Category Archives: UK

‘Bob Pitt Watch’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Former Workers Revolutionary Party member and now editor of What Next, Bob Pitt, is a very industrious bloke. He single-handedly runs a website called ‘Islamophobia Watch’ in which he pours vituperative criticism, mainly on people of a Muslim background who dare to criticise their religion of birth or its cultural practises. The spectacle of a white, middle-aged, middle-class male denouncing Muslims and ex-Muslims (many of them women) who speak out against homophobia and misogyny inside the Muslim community as ‘racists’ is very bizarre.”

Yours truly is denounced in the Alliance for Workers Liberty’s paper Solidarity, 20 October 2005

I don’t in fact run this website single-handedly – it was set up by Eddie Truman, who does all the technical work on it as well as posting. The accusation that our criticisms are concentrated “mainly on people of a Muslim background” is plainly false, as a cursory examination of the site will reveal. The charge against members of the Worker Communist Party of Iran (some, though not all, of whom come from a Muslim background) and against individuals like Irshad Manji is not that they are racists but that their antics play into the hands of the Islamophobic Right, who clearly recognise them as fellow spirits. Hence the enthusiastic endorsement of Maryam Namazie by Jihad Watch, Homa Arjomand by Front Page Magazine and Irshad Manji by Daniel Pipes and Melanie Phillips.

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At last a secularist / humanist voice of reason

Posted on by Eddie Truman

Sir_Bernard_CrickJust when it appeared that the secularist & humanist movement had fallen to the tidal wave of intolerance, racism and Islamophobia (see here and here), Bernard Crick writes in the Guardian:

“To work with those of other beliefs implies, of course, tact and courtesy to mute immediate criticism of what for the time and purpose at hand are irrelevancies. It is historically and psychologically foolish for secularists to believe that criticism of all religious belief is an effective way of combating violent fanaticism.”

Sir Bernard clearly understands that the racist attacks on Muslims by those claiming adherence to humanism and secularism are not acceptable.

This age of fanaticism is no time for non-believers to make enemies

Hatred Bill panders to minorities for votes, says comic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

PratRowan Atkinson made the least funny speech of his career yesterday when he went to warn the House of Lords of the threat to free speech from a law banning religious hatred.

The star of Blackadder and Mr Bean spoke of the dangers of politicians pandering to minority religions for votes. An all-party group of peers is joining religious figures to oppose the Government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.

“The prime motivating energy for the Bill seemed to come not from communities seeking protection from bullying by the British National Party but from individuals with a more aggressive, fundamentalist agenda,” he said.

Times, 21 October 2005

Carey opposes religious hatred bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CareyMuslims and members of other religions should get used to being mocked, the former Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday. Lord Carey of Clifton said he passionately believed it was good for members of a religion to have their faith criticised on certain occasions.

Speaking as a member of an all-party group of peers opposing the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, Lord Carey said he wanted to live in a society where people were sensitive to the feelings of others. “But in being sensitive, what we mustn’t do is create a society in which certain stories are not told,” Lord Carey told a news conference.

Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2005

Of course, as anyone who’s read the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill will know, it proposes to illegalise actions that incite hatred, not ridicule or criticism. It would extend to Muslims, Hindus and other “multi-ethnic” faith groups the protection presently enjoyed by Jews and Sikhs as adherents of “mono-ethnic” religions. In all consistency, Carey should be calling for the abolition of existing racial hatred laws on the basis that “Jews should get use to being mocked”.

Yesterday Carey and his fellow lords Lester and Hunt, together with Lisa Appignanesi of PEN, issued a statement in support of a wrecking amendment to the bill in the Lords. They observed blandly that “there are no pressing practical problems that require such a broad sweeping measure”. Readers of this website, not to mention the victims of the hatred and bigotry we record, might think otherwise.

Tolerance and diversity defeats separatism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

By Murad Qureshi

Tribune, 21 October 2005

Among the stalls at this summer’s Camden Bangladesh Mela in London’s Regent’s Park, I came across one run – rather sheepishly – by Hizb ut-Tahrir. This is an Islamist political party that the Government is now proposing to ban. I found myself involved in an argument with them.

