested in August under immigration powers pending deportation and released by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission Act (Siac) in October on very strict bail conditions amounting to house arrest. One of them told Amnesty: “We’ve been moving from one nightmare to another.”

Independent, 15 December 2005

US paranoia over the Caliphate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The word getting the workout from the nation’s top guns these days is ‘caliphate’ – the term for the seventh-century Islamic empire that spanned the Middle East, spread to Southwest Asia, North Africa and Spain, then ended with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. Specialists on Islam say the word is a mysterious and ominous one for many Americans, and that the administration knows it….

“So now, Mr. Cheney and others warn, Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal is the re-establishment of the caliphate, with calamitous consequences for the United States. As Mr. Cheney put it in Lake Elmo, referring to Osama bin Laden and his followers: ‘They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the seventh-century caliphate’ to be ‘governed by Sharia law, the most rigid interpretation of the Koran’. Or as Mr. Rumsfeld put it on Monday: ‘Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East, and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia.’ General Abizaid was dire, too. ‘They will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world,’ he told the House Armed Services Committee in September, adding that the caliphate’s goals would include the destruction of Israel….

“A number of scholars and former government officials take strong issue with the administration’s warning about a new caliphate, and compare it to the fear of communism spread during the Cold War. They say that although Al Qaeda’s statements do indeed describe a caliphate as a goal, the administration is exaggerating the magnitude of the threat as it seeks to gain support for its policies in Iraq. In the view of John L. Esposito, an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University, there is a difference between the ability of small bands of terrorists to commit attacks across the world and achieving global conquest.”

Elizabeth Bumiller in the New York Times, 12 December 2005

Blame Muslims for Australian riots (2)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips agrees with Tim Priest: “… the widespread spin that has been placed on this disorder, that it has been caused by white racists and that what it reveals is that, under its veneer of multiculturalism, Australia is a fundamentally racist society positively heaving with people with despicable views who have been itching to have a pop at blameless Lebanese Muslims, is very wide of the mark. For it appears that the current unrest was sparked by Lebanese Muslim attacks on two indigenous lifeguards, and that this was only the tip of an iceberg of aggression by this minority which – thanks to the censorship imposed by multiculturalism – has gone all but unreported.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 14 December 2005