Europe muzzles Muslim intellectuals

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Several prominent Muslim intellectuals are increasingly being barred from addressing international gatherings and delivering lectures across Europe on the grounds of extremism or anti-Semitism.

“We face many hurdles while planning for our annual Bourget conference,” Lhaj Thami Breze, Chairman of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), told IslamOnline.net. “We want to invite prominent Muslim scholars from around the world but are always confronted with a long blacklist of people we can not invite.”

The four-day Bourget conference, the biggest Muslim convention in Europe, attracted last year more than 150,000 Muslims from across the continent. “Many moderate Muslims from the East and West, including prominent European thinkers, are banned from attending,” Breze said.

He cited Swiss-based prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and his brother Hany, the director of the Islamic Center in Geneva.

Islam Online, 28 February 2007

Dudley mosque bid thrown out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No mosque here 3

An £18 million mosque and community centre for Dudley has been thrown out against the advice of planning experts – but the battle will almost certainly continue with an appeal.

One man was arrested during scuffles outside the meeting to consider the plan which prompted the biggest protest campaign in memory.

Anti-mosque campaigners cheered after proposals for a £6 million mosque with 65ft minaret and £12 million community centre were rejected by all nine members of the planning committee. But chairman of Dudley Muslim Association Khurshid Ahmed today said the bid to build the mosque would almost certainly continue.

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‘Not possible to modernize Islam’ says WPI representative

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spiegel interviews Mina Ahadi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, who has set up a “Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany”. Ahadi launches an attack on mainstream Muslim organisations in Germany: “They want to force women to wear the headscarf. They promote a climate in which girls aren’t allowed to have boyfriends or go to discos and in which homosexuality is demonized. I know Islam and for me it means death and pain.”

Spiegel, 27 February 2007

The co-founder of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, one Arzu Toker, used the press launch to claim that Islam “humiliates women and turns them into servants of the men”. She refused to distinguish between Islam and extremist fundamentalism, claiming that that “Islam is inherently radical”. Comrade Ahadi added: “I know all about political Islam. It ends up with us being stoned to death, even here in Germany.”

Monsters and Critics, 28 February 2007

Islam is taking over, says Dutch politician

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An anti-immigrant politician is making a meteoric rise with his call on the Dutch – once one of the most tolerant nations in the world – to stop Islam taking over Europe.

Geert Wilders, the 43-year-old leader of the Freedom Party, is convinced that governments are being forced to accommodate a “tsunami of Islamisation” that is fundamentally incompatible with European social values.

“Islam itself is the problem. Islam is a violent religion,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “The Prophet Mohammed was a violent man. The Koran is mostly a violent book. We should invest in Muslim people but they have to first get rid of half the Koran and half of their beliefs,” he said.

The Freedom Party has jumped from six to 10 per cent in opinion polls since November. His passionate campaign for a ban on the Islamic veil, or burqa, in public places is gaining such momentum that the country’s new coalition government could be forced to introduce the ban it does not support.

On the burqa, Mr Wilders is adamant: “It is a medieval token of a barbaric time, of how not to treat women, even if they want to wear it themselves,” he argues.

Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2007

There should be no covering-up in court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Barbara Hewson argues that allowing Muslim women to wear the veil in courtrooms is an affront to open justice and (you can hear this coming can’t you?) Enlightenment values:

“A critic of multiculturalism in the UK, Elie Barnavi, argues in the recent best-selling essay Les Religions Meurtrieres (Murderous Religions) that Europe needs to recall its own bitter experiences of religious extremism and religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in order to counter Islamic fundamentalism effectively today. Europe’s current separation of state and church reflects the triumph of Enlightenment values over religious rule, but it needs to defend those values against political religion vigorously, and not lapse into post-colonial guilt. This is important, if democracies are not to morph back into theocracies again.”

“Post-colonial guilt”, “Islamic fundamentalism” threatening to turn civilised European societies into “theocracies” – what is this, the Telegraph perhaps, or the Daily Mail? Nah, it’s from Spiked, the online journal run by the tendency which used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party but has since morphed into a bunch of right-wing libertarian individualists whose obvious natural home now is the Tory party.

