The BNP’s new intellectual guru

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HateThe anti-fascist magazine Searchlight investigates the British National Party’s efforts to win respectability by covering “its racist anti-Muslim bashing with a quasi-intellectual veneer”. According to their report:

“A key figure in this process is a name unfamiliar to most. Described by John Bean, lifelong fascist officer and editor of Identity, as ‘the BNP economics guru’, Alan Goodacre has come from nowhere to command a key role in the formation of BNP policy…. According to Bean, Goodacre is also editor of the BNP’s Jihad Watch bulletin, one of several subscription email bulletins that the BNP sends out, which contain not original research but a highly selective set of press cuttings that give the deliberately distorted impression of an impending demographic and economic collapse: an acute blend of paranoia and fantasy dressed up as news.

“Goodacre also stated his intention to try and gain the help of Adrian Morgan who writes regularly for the Western Resistance website and has previously contributed to the Guardian and New Scientist and was once a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. Morgan also contributes to the ‘Islam Watch’ website … which would explain Goodacre’s interest in him. Indeed, Goodacre’s evident Islamophobia led him to write a letter to the Jewish Chronicle claiming that the party had genuinely repudiated anti-semitism and no longer denied the Holocaust (which is news to us), while appealing to British Jews to understand that the BNP ‘are the only party in Britain that is truly fighting the Islamofascist threat’.”

Searchlight, March 2007

Muslim women lose swimming pool discrimination case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two Muslim mothers in Sweden on Wednesday lost a discrimination case against an indoor swimming pool where the lifeguards had asked them to remove their veils and body-covering clothing.

The Gothenburg court ruled the municipal pool had not discriminated against the women. It ordered the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination, which had brought the case on their behalf, to pay the City of Gothenburg’s costs of 30,850 kronor (4,375 dollars, 3,330 euros).

The women, Houda Morabet and Hayal Eroglu, were at the pool separately on two different occasions in April 2004, accompanying their young children but not to swim themselves. Both were wearing veils, long pants and long-sleeved tee-shirts because their religion does not allow them to reveal parts of their body in public.

The ombudsman argued in court that the lifeguards’ insistence that they change into tee-shirts was an act of discrimination.

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Straw: ‘big cultural divide’ between Muslims and the rest of British society

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jack Straw waded into a race row again last night by calling on Asian women to learn English before being allowed to settle in the UK. The Leader of the House of Commons also said there was a “big cultural divide” between Muslims and the rest of British society.

The Labour MP’s comments come just four months after he stirred up fury by calling on Muslim women to remove their veils, describing the garment as a “symbol of separation”.

Speaking at an integration conference in his constituency in Blackburn, Lancs, he said he knew a family who moved to the UK in 1954 but the woman could still not speak a word of English. Mr Straw said: “One of the things we should be looking at is the subject of Asian women speaking English and whether we need to engage them and require them to speak English before they are given a settlement visa.”

He added: “One of the things we need to recognise is that there is a big cultural divide between Muslims and the rest of us, more than say with the Afro-Caribbean community.”

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Why socialists should resist Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Deepa KumarAn excellent article by Deepa Kumar in the US Marxist journal International Socialist Review analyses the “orientalist” ideological roots and pro-imperialist mythology of Islamophobia. She concludes:

“Confronting Islamophobia and challenging American racism towards the people of the Middle East is an essential precondition for the rebirth of a strong antiwar movement…. And while Bush argues that ‘the calling of our generation’ is to fight ‘Islamofascism’, we need to assert instead that the calling of our generation is to build an anti-racist antiwar movement that can challenge the attacks on Muslims and Arabs domestically and that can stop U.S. imperialism in its tracks and shape the course of the twenty-first century. Our future, quite literally, depends on building such a movement.”

ISR, March-April 2007

For orientalism, see also Grace Lally’s article in Socialist Worker, 24 February 2007

Daniel Pipes fights the worldwide threat of Islamism — from Malibu

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Pipes calls himself a ‘soldier’ in the war against Islamic fundamentalism…. He soon plans to unveil Islamist Watch, a Web site which he describes as an attempt to monitor nonviolent radical Islam in the West…. Like his father, Daniel Pipes has a reputation for bluntness and a willingness to go against conventional wisdom – both in the academy and elsewhere. Whereas Richard Pipes sounded the alarm against appeasing the Soviets, Daniel Pipes preaches against working with radical Muslims, no matter how law-abiding, scholarly or open-minded they might appear. Instead, ‘like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan’, Pipes said, ‘Islamists should be ostracized socially and politically’.”

Jewish Journal, 6 March 2007

‘How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The appalling Phyllis Chesler (the US feminist who has compared Tariq Ramadan to Hitler) complains that “Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist ‘Islamophobe’ for arguing that Islam … is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West.”

Times, 7 March 2007

The so-called “landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida” that Chesler is so enthusiastic about is also boosted by the likes of Family Security Matters and Front Page Magazine.

World’s soccer chiefs chicken out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Accusing of the International Football Association Board of “pointless cowardice” over the Asmahan Mansour case, the Montreal Gazette also lays into the Quebec Soccer Federation, who were responsible for banning her in the first place:

“You don’t have to be Muslim to wonder how a scarf, especially if tucked in at the neck, can be dangerous. One could even make a case that an exposed pony tail – common enough on the pitch – could conceivably be riskier than covered hair. So the Quebec Soccer Federation now needs to explain itself. Can it cite safety studies? Offer horrible examples of death by hijab? Provide any defence at all of this narrow-minded ruling? If not, it should reverse itself.”

Montreal Gazette, 6 March 2007

See also “FIFA hijab ruling deserves red card”, Edmonton Journal, 6 March 2007

Anti-terror laws: many arrested, few convicted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Government’s campaign to tackle the “terrorist threat” was again questioned today as the Home Office released the latest statistics on individuals arrested under anti-terrorism laws. Of the 1,166 arrested in the UK since September 11 2001, only 40 have been convicted under anti-terrorism legislation. More than half of those suspected of being terrorists of one form or another have been released without any charge at all.

Ummah Pulse, 6 March 2007

See also Press Association, 5 March 2007