“The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or ‘Islamophobia’. They simply ignore the statements and signs which show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicize the west.”
Melanie Phillips rants on, this time in the New York Post, 4 June 2006
Another plug for Bruce Bawer’s hysterical Islamophobic rant, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within, this one by Andre Zantonavitch:
“While Europe Slept argues that while Europe is currently only about ten percent Islamic – vs. two percent for America – if present trends continue it will only take a generation or two for Muslims to become the majority. The once-noble Continent will become what Bat Ye’or in 2005 called ‘Eurabia’. The shocking claim by Gary [sic] Bawer is that well before 2050, most of Europe is likely to become an outpost of Islamdom governed by Sharia.
“The second theme is that Europe today is a hellhole of leftist multiculturalism, far worse than anything in America, and even far worse than almost anyone in America suspects. American expatriate Bawer – who has lived the past ten years in various European countries, mostly Holland and Norway – is almost uniformly horrified by every country he resides in or visits. According to him, political correctness and multiculturalism are ‘a habit of thought that in America is an annoyance but in Europe is a veritable religion’.
“Bawer excoriates his European friends for their propensity to display phony ‘respect’ and ‘understanding’ of the various foreigners in their midst, especially Muslims.”
“Perhaps the greatest idea of the Leftist parties after the Cold War was to re-invent themselves as Multicultural immigration parties and start importing voters from abroad. In addition to this, they have managed to denounce the opposition as racists, bigots and extremists. A new alliance of convenience between Leftists and Muslim immigrants is taking shape in Europe. I think the deal is that the Leftist parties get a number of new clients, I mean voters, in return for giving Muslims privileges and subsidies, as well as keeping the borders more or less open for new Muslims to enter.”
Fjordman at Dhimmi Watch, 30 May 2006
“Europe and Islam are traveling a path that can only end in an unparalleled clash of civilizations…. Bible prophecy assures us that this trend will only intensify in the coming months and years.”
The Philadelphia Church of God offers its take on the recent study of rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Germany.
One of the recurring themes of Islamophobia is the idea that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim or that there are as many and varied strands of thinking amongst Muslims as there is with the rest of humanity. The mere fact of being a Muslim is enough to make you a supporter of suicide bombings, an anti-semite, a threat to “Western Civilisation” and of course a potential terrorist.
When the racists and Islamophobes come across Muslims who are not sword wielding Mad Mullahs out to establish a world caliphate their reaction is not to temper and refine their own views but instead to attack, smear, denigrate and falsify in order to portray their target as being a reflection of their own caricature of Muslims.
We have seen this repeatedly in the past 2 years in relation to Yusuf al-Qaradawi and even Tariq Ramadan.
Inayat Bunglawala is Media Secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and is an extremely eloquent and intelligent spokesman for that organisation.
An intelligent and articulate Muslim? Now there’s a thing to get the Islamophobes ranting and foaming at the mouth.
Inayat is now 36 years old and the best that the right wing press can offer as proof of his extremism is an article he wrote for a Muslim youth magazine 14 years ago in 1992 when he was 22 years old. I don’t know about anybody else but I held some views when I was 22 that I’d wish to refine somewhat in the cold light of 14 years more experience of the world.
The fact that Inayat contributes to the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ website clearly infuriates the racists and Islamophobes and an absurd attempt to smear Inayat developed in the comments section of hislatest posting.
Regular readers of Islamophobia Watch will be aware of the vile “little green footballs” blog and it was through this site that an absurd allegation regarding a death threat Inayat is supposed to have made to that site was published.
Apparently the threat came from someone with a Reuters account and because Inayat works in the media, ipso facto it was him. Absolute hysterical nonsense of course but ludicrous claims and smear attempts are par for the course for the Islamophobes, as they have once again proved.
Those of us who use Google News have often been appalled by the inclusion of articles from anti-Muslim hate sites. To their credit, Google have now decided to remove some of the most egregious examples of internet Islamophobia.
The New Media Journal was kicked off Google News after posting an article entitled “How Has Islam Enriched Your Life?” by syndicated columnist Arlen Peck. In it, Peck wrote: “It is common for the men to have multiple wives, and harvest many children with each of his wives to train for martyrdom.” He asked: “Is it really tacky of me to smile at the nightly scenes on TV showing Arab, Afghani and Pakistani Muslims bombing mosques and killing their Muslim brothers, sisters and children at a brisk pace because that’s all they know how to do?”
