A satirical US attack on a questionable conference has been taken seriously, a sad reflection on that country’s ability to debate Islam, argues Brian Whitaker.
‘Burqa’ allowed in Italy
Rome, October 9 – The decision by a northern Italian city official to allow Muslim women to wear the burqa has sparked consternation in the country, even though at least one minister supported the move. “We have already said several times, and we reiterate it now, that the use of the burqa is unacceptable,” said a spokesman for Interior Minister Giulio Amato.
A 1975 law, introduced amid concern over homegrown terrorism in the country’s cities, forbids Italians from appearing in public wearing anything which covers their faces. Apart from this law, which appears to apply to the burqa, many politicians on both sides of parliament said the garment was also a humiliating imposition. “I am indignant. Covering up women’s faces is an offence to their dignity,” said Equal Opportunities Minister Barbara Pollastrini.
Vittorio Capocelli, the prefect of Treviso in the Veneto region, decided on October 5 that it was acceptable for Muslim women in the city to wear the garment as long as they were ready to remove it and identify themselves to police when required. A day later Family Minister Rosy Bindi, a prominent Catholic politician, indicated her agreement, saying that it was right to be “respectful of the veil” as long as women wore it of their own free will.
The apparent green light for the burqa drew a stinging editorial from Egyptian-born writer and journalist Magdi Allam in Tuesday’s edition of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s best-selling daily. “If the prefect’s decision sets a legal and administrative precedent on a national level, Islamic women could soon be going to school completely covered, be getting hired in workplaces and circulating freely all over Italy,” he wrote.
Bakersfield mosque attack investigated as hate crime
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – Kern County Sheriff’s deputies are investigating a mosque attack as a possible hate crime. Authorities say Saturday’s incident left windows broken, cars smashed and worshippers frightened.
Witnesses reported that two men entered the women’s section of the mosque early Saturday morning. When the women called for help, the suspects left, allegedly yelling slurs such as “Arab terrorists” and “terrorists go home” as they ran out.
Later that night, witnesses said about 10 people returned to the mosque. They allegedly smashed the windows and damaged the cars that remained in the parking lot.
A spokesman with the sheriff’s department says when deputies arrived, they saw some people throwing rocks at the mosque. No arrests have been made in the case.
Islamophobia began with end of Cold War, OSCE meeting hears
Islamophobia gathered pace in the West with the end of the Cold War, long before the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US, participants at a two-day OSCE conference that began in Spain Tuesday said.
“After the end of the Cold War, certain people took Muslims and Islam to be the new scapegoat and enemy,” Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers, told AFP on the sidelines of the gathering. “But after the senseless act of September 11, this has been amplified,” added Cherif, who is known for his commitment to battling religious hatred.
Delegations from the 56 nations that make up the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are taking part in the conference in the southern Spanish city of Cordoba on the topic of intolerance toward Muslims. Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE, which promotes human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in Europe, North America and Central Asia.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mussa told the gathering that after the end of the Cold War, “conservative extremists in certain Western circles” needed to find a new enemy. “We can’t live in stability and security if some are perceived as first class citizens and others second class citizens. This has to disappear,” he added.
Studies by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia have found anti-Muslim behaviour and attitudes have risen since 2001, said Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos. “Without a doubt, international terrorism has fueled this phenomena,” added Moratinos who is chairing the gathering.
Muslims in Europe face discrimination when it comes to employment, education and housing, said Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos, the head of research and data collection at the Vienna-based European Fundamental Rights Agency.
Denmark: rightwing populists incite rise in xenophobia
Denmark: rightwing populists incite rise in xenophobia
From Anne Jessen for Demos and Antifa-Net in Copenhagen
Searchlight, October 2007
INTOLERANCE TOWARDS Muslims in Denmark is growing according to several recent reports that strongly criticise the government’s policies towards immigrants, refugees and ethnic minorities.
At the beginning of 2006 Denmark’s image took a battering as Muslim protests against the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons of Muhammad dominated the international news. Since then the media spotlight has turned away and the Danish government’s hard line on ethnic minorities has resumed. Although the country is governed by a liberal-conservative coalition, the rightwing populist Danish People’s Party (DFP) wields decisive influence over immigration policy.
