Letters in response to Will Hutton’s article last week (see here) on the new anti-incitement bill.
Category Archives: Women
Labour left fails to stand up for right to incite anti-Muslim hatred, AWL complains
“Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, as opposed to ethnicity, is a major attack on freedom of speech. It means extending the blasphemy laws which still, at least in theory, protect Anglican Christianity from rational public debate, to shield all religions with authoritarian impartiality.
“The bill is partly a cynical pitch to win back Muslim voters outraged by Blair’s warmongering and erosion of civil liberties (like the expansion of state funding for faith schools, and defence of the hijab) and partly the brainchild of a Prime Minister with a lot of respect for religious superstition and very little for human rights.
“So why did the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose leaders have boasted that they will be ‘setting the agenda’ for this Parliament, fail to rebel?
“Unfortunately, on this issue as on many others, these MPs are highly representative of a left which is increasingly losing its political bearings. The ‘religious hatred’ law has elicited not a squeak of protest from the trade union movement; meanwhile the National Union of Students, on the initiative of the SWP and their Stalinist friends Socialist Action, has positively endorsed new Labour’s assault on respect for rational thinking and free speech.”
Sacha Ismael of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq provide us with a good illustration of which section of the left has really lost its bearings. The section of the left that supports the right to incite hatred against Muslims and sneers at the defence of the right to wear the hijab.
We need this law to fight hatred
We need this law to fight hatred
By Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting
Evening Standard, 21 June 2005
It is, if its critics are to believed, a grievous threat both to our freedom of speech and to the nation’s cherished sense of humour. As such, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which has its second reading in Parliament today, has been derided as dangerous, politically cynical, and most of all, as unnecessary. So why do so few of my fellow Muslims see it that way?
Debating the Bill, Muslims tend to think not of vicar jokes but of incidents like one in a charity shop in Shepherd’s Bush recently, where a white, British Muslim woman was told by another customer: “You may be English, but you married a f***ing Muslim.”
We think not about alleged political calculations, but about the dangers faced, for example, by one woman recently attacked in the street in north-west London while wearing Muslim dress. She was warned sympathetically by the nurse who treated her injuries: “You have to take off this scarf. Every month we get several cases like you who come for treatment.”
Indeed Muslims might tend to question the extent of freedom of speech when simply going out dressed recognisably as a Muslim can invite assault. Many reported cases involve Muslim women having their headscarves forcibly pulled off and or having alcohol thrown at them. In one incident, a schoolgirl had her headscarf pulled off by a parent of another child at the school gates, to the sound of laughter from those watching.
All these incidents happened because these Londoners were Muslims. It was not about the colour of their skin but the religion they follow.
The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is not about gagging comedians or curbing criticism of any religion. It is about giving Muslims and other followers of religions the same protection from hate crimes as, for example, black people.
‘We’ oppose an anti-incitement law, says Will Hutton
“Being a Muslim, especially a Muslim woman, in Britain is for many a dispiriting and occasionally terrifying experience. The society that prides itself on tolerance has lost its bearings over Islam. On the streets, the prejudice that Islam is irrationally and murderously violent and menacingly foreign has spawned a subculture of hatred and abuse. If you are a woman in a hijab, being jeered at, even spat at, is routine. Many never venture from their houses.
“This is fertile ground for widespread racism and where the law is currently uncertain. Harassment and abuse are certainly illegal, but the threshold that incurs legal action is very high; equally illegal is the expression of hatred, or views that might incite hatred, towards a group or individual for their race.
“But the woman in a hijab could be African, Asian or Middle Eastern. It is not her race that makes her the object of hatred; it is her religious belief and culture that require her to dress in such a conspicuously different way and make her part of the hated group. The law, as currently framed, offers her no systematic protection, and no explicit penalty for a political party, say the BNP, that chooses to make such hatred a central plank of its electoral pitch.”
Thus Will Hutton in the Observer, 19 June 2005
Burchill on Muslim women and hijab
“So certain moderate Muslims are now suggesting that devout women can take off their shrouds and walk free in God’s sunshine. How very magnanimous of them. It turns out that rigging yourself up like a parrot’s cage with the covering on is less to do with flaunting your devilish female charms and thus inflaming bestial male passion, as we were told, than allowing Muslim women to go ‘unmolested’. So now, if wearing the hijab means women will be molested by us nasty infidels, they can go without.”
