Sarkozy defends Muhammad cartoons

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French interior minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has defended a weekly sued for printing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Two French Muslim groups are suing Charlie Hebdo magazine for defamation over the cartoons, printed a year ago. Mr Sarkozy noted he was often a target of the magazine but said he would prefer “too many caricatures to an absence of caricature”.

Mr Sarkozy’s letter drew concern from one of the Muslim groups behind the legal action. “He should remain neutral,” Abdullah Zekri of the Paris Grand Mosque was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. The official French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) voiced anger at what it said was government interference and convened an emergency meeting.

Editor Philippe Val told the court the cartoons critiqued “ideas, not men”. Speaking at the opening of the hearing, Mr Val asked: “If we no longer have the right to laugh at terrorists, what arms are citizens left with? How is making fun of those who commit terrorist acts throwing oil on the fire?”

The illustrations originally appeared in the best-selling Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005 to accompany an editorial criticising self-censorship in the Danish media. One image shows the Prophet Muhammad carrying a lit bomb in the shape of a turban on his head decorated with the Islamic creed.

Muslim groups said Charlie Hebdo‘s decision to publish the cartoons “was part of a considered plan of provocation aimed against the Islamic community in its most intimate faith”. It was “born out of a simplistic Islamophobia as well as purely commercial interests”.

“This is an attack on Muslims,” UOIF President Lhaj Thami Breze told the court according to Reuters. “It is as if the Prophet taught terrorism to Muslims, and so all Muslims are terrorists.”

BBC News, 7 February 2007

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Flawed methodology behind Policy Research report

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a letter to the Guardian, Tariq Modood and Ziauddin Sardar question the methodology behind the recent, much-publicised Policy Research report Living Apart Together. They point out:

“The Cabinet Office’s Equality, Diversity and Prejudice Survey 2006, produced by Professors Dominic Abrams and Diane Houston, confirms that out of all social groups Muslims are at a higher risk of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination on all relevant markers. In this light, we would urge the media to act more responsibly in its dissemination of research on Muslims and Islam.”

The complete version of the Populus poll on which the Policy Exchange report was based is now available online, by the way.

Muslims not the ‘new Jews’ says Norman Lebrecht

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The MCB complains that the Government refuses to take into account Muslim grievances on foreign policy (Iraq and Palestine) and domestic order (the arrest of terrorist suspects). In fact, it is the Muslims who refuse to listen…. Engagement is a two-way process and the Muslims in Britain, while effective at presenting demands, have done little thus far to show that they hear what the rest of the country wants.

“Instead, they have condoned or encouraged the kind of radicalisation which, according to the latest poll, suggests that 31 per cent of young Muslims want Sharia law imposed in Britain.

“If the Muslims are to be the new Jews – secure in their identity but living at peace with society around them – they must learn to engage, to debate, to yield a few sacred cows in exchange for a sense of pride and belonging. It may take another generation, but if multicultural Britain is going to prosper, it would be no bad thing if Muslims decided to become more like Jews.”

Norman Lebrecht in the Evening Standard, 6 February 2007

Does Lebrecht really think this sort of ignorant and condescending crap makes any kind of positive contribution to relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in London?

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Fascists campaign against Preston mosque plan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Masjid-e-Salaam mosqueA huge new mosque and Islamic school could be built in a Preston conservation area. The Preston Muslim Society plan to knock down the existing Masjid-E-Salaam mosque, on Watling Street Road, Fulwood, to include a 17.5 metre tower on the top. The plans also include proposals to demolish another building, which dates back to the early 1900s, on nearby Victoria Road and rebuild it as a learning centre of seven classrooms adjoining the mosque.

More than 145 objections have been received by planners to the plans for the mosque, largely due to concerns about traffic and fears that the building will be out of character for the area. The existing building was converted from a hotel.

The proposal has prompted far-right extremists from the British National Party (BNP) to start a race-hate campaign and leaflet hundreds of homes locally. But local councillors have moved quickly to condemn the leaflet as “appalling” and said their decision to support local people’s objections to the proposals had been done on “purely planning grounds.”

Lancashire Evening Post, 6 February 2007

Another plug for Taj Hargey

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The legal efforts by a Muslim father to force a Buckinghamshire school to permit his 12-year old daughter to wear the niqab should be resisted by sensible integrated British Muslims. This misguided judicial action, if successful, will not only set a deplorable precedent for Muslim exceptionalism, but will also exacerbate frayed tensions between a (largely) self-segregating Muslim community and an antagonistic general public. This legal test case is so critical as to serve as a defining moment in the battle for the hearts and mind of Muslims in this country.

“The disputed decision by a father to protect the ‘human rights’ of his daughter by insisting that she wears the full-face mask in school should not be seen in isolation. It is at the root of a frightening theological convulsion that is underway in the Islamic world. Driven by a toxic combination of Wahhabi-Salafi-Ikhwani-Deobandi religious extremists, this militant movement seeks to resurrect the caliphate not only in the heartlands of Islam itself, but elsewhere as well.”