Amnesty International’s annual report published this summer emphasises that ethnic minority groups suffer discrimination, especially Muslims, and points out that since the cartoons controversy the number of politically motivated attacks on Muslims has increased but this has not been matched by charges brought for violating anti-racism laws.
Amnesty’s report confirmed the findings of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which commented in a report issued in March this year that the Danish jobs market discriminates against foreigners. It said that Denmark has the lowest proportion of employed immigrants out of all the OECD’s 30 member states and that the education system has failed the younger generation of immigrants.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe also censured the Danish government over the situation of Muslims in Denmark in a report prepared in July 2006 but only reported in the Danish media in April. The report’s author, Ömür Orhun, pointed out that the situation of Muslims in Denmark has worsened over the past five years. He criticised the radical aliens legislation, which limits the access of Muslims to the social security system, and blamed the government for the absence of legal mosques and Muslim cemeteries, the requirement for newborn Muslim children to be registered with the Christian church and the fact that anti-racism legislation is rarely enforced.
In May last year the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) expressed its anxiety at increasing xenophobia and intolerance towards Muslims in Denmark. ECRI’s report pointed out that DFP members are able to make shockingly racist statements in public without political or legal consequences.
Both the Danish government and the DFP consistently reject criticism of their positions. Mogens Camre, a DFP Member of the European Parliament, unhesitatingly spells out his agenda: “We must quit the refugee convention of the UN, we must block the civil rights embodied by the European Union charter which are directed against Europeans and we must amend the legal and penal codes to make it possible to defend democracy and throw political-religious leaders, criminals and parasites out of the country.”
Quebec – political courage needed on accommodation
“Quebecers strongly oppose almost any cultural or religious accommodation of immigrants and other minority Quebecers, according to survey findings published yesterday in La Presse. The findings are a sobering measure of the size of the problem Quebec faces and a clear indication that some political courage is going to be needed.
“The poll results are dramatic: A hijab on the soccer pitch? 70 per cent of respondents are against. Turbans for Sikh Mounties? Nearly 80 per cent against. The kirpan? Female-only swimming? Male-only driving testers for Hasidic Jews? No, no, and no, by large margins. People of common sense and goodwill can certainly disagree on many of these issues. But in Quebec’s current happy social context these strikingly one-sided results – if not the entire debate – seem to us somewhat irrational….
“So why all this opposition? One figure offers a hint: 58 per cent object to providing prayer spaces in public buildings. That’s far fewer naysayers than on most such issues.
“This leads us to suspect that the less visible a practice, the more acceptable it’s deemed. Praying to Allah or anyone else is bothersome to fewer old-stock Quebecers if done in private; but Heaven (so to speak) help the 13-year-old girl who wears a scarf to play soccer. Even the Quebec Council on the Status of Women, an organization dedicated to social equality, is campaigning to forbid public-sector employees from displaying any overt signs of culture or religion.
“It’s doing this in the name of a secular state, but the subtext is far different. If an SAAQ clerk or a teacher is barred by law from wearing a hijab, a turban or a kippa, what is the message? What is retained – by adults and kids – is that there’s something wrong with these symbols – and, by extension, their wearers.
“There is some good news in the survey. Younger Quebecers revealed themselves to be far more accommodating than their elders. That openness bodes well for the long term.”
Leader in the Montreal Gazette, 10 October 2007
No more torture in our name
No more torture in our name
By Louise Nousratpour
Morning Star, 10 October 2007
AMNESTY International UK launched a hard-hitting campaign on Monday against human rights abuses in the name of the “war on terror.” The human rights organisation called on people to make a stand against terrorism and against civil liberties being eroded by governments claiming to fight al-Qaida. The billboard and internet campaign is called Unsubscribe, after the process that internet users use to reject unwanted emails.
Speaking at a launch event in Birmingham, Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: “Unsubscribe is about rejecting the false choice between terrorism on the one hand and abuse of human rights on the other.” She stressed people’s opposition to the government’s detention without charge or trial of terror suspects under the pretext of national security. “They believe people have a right to know why they are being detained and they believe in the right to have a fair trial if someone is suspected of a serious offence,” Ms Allen added.
