Category Archives: UK

Hamza and hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has appeared in court at the start of his trial on terrorism charges. The 47-year-old, who denies any involvement in terrorism, has been held at Belmarsh prison since May 2004…. He faces 10 charges alleging he solicited people at meetings to murder non-Muslims, including Jews. A further four charges allege he used ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred’.”

BBC News, 5 July 2005

Though the question of Abu Hamza’s guilt remains open, of course, it might be noted that the latter four charges are under Section 18(1) of the 1986 Public Order Act, which states:

“A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if –
(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred by thereby.”

The current Racial and Religious Hatred Bill proposes to amend this so that “racial hatred” becomes “racial or religious hatred”. At the risk of repetition, the purpose is to extend to Muslims and Hindus the right to protection from hatred presently enjoyed by Jews and Sikhs under the Act.

If, as its critics allege, the Bill represents a terrible attack on the right to free speech, it is difficult to see how they can in all consistency refuse to condemn the suppression of free speech under the existing racial hatred sections of the 1986 Act.

We look forward to Nick Cohen, Melanie Phillips, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Harry’s Place et al publishing indignant articles defending Abu Hamza’s democratic right to incite hatred against Jews without action being taken against him under the Public Order Act.

Lawrence isn’t over yet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“They went to law and won their case, but as symbols of a policing service focused on diverse communities, former Detective Constable Tom Hassell, Detective Sergeant Colin Lockwood and Detective Inspector Paul Whatmore leave something to be desired. During a training course, Hassell erroneously referred to “Shi’ites” as “Shitties”. He likened the headwear worn by Muslims to tea cosies – surely a lame observation for the 21st century, when we know so much about the need to respect other cultures. When Hassell was also flippant about the demands of Muslim fasting, someone – senior colleagues, perhaps – might have thought it prudent, given the demands of basic civility, to take him to task. But neither Lockwood or Whatmore did so. Lockwood merely corrected Hassell’s mispronunciation.

“… one can easily see the subplot of what is happening here. It is already being said that the officers suffered from the politically correct regime forced upon Scotland Yard by the Lawrence inquiry. They themselves have claimed to be victims of a witch hunt, and the commissioner is portrayed as a destructively liberal figure who, because of the failings of those who should have known better, has been allowed to take the helm. ‘Is this man destroying the Met?’ the Daily Mail asked last month.”

Hugh Muir argues that “reactionaries are trying to use an employment tribunal decision to scupper the drive against police racism”.

Guardian, 4 July 2005

Marginalization, Iraq eclipse UK reaching-out to Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Iraq war and marginalization have cast a pall over a bridge-building bid by the British government with the Muslim minority, who said it is high time that authorities stopped living in denial and addressed the underlying causes of the extremist ideology behind the London bombings.

The Muslim Council of Britain, the main representative Muslim body in Britain, said ministers needed to accept the role political events such as the Iraq war had played in the growth of extremism, The Financial Times reported.

“It seems the government is in denial about this,” a spokesman told the paper. “Some of these policies have contributed to making the extremist message more palatable to Muslim youth.”

Anti-Terrorism Minister, Hazel Blears, went Tuesday to Oldham in Greater Manchester on the first stage of her eight-leg journey across the country in search of grassroots Muslim opinion.

She listened for two and a half hours as faith leaders, councilors, young men and women, who mostly welcomed the visit as “useful” while some branded it as a routine Labour-like PR exercise.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney-general, agreed that the Iraq war was partly to blame. “The Iraq war had contributed to this anger, with the western intervention in a Muslim country fuelling the ‘great grief’ caused to British Muslims by the state of the Islamic world,” the FT quoted him as saying.

He added that he found the suicide bombings “totally explicable in terms of the level of anger which many members of the Muslim community seem to have about a large number of things.” Grieve warned he did not think that “simply by visiting community leaders you are going to get to some of these underlying issues”.

In an obvious retreat from his earlier stance, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, acknowledged on July 26 that Iraq was being used to recruit terrorists.

