Category Archives: USA

California synagogue that hosted Islamophobe urged to invite Muslim speaker

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) today urged a Los Angeles synagogue that recently hosted the operator of a virulently anti-Muslim website to invite a Muslim representative who can offer a balancing perspective on Islam.

CAIR-LA has learned that Robert Spencer, who operates the “Jihad Watch” Internet hate site, spoke at Temple Shalom for the Arts during a Yom Kippur event. Spencer’s website is notorious for its depiction of Islam as an inherently violent faith that is a threat to world peace.

CAIR news release, 8 November 2005

‘Muslim groups may gain strength from French riots’ WSJ warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FireThe right-wing myth that the unrest in France is the result of an “Islamic uprising” has been rather undermined by the observable reality that French Muslim organisations have all intervened to oppose rioting. So some “Islamic conspiracy” theorists have found it necessary to shift their ground. Now, it seems, the real danger lies in the fact that Muslim organisations have intervened at all:

“These groups don’t preach violence, but they do advocate something that is troubling Europe’s secular democracies: that Muslims should identify themselves with their religion rather than as citizens. Effectively, they are promoting a separate society within society and that brand of Islamist philosophy is seeping into many parts of Western Europe. Countries from France and Germany to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands haven’t succeeded in integrating their Muslim minorities – and Islamic organizations have carefully positioned themselves to fill the breach.

“The riots ‘are a blessing for them because it gives them the role of intermediary’, says Gilles Kepel, a scholar who has studied and written extensively about the rise of Islam in France. That, in turn, puts them in a stronger position ‘to force concessions from the state’, such as demanding a repeal of the law France passed last year banning headscarves from public schools, he says.”

Wall Street Journal, 7 November 2005

Robert Spencer, though, has carefully considered the evidence and, on balance, prefers to stick with the view that it’s probably the result of a carefully prepared jihadist plan.

Front Page Magazine, 8 November 2005

‘Why France is burning’ – Melanie Phillips explains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French riot police (4)“Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-minded Interior Minister, has been blamed for inflaming the situation by his uncompromising language. French policy in general has been blamed for herding poor Arabs into suburban ghettoes where they have been left to fester in high unemployment and poverty. The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity.

“But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state….

“M. Sarkozy and the police are determined to take back the streets. The Muslims are equally determined to keep territory they feel they have conquered from the French state…. For more than twenty years France’s Muslim areas have been out of control. Indeed, they only turned into Muslim ghettoes in the first place because Muslim violence and harassment forced everyone else out…. The fact is that French Muslims want to be segregated. The ghettoes are a way of ensuring a separate Islamic existence without having to assimilate into French society….

“This is all bound up with the erosion of national identities across Europe. This has affected even France, once a ferocious proponent of French culture which was imposed through a centralised schools system, a strong police force and national military service…. Banning the hijab (Islamic headscarf) in schools represented a flickering of the old national certainty as France sniffed the danger that had arisen in its midst. But it was too little, and maybe too late.

“Even now Britain, France and the rest of Europe are still in varying stages of denial over Muslim unrest. Reluctant even to admit that religion is central to this phenomenon, they look instead for ways to blame themselves and use the insult of ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down debate. The warning for us from the disturbing events in France could not be clearer. We must end the ruinous doctrine of multiculturalism and reassert British identity….”

Mad Mel rants on.

Daily Mail, 7 November 2005

For a contrary view – which is based on interviews with the youth involved in the disturbances, as distinct from Phillips generating Islamophobic fantasies out of her own head – see Molly Moore’s piece in the Washington Post, 6 November 2005

The threat to ‘Western Culture’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Not only don’t the Western Nations – and this is especially true of the European Union – attempt to fight the cultural invasion facilitated by millions of Muslim immigrants that has flooded their countries after WWII, but they actually seem to exhibit enviable enthusiasm and willingness, when it comes to helping Islamics expand their cultural and religious influence in the Dar Al-Harb. Tariq Ramadan, the inventor and active pursuer of the doctrine of the ‘quiet takeover’ – according to which Islam will be established in Europe by making it an integral part of everyday European (or, rather, Eurabian) life – couldn’t be happier. He can relax in his cozy professor’s chair behind the walls of the Oxford University in England and watch how the European governments together with the mainstream media will do his job for him….

