Wilders: get rid of half of Koran!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

geert_wildersAMSTERDAM – If Muslims want to stay in the Netherlands, they should tear out half the Koran and throw it away. And they shouldn’t listen to the imam.

Faction leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) Geert Wilders said this in an interview with daily newspaper De Pers on Tuesday.

He said the holy book of Islam contains “plenty of terrible things.” Wilders said once again that Islam is a violent religion. “If Mohammed lived here today, I would propose he be tarred and feathered as an extremist and driven out of the country,” he said.

The politician wants to impress on people that Islam is “the greatest danger threatening us.” He says that other political parties avoid topics like this. “Everything we are proud of, we are selling to the devil. Former head of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that World War III has begun. I would not use those words, but it’s true,” said Wilders, who in the past has voiced his fear of a “tsunami of Islamisation in the Netherlands.”

Wilders: “Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!”

Expatica, 13 February 2007

Iain Dale discovers media double standards over Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A post yesterday on Iain Dale’s Diary reveals that the eponymous Tory blogger has belatedly woken up to the double standards practised by the media in connection with the Robert Cottage trial. He writes:

“Last October the police raided two peoples’ homes in Pendle and uncovered explosives, rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit. A former British National Party member, Robert Cottage, who stood in last year’s local elections in Colne has now subsequently been accused of possessing the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in the country.

“Maybe I have missed the story, but I have not seen this covered in any of our national newspapers or national broadcast media. Why? If these kind of things had been discovered in the home of a British Muslim I suspect the media would be playing a rather different tune. Think of the front page headlines recently when similar discoveries were made elsewhere in the country.”

Iain Dale’s Diary, 13 February 2007

Perhaps Dale should consider raising this issue with his own party. The heavily publicised report Uniting the Country (pdf here), prepared by the Conservative Policy Group on National and International Security under Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, dismisses talk of media double standards over the Robert Cottage case as a product of Muslims’ victim mentality. The authors complain (p.11) that Muslim perceptions of discrimination have created:

“an environment in which distortion also finds ready, if unwitting, acceptance. The Group was told a story in two widely separated towns of the alleged suppression by mainstream media, on anti Islamic grounds, of the discovery of a BNP chemical weapons factory. This had been manufactured from four separate reports over the space of a month in different local newspapers. The story began with a report of a BNP member being charged with possession ‘of chemical components which could be used to make explosives’. It ended, despite there being no new facts, with the claim of the discovery of ‘chemical weapons’.”

Dead writer’s words fan flames of Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dead writer’s words fan flames of Islamophobia

By Alfio Bernabei

Searchlight, February 2007

A RACIST CALL to blow up a mosque made by Italy’s best selling writer Oriana Fallaci seems to be achieving some of its intended effect, with a little help from rightwing parties.

In that famed part of Tuscany nicknamed Chiantishire, Islamophobia, fanned by Fallaci’s incendiary remarks, reached a peak in December with a second demonstration against the building of a mosque in Colle Val d’Elsa, a town of 14,000 inhabitants near Siena.

While the majority of the protesters recited the Lord’s Prayer, neo-fascists acted as Fallaci’s foot soldiers. The building site came under attack, not for the first time. Metal barriers were torn down and metal poles, which were part of the foundations, uprooted. Among the attackers police identified Forza Nuova militants who had vowed to launch a crusade “to protect our traditions”.

In a separate incident a few days earlier, the severed head of a pig was thrown at the entrance to the building site. Around 1,000 Muslims live in the area, working in farming.

Such protests are nothing new – they have occurred in Genova, Lodi and Padova, among other places, over the past few years. Rightwing political parties, such as the xenophobic Northern League, the neo-fascist National Alliance and Forza Italia, can count on hundreds of their members to take to the streets when demonstrations are called against the erection of mosques. The nazi-fascists always rush to the scene, eager to be seen at the forefront of such protests. Forza Nuova has issued leaflets linking all mosques and Muslims with terrorism, saying: “There is no such thing as a moderate Islam, no mosques to be allowed in our land”.

The current incidents at Colle Val d’Elsa have acquired special significance because of the ghost of a celebrity hovering in the background and questions about the role that certain media can play in fanning the flames of racism, whether through editorial misjudgement or, as some have suggested, by design, wanting to espouse the doctrine of a clash of civilisations.

Fallaci, who died last September, had a house in the area. Interviewed in June 2006 by The New Yorker she said that rather than see a mosque intruding in her beloved environment, she would obtain explosives and blow up the building. “I will go to my friends in Carrara, you know, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I make you juuump [sic] in the air. I blow it up! I do not want to see this mosque – it’s very near my house in Tuscany. I do not want to see a 24-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto … So I BLOW IT UP!”

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A green light to shoot the innocent

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A green light to shootThe families caught up in the Forest Gate terror raids attacked an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report as a “whitewash” on Tuesday after it said that officers would not be disciplined.