Taj Hargey (for background details see here) writes in the Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2007

And who exactly are these people who want to “resurrect the caliphate not only in the heartlands of Islam itself, but elsewhere as well”? Not even Hizb ut-Tahrir holds that position. Whatever your view on the niqab issue, to portray this as part of a campaign to impose an Islamic state in the UK plays to all the worst paranoid stereotypes about the “Muslim threat”. It’s no wonder Taj Hargey is enthusiastically promoted by the Torygraph and the likes of John Ware.

Unfortunately, Cristina Odone seems to have fallen for Hargey’s spurious claims to represent “moderate Muslims”:

Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2007

Meanwhile in an article entitled “School at centre of veil row gets overseas backing“, the Guardian reports that Hargey is boasting that he has the support and financial backing of a group calling itself the Muslim Canadian Congress. This is an organisation that participated in the hysterical “No sharia law in Canada” campaign against the proposal to extend state-sponsored faith-based family arbitration to Muslims in Ontario. In August last year a section of the MCC split away to form a rival organisation, the Canadian Muslim Union, accusing the MCC of aligning itself with the enemies of the Muslim community. The breakaway faction were denounced by the MCC leadership as “Canadian supporters of Hezbollah” – because they had joined a demonstration against Israel’s attack on Lebanon!

So this is where Hargey is getting his international support from – an organisation whose politics are evidently barely distinguishable from those of Harry’s Place.

Torygraph finds a Muslim it likes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim group has offered to help fund a school’s legal battle over its refusal to let a pupil wear the niqab in class. In an unprecedented move, the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford (Meco) has written to the head teacher to say it is prepared to contribute to a fighting fund. Taj Hargey, Meco’s chairman, said he was also willing to organise a campaign among Muslims nationally to resist “this largely Saudi-driven campaign to make the niqab a compulsory requirement for Muslim women”.

Daily Telegraph, 5 February 2007

A law unto themselves

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Welcome to Britain“The biggest press scandal of our time is not intrusion on royal privacy – which has just led to a reporter’s imprisonment – but the newspapers’ consistent and brazen disregard for the contempt laws. The police and the government, far from taking steps to apply those laws, have colluded in what amounts to a complete revision of British legal conventions. The Press Complaints Commission, always active in trying to protect the royals, has so far refused on this issue even to investigate.

“Take last week’s coverage of the alleged kidnap plans by Birmingham-based Muslims. ‘The execution plot: Terror gang planned to kidnap, torture and behead a soldier on our doorstep,’ announced the Sun. Just in case we wanted to know what an execution might look like, the front page showed the US hostage Nick Berg being executed in Iraq in 2004. The Times front page prominently quoted ‘a senior police source’, a ubiquitous and garrulous creature on these occasions: ‘This is Baghdad come to Birmingham … The soldier would have been filmed dressed up … like Kenneth Bigley.’ The Times duly printed a picture of Bigley, a Briton murdered in Iraq in 2004, in an orange jump suit.

“Under the sub judice laws, journalists are supposed, from the moment of arrest, to confine themselves to the barest details and to avoid publishing material which might prejudice a jury if the case came to trial. Judge for yourself whether the coverage fell within the laws.”

Peter Wilby in the Guardian, 5 February 2007

Via Indigo Jo Blogs

Bin Laden is the true representative of Islam, says Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yet another interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who states: “Bin Laden defined the world into Muslims and non-Muslims, and these had to either be converted or killed. I asked myself where I stood after I saw the pictures of people jumping out of the World Trade Center. As a Muslim I had to ask if I agreed with that. I was saddened to see Bin Laden’s citations were from the Koran and were consistent with the Islam I grew up with.”

She adds: “The 74 per cent of Muslims under 24 who said in a survey that women should wear the veil and want Sharia law to be introduced have gone for the consistency that Bin Laden offers.”

Asked if she sees any positive sides to Islam, she replies: “That’s like asking if I see positive sides to Nazism…”

Metro, 5 February 2007

For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 5 February 2007

Fascists jump on the ‘sharia law’ bandwagon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

With evident approval, the British National Party has reproduced an article from the raving right-wing US website The American Daily taking up the popular paranoid fantasy about sharia-supporting Muslims undermining the British legal system.

Quoting a BBC News article on sharia courts, the article complains that this does not go far enough: “… the BBC seems completely ignorant of the abuse women and minorities suffer under Sharia laws the world over. Women are beaten, raped, murdered, mutilated and oppressed by Muslim ‘culture’ and English law should never turn its back on these vulnerable members of their society. This would be a travesty and a direct refutation of western morals that posit that all people are created equal and stand the same in the eyes of the law.”

However, an article in the Telegraph finds more favour with the author, on the grounds that it takes “a little more umbrage at the possibility of immigrant communities circumventing English law”.

BNP news article, 5 February 2007

And who was the author of the Torygraph piece? None other than Mad Mel’s hubbie, Joshua Rozenberg.