Teacher of “hate-filled” Islamist texts or a misunderstood, multicultural school caught in a media row? John Crace has a look at what really goes on at the King Fahad academy.
Islamophobia Watch uncovered – shock revelations!
Over at Western Resistance (and the right-wing US website Family Security Matters) Adrian Morgan exposes two of the evil geniuses behind Islamophobia Watch.
Apparently Eddie Truman is “both a member of Britain’s Communist Party and spokesman of the Scottish Socialist Party”. This will come as a surprise to other leading figures in the SSP, who were under the illusion that Eddie was solely a member of their own party. Now that Morgan’s careful and painstaking research has uncovered this double-dealing, no doubt the SSP will be taking disciplinary action against the two-timing Truman.
As for yours truly, I was “formerly secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party”. Damn! All those years secretly operating at the head of the WRP, hiding behind the cunning pseudonym “Gerry Healy”, and now I’ve finally been rumbled.
Though, to be fair, Adrian Morgan isn’t opposed to all lefties. He applauds certain “Marxist members of the left” who have condemned the alliance between socialists and Muslims that arose out of the anti-war movement, and he provides a link to an article by Alliance for Workers’ Liberty guru Sean Matgamna (or “Sean Mantegna”, as Morgan prefers to call him) which describes the SWP as the “socialist outrider for Islam in Britain”.
First Melanie Phillips expressing her admiration for him, and now Western Resistance – my, isn’t Sean a popular figure among Islamophobes.
NSS backs anti-Arab racism
The National Secular Society rallies to the defence of Robert Kilroy-Silk, “whose TV career was an early victim of the Islamist ‘that-offends-my-religion’ tactic”. That would be the Kilroy-Silk who was sacked by the BBC after describing Arabs as “suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors“, would it?
Mark Steyn’s final solution to the Euro-Muslim problem
“Three weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens reviewed Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, for City Journal, the publication of the Manhattan Institute. The review was generally favorable, though not entirely uncritical. Hitchens quoted Steyn to the following effect:
“Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out – as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent. (Emphasis added.)
“Hitchens let this pass in silence, except for a little bit of tut-tutting about the differences among Muslims, but let’s call it by its real name: Steyn is justifying genocide, both retrospectively in Bosnia and prospectively in the rest of Europe.”
Mark Kleiman at The Reality Based Community, 18 February 2007
Veil is ‘mark of separation’ says Lord Ahmed
The veil is a mark of separation and defiance against mainstream British culture and should not be used, according to Britain’s first Muslim peer.
Lord Ahmed of Rotherham called for a sensible and sensitive debate among Muslims on whether veils were needed in today’s society.
Lord Ahmed made his comments after leading a debate in Doha, Qatar, on Monday in which he spoke first on the motion: “This House believes that niqab (the face veil) is a barrier to integration in the West.”
Lord Ahmed, who became the first Muslim peer in 1988, told the Yorkshire Post: “The veil is now a mark of separation, segregation and defiance against mainstream British culture.”
“We need to re-engage as responsible British citizens and be seen once more as contributors to society rather than people who are a burden, living parallel lives,” he told the paper.
Hitch condemns Muslim masochism
“We are supposed to watch what we say about Islam, lest by any chance we be considered ‘offensive’. A fair number of authors and academics in the West now have to live under police protection or endure prosecution in the courts for not observing this taboo with sufficient care.
“A stupid term – Islamophobia – has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible ‘message’. Well, this idiotic masochism has to be dropped.
“There may have been a handful of ugly incidents, provoked by lumpen elements, after certain episodes of Muslim terrorism. But no true secularist or even Christian has been involved in anything like the torching of a mosque….
“But where are the denunciations from centers of Sunni and Shiite authority of the daily murder and torture of Islamic co-religionists? Of the regular desecration of holy sites and holy books? Of the paranoid insults thrown so carelessly and callously by one Muslim group at another? [Er … here, here and here, for example? – ed.] This mounting ghastliness is a bit more worthy of condemnation, surely, than a few Danish cartoons or a false rumor about a profaned copy of the Quran in Guantanamo.
