Muslim students’ right to organise must not be compromised by this barbaric attack on London, says NUS president Kat Fletcher.
Category Archives: UK
London’s Muslims feel public hostility
Muslim youths walked with a determined stride to London’s East End Mosque to say their prayers on Friday, just hours after armed police surrounded the building after a bomb threat.
Wearing the traditional shalwaar kameez, their heads crowned with the white prayer caps of Islam, swathes of young second-generation Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh made their way to the mosque on Whitechapel Road, one of the oldest and busiest in London.
Other teenagers on their way to prayers said they felt all Asians were suffering at the moment, whether they were muslim, sikh or hindu, and that few of the public really understood that only a minority of Muslims engage in terrorism, with the majority condemning it.
“Anyone with brown skin is suffering from these attacks. When I get on a bus, I feel very afraid. People look at me suspiciously and some even shout ‘Bin Laden, Bin Laden’ at me,” said Siratu.
Tom Tancredo eyes White House run
Tom Tancredo has been called a one-trick pony of a politician, a man out of step with his party, a bigot. The Republican congressman vehemently opposes illegal immigration, and he created an uproar last week when he talked about nuking Muslim holy sites. No matter, Tancredo is pressing on and even hinting at a long-shot presidential bid in 2008.
Another article blaming multiculturalism for the London bombings
“Since the London bombings several columnists – from Tariq Ali in The Guardian to Phillip Adams in The Australian – have argued that the British brought them on themselves because of Britain’s intervention in Iraq. Well, they’re half right. The British (more precisely, their ineffectual governments) did bring those bombings on themselves.
“The Blair Government’s intervention in Iraq is not to blame. Rather, successive British governments have persisted in the multiculturalist folly that a nation can be built on separate but equal cultures. Moreover, under Tony Blair in particular, Britain’s immigration policies and border controls against illegal immigrants have become international jokes, and now a national tragedy.”
Tribune publishes Islamophobic rant by Maryam Namazie
This week’s Tribune features an article by Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran attacking “political Islam” – and indeed Islam of any sort. Namazie pours scorn on what she calls “the futile and ongoing support for a ‘moderate’ Islam”. Now, that’s exactly the sort of responsible message a progressive labour movement publication should be putting out in the present circumstances, isn’t it?
I particularly liked the quote from the WPI’s glorious founder-leader Mansoor Hekmat (now deceased) which concludes Namazie’s article. This urges us to recognise that “Islam and religion do not have a progressive, supportable faction”. According that logic, the left should be demanding the expulsion of Bruce Kent from CND.
The article is in fact based on a speech given by Namazie to a conference in Paris on earlier this month (see here). Predictably, that speech was greeted enthusiastically by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch – although he found it a tad extreme (“I disagree with the recommendations about driving religion out of society”!).
The anti-Muslim backlash continues
The Institute of Race Relations provides a further compilation of press reports about the post-7/7 backlash against British Muslims.
IRR news summary, 21 July 2005
Increases in hate crimes against Muslims are also reported in the South West and Wales.
For BBC reports see here, here and here.
The statement by one of the interviewees that the London atrocities were “nothing to do with Islam” reduces Robert Spencer to apoplexy:
“How long will Muslims and multiculturalists keep saying this? How long will a gullible public keep buying it? When will the denial end about exactly why these bombers are killing themselves and others, and how such bombers are recruited? Is Britain and the West going to play the dhimmi intellectually and morally all the way up to the time that it becomes necessary to assume the dhimmi role not just in metaphor but in reality?”
Enormous upsurge in anti-Muslim backlash
The Islamic Human Rights Commission is sad to announce that there has been a huge upsurge in the number of Islamophobic incidents reported to it in the two weeks following the London bombings.
The source of this hysteria
Portraying Muslim scholars such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and even Tariq Ramadan as extremists is absurd – and dangerous, Naima Bouteldja argues.
An excellent article. However, the author is wrong in assuming that Professor Ramadan’s opponents in France are the main source of misinformation for right-wing journalists compiling attacks on him in Britain. Rather, it is US Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson who provide the Sun et al with their lies and distortions. The recent article in the Sun “exposing” Ramadan was a crude cut-and-paste job from articles by those two writers.
Explainers not popes
“The British right-wing press’s campaign of vilification against Islam continues today, with no less than three hostile articles by three of the usual suspects: Anne McElroy, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Amir Taheri. The last gets a two-page spread in which he is allowed to defame a large proportion, if not the entirety, of the scholarly body of Islam.”
Nazis continue to whip up Islamophobia
“… yesterday evening, as the BBC multi-culti propaganda machine was spewing out its usual ‘wonders of diversity’ fantasies, Nick Griffin was speaking to BNP members from Beeston, who were attending a Leeds BNP meeting to reveal the truth about life for Christians in general and the English in particular in what young Muslims now proudly call ‘the Terror Capital of Britain’. Local people whose families have lived in the area for generations face daily acts of vandalism to their cars and homes, anti-white racist abuse, threats and violence. Time after time they have told visiting reporters and TV cameras what they and their friends have to suffer at the hands of the thugs among their ‘peaceful’ Muslim neighbours, and time after time they have found their plight ignored.”