Support the police, treat Muslims with respect and pull out of Iraq, the Mayor of London proposes.
The National Secular Society helpfully provides a link to this article – under the heading “How to make us safer: appease Muslim fanatics”.
Category Archives: UK
Anti-Muslim hatred transcends hijab
IHRC is deeply concerned at the message being sent out by Zaki Badawi’s attributed statement that Muslim women should remove their hijab to avoid being attacked in the wake of 7/7. The devastating rise in faith hate crimes post 7/7 cannot simply be linked to the wearing of hijab. Whilst incidents against Muslim women have risen, it is worth noting that there have been many complaints both by women who do not wear hijab and also women who are not Muslim but who have been mistaken to be Muslim.
Should the Islamic headscarf be removed?
Online debate over Zaki Badawi’s proposal. BBC News, 4 August 2005
See also “Muslim women reject hijab calls”, Daily Telegraph, 4 August 2005
And “Women hit back over hijab ruling”, BBC News, 4 August 2005
And “Muslim women have the right to wear the hijab”, GLA press release, 4 August 2005
Ethiopian refugee beaten and humiliated by police during London raid
Girma Belay was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he sat in a flat in Stockwell, south London, waiting for a friend to bake Ethiopian bread, he was seized at gunpoint by anti-terror police with laser-sighted weapons, forced to strip naked, punched, beaten and humiliated. With the red laser beam blinding him, he heard someone shout, “Take him out.”
Held for six days at Paddington Green police station, Mr Belay is a shattered man. Tortured by flashbacks and gripped by fear, he clenches his fists and weeps when he describes what happened. He repeats to himself the words of one detective on his release: “Sorry mate – wrong place, wrong time.” But it does not seem to help.
In this instance, as in the Stockwell tube shooting, the victim wasn’t even a Muslim. But what the heck, he was Ethiopian, he lived in Stockwell – what more do you want?
Melanie Phillips et al will no doubt be pleased to know that there are at least some police officers who refuse to be hamstrung by Ian Blair’s abject capitulation to political correctness
Police seized anti-war material in raid of bookshop
On Friday 15 July police descended on the Iqra Learning Centre, an Islamic bookshop in Beeston, Leeds. They battered the door down and sealed the shop off, arresting one man who worked there under anti-terrorism laws.
The press was soon full of lurid stories about how the shop was a “unassuming front” used to “recruit youngsters and fill them with anti-West messages”. The Daily Mirror, citing unnamed “insiders”, declared that it was a “bookshop of hate”.
Local people say Iqra is a respected community bookstore, that the “anti-Western” material seized by police was in fact anti-war literature, and that the suspected 7 July bombers have had no links to the shop for several years.
Mohammed Afzal works as a volunteer at Iqra. “They’ve raided a family bookshop, slap bang in the middle of Beeston, and taken anti-war material away,” he told Socialist Worker.
“The police are trying to make out that the material they took was ‘anti-Western’. But there’s nothing like that there. It’s things like Stop the War leaflets and DVDs of George Galloway at the US senate.”
UK Foreign Office supports Livingstone line
Pro-Israel blogger takes exception to Mockbul Ali’s memo on Qaradawi, rallies to the support of poor innocent MEMRI and applauds Nick Cohen’s ignorant diatribe in the Observer.
Foreign Office backs engagement with Qaradawi – Nick Cohen goes apoplectic
Nick Cohen retails another series of lies and distortions about Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi “ruled that the an [sic] Arab princeling should be stoned to death” (in fact he didn’t), Aljazeera magazine “hadn’t withdrawn the report” (in reality they had) etc etc. And Cohen concludes this demonstration of ignorant bigotry with the smug announcement that his mission as a journalist is to “tell Truth to readers”! What a plonker.
And what has made Cohen so cross? Well, it’s the fact that the Observer has acquired a leaked Foreign Office briefing which recommends that Dr al-Qaradawi should not be banned from entering the UK. The document is a well-informed piece of work, by Mockbul Ali, which entirely bears out the positive assessment of Qaradawi’s role made on this website and elsewhere. See (pdf) here.
The FCO’s line on Qaradawi, as summarised by Cohen, is to “try to detach him and the millions who listen to him from al-Qaeda”. This amounts to wilful distortion. The FCO document in fact argues for engagement with Qaradawi precisely because he is one of the most authoritative and influential opponents of al-Qaeda. He hardly requires any “detaching”. Cohen’s colleague Martin Bright (author of the Observer‘s witch-hunt against the MCB) also tries to imply a link between Qaradawi and al-Qaeda, reporting that “the memo contains the warning that refusing Qaradawi entry could lead to further terrorist attacks”. See here.
Cohen holds up the FCO briefing as evidence that “the mandarins have been preparing for an accommodation with radical Islam”, and Martin Bright agrees that the leaked document “will further fuel concerns of increasing ‘Islamist’ influence in the Foreign Office”.
It is notable that nowhere does the Observer deal with the arguments in favour of Dr al-Qaradawi that are presented in some detail in the FCO document, and unless you consulted the link in the online edition you’d be none the wiser. So much for “telling Truth to readers”. For that you have to go to Islam Online, 4 September 2005
It’s also worth noting that Cohen’s article is warmly welcomed by the Zionist right. See Israpundit, 4 September 2005
Surge in racist attacks after Tube bombings
Muslim leaders warned that a wave of hate crimes was sweeping across Scotland as police hunted a hammer-wielding gang of 10 men who yelled abuse about the London bombings as they attacked two young Asians.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that crimes including verbal racist abuse have increased in Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere north of the border since the July 7 terror attacks.
Osama Saeed, of the Muslim Association of Britain in Scotland, said he believed that many more incidents were going unreported. He said:
“Anecdotally, we’ve heard many more accounts of racist attacks against Muslims in the last month. Unfortunately, there is a lack of confidence in the Muslim community that their complaints will be believed or taken seriously so they often don’t feel confident enough to report it.”
Update: See also “Hate crimes up by 20-per-cent in Scotland”, The Herald, 4 August 2005
Multicultural Britain is not working, says Tory chief
Muslims must start integrating into mainstream British society, says David Davis, the shadow home secretary and front-runner to take over the Conservative leadership.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Davis signalled a significant shift away from the policy of multi-culturalism, which allows people of different faiths and cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate.
“Often, the authorities have seemed more concerned with encouraging distinctive identities rather than promoting the common values of nationhood,” Mr Davis writes.
Daily Telegraph, 3 August 2005
See also Guardian, 3 August 2005
For Davis’s article, see here.
And over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer applauds this example of “common sense from David Davis”.
Muslims who hate us can get out, says Tory
• MP says Muslims who believe Britain is at war with Islam should leave
• Shadow defence secretary incensed by view UK to blame for extremism
• Muslim association calls Gerald Howarth’s remarks ‘naïve’ and ‘arrogant’
“If they don’t like our way of life, there is a simple remedy: go to another country, get out. There are plenty of other countries whose way of life would appear to be more conducive to what they aspire to. They would be happy and we would be happy” – Gerald Howarth, shadow defence minister.
Howarth has the full support of Robert Spencer: “I don’t see anywhere in history that a state lasted very long which tolerated large populations that wanted to make it over into another kind of state altogether.”