As part of the campaign, Amnesty has launched a powerful new two-minute drama film depicting the suffering of a hooded prisoner undergoing “stress and duress” torture by an unnamed man in plain clothes. In the film, which is called Waiting for the Guard and can be seen online at www.unsubscribe-me.org, the prisoner is seen stripped to his underwear in an underground chamber and forced to sit with his head a knee level.
Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said that the Unsubscribe film brought back unpleasant memories. “You cannot imagine that happening to anybody, let alone yourself,” said Mr Begg, who was held without charge for two years at the notorious US prison camp. “The way that I tried almost to tackle it was to say that it didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else.”
Mr Begg said that worse abuses of human rights go on in “ghost” detention camps, referring to widely reported secret CIA “torture camps” that are scattered across the world. “These kinds of things continue to exist. Perhaps they don’t happen at Guantanamo any more, but there are other sites that people have to pass through,” he warned. “By the time I was sent to Guantanamo, I was looking forward to it.”
National Union of Students president Gemma Tumulty said that the campaign would give millions of students in Britain a voice to their “instinctive feeling that something has been going badly wrong in the ‘war on terror’.”
Amnesty will also display a series of hard-hitting billboard posters across the country. They will reproduce some of the most infamous images of human rights abuses from the “war on terror”. The images include an Abu Ghraib prisoner in Iraq being attacked by a dog and a Guantanamo Bay detainee being abused. The posters all bear the message Unsubscribe and will be displayed during October on the streets of Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.
Laughing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’
“An ex-senator that opposes individual rights of women; a pundit that calls people ‘faggots’ and considers Islam a ‘cult’; a Christian scholar who is considered a ‘polemicist’ and an ‘Islamophobe’ by conservative Christians themselves; and an intellectual who has received millions from ‘far right’ organizations since 2001, are rising up for the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities in the Muslim world. This laughable spectacle is called the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It will be coming to a university near you on October 22-26.”
Ali Eteraz at the Huffington Post, 8 October 2007
Rebuking obnoxious views
Terry Eagleton explains his recent much-publicised polemic against Martin Amis and replies to critics:
“In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published last month, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. ‘The Muslim community’, he wrote, ‘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…’
“Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic….
“Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.”
Here at Islamophobia Watch we are of course rooting for Professor Eagleton. However, in the interests of accuracy, we should point out that Amis’s disgraceful comments in fact appeared in an interview with Ginny Dougary published in the Times Magazine in September 2006.
Jon Gaunt rallies to the defence of ‘our tolerant society’
Yes, I know. It’s a bit like the Ku Klux Klan speaking out in support of equality.
Fanatical docs make me sick
By Jon Gaunt
Sun, 9 October 2007
LAST week Muslim zealots were refusing to sell alcohol in Sainsbury’s but this week the lunatics have really taken over the asylum. We now learn that some Muslim trainee doctors are refusing to treat people with drink or sexual problems.
These pious prats won’t be allowed to qualify as doctors if they refuse these aspects of their training, so instead of dithering and wasting our taxes on any more education for these fanatics we should simply tell them to fit in or ship out.
We should also not fall into the trap of thinking this is just an isolated incident, especially after the capitulation of Sainsbury’s over alcohol and now the news that Boots are allowing Muslim pharmacists the right to refuse to dispense the morning-after pill.
All of these zealots think they can get away with these outrages because we have singularly failed to tell people who want to live in this great country that they have to fit in with our way of life.
Even after 7/7 this Government still has the backbone of a blancmange when it comes to dealing with Muslims. Forget concerns about Islamophobia – we should be more concerned with how Muslims seem to be treated with kid gloves.
While the rest of the majority population are told to understand and tolerate their religion, certain members of the Muslim community seem to have carte blanche to walk all over our customs and traditions.
This week the amoebas in Government failed to ban outright the full veil in classrooms, leaving the decision with individual head teachers rather than laying down the law as they have done in France.
Some say we should ban all religious symbols in school but I disagree. This is a Christian country and 72 per cent of us in the last census professed to being Christian and there is a world of difference between a crucifix, a turban, a skullcap and the veil.
This face covering is not a religious symbol but is clearly a sign of repression and oppression. A woman can look modest without resorting to looking like a Dalek and almost becoming invisible in our modern liberal, tolerant society.