“This is the Muslim WPC who sparked a row by refusing to shake top cop Sir Ian Blair’s hand. Natalie Smart, 26, wears the Metropolitan Police’s regulation hijab on the beat. And our exclusive photos show she takes breaks to pray towards Mecca. Met Commissioner Sir Ian was said to be ‘bloody furious’ when the WPC asked not to shake his hand at a passing-out parade of 200 recruits in December. The devout Muslim convert said she could not touch a man who was not her husband – and also declined a photo with Sir Ian to avoid ‘propaganda’. She now patrols on foot and on mountain bike in an affluent London suburb, part of a ‘safer neighbourhood team’ intended to build trust with locals.”
Show British Muslims some respect, urges Roy Hattersley
“… much of what is said and written about Muslim Britain carries a clear message. Live like us or risk being treated like pariahs…. was it necessary to spread the lurid stories about kidnapping, torture and beheading before it was clear that anyone would be accused of those abominations? The Muslim people of Birmingham, who are as horrified by such atrocities as residents in the home counties, did not regard the unattributable briefing as proof that the arrests were justified. They wrote them off as propaganda – propaganda against them. And, intended or not, it had the malign result of increasing the suspicion in which all Muslims are held.
“The way in which the police behaved in Birmingham last week won few, if any, recruits to the ranks of al-Qaida or its supporting cadres. But it did alienate a large number of basically decent young men who ought to be on the authorities’ side. The grandsons of immigrants – born and educated here – are not prepared to accept the slights of second-class status that their grandparents bore with fortitude. Convincing them that society wants Muslims to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship is not only a moral necessity. It is essential to the eventual triumph of the rule of law. All they need is a little respect. They received too little last week.”
Roy Hattersley in the Guardian, 5 February 2007
Current birth rates could produce Muslim domination, say right-wing Christians
The Population Research Institute says the Western world is facing a crisis as virtually every country has birth rates well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. PRI spokesman Joseph D’Agostino says for the most part, only Muslims have high birth rates. “It’s because Christians and Jews are refusing to have children, refusing to get married, [and] having such low birth rates that the Muslims are going to inherit the Earth,” he explains.
D’Agostino says the future of the world will certainly be quite different if Muslims become the dominate population group in the coming decades. “I think we can see what life is like in Islamic countries,” he says. “I think Christians know that it’s a false religion. And we can see that the Muslim world is becoming actually more radical and, in many ways, is headed backwards into its barbaric phase.”
D’Agostino notes that it is only through immigration that the U.S. population continues to grow – and that the current situation begs a pragmatic solution: “If you don’t want the world to turn into Saudi Arabia, maybe people other than Muslims need to start having some kids at the rate the Muslims are having kids.”
The war against the west (part 597)
Melanie Phillips replies to Maleiha Malik’s excellent Guardian article which draws a comparison between the anti-semitism of the early 20th century and Islamophobia today.
Mel takes particular exception to the notion of “anti-Muslim racism”:
“Since when were Muslims a race? Islam is a religion. It is the Jewish people who are victims of something well-nigh identical to racism. But of course, in order to appropriate to Muslims the victimisation of the Jews, Muslims have to be presented similarly as the victims of ethnic prejudice.”
According to this argument, the British National Party’s vile anti-Muslim propaganda is not racist, because how can there be racism towards adherents of a particular religion? The fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims come from minority non-white ethnic communities is mere coincidence, apparently.
This is of course exactly the same argument that the BNP itself uses. It’s no wonder that the fascists list Phillips as one of the newspaper columnists “whose opinions … most closely match their own“.
Anti-Muslim bigot goes into the oil biz
“The BBC reports that an outfit calling itself the ‘Terror Free Oil Initiative’ has set up a filling station in Omaha, Nebraska, touting oil not imported from countries which ‘support terror’ – meaning just about any Muslim country, in the Middle East or anywhere else. At the moment, they only use American and Canadian oil. (Clearly, they’re only talking about one sort of terror.) A few paragraphs into the report and we find out who their spokesman is: Joe Kaufman, the bigot behind ‘Americans Against Hate’, a group which dedicates itself to smearing Muslims and Muslim organisations.”
‘Taking the fight to Islam’
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the only critic of Islam who lives with round-the-clock protection. But surely none wears their endangered status with greater style. The Dutch Somali human-rights campaigner looks like a fashion model and talks like a public intellectual. Tall and slender with rod-straight posture and a schoolgirl smile, she is a thinker of stunning clarity, able to express ideas in her third language with a precision that very few could achieve in their first. This combination of elegance and eloquence would be impressive in any circumstances. Under threat of death, it is nothing short of incredible.”
Andrew Anthony in the Observer, 4 February 2007
Another gushing tribute to the appalling Hirsi Ali who, to general relief among the Dutch Muslim community, has now left the Netherlands to work for the right-wing US think-tank the American Enterprise Institute – which is exactly where she belongs.
‘Is justice served by these tales of beheading?’ asks Nick Cohen
Nick Cohen writes: “Last week’s papers were full of accounts of the supposed plot by nine men held in raids in Birmingham. Every type of paper, upmarket and down, ran headlines such as ‘Terror gang planned to kidnap, torture and behead a soldier on our doorstep’ or ‘Terror hitlist named 25 Muslim soldiers’ with barely an ‘alleged’ thrown in to hint that none of the claims had been proved in court.”
From a single issue of the Sunday Times
In addition to Rod Liddle’s piece, here are some other articles from the same issue of the Sunday Times: We’re far too nice to Muslim extremists, Al-Qaeda tells British cells to carry out wave of beheadings and Preacher calls for death to all Muslim soldiers.
More irresponsible gibberish from Joan Smith
Joan Smith displays her ignorance about the meaning of political Islam, and fingers veil-wearing Muslim women as terrorist pawns. Political Islam in all its variants is “an authoritarian political ideology based on a literal reading of the Koran”. What Islamists “want to replace is liberal secular democracy”. In furtherance of that aim, they are “trying to create as much dissension as possible, training young British men in foreign terror camps, facilitating terrorist attacks in the UK and hoping the wider Muslim community feels victimised when the police claim to have uncovered another terror cell. They’ve had some success in persuading Muslim women to adopt the niqab and jilbab…”
Dirty little secret of who is behind the rise in antisemitism
Rod Liddle has the answer. And yes, you guessed it, anti-semitic attacks are not the responsibility of white racists and the far right but of the Muslim community.