These shameless attempts by Gaffney, Mowbary, and Pipes to malign mainstream Muslim organizations and leaders are not driven by rational and objective considerations, but by paranoia, prejudice, and irrational fear of Islam and Muslims, says Louay Safi.
Category Archives: USA
Man ‘killed by Islamic zealots’
“It’s a chilling story: A man was shot five times in the head at close range in an ‘execution’ plotted by a group who had failed to convert him to Islam, a jury has heard. Where did this happen? Saudi Arabia? Iran? Egypt? Pakistan? Nope. Try Great Britain. Islamic intimidation and contempt for those who reject Islam comes to the sceptered isle.” Thus Robert Spencer on a new Islamic threat to western civilisation.
Dhimmi Watch, 7 September 2005
What Spencer doesn’t bother to mention is that the group concerned is a criminal gang of Afro-Caribbean youths who have adopted the name of the “Muslim boys”. They present a serious problem from the standpoint of gun crime in South London’s black community. But the idea that they have anything to do with Islam in any meaningful sense of the term is an absurdity.
‘Facts for Islamic apologists who justify London bombings’
“Ken Livingston, the London Mayor, was not the only British Islamic apologist who implicitly tried to justify the London bombings by suggesting that ‘decades of western intervention in the Middle East and the Iraq war could have influenced the bombers’. I have heard many Islamic apologists who are poorly educated in Islam, state similar excuses. Knowingly or unknowingly these Islamic apologists serve to hearten the Islamic extremists.”
FaithFreedom.org, 7 September 2005
So what was the cause of the London bombings, then? Well, apparently it all goes back to the Battle of the Ditch in 5 AH (627 AD), which shows that Muslims just want to kill non-Muslims, and to the Battle of Kerbala in 61 AH (680 AD), which shows that Muslims have no hesitation in killing each other. It’s just a bloodthirsty religion.
Encounter with an angry Muslim academic
Richard L. Rubenstein – an “expert” on the dreadful threat to Europe posed by Muslim migrants – recounts a confrontation with Professor Mohamad Al-Khadry at an academic conference in Krakow. “His worst spleen was reserved for Bat Ye’or and MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute). He labeled Bat Ye’or a bigot, a racist, and an ‘Islamophobe’ and attacked MEMRI as a ‘pro-Israel propagandist website’.”
Front Page Magazine, 7 September 2005
Spleen could hardly be put to more appropriate use, I would suggest.
‘Muslim opinion’ be damned
“Every attempt to appease ‘Muslim opinion’ preserves, promotes, and emboldens our enemies. Every concession to angry Muslim mobs gives hope to the Islamist cause. Every day we allow terrorist regimes to exist gives their minions time to execute the next Sept. 11. America needs honest leadership with the courage to identify and defeat our enemies – ‘Muslim opinion’ be damned.”
Another commentator unconvinced by the Bush administration’s “Muslim outreach” strategy.
Karen Hughes – pawn of Wahhabism
“One of President Bush’s closest confidants, Karen Hughes, on Friday addressed the annual conference of an organization whose primary purpose is the propagation of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabist Islam – and which has praised suicide bombers, whose president has publicly denied that al Qaeda was behind 9/11, and whose web site to this day sells a book that lavishes praise on Osama bin Laden.”
The “Muslim outreach” strategy comes in for some stick from Joel Mowbray.
Townhall.com, 6 September 2005
See also Frank Gaffney in the Washington Times, 30 August 2005
Mad Mel and Robert Spencer denounce FO memo on Qaradawi
Melanie Phillips (“Britain’s Foreign Office fifth column”) has a rant at the Foreign Office memorandum recommending that Yusuf al-Qaradawi should not be banned from Britain, as Mel and her mates have been demanding.
As always when reading Phillips’s tirades, you have the sense of stepping into a parallel universe – one in which Britain’s “own Foreign Office is acting as a kind of appeasement fifth column in the very heart of government”; one in which “there has never been a single authoritative challenge to the veracity or integrity of MEMRI’s authoritative translations, which have opened the eyes of the west to what the Arab and Muslim world is really saying”.
As for Mockbul Ali, the author of the FO’s document, with its accurate characterisation of MEMRI’s role, Mel comments: “when Ali gets to the Jews, his guard slips and he endorses the conspiracy theory which is the signature of the Islamic extremist.”
But Mel does have a good word for one person. Yes, it’s our old friend Nick Cohen, whose “fine polemic in the Observer” receives her enthusiastic endorsement.
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 5 September 2005
Meanwhile over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer too rallies to the defence of Yigal Carmon and his associates: “What did MEMRI do? It printed what Qaradawi said. And once again doing so has been characterized by jihadist Muslims and their allies as ‘hatred’.” As for the memo’s point that Qaradawi’s view on Palestine and Iraq are not unusual amongst mainstream Muslims, Spencer retorts: “That’s true: they’re not unusual. Neither was Nazism among Germans.”
In the comments section to this post we have the usual paranoid ravings about how the FO’s policy on Qaradawi “will grant the jihadists every single thing that they wish for, without having to fire a shot, and reduce us all to dhimmi servitude” … plus declarations of support for Peter Tatchell and the Worker Communist Party of Iran.
Outraged Europeans take dimmer view of diversity
It was less than genteel, not the kind of thing a Londoner liked to admit, but Matthew Pickard couldn’t help himself when drawn into a discussion about the recent bombings on the city’s transit system. There is an “undertow”, he said, a feeling of resentment toward ethnic communities that had long been welcomed.
“My friends, who are all educated and professionals, they’re saying, ‘What gives those people the right to come up from other countries and set up homes and set up families and then start bombing and maiming people?’,” the 33-year-old engineering consultant said. “They just don’t move in and integrate with society. They move in and take over. I just think enough’s enough.”
Defining a moderate Muslim
Daniel Pipes returns to the theme of who qualifies as a “moderate Muslim”. Well, it’s not Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf al-Qaradawi or Azzam Tamimi.
Daniel Pipes blog, 3 September 2005
So who does receive the Pipes seal of approval? See here.
Bush aide slams anti-Muslim hatred
A close aide of US President George Bush told an annual convention of American Muslims that hatred directed at Muslims was no more acceptable than violence done in the name of Islam.
“As we want Muslim voices to speak out against terror and violence and extremism, it is equally important that we be mindful of speaking out against all voices of hate and incitement including those raised against Muslims themselves,” Karen Hughes told the opening of the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) on Friday, September 2.
Hughes, one of Bush’s closest communications advisers, urged people of all faiths to speak out against the “backlash and widespread demonization of Islam and Muslims” that followed the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, blamed on Muslim extremists.