This is a battle of ideas that my family has been fighting for many years. In 1947 at the time of the partition of India my grandfather argued against the creation of religious states. Now it was my turn to argue against a cult that believes voting is haram, an act of disbelief, and that the return of the khalifah – an Islamic state headed by the caliph, the “successor” to the prophet Muhammad – is the only answer to every problem faced by Muslims in the modern world.

How can voting be an act of disbelief? Those such as members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who insist that it is, claim it means participating in a democratic system that upholds the will of man over the will of Allah. For them, Islamic government is “God’s rule” and they reject democracy as “people’s rule”. They look to the political system established in seventh-century Mecca after the death of the prophet as the model that Muslims should aspire to and seek to recreate.

However, while Muslims regard the period of rule under the “rightly-guided caliphs” in idealised terms, as the best that human endeavours can achieve, it was also a period of dissent, rebellions and wars. Let us not forget that three of the four caliphs who succeeded the prophet were murdered.

Organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir which forget this historical context are similar to those religious classes on the Qur’an where the sole emphasis is on the rote learning of Arabic letters. It is a method that leads to closed minds.

The formula that the only solution to the Muslim world’s problems is a return to the early days of Islam living under just rule through the khilafa state is of no help to Muslims confronted by the problems of today. The issues of contemporary politics are too complex to be simplified in this manner.

Even in the case of Muslim-majority countries, Hizb is vague about how existing nation states can be persuaded to cede power to their proposed supra-national khilafa state. Its programme is even more abstract in the UK, where Muslims are a small minority and prospects for the establishment of an Islamic state are non-existent.

Therefore, in practice, Hizb operates as a sect, making propaganda in order to recruit Muslims to their ideas so they can make more propaganda in order to win further recruits. Members are encouraged to turn their backs on mainstream politics in Britain and to reject the struggle for realistic reforms that will improve the lives of British Muslims.

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WPI ‘liberals’ try to wreck CND meeting

Posted on by Bob Pitt

WPI CNDOver at Harry’s Place, they’ve just cottoned on to the fact that there was a clash at last weekend’s CND conference when our dear friends from the Worker Communist Party of Iran were thrown out for disrupting a session at which the Iranian ambassador was speaking.

There are a couple of points to be made here. The first is that the leaflet distributed by the WPI at the conference (see image, left) featured a picture of the Mashhad hangings accompanied by the statement that “In July this year two gay teenagers – one under 18 at the time of arrest – were publicly hanged in the Iranian city of Mashad for having a sexual relation.” This quotation is reproduced uncritically by David T at Harry’s Place without any indication that this claim has been rejected by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others (see here).

The other point is that the WPI were allowed into the lunchtime session at which the Iranian ambassador would be answering questions. Jeremy Corbyn, who was chairing the session, took four or five questions from WPI supporters. He answered one himself, explaining that whatever their views on the present government all Iranians would agree that they didn’t want their country bombed by the USA. The problems began when other contributors took a different line from the WPI, who shouted them down along with the ambassador’s replies and refused to allow the meeting to continue. They were then ejected from the room. As they were bundled out, one was heard to shout “Bomb the fascists!”

That same weekend, Nick Cohen devoted his Observer column to a gushing tribute to WPI leader Maryam Namazie (see here). “She ought to be a liberal poster girl”, Cohen declared. It’s a strange form of liberalism that believes it is acceptable to shout down your political opponents and try to wreck democratically organised meetings.

All this gives an indication of the sort of regime the WPI would establish if they ever took power in Iran – one characterised by lying propaganda and the suppression of political dissent. Fortunately, as I’ve pointed out before, there isn’t the slightest prospect of that ever happening.

Tariq Ramadan – ‘extremist preacher’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_Ramadan“Obviously, even if Blair affirmed that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ after the attacks on London, they clearly have not when it comes to extremist preachers. And that, quite clearly, is what Tariq Ramadan is…. In France, during most of the 1990s, Ramadan preached to young Arabs the solution to their everyday problems: Islamic fundamentalism.”