One of the four would-be bombers arrested last week in the biggest massive manhunt in British history told investigators that they were motivated by the Iraq war and not by religious fervor.

Islam Online, 3 August 2005

Posted in UK

Fascists join attack on Ian Blair

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joining the Daily Mail in an attack on Sir Ian Blair, the BNP rallies to the defence of police officers who made abusive remarks about Muslims, including a reference to Shi’ites as “Shitties”:

“Sir Ian described the remarks at the heart of this week’s employment tribunal defeat as Islamophobic: ‘That language was gratuitous, offensive and deliberate. Officers can expect to be disciplined for using language like that. I want this force to have no place for racism’. If I was one of those officers I would now look at suing Sir Ian for libel and abuse of authority within the Police. Not only is the language not racist as defined in common law, but it is also a fact that Islam is a religion not a race.”

BNP news article, 2 July 2005

Fascists join attack on Ian Blair

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joining the Daily Mail in an attack on Sir Ian Blair, the BNP rallies to the defence of police officers who made abusive remarks about Muslims, including a reference to Shi’ites as “Shitties”:

“Sir Ian described the remarks at the heart of this week’s employment tribunal defeat as Islamophobic: ‘That language was gratuitous, offensive and deliberate. Officers can expect to be disciplined for using language like that. I want this force to have no place for racism’. If I was one of those officers I would now look at suing Sir Ian for libel and abuse of authority within the Police. Not only is the language not racist as defined in common law, but it is also a fact that Islam is a religion not a race.”

BNP news article, 2 July 2005

I’m not sorry, says police chief

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has admitted that his methods may be unpopular within his force. He added that his mission to modernise the force would not be jeopardised by the fallout from this week’s employment tribunal, in which he was accused of having hung three of his officers out to dry.

His force was found to have racially discriminated against three white officers who were disciplined after allegedly making racist remarks about Muslims at a training day. Sir Ian was unrepentant and described the remarks, which were at the heart of this week’s tribunal, as Islamophobic, promising that there would be no room in his force for racism.

The Times, 2 July 2005

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, returns to the attack, devoting an entire article to one of the officers, DC Hassell, who is portrayed as the innocent victim of “bosses obsessed with political correctness”:

“The case, which revolved around a bungled presentation on Islam in which DC Hassell – woefully unqualified for the task – mispronounced Shi’ites as ‘Shitties’ and described Muslim headgear as ‘tea-cosies’, was eventually exposed as one of the most ludicrous and unfair procedures ever brought against serving officers.”

The Mail reports that Hassell also “told his colleagues that he would not want to be ‘that lot’, referring to Muslims fasting and abstaining from sex in daylight hours during the holy month of Ramadan. He still fails to see why any of that should cause offence”.

Daily Mail, 2 July 2005

The Mayor of London has issued the following statement: “Sir Ian Blair deserves full backing for his firm action in initiating disciplinary proceedings. We cannot go back to the bad old days when many of London’s diverse communities had no confidence in the police because they believed that allegations of racism in the Met were ignored.”

GLA press release, 30 June 2005

IHRC demand end to SOAS student witch hunt

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“SOAS masters student Nasser Amin wrote an article in his university paper defending the right of Palestinians to resist occupation by violence. After the publication of the article Amin became the focus of a bitter witch hunt which resulted in him being reprimanded by SAOS University. The reprimand was published on the university’s official website without even informing Amin. His article ‘when only violence will do’ was written in response to one published by Hamza Yusuf which said, in effect that Muslims in Palestine should ‘turn the other cheek’ when facing Israeli violent antagonism.

“The article was not extreme nor even unusual, and similar arguments have been used and promoted in academia e.g. by Professor Michael Neuman. The article was set in a context of open debate about the moral rights and wrongs of Palestinian resistance, and SOAS’s response is at best bizarre.”

