Marc Lynch on the Zawahiri tape, broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Once again Lynch argues that “it’s precisely because Zawahiri’s call for violent, total change represents a minority view that he keeps lashing out against the advocates of peaceful, gradual change”. The latter, of course, being represented by figures such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Category Archives: USA
Multicultural Britain is not working, says Tory chief
Muslims must start integrating into mainstream British society, says David Davis, the shadow home secretary and front-runner to take over the Conservative leadership.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Davis signalled a significant shift away from the policy of multi-culturalism, which allows people of different faiths and cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate.
“Often, the authorities have seemed more concerned with encouraging distinctive identities rather than promoting the common values of nationhood,” Mr Davis writes.
Daily Telegraph, 3 August 2005
See also Guardian, 3 August 2005
For Davis’s article, see here.
And over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer applauds this example of “common sense from David Davis”.
Robert Spencer’s mission – to ‘dispel myths and stereotypes’ about Islam
Robert Spencer, author of the new Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), told a group of college students gathered for the Young America’s Foundation conference in Washington, D.C., that he spends his life trying to “dispel myths and stereotypes” about Islam perpetuated in the media and on college campuses.
Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and a HUMAN EVENTS columnist, blamed political correctness, which “stifles public discourse,” combined with a general unwillingness among public officials to recognize the fundamental teachings of the Islam as a source for acts of terror throughout the Western world for distorting the public’s perception of the War on Terror.
He cited British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s rush to defend Islam as a peaceful religion as an example of the public’s failure to recognize that the motivation of Islamic extremism often comes directly from the Koran itself.
Muslims who hate us can get out, says Tory
• MP says Muslims who believe Britain is at war with Islam should leave
• Shadow defence secretary incensed by view UK to blame for extremism
• Muslim association calls Gerald Howarth’s remarks ‘naïve’ and ‘arrogant’
“If they don’t like our way of life, there is a simple remedy: go to another country, get out. There are plenty of other countries whose way of life would appear to be more conducive to what they aspire to. They would be happy and we would be happy” – Gerald Howarth, shadow defence minister.
Howarth has the full support of Robert Spencer: “I don’t see anywhere in history that a state lasted very long which tolerated large populations that wanted to make it over into another kind of state altogether.”
‘A monster of our own making’
“These British bombers are a consequence of a misguided and catastrophic pursuit of multiculturalism”, according to the Observer‘s strap to an article by William Pfaff. The author explains:
“A half-century of a well-intentioned but catastrophically mistaken policy of multiculturalism, indifferent or even hostile to social and cultural integration, has produced in Britain and much of Europe a technologically educated but culturally and morally unassimilated immigrant demi-intelligentsia.”
Admittedly, this is only one point in a rather rambling article – but it’s evidently the point the Observer wants to highlight.
‘In a rare media moment, a terror apologist meets his match’
The US Right attacks Azzam Tamimi of MAB as “an apologist for jihadists masquerading as a moderate Muslim intellectual”.
Suspect’s tale of travel and torture
A former London schoolboy accused of being a dedicated al-Qaida terrorist has given the first full account of the interrogation and alleged torture endured by so-called ghost detainees held at secret prisons around the world. For two and a half years US authorities moved Benyam Mohammed around a series of prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay in September last year.
First torture them, then rig their trials
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) obtained two leaked emails from former military prosecutors at Guántanamo Bay over the weekend. The emails both claim that the military committees set up to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba are “rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused.”
In the first email obtained by the Australian news organization, Gitmo prosecutor, Major Robert Preston, wrote to his supervisor that the trial process at Guantanamo was perpetrating a fraud on the American public. Preston also wrote that the cases being tried were insignificant at best.
“I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people,” Preston wrote. “Surely they don’t expect that this fairly half-arsed effort is all that we have been able to put together after all this time … I lie awake worrying about this every night,” he wrote.
“I find it almost impossible to focus on my part of mission … After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don’t really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer.”
Shortly after Preston sent these emails to his superior he was transferred from his post.
In the second email obtained by the ABC, Captain John Carr, who also left his position after his email claimed that the commissions at the prison appeared to be rigged, wrote, “When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged.”
Carr also wrote that Gitmo prosecutors were continually told by the chief prosecutor that the panel set up to try detainees was specially selected in order to guarantee convictions. “You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel,” Carr wrote.
Joshua Frank reports in Counterpunch, 2 August 2005
See also “Leaked emails claim Guantanamo trials rigged”, ABC, 1 August 2005
Britain ‘taken for suckers by the Muslim immigration wave’
“Our English cousins are getting a brutal lesson in reality: Multiculturalism will kill you if you don’t watch out…. Public opinion in Britain, in fact, appears to be saying enough, already. There’s a growing consensus that the British have been taken for suckers by the Muslim immigration wave that has overwhelmed the sceptr’d isle…. The one-sided celebration of diversity is beginning to grate as well. Julie Burchill, a columnist for the Times of London, notes that ‘English toddlers are being forced to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid when they are still trying to get their heads about the Easter bunny’.”
US radio station suspends talk show host
Radio talk-show host Michael Graham was suspended by station WMAL-AM yesterday for repeatedly describing Islam as a “terrorist organization” on his program. Graham said he has been ordered off the Washington station, without pay, for an indefinite period while the station investigates the comments that drew complaints from a Muslim group, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Graham said on his mid-morning program on Monday that the fault for recent acts of terrorism lies not with Islamic radicals alone but also with Muslims generally because religious leaders and followers have tacitly supported extreme elements. “The problem is not extremism,” Graham told listeners. “The problem is Islam.” He also said, “We are at war with a terrorist organization named Islam.”
Indeed, only yesterday, Graham expanded on these views in the Jewish World Review.
As you can imagine, his suspension doesn’t meet with the approval of the folks at Jihad Watch. “This is yet another sad story”, Robert Spencer comments, “and it bodes ill for our freedom in America: Graham’s words were inflammatory, but he had perfectly cogent and reasonable arguments to back them up.”