“Although Mr Esposito is less transparent than most apologists for radical Islam, he is more than a mere apologist. He defends supporters of Islamic terrorism. He even mentors them.”
Joel Mowbray extends the witch-hunt against Azzam Tamimi to John Esposito.
The Wall Street Journal carries a piece by Bret Stephens reporting favourably on developments in the Belgian far-right party Vlaams Belang (formerly the Vlaams Blok, which officially dissolved itself in 2004 after being convicted of inciting racial hatred). Noting that the party has a history of Nazi sympathies and Holocaust denial, Stephens adds:
“But that’s changing. Younger party leaders, realizing their anti-Semitic taint was poison, began making pro-Israel overtures. And the party’s tough-on-crime, hostile-to-Muslims stance began to attract a considerable share of the Jewish vote, particularly among Orthodox Antwerp Jews who felt increasingly vulnerable in the face of the city’s hostile Muslim community. Today, Vlaams Belang is the largest single party in the country.”
Stephens continues: “Meanwhile, the real fascists in Belgium are gaining strength, largely protected from scrutiny by the country’s ‘anti-racism’ legislation. At Brussels’s Imam Reza mosque, a preacher commemorated the 17th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death: ‘The enemies cannot extinguish the light of the Islamic Revolution.’ And in Molenbeek, the newspaper Het Volk published a study of the local Muslim population: The editor, Gunther Vanpraet, described the commune as ‘a breeding ground for thousands of Jihad candidates’.”
A British Muslim airline pilot yesterday described the “humiliating” moment when he was hauled off a transatlantic flight just before take-off. Amar Ashraf, 28, who was born in Wrexham, North Wales, said he felt “demoralised and humiliated” after being told to leave the flight from Manchester to Newark by a stewardess, and then being questioned by armed police. He believes his removal was down to having a “Muslim-sounding name”.
For the case of Dr Ahmed Farooq, to which the article refers, see CBC News, 19 August 2006
Dr Farooq was thrown off a plane in Denver last week after a fellow passenger observed him engaged in the “suspicious” activity of reciting his evening prayers. Robert Spencer has little sympathy for Dr Farooq: “These are the same prayers that jihad terrorists have prayed….”
Postscript: Yusuf Smith draws our attention to the case of Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American blogger who suffered harassment when he tried boarding a plane from New York to California wearing a T-shirt with Arabic writing on it.
“President Bush recently changed his definition of who ‘the enemy’ is from bin Laden and the al Queda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 to ‘Islamic fascists’ in general, sending the right after Islam in general and Middle Easterners in particular.”
Dave Johnson in the Huffington Post, 20 August 2006
“The increasingly common juxtaposition of the words ‘Islam’ and ‘fascism’ in America is a result of the efforts to poison public opinion by the Neo-cons. They cut the White House to fit their own lines. President Bush first used terms with a Neo-con stamp like ‘Islamo-fascist’, ‘Islamic radicalism’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’ in a speech he made on October 6, 2005 at the National Endowment for Democracy. He later used such terms between the lines on different occasions. This subject caught Turkey’s attention the most last week by way of a statement Bush made after the London terror operation. It was reported by many Turkish press organizations that Bush used the term ‘Islamist fascist’. Actually, the U.S. president mentioned a war against ‘Islamic fascists’. The adjective ‘Islamic’ is used in two ways in English. The first means Muslim. The other means something conforming and belonging to the Islamic religion. If the first meaning was intended, it points to certain Muslims encouraging fascism. In the second meaning, fascism is directly linked to Islam. While Neo-cons, most of whom are enemies of both Muslims and Islam, say ‘Islamo-fascism’, let there be no doubt that they intend the latter meaning.”
Ali H. Aslan in Zaman, 21 August 2006
Jewish groups are concerned over a speaker addressing an Islamic conference in Manchester on Sunday. Dr Azzam Tamimi, who is one of the guest speakers at the ExpoIslamia convention, has said suicide bombings are justified in certain circumstances. Louis Rappaport, president of the Jewish Representative Council of Gtr Manchester, said Dr Tamimi would not help Jewish-Muslim relations.
See also World Net Daily, 20 August 2006
You can imagine what the outcry would be if a Muslim organisation called for a supporter of Israeli state terrorism to be excluded from the platform of an event organised by the Jewish community.
Thousands attending a Washington banquet for the new group Christians United for Israel have been told that the war on terror is really a war against radical Islam. The Israeli ambassador to the United States says Muslim radicals were the enemy on Nine-Eleven and are the enemy today in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.
“When Britain was attacked last year on 7/7 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the U.K. Within a short time, however, much of the country decided that it was Britain’s own fault on account of ‘Islamophobia’ and the war in Iraq…. From the evidence of one opinion poll this week, the British public has at least woken up to the fact that we are in the throes of a world war. Not so, however, the British establishment and chattering classes …. The unpalatable fact is that there is actually a continuum of Islamic extremism in Britain. While probably only a small number on this continuum will ever be involved in violence, too many others subscribe to odious beliefs and ideas which maintain the sea of hatred and bigotry in which terrorism swims.”
Melanie Phillips in National Review Online, 18 August 2006
Yusuf Smith draws our attention to an exposé of the recently-launched Sufi Muslim Council, which has been boosted by the likes of Martin Bright.
Indigo Jo Blogs, 18 August 2006
See also Rolled Up Trousers, 18 August 2006
“The present technological, cultural and financial strength of Europe is a façade that conceals a deep underlying moral and demographic weakness. The symptoms of the malaise are apparent in the unprecedented demographic collapse and in the loss of a sense of place and history that go hand-in-hand with the expansion of the European Union.
“The emerging transnational hyper-state is actively indoctrinating its subject-population into believing and accepting that the demographic shift in favor of Muslim aliens is actually a blessing that enriches the Old Continent’s culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. Europe is losing the ability to define and defend itself, to the benefit of unassimilable multitudes filled with contempt for the host-society….
“Most Muslims in Europe live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country. Their mindset has nothing but contempt for the liberal concept of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’, and they possess a disdainful and hostile attitude to the host-society. Such hostility is clearly manifested in hard-core anti-Semitism – in its raw, unadulterated variety that is repugnant to most Europeans but regarded as normal, legitimate, and divinely ordained by most Muslims. But since the dictum of the multiculturalist ruling elite is that Islam is peaceful, tolerant, and as European as the Sistine Chapel, the truth must not be spoken….
“In recent years, a notable trend in the [European] Monitoring Center’s documents is to include ‘anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’ under the same heading, with the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ so broad as to preclude any possibility of meaningful discussion of Islam. The implication that Islamophobia thus defined and anti-Semitism are equally repulsive and deserving of similar legal sanction is a regular feature of the EU race relations industry output. It also routinely refers to ‘institutional Islamophobia’ as an inherent social and cultural sickness of most European societies that needs to be rooted out by education, re-education, and legislation.”
A paranoid rant by Serge Trifkovic in Front Page Magazine, 18 August 2006