Category Archives: USA

Muslim feminism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Toronto Star last week ran a gushing profile of Indonesian Muslim feminist Musdah Mulia, exulting that she ‘blames Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity’ in the Islamic world. This is closely related to a large-scale and continually growing problem: analysts attribute the actions of the global terrorist movement to a hijacking of Islam, without caring or daring to look squarely at what exactly it is about Islam that gives rise to fanaticism and violence.”

Yes, you probably guessed – another Islamophobic rant from Robert Spencer.

Front Page Magazine, 14 April 2005

“Spencer portrays himself as a scholar of Islam, and that he is not. He misquotes verses of the Qur’an, takes things out of context, and shamelessly lies.” Khaleel Mohammed replies to Spencer. (Errs on the side of mildness, if you ask me.)

Front Page Magazine, 18 April 2005

Met chief issues fresh terror warning

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britain’s most senior policeman has issued a new warning about the threat of al Qaeda terrorists targeting the UK. Sir Ian Blair is calling for new laws to tackle terrorist conspiracies and has asked for the introduction of ID cards to be given further consideration. His comments came in an interview broadcast on the Breakfast with Frost programme. And they follow the jailing of Kamel Bourgass for murdering a policeman and conspiring to cause a public nuisance after police unravelled an al Qaeda ricin poison plot.”

Sky News, 17 April 2005

Ian Blair did go on to say that Bourgass is “one individual, not the whole Muslim community” and that “99.9% of Muslims … are law-abiding people and we’ve got to support them in that and understand the difference”. He raised the question: “What is it that drives a tiny number of young men and women into extreme violence?”

This talk of extremists comprising a tiny minority of Muslims is the sort of wishy-washy liberalism that really irritates Robert Spencer: “99.9%? What was it, then, that made Al-Muhajiroun, a group that openly supported Al-Qaeda and spoke freely of wanting to see ‘the black flag of Islam’, that is, the flag of jihad, ‘flying over #10 Downing Street’, Britain’s largest Muslim group?”

Jihad Watch, 17 April 2005

Anyone who’s loopy enough to believe that the minuscule and marginal Al-Muhajiroun sect (which formally dissolved itself last year) is “Britain’s largest Muslim group” isn’t going to be taken too seriously, though. A bigger threat comes from those who make reference to Islamist extremists being a tiny minority and then use an almost certainly non-existent terrorist plot in order to call for repressive legislation that will impact on all Muslims.

For a response by civil rights organisation Liberty see BBC News, 17 April 2005

Mother defends girl swept up in immigration raid, amid terror claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The tiny store is more like a corridor off the sidewalk than a shop, and its dangling wares – $3 scarves, trinkets, cellphone covers – shiver each time the subway rumbles by. At the store, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a 16-year-old Guinean girl named by the government as a potential suicide bomber helped her father make a living when she was not in school or caring for younger siblings in her family’s apartment in East Harlem, the family says.”

New York Times, 15 April 2005

Unholy alliance: the ‘peace left’ and the Islamic jihad against America

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Horowitz and John Perazzo claim that the anti-war movement in the US has allied itself with Islamic terrorism. They present “the first in a series of articles and visual maps describing the unholy alliances that have been formed between American leftists and radical Islam, unlikely allies who have joined efforts to oppose America’s defensive War on Terror and its war of liberation in Iraq. These are mainly (but not exclusively) de facto alliances, much as the Hitler-Stalin Pact was an alliance of convenience based on a common interest”.

Front Page Magazine, 13 April 2003

Now what does that remind me of? Well, it’s almost identical to the nonsense we hear about the left in Britain from Nick Cohen, Harry’s Place et al.

How Muslim spies and subversives have penetrated Washington

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Infiltration“Washington hasn’t leveled with us about the full scope and depth of the Islamic threat not only inside America but inside the government, just as it hasn’t leveled with us about the true nature of Islam. We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, and we’re just inviting another 9/11. So I wrote this book to expose the elaborate fraud that’s been orchestrated by our leaders in the Washington establishment and the leaders in the Muslim establishment, who are playing us all for suckers.”

Paul Sperry promotes his book Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington at Front Page Magazine, 12 April 2005

Robert Spencer is impressed: Jihad Watch, 13 April 2005

The parallels between present-day Islamophobia and the anti-Soviet hysteria of the ’50s are quite striking. Just as McCarthy got so carried away by his witch-hunting that he began denouncing establishment right-wingers as crypto-Communists, the most extreme of today’s anti-Muslim witch-hunters appear to have turned on the Bush administration, condemning it for going soft on Islam. It is at least reassuring to see the Islamophobic right tearing itself apart in this way.

Muslim schoolgirl detention condemned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The arrest of a 16-year-old Muslim schoolgirl in the United States on charges of planning to be a suicide bomber drew fire from her teachers and classmates, reported a leading American daily on Saturday, April 9.

“She is, yes, an orthodox Muslim, but completely integrated into this school,” Jessica Siegel, an English teacher at Heritage High School in East Harlem, told The New York Times. “She’s a wonderful, wonderful girl.”

The Guinean tenth-grader has been described by the FBI as “an imminent threat to the security of the United States” on allegation of planning to be a suicide bomber, according to a government document provided to the daily by a federal official.

She is being held in an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania and her father is now in immigration jail facing deportation.

“She’s about the last person anyone could imagine being a suicide bomber,” said Ms. Siegel, who was profiled in Samuel G. Freedman’s book Small Victories as an unsentimental but fiercely committed teacher who provoked and delighted her students.

Ms. Carr, a speech pathologist, was no less furious. “They have painted this picture of her as this person that is trying to destroy our way of life, and I know in my heart of hearts that this is bogus,” she said.

“I feel like, how dare they? She’s a minor, and even if she’s not a citizen, she has rights as a human being,” said Ms. Carr, who welcomed the girl to her house daily and knows her family well.

Islam Online, 9 April, 2005

Two girls held as US fears suicide bomb

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two 16-year-old girls from New York City were arrested last month and charged with immigration violations after the FBI asserted that they intended to become suicide bombers, according to a government document. A spokesman for one of their families, however, said the accusation was false and said the government had probably misinterpreted a school essay written by one of the girls.

New York Times, 7 April 2005

Catholics go soft on Islam, Robert Spencer complains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“We have to learn to live with Islam,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, speaking to reporters Tuesday in Rome. “We have to learn how to dialogue with Islam.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch is not impressed: “Sure. It’s all on us. If only we could learn to live with them, everything would be all right…. if we would just be nice to them, all our troubles would vanish.” Such views, Spencer observes, are “usually advanced by the most energetic proponents of multiculturalism”.

Dhimmi Watch, 6 April 2005