The Journal said it feels it did nothing wrong by running these stories. “Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals,” the Journal posted on its site.
“I was in Warsaw to speak at an OSCE conference on Islamophobia when my office forwarded me an article that had just appeared in the New York Sun, a purveyor of incitement and hate, masquerading as a newspaper. Entitled ‘The Three Myths About Islam‘, the article sets out to demonstrate that because of liberal political correctness, Americans had come to believe a number of falsehoods about Islam: namely that it is a peaceful, tolerant and under attack. In fact, according to the author, the opposite is true. The religion of 1.5 billion, he claims, is, by its nature and history, intolerant, aggressive, and violent….
“While the article was clearly disturbing, I might not have become as upset as I did (since I don’t expect anything more from the Sun), had it not been for the fact that the author of this malevolent attack was identified as a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of Washington’s premier think tanks. More troubling is the fact that the article was being distributed to a larger list, via email, by an official at the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the US’s mainstream Jewish organizations….
“From Warsaw, I wrote to the AJC demanding an explanation. I noted that if an Arab American or Muslim American group had distributed a piece called ‘The Three Myths of Judaism’, that had similarly grotesquely caricatured the Jewish faith, that group would have been called anti-Semitic – a rebuke they would have rightly deserved.”
James Zogby writes in The American Muslim, 22 May 2006
There’s a pretty dreadful article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in today’sObserver by Jason Burke, who you’d have thought would know better, and a no less one-sided comment piece by Isabella Thompson. Hirsi Ali is described as a “radical liberal” (!) in the headline to Burke’s article and neither he nor Thompson bothers to address the appalling role she has played in stoking up anti-Muslim hysteria in the Netherlands.
Another incoherent anti-Muslim diatribe from Nick Cohen in the Observer. He applauds the editor of Die Welt who re-published the Danish cartoons on the grounds that “it is essential to protect freedom of expression because of all the pain we have invested to keep our liberal, secular society”. Somehow, you can’t imagine Cohen offering similar congratulations to an editor promoting “free speech” by printing anti-semitic caricatures. But publish racist illustrations directed against Muslims and Cohen will acclaim you as a defender of secular liberalism.
Cohen also takes exception to an admirable call by the EU to avoid the term “Islamic terrorism”. He objects that “the EU wishes to deny that political Islam inspires terrorists to blow up everything from mosques in Baghdad to tube trains in London, even when Islamist terrorists say explicitly that it does”. Perhaps Cohen would like us to refer to Bush and Blair as “Christian terrorists”, on the basis that they both make it clear that their politics are inspired by their religious beliefs? But then, I was forgetting – Cohen enthusiastically approves of that sort of terrorism, seeing the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a means of bringing liberal secular values to the benighted Muslim masses.
Mind you, Cohen does have one admirer – Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, who pays tribute to this “most welcome anti-dhimmitude from Nick Cohen”. Dhimmi Watch, 14 May 2006
Rather untypically, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has rallied to the defence of an illegal Muslim migrant: “Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has spoken up repeatedly and heroically, at immense personal risk and loss, against the Islamic jihad ideology – and particularly its inhumanity to women – is being hounded by dhimmis in the Netherlands.”
It turns out that Hirsi Ali (or Hirsi Magan to give her right name), the one-time collaborator of Theo Van Gogh and MP for the right-wing anti-migrant party the VVD, told a lot of porkies to claim asylum back in 1992.
As one critic put it: “To secure for herself a promising career she besmirched her family and the Islamic background that gave her a good education. She deliberately painted a black picture of Islam that she never experienced as such, only to profit from it. The Dutch party she is an MP for, the VVD, knew she had lied. They used her in their anti-Islamist and anti-left campaign. And Ayaan Hirsi ‘Ali’ presented the world with a fancy story it very much liked to hear.”
Hirsi Ali has now been offered a job in the US with the neocon American Enterprise Institute, starting in September. Muslims in the Netherlands will be glad to see the back of her. Nasr Joemman, secretary of the Contact Organisation for Muslims and Government, said that Hirsi Ali’s attacks on Islam had caused “a lot of damage”. He added: “I celebrate that she is leaving the Netherlands. I hope that by her departure we can move forward with building a harmonious society.”