The police watchdog criticised Scotland Yard’s handling of the raids in east London last June and urged the Met to apologise publicly for its “very aggressive” tactics. But the IPCC claimed that the police had been justified in carrying out the raids and that officers would not be disciplined.

The families, in a statement issued through their lawyers, said that they had been the victims of a “crime of the utmost seriousness” and had been denied justice because of the failure to investigate that crime.

Mohammed Abdul Kahar, one of two brothers arrested in the raids, attacked the report as a “whitewash.” Mr Kahar, who was shot during the raids, said that the report gave a “green light” to police to conduct anti-terror operations the way that they wanted.

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The abuse of research

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As political parties set out their stalls of new ideas in preparation for a general election, the increasing influence of privately funded research on political discussion will demand closer scrutiny. Private thinktanks are increasingly shaping national debates in the media, something made possible through the private funds required for high-profile launches, websites and email campaigns.

A striking example of this symbiotic relationship is Policy Exchange’s report Living Apart Together, on Muslim social attitudes, which is officially launched today. It was released to the press two weeks ago to provide research cover for David Cameron’s speech attacking multiculturalism and prominent Muslim organisations. The report included claims that a significant minority of Muslims were “living apart” from British society, claims that were widely reported in the media and appeared to legitimise Conservative party rhetoric.

Yet few reports made clear that Policy Exchange has an explicit political agenda. Michael Gove, the Conservative MP and author of the book Celsius 7/7 – How the West’s Policy of Appeasement Has Provoked Fundamentalist Terror and What Has to Be Done Now, is a founding chairman of Policy Exchange. And he has made it clear that thinktanks are crucial for the next general election campaign, stating that “a precursor to electoral victory is victory in the battle of ideas and the battle for the agenda”.

The politicisation of research can lead to serious distortions in debates on policy issues. Debates about multiculturalism, security and British Muslims are bound to have a central place in the next election.

Marie Smyth and Jeroen Gunning report in the Guardian, 13 February 2007

YouTube censors Islam critic?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

WebProNews is outraged that YouTube has prevented an atheist from using its platform to attack Islam:

At YouTube, you can say pretty much whatever You want, as long as it’s not about Islam. If that’s not true, YouTube user Nick Gisburne begs to differ after his account – his entire account – was deleted for its “inappropriate content.” What exactly did he say? Well, nothing really. He let the Koran speak for itself.

Gisburne is a self-described atheist with, at least from the one video, a deep questioning of Muslim claims about the Koran. To express his doubts about Islam being a religion of peace, Gisburne created a 10-minute video, entitled “Islamic Teachings” that was nothing but violent quotations taken from the Koran instructing followers to kill nonbelievers and speed their way to Hell where Allah will torture them forever.

It would seem quoting the holy book in a sort of testament against itself was over the line for someone working at Google-owned YouTube. Not only was the video deleted without any type of warning to the uploader, but the uploader’s account was also deleted with only the explanation (or accusation) of submitting inappropriate content, a category usually reserved for nudity or video violence.

Jihad Watch shares the indignation of WebProNews, which is hardly surprising, given that Robert Spencer employs exactly the same method as Nick Gisburne – using selective quotations from the Qur’an to depict Islam, and by extension its followers, as promoting hatred and violence.

‘Swim centre bars two-year-old girl because she isn’t Muslim’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thus the headline to yet another scaremongering article in today’s Daily Mail. Read it, and you find that the actual story is that some bloke took his kid to the local swimming pool not having been informed that it had been booked for a women-only session. Big deal. Judging by reports in the Mail and other right-wing papers, there’s barely a single swimming pool in the UK that hasn’t been taken over by Muslims.

Muslims can learn from this new Jewish group, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yasmin Alibhai-BrownYasmin Alibhai-Brown – one of the initiators of the much-hyped but evidently stillborn New Generation Network – argues that the recently-launched Independent Jewish Voices is a model for organisation within Muslim communities:

“In key ways, this breakout faction is no different from the many Muslim challengers emerging to halt the influence of the monolithic, regressive, self-serving, presumptuous, overweening Muslim Council of Britain, funded for years by the Government without any regard for the hundreds of thousands of British Muslims who have never accepted this informal jurisdiction over our lives and thoughts….

“Rebellious British Muslims have felt the same suffocation experienced by IJV as unelected community and religious leaders found subtle, sometimes rough, ways to discredit opposing views. Religion and race were used – if you voice any disagreements with the ‘official’ line, or point out oppression within, you are charged with betraying the faith and faithful, bringing on the BNP and encouraging Islamophobia. And thus are we blackballed, decent Muslims who are concerned about the crisis we find ourselves in globally.”

Independent, 12 February 2007

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Islam is ‘backward, tribal and from a medieval period’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Kilroy-Silk set himself on a collision course with sections of the Muslim community today when he claimed that most religious doctrine practised in the UK’s mosques was “backward, tribal and from a medieval period”. The controversial MEP and former talk-show host made the remarks in an interview with the BBC in which he called for legislation to allow Muslim women into UK mosques.

Press Association, 13 February 2007

Online discussion here.