Mirror pays damages for Al Qaeda slur

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A leading Malaysian politician has accepted substantial undisclosed libel damages from the Daily Mirror over his wrongful identification as the third in command of Al Qaeda.

Abdul Hadi Awang, who is currently the president of Malaysian opposition party PAS, was caused great embarrassment and distress by the incorrect use of his photo in the Daily Mirror in May as part of a series concerning a number of terror plots in the UK, his solicitor-advocate, Adam Tudor, told Mr Justice Eady at the High Court on Friday.

Solicitors Carter-Ruck said later that Hadi Awang’s complaint was one of a number it had brought over the past 12 months on behalf of Muslims falsely accused of involvement with terrorism. To date, these had led to the payment of more than £700,000 in damages plus legal costs.

The article stated that Mr Hadi Awang was third in command of Al Qaeda, and was being held in Guantanamo Bay following his capture, he said. Trinity Mirror plc, the newspaper’s publisher, acknowledged that Hadi Awang had no involvement whatsoever in Al Qaeda – on the contrary, he had always been vehemently opposed to its “barbarous acts”.

The newspaper had explained that the photograph, which was published in error, was intended to refer to the suspected Al Qaeda terrorist, Abdul Hadi Al Iraqi, with whom Hadi Awang had no connection. It had published an apology and had agreed to pay Hadi Awang substantial damages and his legal costs.

Press Gazette, 22 October 2007

Rightwing SVP tightens grip in Swiss election

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Add NewChristoph BlocherSwitzerland’s rightwing People’s party, accused of racism and fanning Islamophobia, strengthened its position as the country’s leading political force yesterday, gaining more than 2 percentage points to win a general election for the second time in a row, according to projections.

Led by the populist industrialist Christoph Blocher, the People’s party, or SVP, was projected to have taken almost 29% of the vote, securing six more seats in parliament and two seats in the seven-strong cabinet that is always a coalition of the four strongest parties.

Guardian, 22 October 2007

Young U.S. Muslims struggle against prejudice

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Speaking with kids from high schools and youth organizations in the Dearborn area, Y-Press learned about some of the stereotypes many Americans hold about Arab-Americans and Muslims. The issues affecting Arab teens range from everyday high school challenges to discrimination.

The Abusalah family, natives of Palestine, ordered their meals at a restaurant and watched as the white family next to them got more attention from the waiter: Their order was taken first, the food arrived faster, and the waiter was simply friendlier. He barely smiled at the Arab-American family.

“It’s all the time,” said Reema Abusalah, 15. “We always get the dirty looks and stares. It’s not around Dearborn usually, but when we leave Dearborn, we see people who are not Arab stare at us, give us dirty looks and look funny at us.”

Reema feels that people who don’t live in diverse communities such as Dearborn rely on biased opinions to generate a picture of Arab-Americans.

For example, a lot of movies cast Arabs as villains, and the news media reports more negative stories about Arabs than positive ones. Yusef Saad, 16, saw a documentary called “Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” Arabs come out looking bad in such films as “Back to the Future” and even the Disney movie, “Aladdin,” Yusef said.

For Muslim teenage girls wearing the traditional Islamic hijab, or headscarf, stereotypes are sometimes intensified. “They think that all Muslim girls are oppressed and forced to put on the hijab. Well, it’s actually the other way around,” said Nour Hijazi, 17. “We want people to look at us and not evaluate how we look, but actually how we are and the way we treat people.”

Indianapolis Star, 21 October 2007

German neo-Nazis stage mosque protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NPD mosque protestBERLIN — Members of a German neo-Nazi party demonstrated Saturday in Frankfurt against the construction of a mosque in an area which already has two.

About 200 people marched shouting “Stop the Islamisation of Germany,” said Joerg Krebs, a spokesman for the local branch of the NPD, a neo-Nazi party. “We don’t want a big mosque in Hausen,” a Frankfurt quarter, “as there are already two mosques.”

The mosque is expected to cost about 10 million euros. Germany is home to some 3.4 million Muslims and there are 159 mosques scattered over the country. Some 900 people in the city held a counter-demonstration Saturday against the neo-Nazi rally.

AFP, 20 October 2007

Amis finds another supporter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Henry Porter joins the likes of Ruth Dudley Edwards in rallying to the defence of poor misunderstood Martin Amis:

“Amis prefaced his remarks with: ‘There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it too? – to say…’ He was confessing to an urge that millions of people felt after the 7 July attacks or the attempts to blow up a nightclub full of young women in the summer. He was not recommending a campaign of persecution but owning up – bravely, as it turned out – to what amounted to a revenge fantasy. This is what writers are meant to do – to experiment, to give vent to the things so many of us feel but do not express, to allow reason to assert itself and to come out the other end with a view.”