“The civilized world – yes I do mean to say that – should find its own voice and state firmly to Muslim leaders and citizens that respect is something to be earned and not demanded with menace. A short way of phrasing this would be to say, ‘See how the Muslims respect each other!'”
That well-known representative of the civilised world, Christopher Hitchens, lectures Muslims on the meaning of respect.
Muslims angered at depiction in German carnival
Some two million people took to the streets of Germany’s Rhine region for the climax of the carnival season Monday but Muslim representatives were angered by floats featuring bearded men in turbans and explosives belts.
The word “Cliche” was printed on one of the men, while the other bore the word “Reality.”
The depiction of Islam was “barefaced lies” and the float was “using negative images to seek attention,” the Central Council of Muslims’ secretary general Aiman Mazyek told Tuesday’s edition of the Westdeutsche Zeitung daily.
Mazyek said he asked himself what the float was meant to signal. “This is how I read the message: ‘We love our prejudices and we strengthen them with blatant lies if necessary,'” Mazyek told the paper. “It has nothing to do with humor,” he added.
Deutsche Welle, 19 February 2007
Meanwhile the German newspaper Spiegel blames divisions not on racism but on Muslims themselves, who are accused of creating “A parallel Muslim universe“
On being treated as a ‘dangerous foreigner’
“Every air traveler likely has done it: stand in an airport security line in your socks, pushing forward plastic bins of shoes, jackets, laptops and handbags, all with only 20 minutes left to board, even though you showed up two hours early as told.
“Think you have it tough? Try being a Muslim American. We Muslim Americans don’t get smiles and ‘Have a good trip.’ Instead, we get suspicious security guards and frowns. For Muslim American men, it’s their beards that make the difference. For us women, it’s our head scarves.”
Naureen Kamdar relates her experience as a Muslim woman at a US airport.
Swedish integration minister rejects allegations of Islamophobia
Sweden’s new integration minister dismissed allegations of “Islamophobia” by Muslim groups, and vowed Monday to defend the rights of women who are “oppressed in the name of religion.”
Nyamko Sabuni, 37, has irritated Muslim leaders by opposing religious schools and suggesting that all schools ban Islamic headscarves for girls younger than 15.
Nearly 50 Muslim organizations signed a petition opposing her appointment as integration minister, saying her views “breathe of populism and Islamophobia.”
“I will not let myself be scared into silence,” Sabuni told reporters when asked about the petition. “I will never accept that women and girls are oppressed in the name of religion.”
The 37-year-old Congolese immigrant became Sweden’s first black Cabinet member when she joined the center-right coalition government that took power in October.
Her views on religious schools, which make up a fraction of the country’s 5,000 schools, headscarves and other issues have not been endorsed by the coalition, but stirred debate about the place of Islam in Scandinavian society.
Many Muslims feel unfairly singled out by Sabuni’s campaign against arranged marriages, genital mutilation and honor killings, saying such practices are linked to tribal traditions rather than religious beliefs.
Professor in Muslim comments furore lashes out at Australian Jewish leaders
A visiting Jewish professor has lashed out at Australian Jewish leaders for their “shameful submission to Muslim thugs”, saying his comments were less harsh than some by the Prime Minister and federal Treasurer.
Hebrew University professor Raphael Israeli, dropped from a proposed lecture tour after comments last week, said political correctness did not allow his remarks to be said, though, privately, all supported them.
He said Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello had said harsher things after “Muslim riots”, but “someone elected to seize upon this opportunity now and sweep Australia into a storm in a teacup”.
Professor Israeli, who will teach his six-week Islamic history course at the University of NSW, posted his version of the stoush on a website. On the Dhimmi Watch section of www.jihadwatch.org, he wrote: “The dhimmi-like Jewish leadership cancelled all activities, in a shameful submission to the Muslim thugs and under the false claims of a ‘multicultural society’ in Australia, which they know is not true.”
For more on Raphael Israeli, see the website of the neocon PR company Benador Asssociates.