Category Archives: USA

Islamophobia Watch uncovered – shock revelations!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at Western Resistance (and the right-wing US website Family Security Matters) Adrian Morgan exposes two of the evil geniuses behind Islamophobia Watch.

Apparently Eddie Truman is “both a member of Britain’s Communist Party and spokesman of the Scottish Socialist Party”. This will come as a surprise to other leading figures in the SSP, who were under the illusion that Eddie was solely a member of their own party. Now that Morgan’s careful and painstaking research has uncovered this double-dealing, no doubt the SSP will be taking disciplinary action against the two-timing Truman.

As for yours truly, I was “formerly secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party”. Damn! All those years secretly operating at the head of the WRP, hiding behind the cunning pseudonym “Gerry Healy”, and now I’ve finally been rumbled.

Though, to be fair, Adrian Morgan isn’t opposed to all lefties. He applauds certain “Marxist members of the left” who have condemned the alliance between socialists and Muslims that arose out of the anti-war movement, and he provides a link to an article by Alliance for Workers’ Liberty guru Sean Matgamna (or “Sean Mantegna”, as Morgan prefers to call him) which describes the SWP as the “socialist outrider for Islam in Britain”.

First Melanie Phillips expressing her admiration for him, and now Western Resistance – my, isn’t Sean a popular figure among Islamophobes.

Mark Steyn’s final solution to the Euro-Muslim problem

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Three weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens reviewed Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, for City Journal, the publication of the Manhattan Institute. The review was generally favorable, though not entirely uncritical. Hitchens quoted Steyn to the following effect:

“Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out – as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent. (Emphasis added.)

“Hitchens let this pass in silence, except for a little bit of tut-tutting about the differences among Muslims, but let’s call it by its real name: Steyn is justifying genocide, both retrospectively in Bosnia and prospectively in the rest of Europe.”

Mark Kleiman at The Reality Based Community, 18 February 2007

Hitch condemns Muslim masochism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hitchens“We are supposed to watch what we say about Islam, lest by any chance we be considered ‘offensive’. A fair number of authors and academics in the West now have to live under police protection or endure prosecution in the courts for not observing this taboo with sufficient care.

“A stupid term – Islamophobia –  has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible ‘message’. Well, this idiotic masochism has to be dropped.

“There may have been a handful of ugly incidents, provoked by lumpen elements, after certain episodes of Muslim terrorism. But no true secularist or even Christian has been involved in anything like the torching of a mosque….

“But where are the denunciations from centers of Sunni and Shiite authority of the daily murder and torture of Islamic co-religionists? Of the regular desecration of holy sites and holy books? Of the paranoid insults thrown so carelessly and callously by one Muslim group at another? [Er … here, here and here, for example? – ed.] This mounting ghastliness is a bit more worthy of condemnation, surely, than a few Danish cartoons or a false rumor about a profaned copy of the Quran in Guantanamo.

“The civilized world – yes I do mean to say that – should find its own voice and state firmly to Muslim leaders and citizens that respect is something to be earned and not demanded with menace. A short way of phrasing this would be to say, ‘See how the Muslims respect each other!'”

That well-known representative of the civilised world, Christopher Hitchens, lectures Muslims on the meaning of respect.

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On being treated as a ‘dangerous foreigner’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Every air traveler likely has done it: stand in an airport security line in your socks, pushing forward plastic bins of shoes, jackets, laptops and handbags, all with only 20 minutes left to board, even though you showed up two hours early as told.

“Think you have it tough? Try being a Muslim American. We Muslim Americans don’t get smiles and ‘Have a good trip.’ Instead, we get suspicious security guards and frowns. For Muslim American men, it’s their beards that make the difference. For us women, it’s our head scarves.”

Naureen Kamdar relates her experience as a Muslim woman at a US airport.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 20 February 2007

Abbey Mills Islamic centre ‘will be blocked’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abbey Mills Islamic CentreControversial plans to build a “supermosque” on the doorstep of the London Olympics will be blocked by the Government.

The group behind the plans is Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary sect whose charitable trust, Anjuman-e-Islahul Muslimeen, has owned the 18-acre site since 1996. Tablighi Jamaat was called “an ante-chamber for fundamentalism” by French security services. Two of the July 7 London suicide bombers are believed to have attended one of its mosques.

A senior security source said that he was concerned about the proposed mosque, and expected ministers to use their powers to call in, and turn down, the planning application. The move was confirmed by a senior Government source, who said there were fears that the giant mosque could damage community relations in the area, and added: “We are going to stop it.”

Alan Craig, a Newham councillor for the Christian People’s Alliance party, has warned of the “community and security impact” that the mosque would have, and claims Muslims are already moving into the area in preparation for its opening.

Sunday Telegraph, 18 February 2007

Robert Spencer welcomes this example of “anti-dhimmitude in the UK”.

