Black and Muslim lawyers plan breakaway regulator

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Black and Muslim solicitors have accused Britain’s legal watchdog of racial discrimination and want to break away to establish their own watchdog body.

The Association of Muslim Lawyers (AML) and the Society of Black Lawyers have obtained figures that show that the Law Society’s regulatory arm is more than twice as likely to investigate misconduct allegations against ethnic minority solicitors than it is against white lawyers. They claim that the disproportionate attention is fuelled by discrimination, rather than by suspect practices.

Figures published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in 2006 showed that 62 per cent of investigations related to nonwhite lawyers.

Peter Herbert, the chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers, said: “These figures are a prima facie case of racial discrimation. Clearly this form of regulation is not working and we are looking at establishing a separate, independent watchdog for ethnic minorities.”

Mahmud al-Rashid, a spokesman for the AML, said: “The figures show there must be discrimination at the SRA. We are demanding an immediate investigation.”

Times, 17 October 2007

Ref benches teen soccer player because of headscarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Iman KhalilFor six years, Iman Khalil has worn a headscarf with her soccer uniform. It wasn’t a problem until this past weekend, when a referee decided before a tournament match on Saturday that the headscarf violated league rules.

“The referee looked at me and said, ‘You can’t play in that,'” the 15-year-old told The Tampa Tribune. “This isn’t headgear or anything. It’s part of the faith. I don’t think it should be a problem that I wear it.”

A league official overruled referee Steve Richardson during half-time, but he still refused to let the Muslim girl play in the second half of the game.

“At first I was extremely upset,” she said. “I got very emotional. I kept my cool. I wiped my face because I was crying. But then everyone rallied around us. All the team. All the parents. Even the other team. It was just phenomenal.”

The league later apologized to Iman and reminded referees that players are allowed to wear religious articles as long they don’t pose a threat of injury.

USA Today, 15 October 2007

Uri Avnery on the ‘Clash of Civilisations’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When I hear mention of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry”, writes Uri Avnery of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom. “To laugh, because it is such a silly notion. To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters. To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.”

Gush Shalom website, 13 October 2007

Islamic scarfs face ban in Australia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Howard Government is considering banning Islamic scarfs at Australian airports, senior government sources have revealed. The security measure would see even the most inoffensive Muslim scarf, the hijab, which covers the hair and neck, banned, along with several other types.

Security officials were especially concerned by two other types of scarf, the niqab and burka. The niqab covers the face, but leaves the eyes exposed, while the burka covers the entire face, with only a mesh screen for the eyes.

The scarf policy is under active consideration in Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews’ office, which is consulting airport security officials over the policy.

Herald Sun, 14 October 2007

Update:  The Sydney Morning Herald quotes a spokeswoman for Andrews as saying: “I can say that the minister’s office is absolutely not considering any such plan.”

A lesson in humility for the smug West

Posted on by Bob Pitt

William Dalrymple (2)“For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for all that is remarkable and beautiful in our art, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-defeating in western history.

“The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right….

“Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders ‘to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions’. It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.

“We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.”

William Dalrymple in the Sunday Times, 14 October 2007

Read the open letter itself (pdf) here.

See also Christian Science Monitor, 15 October 2007

For an alternative view of the Muslim scholars’ letter – “Masquerading as the promotion of peace through emphasising characteristics that these religions apparently share, it instead effectively puts a scimitar to the neck of the Christian church and says: ‘Peace on our terms'” – see Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 12 October 2007

Racist football fans get kicks from abusing Muslim players

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mido (2)Here are some sounds from the playing fields of Europe on an average Sunday: “Bin Laden! You know where he is!” “Have you got a first-aid kit or is that a suicide bomb?” No, it’s not what Italy’s Marco Materazzi told France’s Zinedine Zidane in the World Cup final. It’s what a Muslim football team in Luton, England hears all the time.

Yet Islamophobia is generally ignored. Nobody ever gets punished for it. After Newcastle supporters repeatedly chanted “Mido’s got a bomb” at Middlesbrough’s Egyptian striker in August, only one person was disciplined: Mido himself. He got a yellow card for running to the jeering fans with his finger to his lips after scoring.

Contrast this laxity with the multi-year ban on Blackburn fans caught abusing a black player, or with the anger in Britain when Chelsea manager Avram Grant experienced anti-Semitism, or when black England players were abused abroad. Piara Powar, head of the anti-racism group Kick It Out, believes people are more likely to “shrug” when Muslim players are abused than when blacks are. Powar says some think, “maybe they brought it on themselves”.

In all of Britain’s professional football, there are just a handful of British Muslims. Even Muslim spectators are so rare that when some north Africans and Iraqi Kurds bought tickets to watch Manchester United in 2004, it was assumed they wanted to blow up the stadium. Hundreds of police officers arrested the fans in dawn raids before the misunderstanding was cleared up.

Muslims are more common in amateur football, and so is Islamophobia. A study in west Yorkshire several years ago found that every Asian or black amateur interviewed had experienced racism. Just in case any religious Muslim women might want to play, Fifa recently banned them from doing so in hijab, supposedly for safety reasons, though so far no footballers have been killed by flying veils.

Financial Times, 13 October 2007

Amis wasn’t advocating oppression of Muslims, he was merely adumbrating

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin amisIn a letter in today’s Guardian Martin Amis expresses indignation that Terry Eagleton should take exception to his remarks about Muslims.

(Just to remind you what these were: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”)

As Mart explains: “I was not ‘advocating’ anything. I was conversationally describing an urge….” And in a letter to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent he offers a similar defence against Eagleton’s criticisms: “The anti-Muslim measures he says I ‘advocated’ I merely adumbrated….”

So that’s all right then.

For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 October 2007

Campaigns for ban on mosques across Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pro Koln demoFrom London’s docklands to the rolling hills of Tuscany, from southern Austria to Amsterdam and Cologne, the issue of Islamic architecture and its impact on citadels of “western civilisation” is increasingly contentious.

The far right is making capital from Islamophobia by focusing on the visible symbols of Islam in Europe. In Switzerland it is the far-right SVP that is setting the terms of the debate.

Next door in Austria the far right leader Jörg Haider is also calling for a ban in his province of Carinthia, even though there are few Muslims and no known plans for mosques. “Carinthia,” he said, “will be a pioneer in the battle against radical Islam for the protection of our dominant western culture.”

In Italy the mayors of Bologna and Genoa last month cancelled or delayed planning permission for mosques after a vociferous campaign by the far-right Northern League, one of whose leaders, Roberto Calderoli, threatened to stage a “day of pork” to offend Muslims and to take pigs to “defile” the site of the proposed mosque in Bologna.

While the far right makes the running, their noisy campaign is being supported more quietly by mainstream politicians and some Christian leaders. And on the left pro-secularist and anti-clericalist sentiment is also frequently ambivalent about Islamic building projects.

Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne has voiced his unease over a large new mosque being built for the city’s 120,000 Muslims in the Rhineland Roman Catholic stronghold. A similar scheme in Munich has also faced local protests.

The Bishop of Graz in Austria has been more emphatic. “Muslims should not build mosques which dominate town’s skylines in countries like ours,” said Bishop Egon Kapellari.

Guardian, 11 October 2007

‘Graves of 350,000 to make way for Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

That’s the headline to an Evening Standard story which reports the possible redevelopment of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in terms that echo the propaganda of the BNP:  “Officially it would be known as a ‘multi-faith’ cemetery but it is likely that it would principally answer calls for a Muslim graveyard in the largely-Asian East London borough. The local newspaper has been bombarded with letters from historians and nature lovers declaring: ‘There is no way we’ll allow them to dig up our ancestors’.”