Experts sound alarm on rising Islamophobia in Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe and governments should do more to protect the continent’s 15 million Muslims from discrimination, experts meeting in Spain said Monday.

“The situation is very serious,” said Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers who is known for his commitment to battling religious hatred. “Islamophobia is a rising phenomena,” added Jasser Auda of Britain’s Forum Against Racism and Islamophobia, which is made up of representatives of the British Muslim community.

The two were speaking at a meeting in the southern Spanish city of Jaen of some 30 non-governmental organisations from across Europe. The gathering was held ahead of the start on Tuesday in the nearby city of Cordoba of a two-day conference on the issue organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE, which promotes human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in Europe, North America and Central Asia.

Participants said there was no easy solution to fighting Islamophobia. Turkish State Minister Meymet Aydın underlined the need to help Western societies undestand Islam.

“It is good to attract the attention of governments on the issue, to increase their level of awareness,” said Aydin Suer, the spokesman for Femyso, a confederation of Muslim youth groups from 22 European nations.

“The problems are complex, the solutions themselves are complex,” said Suer. Muslims could not just blame media stereotypes for the problem, he added. “We Muslims need to question ourselves,” he said.

The non-governmental organisations will present a list of recommendations on how to tackle the problem to delegations from the 56 nations that make up the OSCE, and that are set to take part in the Cordoba conference.

“This will be the message from civil society” to the government representatives gathered in Cordoba, said Spain’s special ambassador for relations with Muslim communities, Jose Maria Ferre.

Cordoba was chosen as the host for the event because for centuries the city was a symbolic centre of coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The city hosted an OSCE conference on anti-Semitism in 2005.

AFP, 8 October 2007

Anti-Muslim preacher ‘prepares’ Australian politician for prime ministership

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Peter CostelloThe leader of a Christian group that advocates the destruction of mosques, casinos and bottle shops has met Peter Costello to “prophetically prepare” the Treasurer for the prime ministership.

Mr Costello and John Howard held private meetings with Catch the Fire leader Danny Nalliah in August, the same month the Prime Minister met with the leaders of the Exclusive Brethren, which prohibits voting and modern technology.

Mr Nalliah said in a letter to Christians that the Lord had told him to spend “personal time” with Mr Howard and to prepare Mr Costello as the “future prime minister”.

The Catch The Fire ministries sparked a row with the Islamic Council of Victoria in 2002 when it claimed in a newsletter that Muslims were demons training to make Australia an Islamic state, that the Koran promoted violence and that Muslims derived money from drug dealing.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Mr Nalliah and colleague Daniel Scot had vilified Islam under the state’s 2002 Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. However, the Victorian Court of Appeal quashed the order, ruling the VCAT had not used the proper legal test for incitement and so sent it back for a review, where the dispute was mediated.

Mr Costello wrote a letter of support to Mr Nalliah during his legal battle.

The Australian, 8 October 2007

‘Army forks out for 95 hijabs’

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“Politically correct MoD officials are to issue free hijabs to female Muslim troops – while front line soldiers are having to buy their own kit. Under new service dress regulations, six of the Islamic hijabs will be given to each Muslim servicewoman wanting them. But it has sparked fury amid an MoD cash crisis. Squaddies also claim the hand-out is unfair as they pay out of their own pockets to observe strict military dress rules.”

Sun, 8 October 2007

‘Islam is Peace for Britain?’ Robert Spencer thinks not

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Islam is Peace campaign has failed to impress the proprietor of Jihad Watch. Robert Spencer complains:

“There is not one word about fighting against the jihadist ideology of Islamic supremacism within English mosques and Islamic schools. Instead, point one of the campaign is to fight against undefined Islamophobia, as if the only reason why anyone regarded Muslims with suspicion was because of bigotry and hatred by non-Muslims. Well, I’ve got news for you. If ‘Islamophobia’ actually exists at all, it is a result of the over nine thousand violent attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam since 9/11.”

Human Events, 8 October 2007

See Jihad Watch video here.

Note Spencer’s use of an interview with Anjem Choudary to illustrate the mainstream Muslim view concerning attacks on innocent people. Spencer does not of course mention that Choudary is the leader of a tiny group of extremist nutters who represent next to nothing within Islam in the UK. But, to take the charitable view, it may well be that he doesn’t even know that. After all, this is the same Robert Spencer who once assured his readers that Al-Muhajiroun was “Britain’s largest Muslim group“.

Fascists resist the ‘creeping Islamification’ of death

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tower Hamlets CemeteryThe London Borough of Tower Hamlets is considering a proposal to re-open a disused cemetery as a multi-faith burial ground. Predictably, the British National Party has responded with a typical piece entitled “Tower Hamlets: Our dead to be dug up to make room for Muslims?”

According to the fascists: “hundreds of thousands of British bodies may be exhumed if Muslim-friendly Tower Hamlets council gives the go-ahead…. Apparently the local Islamic community ‘need’ a specific burial site – as cremation is not for them. And, in the best traditions of appeasement, the local council is determined that they shall have one…. Labour’s environment spokesman in Tower Hamlets, one Abdal Ullah, said: ‘To preserve the respect and dignity for everyone, I think most of the graves would have to be cleared out and we’d start afresh.’ And the remains of our British ancestors dumped where exactly Abdul? … Even in death, apparently, we are not free from creeping Islamification.”

