Mariam Ali highlights the growing concern felt by Muslims in the UK about the loss of civil liberties being suffered under the government’s ‘anti-terror’ legislation, with a case study of Babar Ahmad, currently awaiting the Home Secretary’s decision on an extradition request by the US.
Category Archives: UK
Ken says US and Muslims are at war (so Tory claims)
Lost in translation
By Ken Livingstone
Morning Star, 28 May 2005
Tories on the London Assembly have got themselves seriously hot under the collar about an interview I gave to the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera during the general election campaign.
They alleged, with plenty of huffing and puffing at this week’s Mayor’s Question Time, that I had said that “war has now started between the United States and the Muslims.” They based this assertion on a BBC translation into English from the Arabic translation of what I had originally said in English. I assured the Leader of the Tory group, Bob Neill, that I had said no such thing and that I had in fact warned against a new cold war against Islam.
Bob Neill refused to accept my assurances that the translation was wrong. He paid no attention in the Assembly meeting to my suggestion that he should watch the original interview. Instead he wound himself up into a right old lather, dismissing the notion that the BBC’s transcript from the Arabic back into English may not be accurate as “a fantasy.” Playing to the gallery, his flourishes suggested that I probably thought the BBC was part of a Zionist conspiracy!
Salma Yaqoob: respect due
Elections 2005 saw Salma Yaqoob come tantalisingly close to becoming Britain’s first ever female Muslim MP.
In a wide-ranging interview, Tariq Pandor finds out more about Salma and her thoughts on the elections and Muslim political participation in the UK.
Guantánamo is gulag of our time, says Amnesty
Britain and the US are betraying the cause of human rights in pursuit of their “war on terror”, Amnesty International says in its annual report published yesterday.
Irene Khan, Amnesty’s general secretary, launching the report, accused the two governments of condoning torture while trying to keep their consciences clear. Britain used the language of freedom and justice in the context of Iraq, yet insisted that the Human Rights Act did not apply to British soldiers operating there, she said.
The British government was seeking diplomatic assurances from countries, including Algeria, to which it wanted to deport people. By seeking assurances for particular cases, it was admitting that torture was entrenched in those countries and was therefore, in effect, condoning the practice, she said.
“A new agenda is in the making, with the language of freedom and justice being used to pursue policies of fear and insecurity. This includes cynical attempts to redefine and sanitise torture,” said Ms Khan.
She said the US claimed to be promoting freedom in Iraq, yet its troops had committed appalling torture and had ill-treated detainees. She described Guantánamo Bay as “the gulag of our time”.
The Evening Standard, Mad Mel and the Muslim Council of Britain
On 20 May, during a protest outside the US embassy in London against the desecration of the Qu’ran at Guantánamo, a minority of demonstrators chanted extremist slogans. The Evening Standard reported:
“Led by a man on a megaphone, they chanted, ‘USA watch your back, Osama is coming back’ and ‘Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush’. A small detail of police watched as they shouted: ‘Bomb, bomb New York’ and ‘George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head’.”
Though the Standard mentioned that only “some among the crowd” were responsible for chanting these slogans, the overall impression given was that the demonstration was dominated by such elements. If more moderate voices were present, you’d never have known it from the Standard report.
Predictably Melanie Phillips leaped on this. Basing herself on the Evening Standard report, she claimed that “among the organisers of this revealing hate-fest” was the Muslim Council of Britain.
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 24 May 2005
Yeah right, Melanie. The MCB is well known for its support of Osama bin Laden and its enthusiastic endorsement of 9/11. But why let facts get in the way of an outburst of anti-Muslim prejudice, eh?
For the MCB’s letter to the Evening Standard, see here.
See also Yusuf Smith’s comments, though he mistakenly accepts as good coin the Standard‘s false report that the MCB helped organise the demo.
Hijab activists see European campaign a ‘success’
Marking the end of three months of intense lobbying and painstaking efforts to make their voice heard and gain the support of Members of the European Parliament, Protect Hijab activists see the campaign a “success” and “positive step”.
“If we look at the number of Written Declarations (WDs) that have been put before the European Parliament this year, from eight WDs only two got more signatories than ours,” Vice-Coordinator of the London-based Assembly for the Protection of Hijab (Protect Hijab), Rajnaara Akhtar, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, May 24.
She was referring to a Written Declaration on Religious Rights and Freedoms, which was tabled by Protect Hijab and MEPs to the parliament February 21 as a preliminary step towards a binding resolution obliging European countries, particularly France, to lift ban on hijab in state-run institutions like schools.
An essay in imperial villain-making
“By the end of the 90s, the hardliners calling for regime change in the east found that they had a powerful ally in government. This new president was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled global power. It was best, he believed, simply to remove any hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the west.”
William Dalrymple reports.
Gay Palestinians tortured and murdered by PLO and Hamas says Outrage
Outrage engages in its now annual disruptive stunt at the “Free Palestine” demonstration in London. “The Palestinian administration tolerates the so-called ‘honour’ killing of women who refuse to submit to the strict rules of orthodox Islam”, Tatchell claims.
Outrage press release, 23 May 2005
For a comment on Outrage’s antics last year, see Yoshie Furuhashi’s useful article, “Queering Palestinian solidarity activism”, at Critical Montages.
Or if you have problems with that link try here.
McCartney attacks animal bill over ritual slaughter
Paul McCartney and Carla Lane, the comedy writer, have criticised the Scottish executive for failing to ban the ritual slaughter of animals. McCartney who, along with his wife Heather Mills, is a vocal campaigner for animal rights, accused ministers of living in the past by effectively condoning cruelty. Lane said the executive’s failure to ban halal and kosher methods of butchering animals – where their throats are cut without first being stunned – was motivated by political correctness.
Tatchell crosses the line
“A friend of mine told me that Peter Tatchell was again at the Free Palestine demo yesterday. Apparently he was with a group of about thirty people (with a police escort) bearing placards saying ‘Stop the Honour Killings’. The expression ‘honour killings’ is usually used to refer to domestic murders of women deemed unworthy. It’s used by western Orientalists to suggest that there is something worse about this than the two women killed by men every week in the UK. So why is Tatchell using the expression to condemn the killing of gays in Palestine? And why does he see fit to demonstrate against Palestinians at a Free Palestine rally? When he first invade the demo last year he bore a placard with the inane slogan ‘Israel stop persecuting Palestine – Palestine stop persecuting queers’. Now by conflating homophobia in the third world with extreme domestic violence, and putting as orientalist a spin on it as he could think of, he’s crossed the line from seeking to embarrass Palestinian officialdom to full-blown anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.”
Mark Elf at Jews sans Frontieres, 22 May 2005