Category Archives: Women

NSS on the Aishah Azmi case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When I was the Chief Officer of an organisation (a Council for Racial Equality in Yorkshire as it happens) I would not have tolerated any member of my staff wearing a niqab, or any other kind of non-medical mask over their face. Had I ever been approached by a woman wearing a niqab (though I never was) I would have done exactly as Jack Straw claims he would do, and politely asked her to remove it.

“I do not know Ms Azmi or her personal circumstances but I do have some familiarity with the various communities in Kirklees. I was a founder member and the first Secretary of the Kirklees Community Law Centre but I resigned from the Management Committee over a decade ago because the other members were not willing to stand up to the unreasonable demands of the leaders of the local Pakistani Community Association.

“These so-called community leaders were so used to being indulged and deferred to in all matters relating to ‘their’ communities that their response to any opposition was to bully and bluster. I suspect that some of these same people will be bending the ears of the local authority at this very moment, demanding all sorts of concessions and assurances about future practices in schools and other areas of the public sector.”

Steve Radford on the National Secular Society website.

The worrying thing is that someone like this was ever responsible for racial equality in the first place.

Ban It! says the Express

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ban ItPressure was mounting last night for veils to be banned in Britain – just as they are in some Muslim countries. And rebels plotting fresh court protests were given a blunt warning by lawmakers: “Carry on, and we will bar you.”

The threat came amid a public outcry over the costs being racked up by teaching assistant Aishah Azmi as her lawyers, funded by taxpayers, continued their fight for her right to wear a veil in class. Daily Express readers responded in massive numbers to a poll on the crisis, with 99 per cent calling for the veil to be banned in schools, increasing pressure on the Government to act.

A ban would see Britain following many of its European neighbours, along with predominantly Muslim countries like Turkey and Tunisia in outlawing traditional Islamic headscarves in public schools and buildings.

Tory MP David Davies urged the Government to examine what other countries had done to discourage or outlaw the wearing of the full veil in public. “We should give it serious consideration too. It’s been banned in many countries, including Muslim. The time may have come for us to consider the same thing,” said the MP for Monmouth. “Tony Blair was right to say that it is a mark of separation. And what worries me is that it’s a way of subjugating women.”

Labour MP Ann Cryer, whose constituency in Keighley, West Yorkshire, has a large Muslim population, said she feared the high-profile Azmi case could spark a welter of copycat legal action by militants. And if that happened, she warned, legislation may be needed to enshrine in law a ban on veils being worn in classrooms and other civic buildings – which could mean on-the-spot fines and the withdrawal of state benefits.

Mrs Cryer said it was “totally unacceptable” to wear a full veil in front of young children and said an outright ban would be needed if people kept “pushing the boundaries” over the issue.

Daily Express, 21 October 2006

Right-wing press rails against Aishah Azmi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Veil Case Teacher Costs UsAishah Azmi seems determined to pursue her warped agenda against the Church of England school that employs her all the way to the European Court – and the taxpayer will have to foot the legal bills.

Is it too much to hope that moderate Muslims will see what really lurks beneath this woman’s veil: not a victim with a genuine grievance but a politically motivated extremist who is doing terrible damage to their standing in the eyes of the long-suffering British public?

Editorial in the Daily Express, 20 October 2006

The bridge of her nose was all that could be seen of bolshie classroom assistant Aishah Azmi. Yet she was handed £1,100 of our money for refusing to remove her veil in school. She then had the gall to lecture US on integration.

What a ludicrous travesty of justice and common sense.

Why was this troublemaker prepared to remove the veil in order to get her job – but not after? How did the tribunal conclude she was a victim when she was the one who moved the goalposts? What message does this damaging ruling send to moderate Muslims who staunchly oppose the veil?

And how on earth could the panel be sure it was really her behind the black shroud covering her from top to toe?

Editorial in the Sun, 20 October 2006

The cult of victimhood has a new heroine. Aishah Azmi, the classroom assistant who insisted on wearing her niqab when in the presence of men (though not, apparently, when she was interviewed by a man for the job) has been awarded £1,100 for “injury to her feelings”.

Kirklees council had had the temerity to tell her to remove the veil when teaching because pupils said they found it hard to understand her. Mercifully, her claims of religious discrimination and harassment were thrown out. Yet that is unlikely to prevent Miss Azmi and her “supporters” proclaiming this as some sort of victory in an undeclared Holy War.

It is nothing of the sort. The wearing of a veil is a political and cultural statement, not a religious one, and the sooner this is more widely recognised, the less likely it will be that we have a repeat of this nonsense.

Editorial in Daily Telegraph, 20 October 2006

Warmongers play race card

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Warmongers Play Race CardBritain is facing a sustained attempt to whip up full-blooded racism. Each day government ministers are clamouring to appear on camera denouncing Muslims and demanding their neighbours and teachers spy on them.

Across the country communities are living in fear. From bitter experience they know that racist speeches by politicians quickly translate into murderous racist violence on the streets. Listen to what befell Hina’naz Ahmed, a student at Wolverhampton University, last week:

“As I was walking past a bus stop I was surrounded by about five youths, one of them a girl. They stood and waited for me then followed me down the street shouting abuse, telling me to take off my veil.

“They then repeatedly said that Straw has made it illegal so I had to take it off. They shouted ‘Jack Straw’ repeatedly. I think Straw has made racists think it’s OK to abuse people like me.”