In another Spiked article, Josie Appleton attacks the evil collectivist mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who is intent on suppressing the priceless individual freedom to drive round the capital in one’s 4×4 and destroy the environment in any way one sees fit. Appleton’s proposal that voters should consider removing Livingstone at the next mayoral election does, however, suffer from the small flaw that when they turn up at the polling booth “in two years’ time”, as she recommends, the election will have taken place ten months earlier.

David Aaronovitch on the white man’s burden

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David AaronovitchDavid Aaronovitch explains why the West has a moral obligation to attack Muslim countries in order to bring them the benefits of western civilisation:

“A month ago I was invited to speak at an all-day event on ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ organised by the eccentric half of Ken Livingstone’s personality. Its purpose, as far as I could work out, was to promote cultural relativism by suggesting that anything that looked like telling foreigners what to do was some kind of mad imperialism. So we shouldn’t seek to export democracy, because it wouldn’t work and maybe they didn’t want it anyway, and it would end in a bloodbath or profits for Western companies, whichever you thought was worse….

“Others have argued, more extremely, that in some Islamist cultures women aren’t yearning for the right to education, or to be treated by (male) doctors, or to be anything except shut up in their father’s or husband’s houses…. The Western idea of freedom isn’t everything.

“I am well aware that nothing of the above argument makes what has happened in Iraq the less appalling. Hating the occupiers I could cope with, but I didn’t remotely foresee the insanity – the bloody aimlessness – of blowing up students or day-labourers, with Allah knows what long-term objective in mind. And we in the West can take from that experience the lesson of being careful in the way we intervene, of course. But not – not – that you shouldn’t do it. Not that there shouldn’t be moral foreign policies. Not that we think that democracy, basic human rights or liberty are relative values.”

Times, 27 February 2007

For a critique of Aaronovitch’s article – “for Dave, it appears that the Iranians are dumb chattels, sitting around in leg irons and only capable of being liberated by a passing dashing British warship” – see
Aaronovitch Watch, 27 February 2007

Evidence against Muslim charity appears fabricated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

When the Bush administration shut down the nation’s largest Muslim charity five years ago, officials of the Dallas-based foundation denied allegations it was linked to terrorists and insisted that a number of accusations were fabricated by the government. Now, attorneys for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development say the government’s own documents provide evidence of that claim.

In recent court filings, defense lawyers disclosed striking discrepancies between an official summary and the verbatim transcripts of an FBI-wiretapped conversation in 1996 involving Holy Land officials. The summary attributes inflammatory, anti-Semitic comments to Holy Land officials that are not found in a 13-page transcript of the recorded conversation. It recently was turned over to the defense by the government in an exchange of evidence.

Los Angeles Times, 25 February 2007

Do you realise Europe is in the throes of civil war?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The “civil war” is between secularism and Christianity, and Larry Siedentop is worried about it. He blames both sides for ignoring “the moral symmetry between secularism, with its civil liberty, and Christianity”.

After all, European secularism “rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the blind following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others. This is also the central, egalitarian moral insight of Christianity. It can be seen in St Paul’s contrast between ‘Christian liberty’ and observance of the Jewish law. Enforced belief was, for Paul, a contradiction in terms. Strikingly, in its first centuries Christianity spread by persuasion, not by force of arms – a contrast to the early spread of Islam.”

Siedentop outlines his central concern: “What will happen to this ‘civil war’ now that Europe is faced with the challenge of Islam? Will Europeans come to understand better the moral logic that joins Christianity and civil liberty? It is important that they do so….”

So, cutting through the waffle, the basic message is that secularists and Christians should bury the hatchet in order to resist the Muslims.

Times, 27 February 2007

Muslim girl ejected from tournament for wearing hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Asi MansoorFive young teams from across Canada walked out of a Quebec soccer tournament Sunday because a young Muslim girl was ejected for wearing a hijab.

Calling the rule banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women racist, four other teams followed Asmahan Mansour’s team, the Nepean Selects from Ottawa, after she was thrown out for running afoul of a Quebec Soccer Association rule.

CBC News, 25 February 2007

“The tremendous support shown for the Muslim player is an indication that common sense and respect for religious differences are more powerful than arbitrary rules,” said CAIR-CAN Executive Director Karl Nickner.

CAIR news release, 26 February 2007

See also “Muslims decry soccer referee’s call on hijab”, Montreal Gazette, 27 February 2007