Observer, 21 October 2007

For Amis’s actual words, see here. You’ll note that, in the same interview, Amis also came out with a “Muslims are outbreeding us” line that was plainly inspired by paranoid right-wing fantasists like Mark Steyn: “They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.”

But that’s par for the course with Amis. Just over a year ago, to take another example, he wrote an article for the Observer containing formulations that were indistinguishable from the sort of bigoted nonsense that appears on sites like Jihad Watch:

“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam…. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it…. Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century.”

Racist bus passenger avoids jail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A bus driver who has been in this country for more than 40 years and driven a bus for 35 of them was told by a drunken passenger: “You are from Pakistan. You are a terrorist and you are blowing the f…… country up”.

Kurshidahmad Saiyed told Isleworth Crown Court: “I was very distressed at being abused like this. I have been a loyal public servant for so many years.” His tormentor, 42-year-old Anthony Cosgrove of Popes Lane, Ealing, was found guilty by Brentford magistrates of racially aggravated harassment, on August 28 last year.

Cosgrove was arrested in October and denied the charge, which was tried earlier this year. He was already subject to a suspended sentence for possessing firearms while prohibited.

Telling him he was very lucky not to be going straight to prison, Judge Hezlett Colgan suspended a six-month sentence for two years and told Cosgrove not to change his address for six months and to be under the supervision of the probation service. He said:

“You caused a bus driver harassment and distress and in doing that you used racist language. That is almost always an offence that means an immediate sentence of imprisonment. But you owe a great debt to your counsel who has just persuaded me not to send you to prison.”

Richmond & Twickenham Times, 20 October 2007

Posted in UK

Right wing organises to ‘resist Islamisation’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On October 18 and 19, over 70 organizations and individuals joined together in the European and Flemish Parliaments to create a European network of activists from 14 nations to resist the increasing Islamisation of their countries.

“Keynote speakers included Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia and Dhimmitude and Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace, Why Christianity is and Islam Isn’t. Additional speakers included David Littman, Dr. Arieh Eldad, member of the Israeli Knesset, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Sam Solomon, Director of Fellowship of Faith for Muslims and author of the Charter of Muslim Understanding, Dr. Marc Cogen, Ghent University, Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and Laurent Artur du Plessis, author of a forthcoming book on shariah finance.”

Center for Vigilant Freedom press release, 19 October 2007

Centre for Social Cohesion witch-hunts ‘Islam is Peace’ campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On 24 September, posters stating ‘Islam is Peace’ and ‘Proud to be a British Muslim’ appeared on London buses, London Underground trains and in airports around Britain – the latest phase in a campaign by the group Islam-is-Peace to ‘address the negative perceptions and stereotypes of Islam and British Muslims’, according to the group’s website. But although Islam-is-Peace presents itself as independent, its only known senior members are also prominent figures in the Muslim Association of Britain – a Hamas-linked group whose founder and a chief ideologue have publicly defended Islamic terrorism.”

Centre for Social Cohesion press briefing, 18 October 2007

Showdown at Columbia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Columbia UniversityWhen David Horowitz returns to Columbia University next Friday to mark his organization’s much-hyped “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” (IFAW), he will find a determined and “dangerous” opposition, coming from a coalition of concerned students and up to nine of Horowitz’s “101 Most Dangerous Professors”.

“NOT ON OUR CAMPUS”, counter the flyers being circulated by the hundreds from Columbia’s Intercultural Resource Center, as students prepare for a major speakout and counter-event on Friday. Many here see Horowitz’s visit as an insult and an injury to a campus community still reeling from a slew of racial attacks this semester, most recently a noose hung on the door of a Black professor at Teachers’ College.

“What it does,” added Noah Baron of Columbia Students for a Democratic Society, “is it builds on people’s fears… And it makes it more difficult to discuss things that are already difficult to discuss … racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and things like that.”

Many students at Columbia don’t buy the “Islamo-Fascism” talk in the first place. The term only gained currency after President Bush picked it up as a mantra in 2006. Rahel Aima of Columbia SDS sees it as a fiction: “Islamo-Fascism is constructed … [They say]  ‘We don’t like Islam, we think fascism is bad, let’s put them together’… And they’re like, ‘If you’re not with us, you’re fascists’.”

With IFAW, Horowitz, an ex-Leftist-gone-Right, is taking on two of his favorite enemies: Left-wing faculty and Muslim youth. In a recent statement, he claimed that “the progressive left is the enabler and abettor of the terrorist jihad”, and in the same document, he called the Muslim Students Association (MSA) a “front for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas”.

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