Campaigners seek new policies to regain trust of Muslim community

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Peace campaigners reiterated calls for a reverse of Britain’s warmongering foreign policy on Wednesday after ministers boasted about a new £5 million initiative to fight so-called Muslim extremism.

Ministers unveiled plans to allocate £5 million to local authorities in the fight against extremism as part of what Prime Minister Tony Blair has called a “radical and head-on” confrontation. Despite failures in Iraq and calls for him to step down, Mr Blair stubbornly declared his determination on Tuesday to “stand up” to Islamist extremism at home and abroad.

But Muslim Parliament of Great Britain deputy leader Jaffer Clarke dismissed the initiative as “unfocused, unworkable” and far from what the Muslim community needs, which is an end to wars in the Middle East and a new direction in foreign policy.

A Respect coalition spokesman called the move “mere window dressing, given that the government is demonising Muslims daily.” He said that, if ministers were sincere about “fighting Muslim extremism,” they should “reverse the foreign policy alliance with US President George W Bush.”

Morning Star, 8 February 2007

See also the Guardian which reports that “there is concern in the Muslim community that the government is marginalising groups which represent large parts of the community, such as the Muslim Council of Britain. Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said it was puzzled by some of the remedies for extremism presented by the government: ‘The overwhelming majority of Muslim organisations are the solution, not the problem’.”

Guardian, 8 February 2007

Ex-terror plot suspect speaks out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Maktabah bookshopA man freed after he was arrested over an alleged plot to kidnap a UK Muslim soldier has criticised the police investigation.

Abu Bakr, who works in the Maktabah bookshop, targeted in anti-terror raids in Birmingham, also told BBC News the UK was “a police state for Muslims”. Mr Bakr, one of nine men arrested in raids, was released without charge along with another man.

Mr Bakr, who is studying for a PhD in Political Islam at the city’s university, said he became aware of the police forcing their way into his house early last Wednesday morning by his wife screaming. Asked how he felt about his arrest, he said: “It’s a police state for Muslims. It’s not a police state for everybody else because these terror laws are designed specifically for Muslims and that’s quite an open fact,” he added.

He had been released by police on Wednesday morning and told to “go back to things how they were”, he added. “But they don’t realise that, after seven days of virtual torture for my family, it’s going to be hard to readjust,” he added. “This is going to affect me for the rest of my life.” Mr Bakr said his parents had told him they had aged 10 years while he had been in custody.

He also criticised what he called “amateur-type interrogation” by the police who, he said, had subjected him to “random questioning” about notes written on pieces of paper by his young children.

BBC News, 8 February 2007

In books, a clash of Europe and Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”

The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept,” he wrote. “Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

The fusillade of e-mail messages on the subject circulating among the Circle’s 24 board members mirrors a larger debate over a string of recently published books that ominously warn of a catastrophic culture clash between Europeans with traditional Western values and fundamentalist Muslims – books including Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion by Robert Spencer, and America Alone by Mark Steyn.

New York Times, 8 February 2007

Two released without charge after Birmingham anti-terror raid

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Gareth PeirceTwo of the nine terror suspects arrested in last week’s Birmingham raids have been released without charge, their solicitor said today.

In a statement after their release from Coventry’s Chace Avenue police station in the early hours of today, the men said there had been no mention to them by police of a plot to kidnap or behead any soldier.

Their solicitor Gareth Peirce said: “They have left the police station without any better understanding of why they were there than when they first arrived seven days ago. Not a word was ever mentioned to either of them about a plot to kidnap or the grisly suggestion of a beheading or even of a soldier at all.

“Both have been met with a consistent refusal over seven days for any explanation for their arrest. They are convinced that others in the police station must be as innocent as they and urge that they also be swiftly released.”

Times, 7 February 2007

See also Liberty’s criticism of government briefings to the media: BBC News, 6 February 2007

Contempt for our culture

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Muslims are set to be the focus of political polarisation for years to come: every time under a new title, from terrorism, to integration, to faith schools, to the veil. This politically lucrative subject is favoured by politicians from the BNP to Blairites. Latest to join is the Conservative leader, David Cameron. Bar the warm words, his speech last week could have been delivered by a Howard or a Duncan Smith, betraying the same rigid notion of national identity, contempt for cultural pluralism and hostility to immigration.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 7 February 2007

Answering Michael Gove

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Michael GoveContinuing the witch-hunt of Dr Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, Michael Gove demands to know “What kind of moderate is he?”

Answer: This kind of moderate.

Gove also poses the question: “What does it say about Birmingham Central Mosque that this man is the chairman?”

To which we might reply: What does it say about the Conservative Party that a paranoid anti-Muslim bigot like Michael Gove is a Tory MP?

The roots of terror: Islam or Islamism?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In national-socialism (Nazism), the story was of a ‘master race’ betrayed and stabbed in the back by an enemy within. Jews had to be eliminated and Europe had to be conquered to usher in the new order where the master race would rule again as it did in Germany’s glorious antiquity. In global Islamism, the villain is the west and it can be eliminated only by a military defeat or else by the conversion of every non-Muslim to Islam. The operating vision of Islam here is not the faith practiced around the world in diverse forms, but Islam as defined by Osama bin Laden: an intolerant, puritanical and fanatical sect holding a monopoly of virtue.”

Meghnad Desai at Open Democracy, 6 February 2007

The fact that Islamism itself comes in “diverse forms” is evidently lost on Desai.

‘Violence is inherent in Islam – it is a cult of death’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Violence inherent in IslamThus the headline to an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali by David Cohen in today’s London Evening Standard. The strap reads: “Human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali issues a stark warning about the growing threat of Muslim extremism in Britain”. Bullet points under the headline are:

• Islamic faith schools must close • Sharia law could happen here • Multiculturalism has failed • Islam is the new fascism

Cohen tells us: “Having grown up within Islam, Hirsi Ali believes she is uniquely placed to warn the British public that they are living under a ‘great deception’ about the true nature of Islam. ‘They have deceived themselves that the men arrested in the beheading plot last week and the 7/7 bombers are a fringe group of radical Muslims who’ve hijacked Islam and that the majority of Muslims are moderate. But they’re not. The plot to murder Muslim soldiers in the British Army is consistent with the purest teachings of Islam’.”

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