Julie Burchill in the Times, 6 August 2005
Minister urges fine for burka
Women wearing burkas in Italy should be reported to the police and fined, Silvio Berlusconi’s justice minister said at the weekend. Roberto Castelli said the garment was at odds with an Italian law that forbids masks.
The burka is rare, though not unknown, in Italy. But commentators yesterday noted that the minister’s ruling against masks could be applied to other garb more commonly worn by Muslim women, that leaves only the eyes visible.
Mr Castelli told a meeting in the northern town of Como: “No one may break the law.”
He was referring to a decision by the local prefect to overturn fines imposed last year on an Italian convert to Islam from nearby Drezzo, who wears a burka. Two other women have been fined for wearing the garment elsewhere.
Mr Castelli’s remarks were condemned by leftwing parties. Marco Rizzo of the Communist party said they were “at the threshold of incitement to racial and religious hatred”.
See also “Italian minister grilled over fining niqab”, Islam Online. 6 June 2005
US Muslim sues over prison visit, headscarf
A Muslim woman who was ordered by male prison guards to take off her headscarf before she could visit an inmate has filed a federal lawsuit alleging her constitutional right to practice religion had been violated.
Cynthia Rhouni, 43, of Madison, says the scarf, or hijab, that always covers her head and shoulders in the presence of men shows the world she is a devout Muslim.
Rhouni’s lawsuit claims that male prison guards at the maximum-security Columbia Correctional Facility north of Madison told her rules prohibited any head covering in the visiting room. They ordered her to take off her scarf before she could see her estranged husband in 2003, the suit alleges.
Hijab activists see European campaign a ‘success’
Marking the end of three months of intense lobbying and painstaking efforts to make their voice heard and gain the support of Members of the European Parliament, Protect Hijab activists see the campaign a “success” and “positive step”.
“If we look at the number of Written Declarations (WDs) that have been put before the European Parliament this year, from eight WDs only two got more signatories than ours,” Vice-Coordinator of the London-based Assembly for the Protection of Hijab (Protect Hijab), Rajnaara Akhtar, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, May 24.
She was referring to a Written Declaration on Religious Rights and Freedoms, which was tabled by Protect Hijab and MEPs to the parliament February 21 as a preliminary step towards a binding resolution obliging European countries, particularly France, to lift ban on hijab in state-run institutions like schools.
Anti-hijab party wins elections
In an unhappy outcome for German Muslims in the largest regional state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the conservative anti-hijab Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won state elections Sunday, May 22, triggering a decision to hold a snap general election across Germany in the autumn.
The CDU’s resounding victory sent shock waves among the Muslim minority in NRW, home to one million of Germany’s 3.4 million Muslims. During the election campaign, Christian Democrat leader in NRW Juergen Ruettgers said he would swiftly ban hijab from state schools.
Ruettgers’s plan to ban hijab within three weeks of his election victory, despite opposition from other parties, was not the only reason for Muslims’ concern. His anti-Muslim drive is shown in many statements he made in the run up to state elections and even before.
Late last month, he told a German news channel that he is a Catholic who believes Christianity presented the best image of man and should therefore be leading all other religions worldwide.
Muslim dress focus of Sydney debate
A leading Australian politician has called for an end to public debate about a high school student who has won the right to wear a Muslim garment in class.
Yasamin Alttahir, 17, was placed on detention after she refused to stop wearing an ankle-length manto to Auburn Girls’ High School in Sydney. The school eventually agreed to let her continue wearing the religious garment after she obtained a permission note from her parents.
Bob Carr, premier of New South Wales state, has supported Alttahir’s right to dress according to her faith. “Let’s tolerate the difference in our community,” he told reporters. “Young women, conservatively presented, not dressed like Britney Spears, turning up to school.”
Carr called for an end to media debate about Alttahir, an Iraqi-born Shia Muslim, who has been accused of being a troublemaker by some talkback radio presenters for defying school uniform policies.
“I just think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t traumatise a young woman who’s at school to get her education and training and set herself up for life,” he said. “I think we should give the issue a rest.”