When Muslims are charged with something the word Islam or Muslim is attached to whatever crime they are accused of, and the story makes the front page headlines, when they are found not guilty or innocent, that goes somewhere on the back pages in small print.
Sheila Musaji lists some examples.
“The word ‘appeasement’ is rarely used except in the context of Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in 1938, but what about the present appeasement of Muslims in Britain? … We are told that Islam itself cannot be blamed for the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like saying that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity….
“Islam has failed to moderate its cruel practices to the extent that mainstream Christianity has done in the past couple of centuries. The Taliban, Al-Qa’eda, and the Badr Corps are certainly extremist, but they are orthodox, deriving logically from the Koran, which denigrates women and tells believers to wage jihad against heretics and infidels.”
Barbara Smoker, the former long-time president of the National Secular Society, writes in the latest issue of (pdf) Gay Humanist Quarterly.
GHQ is edited by Brett Lock of OutRage! by the way.
Readers of Islamophobia Watch will no doubt also be aware that the publishers of GHQ, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, underwent an acrimonious split in 2005 over the publication of racist anti-Muslim material in their then magazine Gay and Lesbian Humanist. (See here, here, here, here, here and here.) GHQ is published by the faction within GALHA who supposedly rejected Islamophobic bigotry! Perhaps the two sides should consider getting back together.
It might be noted that in addition to Barbara Smoker GALHA’s vice-presidents include Labour MEP Michael Cashman, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and London Assembly member Darren Johnson of the Green Party. It might be an idea to draw their attention to the contents of GALHA’s current magazine.
Update: For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 7 March 2007
The Muslim community is overly sensitive and is the only migrant group to have plotted violence against Australia, Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell has claimed.
Dr Pell said integration was a “key tool” for a harmonious and secular democratic society. “Equal rights however, carry with them equal responsibilities – problems arise when minorities demand special consideration that places them outside the law as it applies to other citizens,” he said.
“Flexibility and adaptability are called for when refugees and immigrants arrive in our country but there is a limit in (adopting) minority demands beyond which a democratic host society cannot go without losing its identity.”
For earlier statements on Islam by Cardinal Pell, see here and here.
Over at the Guardian‘s Comment is Free, Sue Blackmore defends the publication of Islamophobic material in the Clare College student magazine Clareification on the grounds that “it’s offensive, and funny, and that’s what satire is all about”.
In the interests of defending the absolute right to engage in satire, and in order to provide some historical background to this principle, perhaps Sue Blackmore could do a follow-up post defending the right of Der Stürmer to publish anti-semitic caricatures. She could entitle it: “Julius Streicher – what a laugh”.
Australians’ worries about the threat of terrorism posed by Muslims falls dramatically once they have a chance to hear all sides of the issue. That is the finding of before-and-after polling of 329 randomly selected people who attended a national conference on attitudes to Muslims in Canberra at the weekend.
The “national deliberative poll” taken before the conference found 49 per cent thought incompatibility between Muslim and Western values was a big contributor to terrorism. That figure fell to 22 per cent when the same people were polled yesterday, after spending two days hearing views ranging from hostile to sympathetic about the presence of Islam in Australia.
A similar trend emerged on related issues. Before the conference 44 per cent thought Muslims coming to Australia had made a bad impact on national security; that dropped to 23 per cent yesterday. More than one third thought beforehand that Muslims were a threat to the Australian way of life, but that fell to 21 per cent.
An 11-year-old Ottawa girl who was ejected from a soccer game because she was wearing a hijab is disappointed that the sport’s international governing body has decided to uphold the referee’s decision.
The International Football Association Board had been asked to consider the case of Asmahan Mansour, who was recently ejected from an indoor game in Laval, Que., for wearing a headscarf. The referee said the hijab, traditional headgear for Muslim girls, was a safety concern.
“Hundreds of thousands of Muslim girls are to be banned from wearing veils at school, the News of the World can reveal. Headteachers will be told they can outlaw the full-face cover-ups under new rules being drawn up by Education Secretary Alan Johnson. Schools can already ban teachers from wearing niqabs, which cover the entire face apart from a slit for the eyes. And now pupils across Britain will be told they can’t wear them either…. Mr Johnson’s move has been welcomed by moderate Muslims. Dr Taj Hargey, of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, said: ‘This is fantastic news. It is wrong for Muslims to be given special treatment’.”
News of the World, 4 March 2007
“It’s pretty clear that the NSS have lost their way, and now come across as an extremely bitter bunch of people railing against the religious in manner in which they would heap opprobrium if it was the other way round.”
Osama Saeed takes on Terry Sanderson and the NSS.
Norwegian anti-immigration politicians in Bergen have promised to chase off Muslims with pigs feet and squealing noises if Bergen’s central square is used for prayers.
The leader of the Demokratene, an extreme populist party formed by outcasts of the populist Progress Party, Vidar Kleppe, said Wednesday that he backed the remarks of city council representative Kenneth Rasmussen.
Rasmussen reacted with threats of porcine tactics after Labour Party politician Jerad Abdelmajid said that the city’s Muslims could take their Friday prayers in Torgallmenningen, Bergen’s central square, when they will be without a mosque from March 31. Building of a new mosque is behind schedule.
“I completely agree with Kenneth Rasmussen that Muslims having their Friday prayers with their butts in the air in the city center is no solution. They can find other places,” Kleppe told news agency NTB.
Kenneth Rasmussen told newspaper Dagbladet‘s web site that Bergen residents should hang up pig’s feet and play pig squeals over loudspeakers to scare off Muslims, and claimed these tactics worked when he was a soldier for the United Nations in Somalia and Lebanon in the 1990s.
Help! It appears that “the very cultural stability of the Queen’s country is at stake, as the cries for Sharia ring louder and broader than ever” – according to Marc Sheppard, writing at The American Thinker, 2 March 2007