BNP regional voices, 8 October 2007

Update:  Readers will be pleased to hear that the threat to Western civilisation has apparently receded. The BNP now reports that it has received a communication from Denise Jones, leader of Tower Hamlets Council, who states: “With regards to Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, there are currently no plans to re-open it as a cemetery.”

The English Defence League: not suited but booted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anindya Bhattacharyya provides a useful summary of the campaign by anti-racists against the English Defence League. He notes: “the fact that racist groups such as the EDL have taken to the streets with an explicitly anti-Muslim agenda has clarified what is at stake. Arguments about the nature of Islamophobia that had until now been primarily ideological are now being played out on the streets”.

Socialist Review, October 2009

Now Italy considers banning the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Italy today became the latest European government to announce it was considering introducing a law which would make wearing a burqa illegal. MPs from the anti-immigration Northern League party, a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling right wing coalition, have presented the proposal in a bill. It comes just weeks after France also said that it was considering making the wearing of burqas by Muslim women illegal.

Daily Mail, 7 October 2009

‘Fear of giving offence is killing our culture’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Minette Marrin (2)Minette Marrin complains that the struggle against the civilisation-sapping ideology of multiculturalism is not over yet:

“For at least 20 years there was a debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty self-loathing…. Even the phrase ‘host culture’ was considered unacceptable. We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure….

“It might seem, superficially, that the Victoria Climbié report and the massacre of 7/7 in London, among other shocks, have brought us back at last to our cultural senses and our cultural self-respect. Not entirely so, unfortunately…. A week ago The Sunday Times reported that some Muslim workers in Sainsbury’s are refusing to check out purchases of alcohol on the debatable ground that it’s against their religion.”

Well, actually, it was just the one Muslim worker in a single branch of Sainsbury’s. But why quibble over figures when the very future of “our” culture is at stake? Marrin continues:

“This is preposterous and a depressing sign of the times. But the painful truth is it would be just as preposterous to blame the Sainsbury’s Muslims. For years now ethnic minorities have been encouraged to insist on their cultural differences and on their human right to have these differences respected and actively promoted….

“Surely the fault lies with Sainsbury’s, for cultural funk. And it lies with all those others who out of some strange abandonment of common sense – such as the government’s laissez-faire guidelines on wearing Muslim veils in schools last week – bottle out.”

Sunday Times, 7 October 2007

Elsewhere in the same issue, the paper follows up last week’s exposé of cultural surrender at Sainsbury’s with another article, “Muslim medical students get picky“, which claims:

“Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex.”

“Some … some … a small number” – and how many Muslim medical students, roughly, might that be? Of course, we’re not told. Although, to be fair to the Sunday Times, its intrepid reporters have come up with a further shocking revelation: “At a Sainsbury’s store in Nottingham, a pharmacist named Ahmed declined to provide the pill to a female reporter posing as a customer”. So that makes one Sainsbury’s employee who opts out of selling alcohol, two who’ve been given exemption from stacking the drinks shelves, and one who avoids selling the pill. Clearly, the foundations of Western civilisation are under mass assault from the Muslim hordes.

Meanwhile, over at the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance, one Mark Alexander (who’s apparently the author of a book entitled The Dawning of a New Dark Age: A Collection of Essays on Islam) offers his take on the Sunday Times report:

“This latest story about the obstreperousness of trainee Muslim medical students should alarm us all. It is a harbinger of the nightmare that awaits us all in the West as a result of allowing far, far too many Muslims into the Judeo-Christian West…. If something isn’t done about the Muslim problem, then it is only a matter of time before blood will be shed. Not in the operating theatres, but in the streets.”

And the fascists of the British National Party (who are becoming great fans of the Sunday Times) present the report as evidence that “the country moves unceasingly and unchallenged to becoming part ofDar-ul-Islam (the world of Islam)”.

BNP news article, 7 October 2007

Cf. The letter of appreciation to Sainsbury’s from Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain.

See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 8 October 2007

Spain to host Islamophobia summit

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mesquita CordobaSpain will host a two-day international conference to discuss the roots of discrimination and hostility toward Muslims in the West. The conference is held under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the historical city of Cordoba in southern Spain, once the symbol of Islamic civilization in the Iberian peninsula.

High-ranking delegations from the 56 OSCE member states from Europe and Central Asia as well as non-governmental organizations will take part in the conference which focuses on intolerance toward Muslims, its consequences and the role of media, AFP reported. The event is part of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s diplomatic push for an international effort to resolve cultural and religious differences, especially between the Western and Muslim world.

Press TV, 7 October 2007

US Congress – appeasers of jihadism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The US House of Representatives has adopted a resolution commemorating Ramadan, which “recognizes the Islamic faith as one of the great religions of the world” and “expresses its deepest respect to Muslims in the United States and throughout the world on this significant occasion”.

The British National Party cannot restrain its indignation: “With ‘allies’ like those in the US Congress, who needs a fifth column of jihadists preparing for a fundamentalist take-over of Europe?”

BNP news report, 5 October 2007