Olivier Guitta makes an idiot of himself.

Tech Central Station, 18 October 2005

The mystery of ‘Sid’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mohammed Sidique KhanNasreen Suleaman examines the background of 7/7 bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan. It knocks on the head those ignorant theories, emanating from both the Right and the “Left”,  that multiculturalism resulted in segregration which then led to the adoption of the extremist views that produced the London bombings.

The Beeston of Khan’s youth was a largely white neighbourhood – and indeed he seems to have spent most of his time in the company of white English lads. Over the past few months I have spoken to many of those white childhood friends, friends who knew Khan as Sid, and they all tell a similar story.

Their accounts of Khan’s upbringing and character show a man who spent most of his formative years not really mixing with other local Muslims.

And, says Ian Barrett, unlike the other children of Pakistani parents, he was not under any family pressure to take an interest in Islam.

“The other Pakistani lads would have to go mosque because their families would say ‘You’re going to mosque.’ But Sid didn’t go,” says Ian. “He didn’t seem interested in Islam and I don’t ever remember him mentioning religion.”

Khan was, by all accounts, an exceptionally well integrated person. His anglicised name “Sid” was just one symbol of his willingness to take on a British identity.

BBC News, 19 October 2005

GALHA issues statement

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The GALHA committee has issued a statement regarding comments in the Autumn 2005 issue of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine.

GALHA press release, 16 October 2005

This statement can only be welcomed. On the other hand, the contact given is GALHA secretary George Broadhead, who is himself the author of an article in the same issue of G&LH magazine which includes the following passage:

“There are two terms that, increasingly, annoy us: Islamophobia and moderate Muslims. What we’d like to know is, first, what’s wrong with being fearful of Islam (there’s a lot to fear); and, second, what does a moderate Muslim do, other than excuse the real nutters by adhering to this barmy doctrine?”

Broadhead’s assertion – in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 – that there are no such people as “moderate Muslims”, and that all adherents of Islam are implicated in the actions of a minority of extremists, strikes me as only marginally less poisonous than the material in G&LH magazine from which the GALHA committee now seeks to dissociate itself.

Incidentally, the GALHA website contains the following information about the author of the most blatantly Islamophobic article in G&LH magazine: “Diesel Balaam works in the television industry. He was co-author with Sukie de la Croix of the satirical column Emerald City News which appeared weekly in London’s Capital Gay from 1987 to 1992. Their book of short stories Black Confetti: New Fairy Tales for an Old Country was reviewed in the Spring 1996 issue of Gay and Lesbian Humanist.”

So GALHA members who deny any knowledge of who Balaam is are perhaps being a trifle disingenuous.

Mad Mel backs Blair

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmelMelanie Phillips complains that objections to the new anti-terrorism bill “betray more than a touch of hysteria and irrationality”. In contrast to her own balanced and reasoned contributions the debate, that is. According to Mel:

“The unpalatable fact is that this country has left itself wide open to terrorism. The judges pose as our society’s bulwark against tyranny. But frankly, they are the very last people upon whom we can rely. For with their obsession with ‘human rights’, it is the judges who have imperilled our safety by turning Britain into a magnet for terrorists and subversives. Through their interpretation of human rights law they have destroyed our border controls so that extremists could pour into the country knowing they would never be pursued.

“The judges frustrated all attempts to deal with illegal immigration, thwarted other countries’ desperate attempts to get Britain to extradite terrorist suspects, produced the lunatic situation where people who are a danger to this country cannot be deported in case they may be ill-treated, and when the government tried to lock them up instead to safeguard the public ruled that this too was contrary to human rights law….

“Other countries are far more robust. France has recently thrown out a number of Islamist extremists without demur. Even ultra-liberal Holland is planning to ban the burka in public places – following the example of several towns in Belgium and Italy – because a garment which conceals everything except the eyes obviously makes identification impossible and is therefore an unacceptable security risk.”

Daily Mail, 17 October 2005