Thousands more are stopped and searched after car bomb plot

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stop and SearchPolice are stopping 366 people every day in London under stringent anti-terror powers described by the official security legislation watchdog as “a significant intrusion into personal liberties”.

The number of random checks carried out in the capital increased fivefold to almost 11,000 last month in the aftermath of attempted car bomb attacks, when the threat level was raised to severe.

Scotland Yard said yesterday that it was encouraging beat officers to use their stop-and-search powers more often and more widely to deter further terrorist attacks. Commander Rod Jarman predicted “an increase in overt counter-terrorism activities by the police over the coming months”.

Scotland Yard said that 54 per cent of those stopped last month were white, compared with a 71 per cent white population in Greater London. The proportion of people of Asian ethnicity stopped was 24 per cent – double the percentage in the capital’s population.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “It is perhaps unsurprising that we have seen this massive increase in the number of stop-and-searches carried out in the immediate aftermath of the attempted car bomb attacks in June. However, questions remain regarding the actual effectiveness of such a strategy based on disruption – given the very low number of charges brought as a result – and whether it is actually doing more harm than good.”

Gareth Crossman, of Liberty, said: “Thousands of Terrorism Act stop-and-searches have produced hardly a single terrorism arrest. When not targeted against specific threats, Section 44 undermines community relations and wastes police resources.”

Times, 7 August 2007

Martin Bright repeats call for left-right alliance against ‘radical Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

James Silver interviews Martin Bright, political editor of the New Statesman and obsessive enemy of the Muslim Council of Britain. It contains the welcome news that Bright’s contact in the FCO, from whom he acquired the internal documents used in his witch-hunt of “Islamists”, has been identified and arrested. Bright also explains why he chose the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange to publish his pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: “I believe a coalition of left and right need to be built around this issue.”

Guardian, 6 August 2007

Kids told to write ‘Allah is God’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Angry parents have blasted a teacher for telling ten-year-olds to copy a Muslim prayer saying ‘There is no God but Allah’. Helen Green is said to have picked the Muslim call to prayer as HAND-WRITING practice. It includes the lines ‘Allah is the greatest’ and ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah’.

“Pupil Billy Darbyshire’s stepmum Hayley Clayton said: ‘The explanation was that the children were learning about Islam in RE. But this was like he was taking an oath. A Muslim child would never be asked to write a Bible passage. Why didn’t she choose a passage from a normal story book to teach handwriting?’ Hayley, 23, said Mrs Green – deputy head of Newlands Primary School in Wakefield, West Yorks – had acknowledged it was a ‘sensitive issue’ because three of the 7/7 suicide bombers came from Leeds, 15 miles away.”

Sun, 6 August 2007

European mosque plans face protests

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Petitions in London, protests in Cologne, a court case in Marseille and a violent clash in Berlin – Muslims in Europe are meeting resistance to plans for mosques that befit Islam’s status as the continent’s second religion.

Across Europe, Muslims who have long prayed in garages and old factories now face skepticism and concern for wanting to build stately mosques to give proud testimony to the faith and solidity of their Islamic communities.

Some critics reject them as signs of “Islamisation”. Others say minarets would scar their city’s skyline. Given the role some mosques have played as centers for terrorists, others see Muslim houses of worship as potential security threats.

“The increasingly visible presence of Muslims has prompted questions in all European societies,” Tariq Ramadan, one of Europe’s leading Muslim spokesmen, argued when far-right groups proposed this year to ban minarets in his native Switzerland.

The issue hit the headlines in Britain in late July when a petition against a “mega-mosque” next to the 2012 London Olympics site was posted on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Web site. It attracted more than 275,000 signatures before it was taken down.

In Germany last month, there were anti-mosque protests in Cologne and Berlin and a local council voted against one in Munich. A French far-right group vowed to sue the city of Marseille for a second time for helping build a “grand mosque”.

Bekir Alboga of the Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB) in Cologne said critics who see these new mosques as signs of separatism or of an Islamic colonization of Europe miss the point.

“The desire of Muslims to build a house of worship means they want to feel at home and live in harmony with their religion in a society they have accepted as theirs,” he said.