Dhimmi Watch, 18 February 2007

Being a Muslim American

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“By most estimates, Islam is now the largest non-Christian religion in the United States. And yet some 60 percent of Americans claim never to have met a Muslim. No wonder, then, that so many wild misconceptions about Muslims endure in the United States. Indeed, a third of Americans told Gallup pollsters in July 2006 that they thought America’s Muslims are sympathetic to al-Qaeda…. American Islamprovides a welcome antidote to the widespread Islamophobia that has infected so many Americans over the last five years.”

Reza Aslan reviews Paul M. Barrett’s American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion.

Washington Post, 18 February 2007

YouTube censors Islam critic?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

WebProNews is outraged that YouTube has prevented an atheist from using its platform to attack Islam:

At YouTube, you can say pretty much whatever You want, as long as it’s not about Islam. If that’s not true, YouTube user Nick Gisburne begs to differ after his account – his entire account – was deleted for its “inappropriate content.” What exactly did he say? Well, nothing really. He let the Koran speak for itself.

Gisburne is a self-described atheist with, at least from the one video, a deep questioning of Muslim claims about the Koran. To express his doubts about Islam being a religion of peace, Gisburne created a 10-minute video, entitled “Islamic Teachings” that was nothing but violent quotations taken from the Koran instructing followers to kill nonbelievers and speed their way to Hell where Allah will torture them forever.

It would seem quoting the holy book in a sort of testament against itself was over the line for someone working at Google-owned YouTube. Not only was the video deleted without any type of warning to the uploader, but the uploader’s account was also deleted with only the explanation (or accusation) of submitting inappropriate content, a category usually reserved for nudity or video violence.

Jihad Watch shares the indignation of WebProNews, which is hardly surprising, given that Robert Spencer employs exactly the same method as Nick Gisburne – using selective quotations from the Qur’an to depict Islam, and by extension its followers, as promoting hatred and violence.

Bruce Bawer and Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

While Europe Slept“So what are Mr. Bawer’s views? He calls himself a ‘liberal’ cultural critic but his views are anything but liberal, and he is much in vogue with the ultraconservative National Review types as well as the ethno-nationalist ‘intellectuals’ in Europe where he lives….

“Bawer has his own solution to the ‘immigrant question’. He tells us his views are unfairly attacked by people who call him names ‘instead of trying to respond to irrefutable facts and arguments’. If Mr. Bawer’s arguments are indeed ‘irrefutable’ what would be the point of trying to respond to them? People who believe their opinions and arguments are ‘irrefutable’ are manifesting that very same fundamentalist mentality they claim to be opposing.

“Here is Bawer’s solution. ‘European officials’, he writes, ‘have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They’re in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow.’ Clearly, when you are calling out the army and advocating deportation of planeloads of people daily, there is more to it than a crackdown on violent militant Islamists. This looks like a call to a general assault on Muslim immigrants in general.

“This may also explain his sympathetic defense of the Sweden Democrats in an opinion piece he wrote for the December 8, 2006 New York Sun. This article, ‘While Sweden Slept‘ is an incontinent attack on Swedish Social Democracy. The Sweden Democrats he champions in this article are a small radical right-wing party of ethno-nationalists. It grew out of the racist ‘Keep Sweden Swedish’ movement of the 1980s. Their basic ideology is the ein Volk, ein Reich variety. One of their own leaders resigned saying the party was infested with neo-Nazis, racists and holocaust deniers. The party is opposed to immigration and if it ever got into power would no doubt take Bawer’s views on how to ‘rescue Europe’ (or at least Sweden) seriously.”

Thomas Riggins in Political Affairs, 13 February 2007

Worldwide protests greet Guantánamo anniversary

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Five years of tortureFive years of torture: worldwide protests greet Guantánamo anniversary

By Tom Mellen

Morning Star, 12 January 2007

HUMAN rights activists gathered outside the US embassy in London on Thursday as part of an international day of protest marking the fifth anniversary of the opening of the notorious Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.

Under the fluttering stars and stripes, the imperial eagle and a couple of machine-gun toting police officers, more than 500 protesters, including jumpsuited Amnesty International campaigners muzzled with masks and earmuffs, filled Grosvenor Square, graphically hammering home the daily brutality taking place in the legal black hole.

Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin said that, “if we allow Guantanamo to continue unopposed, human rights standards all over the world will be eroded.” Calling for everyone to show solidarity with those who remain languishing in the camp five years on, Mr Durkin warned that “everyone is at risk of Guantanamo-style treatment.”

In Scotland, over 40 Amnesty supporters braved driving wind and rain to protest outside the US consulate in Edinburgh, where they chained themselves together to highlight the suffering of the Guantanamo detainees.

Rallies also took place in New York, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid and Israel, while international peace activists including US “peace mum” Cindy Sheehan and the brother of British citizen Omar Deghayes marched to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay to demand its closure.

The “icon of lawlessness” has drawn criticism from lawyers and rights activists ever since the first 20 prisoners were transported there from Afghanistan in 2002.

US President George Bush was dealt a blow by the US Supreme Court in June last year, when judges ruled that the military tribunal system at the base was illegal, breaching both the Geneva conventions and US law.

In total, some 775 men have been detained, with just under half – 379 – released. Just 10 detainees have been charged, but none has gone to trial.

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