IHRC action alert, 30 June 2005

Most people back religious hatred law – and they’re right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Most people back religious hatred law – and they’re right

By Ken Livingstone

Tribune, 1 July 2005

Anyone would think from the media coverage of the government’s proposed legislation to ban incitement to religious hatred that the combination of some comedians and celebrities, along with the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, represented the views of the great majority of the population.

In London, they definitely do not. The Government’s new Bill, which will significantly build on existing legislative measures aimed at combating hate crime, has overwhelming backing from Londoners. Seventy-two per cent of London residents support the new anti-incitement law, according to our opinion polls. Just 15 per cent are against. The media has ignored this impressive show of popular support for the Bill, preferring to give publicity to the unrepresentative views of a few high-profile celebrities, who have falsely portrayed it as a new blasphemy law.

Some faith groups such as Jews and Sikhs are currently protected from incitement to hatred on the basis that these religions are held to be mono-ethnic, and therefore come under the 1986 Public Order Act which bans incitement to racial hatred. Members of faiths which are defined as multi-ethnic, such as Hindus and Muslims, are not so protected. This is clearly unacceptable, and has left a loophole for the far Right.

Opponents of the Bill claim that existing laws are sufficient to deal with the racists. They cite the case of Mark Norwood, a BNP member in Shropshire who was successfully prosecuted in 2002 after he placed a poster in his window carrying the slogan “Islam Out of Britain”. They omit to mention the case of another BNP member, Dick Warrington, who was prosecuted for displaying a poster with the same slogan but was acquitted by magistrates in Leeds in 2002.

The BNP had this to say about Warrington’s prosecution: “The snag for the police, however, is that Islam is not covered by the anti-free speech race law… it’s legal to say anything you want about Islam, even far more extreme things…”

Nick Griffin’s secretly-filmed tirade against Muslims, clearly desgined to whip up the most unpleasant hatred against Asians, indicates what we are up against.

The comedian Rowan Atkinson has accused the government of “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut”, which could be taken to imply that the rise in anti-Muslim hatred is a matter of little significance.

The same argument was employed during the Commons debate on the Bill by Tory MP Boris Johnson, who stated that “the problem of Islamophobia is in danger of being exaggerated”. As the editor of a magazine – The Spectator – that has brazenly contributed some of the worst examples of Islamophobia in the media, this is hardly surprising.

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Champagne Peter denounces mayoral capitulation to homophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

outrageprotest2The Daily Telegraph (30 June 2005) reports: “Ken Livingstone is ever eager to ingratiate himself with London’s gay community. But his antics appear to cut little ice with gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who was attending the the mayor’s Pride event on Monday night.

“‘This all about ticking boxes on a page’, opined Tatchell, sipping on a glass of pink champagne. ‘Ken just wants to be able to say he supports gay rights, but when it comes to the crunch it’s all meaningless: he’s still more than happy to welcome a homophobe like Yusuf al-Qaradawi to City Hall’.”

And apparently also happy to welcome an Islamophobe like Peter Tatchell – who proceeds to knock back the free champagne and while slagging off his host to the Tory press.

Perhaps Tatchell should ponder the comments of a member of Imaan, the lesbian and gay Muslim group: “It can be argued that over the years Ken Livingstone’s record on empowering Gay and Lesbian Rights is more impressive than Peter Tatchell’s, which frankly, at times, has been more self-indulgent than effective.”

Robert Spencer’s ongoing, unshakeable quest for self-publicity

Posted on by Bob Pitt

spencerbook2Yet another plug from Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch for his forthcoming book ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)’.

Jihad Watch, 29 June 2005

The book description on Amazon reads: “Islam expert Robert Spencer reveals Islam’s ongoing, unshakable quest for global conquest and why the West today faces the same threat as the Crusaders did – and what we can learn from their experience.”

The back cover informs us: “Everything (well, almost everything) you know about Islam and the Crusades is wrong because most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academics and Islamic apologists who who justify their contemporary political agendas with contrived historical ‘facts’.”

As distinct, presumably, from the scrupulous commitment to historical objectivity which characterises the writings of raving right-wing Islamophobes.