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Schools are run by Islamic group Blair pledged to ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shiv Malik continues the witch-hunt of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Sunday Times, 5 August 2007

See also the article in the Sunday Times Review by Tory shadow home secretary David Davis, which falsely accuses Hizb ut-Tahrir of sympathising with the recent terrorist attacks in Glasgow and London (read HT statement here) and concludes by asking us to “expect further calls to ban it”. No prizes for guessing where those calls will come from.

Flushing the Quran not a hate crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“One really has to wonder about the amount of time that the New York City police department has to deal with petty crime, but considering the amount of time it is spending to prosecute a book flushing it is no wonder al Qaeda is still looking at their city. Charges against Stanislav Shmulevich, a former Pace University student, for throwing a couple of Qurans in toilets are absurd on their face, but show that too many people are afraid to upset some in the Muslim faith just to keep their towns from burning….

“Muslim students are not only being coddled by the university, but also the state of New York. Charging a young man with vandalism is fine – he threw a book owned by Pace University into a toilet, but putting him on trial in a city where the reality of Islam showed itself on September 11, 2001 seems hardly to be a rational spending of taxpayer money…. So long as crimes are done in the name of Allah it seems only logical to follow that committing an act of civil disobedience against the book where radical Muslims find their courage to kill Americans is justified….

“The Quran gives comfort, indeed permission, to radical Muslims to blow us up. Would we disallow people to have thrown away Hitler’s books or Japan’s rantings during WWII? Of course not, but our war today is being fought ineffectively because America is too sensitive about how and who we fight. Those who kill us grasp the Quran before they go to bed at night and they praise Allah at their success….

“We’ve been asking ourselves for too long how we can live life free of the burden of worrying about offending Muslims. We’ve gone so far over the top to keep the so-called Muslim street happy that we cannot just call an act of vandalism an act of vandalism. No, sir – we have to appease Muslim students by calling water logging a book that some use to justify our death and destruction a hate crime.”

Steve Yuhas at The Conservative Voice, 4 August 2007

Osama strikes back

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Osama Saeed (4)“At the Scotland United Against Terror rally I was heckled by someone in the crowd.

“Nothing new in that, happens quite a bit, par for the course. Caught a glimpse of the bloke near the front, just looked like the normal vagrant, possibly drunk, but definitely looking a complete state. He disappeared shortly after – possibly he’d been taken away by the police. He’d actually been pulled up by one of the other attendees to whom he retorted he was an academic and therefore was under the impression that he was above everyone else and allowed to act like a berk. Then he was pulled up by another academic who was on hand.

“I’ve just been told that the vagrant in question, was actually Tom Gallagher.”

Osama Saeed replies to articles by Gallagher in the Spectator and the Herald and to Brian Monteith’s piece in the Edinburgh Evening News.

See here, here and here.

More bigotry from Rod Liddle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rod Liddle“Apparently, one in 11 British Muslims actively supports terrorist attacks over here and a further 20% or so ’empathise’ with those who carry out such attacks. This warning comes not from the BNP, but from a bloke called Haras Rafiq, who is an adviser to the government. I’d put the figures slightly higher – based on previous opinion poll findings – but Rafiq seems to be in the right sort of area. That’s something like 400,000-plus British citizens ready to either strap on the Semtex or smile indulgently while someone else does so.

“Who knows if this will come as a shock to the government, the leaders of Muslim organisations and the BBC which insist that terrorism has ‘nothing to do with Islam’ and that each act of carnage is simply the work of rogue nutters and wholly unconnected to the religion to which, seemingly by coincidence, they adhere.”

Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times, 5 August 2007

‘Racist’ letter sent to church

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A racist letter has been sent to members of a Lancashire church. The vicar and several parishioners at St Leonard’s Church in Penwortham have been contacted by a group calling themselves the Preston Pals, which has links to the far right BNP.

The letter asks the church to support their “cause” and stand up for Preston’s Christian population. They have previously leafleted residents in the Watling Street Road area of Fulwood peddling their opinions over proposals to replace the local mosque.

Vicar Nick Mansfield said he was shocked and upset that the church in Marshalls Brow had been targeted by the group, which has links to the British National Party. He condemned the senders of the letter as having “not a very Christian attitude”. He added: “To target people of another faith in this way is ludicrous.”

Lancashire Evening Post, 3 August 2007