“The riots that have already engulfed over 20 Parisian suburbs are not simple protests of the ‘oppressed’ and ‘disaffected’ immigrants that are supposedly deprived of opportunities for advancement by the ethnocentric French society. For the Western Nations and France in particular they have much more far-reaching and ominous implications. They are a challenge thrown today to the Western Culture. They are an act of defiance, rejection, and outright expression of scorn for the traditions and values that have allowed these very Muslim immigrants to join the club of the Golden Billion. They have refused and ridiculed this invitation. Instead, the majority of Muslim immigrants, whether they come from Africa or the Middle East, have arrived in Europe not to enrich the existing society, but to expand the domain of Islam, and effectively transform that society into the one that would conform to the norms of the Islamic Law.”

American Daily, 6 November 2005

‘Wake up, Europe, you’ve a war on your hands’, Sun-Times columnist warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Ever since 9/11, I’ve been gloomily predicting the European powder keg’s about to go up. ‘By 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night’, I wrote in Canada’s Western Standard back in February. Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday’s edition of the Guardian reported in London: ‘French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.’

“‘French youths’, huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the ‘youths’ are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn’t take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ‘French’: They’re young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you’re likely to find in the Middle East…..

“The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. – as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ‘like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass’, as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ‘Martel’ – or ‘the Hammer’.”

Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times, 6 November 2005

‘How long before Europe falls?’ US Islamophobe asks

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Many French authorities seem bewildered and unable to deal with the uprising. What did they expect?  When a country opens its borders and allows Muslims to pour in without demanding that they accept the local culture, riots should not have been a surprise. A growing number of Muslims that have immigrated to European countries, it seems, come with no intention of blending with the locals. They have come with a purpose and that purpose is to take over the country. Many Muslim immigrants gather together, live in poverty, are unemployed and living on the dole with nothing to do but reproduce, get angry, and be taught endlessly that Islam will make it better. Of all the countries in Europe, France has probably been the most accommodating. This is its reward.”

Barbara J. Stock at Renew America, 6 November 2005 

Anti-Islam rant from Julie Burchill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Burchill“I wonder why Prince Charles seeks to big up powerful, theocratic Islam – which already controls so much land and wealth and yet will kill and kill to gain more – and not vulnerable, pluralistic Israel?” Julie Burchill asks.

Times, 5 November 2005

Robert Spencer applauds this sterling example of “anti-dhimmitude” from Burchill. “Read it all”, he urges.

Dhimmi Watch, 5 November 2005

FBI detains Muslims praying at football game

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Five Muslim football fans were detained and questioned during a game at Giants Stadium because they were congregating near an air duct on a night former President Bush was in the stadium, the FBI said Wednesday.

Some of the Muslims said they did not know they were in a sensitive area, and they complained that they were subjected to racial profiling while they were praying, as their faith requires five times a day.

“I’m as American as apple pie and I’m sitting there and now I’m made to feel like I’m an outsider, for no reason other than I have a long beard or that I prayed,” said Sami Shaban, a 27-year-old Seton Hall Law School student who lives in Piscataway.

At a news conference Wednesday, Shaban said he and four friends had just gotten to the September 19 New York Giants-New Orleans Saints game when they left their seats to pray. Around halftime, 10 security officers and three state troopers approached the men and told them to come with them, Shaban said.

The men were questioned and then were not allowed to return to their seats, but were instead assigned to seats in another section, Shaban said. Three guards stood near them, and escorted them to their cars when they left the stadium, he said.

Associated Press, 2 November 2005