Socialist Worker, 20 October 2006

Demonising Muslims must stop, says CPB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Communist Party of Britain national membership organiser Geoff Bottoms told the party’s political committee on Wednesday evening that “new Labour ministers should stop demonising Britain’s Muslims.” He said that, instead, ministers should “start addressing the real causes of terrorism, which are rooted in the policies of British and US imperialism.”

Mr Bottoms added: “Jack Straw’s criticism of the full veil worn by a small minority of Muslims has nothing to do with women’s liberation, while Ruth Kelly’s threat to excommunicate Muslim organisations which criticise government foreign policy will do nothing to foster community cohesion,” adding that “her approach befits her membership of the ultra-right-wing Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei.”

The committee welcomed the stand taken by university vice-chancellors and students and lecturers’ unions against government plans for them to inform on Muslim and “Asian-looking” students to Special Branch.

Morning Star, 20 October 2006

NUJ forces Daily Star to abandon anti-Muslim ‘spoof’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A staff revolt at the Daily Star prevented publication of a spoof Islamic version of the paper called the “Daily Fatwa”.

The mock-up “Daily Fatwa”, which promised a “Page 3 Burkha Babes Special” and competitions to “Burn a Flag and Win a Corsa” and “Win hooks just like Hamza’s”, was prepared to run as page 6 in Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Star, one of the stable of newspapers owned by publisher Richard Desmond. The page also included a spoof leader column under the headline “Allah is Great” but left blank save for a stamp with the word “Censored”.

But shortly before the Star was due to go to press on Tuesday evening, concerned members of the National of Journalists (NUJ) called an emergency meeting in the 9th floor canteen of Desmond’s Northern & Shell building beside the River Thames. After 25 minutes, the NUJ chapel passed a motion saying that the article was “deliberately offensive” to Muslims.

Independent, 19 October 2006

Mad Mel goes ‘behind the veil’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On the Moral Maze last night, which discussed the place of religious symbols such as the Muslim veil and the Christian cross in public life, one of our witnesses was Nai’ma B Robert, a convert to Islam who wore the niqab or full-face veil. She spoke well, although I thought naively, about how she chose to wear the niqab as an ‘act of worship’ – naively because she was unwilling to face up to the political purpose of the veil and its role as a symbol of the jihad which is used to recruit more people to the cause of Islamising society and to demoralise and intimidate its victims. That is why not just the niqab but also the hijab has been banned from public places in Turkey and Indonesia.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 19 October 2006

Feminism, imperialism and the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Muslim women who adopt the veil in Europe may simultaneously be seeking to affirm their religious identity while being determined to enter the public sphere as full and equal citizens. They are often also trying to change the cultural and political meaning of the veil in a contemporary context. For some it may be linked to patriarchal pressure, for others a symbol of identity and emancipation in a commodified and patriarchal society – and for many a response to a religious vocation. Feminist politics needs to be flexible and respond to these complexities. And for Muslim women their religion and even their gender are not the only, or the most grievous, focus of their oppression – their bodies have also been, and continue to be, a battleground for European and US imperialism.

“Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt in the late 19th century, famously justified British colonial rule by arguing that it could liberate Egyptian women from their oppressive veils…. When the US launched its war on terror in Afghanistan in 2001, George Bush glorified his aims by stating: ‘Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes … The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’ The US social anthropologists Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind have noted that the relationship between the neoconservative Bush administration and some US feminists was reciprocal and intimate….

“Those feminists who give well-meaning lectures to Muslim women on what they should think, say and wear are not in the end alone. There is a risk that their powerful female voices will inadvertently sustain another political discourse: the words and actions of an illustrious line of men who continue to justify their imperial ambitions on the bodies, often dead bodies, of Muslim women.”

Maleiha Malik in the Guardian, 19 October 2006

Anthony Glees: Internment should be a policy option

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Academics should think the unthinkable. We should not be blinkered by political correctness. People need to speak up. They shouldn’t be made to be afraid. Increasingly universities are becoming mental corsets because of over-regulation. I’ve had universities threatening legal action, vice-chancellors calling for me to be prevented from doing research. And it’s these people who claim to be for freedom of speech.

“The legal profession has taken the European Convention far too far in a way that is inappropriate in a country that’s at war. The convention is deeply flawed. It was set up in 1948 and it is not right for now. At the moment we are at war, the fact that it is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan conceals that fact. The law has been used to favour the perpetrator, not the persecuted. We need to think about how we should behave to people who consider us enemies, whether they are British citizens or people who are in Britain seeking asylum.

“Internment in the second world war is called MI5’s darkest hour, but internment was a very effective way of keeping the country safe from Nazi subversion. People say that the vast majority of those interned were Jews, and they would be the last people to act in a subversive way. In fact research shows that there were some Jews in Britain as agents of the Third Reich. Their families were in the hands of the Gestapo and they were blackmailed. And some say that internment in Northern Ireland made the situation better. Internment needs to be talked about. There shouldn’t be things that shouldn’t be considered – if they can help.

“The German equivalent of MI5 is called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Liberal democracy will be easily destroyed if we do not act against extremism. We give our enemies the weapons they need to destroy us. We need to be more mindful that there is a threshold that should not be crossed. Not everything is permissible. Wearing the niqab is saying we don’t want to be British. Forty per cent of British Muslims say they want to live under sharia law. That is unacceptable. They should go to a country with sharia law.”

Anthony Glees in the Independent, 19 October 2008