Category Archives: USA

Islamophobia in Denmark

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A balanced and informed article from the NYT  by Dan Bilefsky on the controversy in Denmark arising from the decision by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, including one in which he is shown wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse. Bilefsky places the issue in the context of “an intensifying anti-immigrant climate that is stigmatizing minorities and radicalizing young Muslims” and the rise of the far-right Danish People’s Party.

New York Times, 8 January 2006

It is articles like this, of course, that lead to angry denunciations of the NYT by Jihad Watch et al.

‘The pope is no dhimmi’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

US right-winger Hugh Hewitt interviews Father Joseph Fessio, Provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida – mainly on the subject of the threat posed by Islam to the West. They both endorse Mark Steyn’s recent article claiming that higher birthrates among Muslim communities in Europe are bringing about the extinction of Western civilisation. Interesting insight into right-wing Catholics’ view of Islam – and that of Pope Bendedict in particular.

Hugh Hewitt blog, 6 January 2006

Robert Spencer welcomes the revelation that “the Pope is no dhimmi”. Dhimmi Watch, 6 January 2006

Terror suspect facing US extradition

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Terror suspect faces US extraditionPeace campaigners condemned a court ruling yesterday allowing the extradition of a British-born terror suspect to the US, where he risks an unfair trial and even torture.

District Judge Timothy Workman ruled at Bow Street magistrates court that Yorkshire-born Haroon Rashid Aswat, who is accused of trying to set up al-Qaida training camps in the state of Oregon between 1999 and 2000, can be extradited to the US.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke has up to two months to approve the extradition of Mr Aswat, who denies the charges. His lawyers have expressed grave concern that he could end up in the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention centre if extradited.

Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs chairman John McDonnell said that he was “appalled” by the court’s decision and agreed that “no-one can be sure that this British-born man will receive a fair trial in the US.”

Morning Star, 6 January 2006

The forgotten prisoners

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Forgotten PrisonersPeace campaigners accused the Blair government of complicity in the US “barbarities” at Guantánamo Bay yesterday and demanded the release or trial of British detainees held there.

Families and supporters of British residents held in Guantánamo Bay for the past three years without charge or trial demanded that they be either released or repatriated to face trial in Britain. The Save Omar Deghayes Campaign delivered giant postcards, depicting Home Secretary Charles Clarke, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Prime Minister Tony Blair as the Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Speak No Evil monkeys, to their respective offices to highlight their demand.

Today is the deadline for a High Court response to demands for a judicial review of the British government’s refusal to represent these men on the grounds that the refugees are not British citizens.

Morning Star, 5 January 2006

Battle waged in Boston over new mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Boston MosqueWorshippers at the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) still pack into their cramped mosque in Cambridge, Mass. The crowd spills out into the parking lot for the Friday prayer service. Their hopes of celebrating this past Ramadan in a brand-new mosque and cultural center were dashed.

The stated aim of the quarter-century-old society was to build a center for worship, education, and community outreach. Instead, the $24 million project in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood is snarled in accusation, acrimony, and lawsuits. It’s a microcosm of the suspicions about Islam that have played out across America since 9/11.

After the city of Boston conveyed a parcel of land to the ISB, articles appeared in the Boston Herald in 2003 linking society leaders to Islamic extremists. The ISB denied the story, responding in detail to what it saw as inflammatory distortions. “When you place a picture of Osama bin Laden next to a picture of our mosque, that is completely misrepresentative of who we are,” says Salma Kazmi, assistant project director.

Four years after 9/11, mosques in many communities continue to encounter wariness and resistance ranging from suspicions raised at zoning hearings to vandalism and worse. On Dec. 20, two pipe bombs damaged an Islamic center in an upscale neighborhood of Cincinnati. The FBI said the powerful explosion could have been deadly had people been present.

“It’s all part of the unfortunate temper of the times,” says John Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. “There is such a thing as Islamophobia.”

Christian Science Monitor, 5 January 2006

Andy Armitage defends ‘free speech’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Former editor of the now defunct Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine Andy Armitage replies to the Guardian piece on the split in GALHA. He continues to defend his decision to publish the notorious article by Diesel Balaam. “Neither the writer of that article nor we as editors are racist. We criticise religions and do not care about the racial origin of people who practice them.”

Guardian, 4 January 2006

Needless to say, Robert Spencer is fully behind Andy. Dhimmi Watch, 2 January 2006

Western civilisation succumbs to Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“If a population ‘at odds with the modern world’ is the fastest-breeding group on the planet – if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions – how safe a bet is the survival of the ‘modern world’?”

Mark Steyn in the New Criterion, January 2006

Melanie Phillips is impressed (“great piece by Mark Steyn”), but Robert Auster feels that Steyn’s emphasis on demographic changes and the West’s “lack of civilizational confidence” (due to “the progressive agenda – lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism”) underestimates the evils of Muslim immigration.

See Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 2 January 2006 and View From the Right, 1 January 2006