Detroit mosque vandalized

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Detroit mosque vandalisedA Detroit mosque was vandalized this week with anti-Muslim graffiti that reads in large capital letters: “Go Home 911 Murderers.”

The original Islamic Center of America, on the corner of Joy and Greenfield roads, was struck sometime early Monday or late Sunday, said local Muslims. The mosque moved in 2005 to a new building on Ford Road in Dearborn, but the old one still stands.

On the front of the vandalized mosque, under its name, someone spray-painted in green “You Idol Worship” and then the comment that appeared to blame them for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “It’s painful,” said Nabil Zbib, 36, of Dearborn, who spotted the graffiti on Monday and reported it to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Last week, the Shi’ite mosque hosted a news conference at its location in Dearborn, criticizing Northwest Airlines for what it said was biased treatment against a group of Muslims who were not allowed to board a connecting flight in Germany to Detroit. The mosque and the council received hate e-mail after the news conference, but it’s unclear whether this vandalism is related to that.

“This is hurtful for the entire Muslim community, to see such enmity directed towards Muslims,” said Dawud Walid, head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Other Shi’ite mosques in Dearborn and Detroit have been vandalized in recent weeks, but it’s unclear whether those cases are connected to this latest incident.

WZZM, 23 January 2007

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CAIR calls for probe into New Jersey mosque fire

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A national Muslim civil rights group wants authorities to investigate a weekend fire that damaged a mosque as a potential bias crime.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations on Tuesday asked authorities to launch a hate crimes investigation into the fire that damaged a rear porch and wall at the National Islamic Association mosque in Newark on Sunday.

The first worshippers arriving at the mosque before 6 a.m. prayers found the back porch and part of a wall ablaze, said Ashraf Latif, the mosque’s president. “They ran and got some mats and started beating the fire, and someone else got some water and they put it out before the fire department got there,” he said.

Latif said the fire appeared to have begun in some coils of rope that someone put on the back deck. An investigator with the fire department who came said he smelled some accelerant on the ropes,” Latif said.

John Brown, a spokesman for the Newark Fire Department, said the cause of the fire will not be determined until Thursday at the earliest. He could not comment on Latif’s assertions that a flammable substance was detected.

Latif said the mosque has received some anti-Islamic mailings in recent years, but nothing that caused its members undue concern. There have been no overt threats recently, he said.

“Historically, there has been no anti-Islam sentiment in Newark,” he said. “This is a great place. We just want a full investigation to determine if this was set by someone outside the community for whatever reason, or if it was some bum trying to get warm.”

The mosque, which has 140 registered families who worship there, was not seriously damaged by the fire, Latif said.

Associated Press, 23 January 2007

Pickled Politics on Clash conference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MayorSunny Hundal offer his take on last Saturday’s Clash of Civilisations conference in London. It’s a reasonable and quite balanced account (certainly in comparison with right-wing pieces like this). But Sunny spoils it with an ignorant attack on Yusuf al-Qaradawi, writing: “Qaradawi certainly isn’t likely to lead a call for Muslim women to be given more rights in the Middle East.”

Pickled Politics, 23 January 2007

Which shows how much Sunny knows. As one writer has pointed out: “Barbara Stowasser, author of the book Women in the Qur’an and a leading academic expert on Islam, argues that Qaradawi’s [Al Jazeera] broadcasts have been crucial in overturning the conservative Islamic view that women should be restricted to domestic duties and play no part in politics and public life generally. She applauds his ‘vision of a new, more gender-equal Islamic society’ and stresses ‘his role as both exponent and catalyst of a new groundswell of Muslim public opinion in favour of women’s Islamic political rights’.”

Labour Left Briefing, November 2004

I looked up the source for this and it would appear to be Barbara Stowasser’s article “Old Shaykhs, Young Women, and the Internet: The Rewriting of Women’s Political Rights in Islam”, published in the journal The Muslim World in 2001. Perhaps Sunny could check it out.

MWAW replies to ‘Undercover Mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dave Crouch of Media Workers Against the War takes on Channel 4’s Dispatches:

“The media must be so grateful to Jade Goody. Thanks to her and Big Brother they have a scapegoat for the racism that they themselves have made respectable. The same newspapers that fill their pages with hate for asylum-seekers, immigrants and multiculturalism suddenly declare themselves anti-racists.

“Not for one second have the print and broadcast media relented in their barrage of racism against Muslims. The latest example is Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’, broadcast on January 15. The documentary is a textbook example of Islamophobic reporting. It has set the right-wing blogosphere on fire; clips from the programme on YouTube have gone straight into the top ten.

“The message of ‘Undercover Mosque” is that, however ‘moderate’ Muslims claim to be, it is the fundamentalists who are really pulling the strings, using the cover of moderation to preach racism, bigotry and holy war.”

MWAW website, 22 January 2007

Dave also refers us to a detailed response to Channel 4 by Shafiq ur-Rehman, president of the UK Islamic Mission. See (pdf) here.

Racial slurs used during assault on Palestinian students in North Carolina

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the FBI to investigate a group assault on three Palestinian students in North Carolina as a possible hate crime.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the students were allegedly assaulted by “at least 15 members” of the Guilford College football team. During the attack, the assailants reportedly called the students “terrorists” and “sand n**gers.” Two of the victims suffered severe injuries. Three Guilford College students were arrested and charged with “ethnic intimidation.”

CAIR news release, 22 January 2007

A clash of civilisations?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

TOM MELLEN sees neocons and progressives clash over war and torture at a London conference.

Morning Star, 22 January 2007

CAMPAIGNERS, academics, religious figures and thousands of working people engaged in a fierce battle of ideas at the weekend on what the so-called “clash of civilisations” means to Londoners. Whitehall’s QE2 centre was packed to the rafters on Saturday, with people eager to discuss the urgent issues thrown up by globalisation and the “war on terror.”

The World Civilisation Or a Clash of Civilisations? conference saw notorious rightwingers Daniel Pipes and Douglas Murray rub shoulders with Venezuelan government official Andres Izarra and anti-racism campaigner Denis Fernando. Discussions ranged from Democratic Solutions in the Middle East to Anti-Semitism and were marked by a high level of popular participation.

BBC news presenter Gavin Esler chaired the opening debate between London Mayor Ken Livingstone and neocon US foreign policy adviser Mr Pipes, who claimed that the world faces a “clash between civilisation and barbarism.”

Noting that London itself draws strength from the diverse cultures that co-exist in the city, Mr Livingstone said: “People have the choice to select for themselves what they find attractive in all cultures – we are witnessing the emergence of a global civilisation. If you go onto the streets of a modern world city, whether that’s London or New York, Shanghai or Mumbai, you see young people working together, using the same technology and sharing the same concerns.”

But Mr Pipes sneered at the mayor’s “complacency,” describing Islamists as “ideological barbarians.” He claimed that this “tyrannical, woman-oppressing terrorist movement” threatens civilisation and that, “while Mr Livingstone looks to multiculturalism, I look to win the war.”

Respect councillor Salma Yaqoob pointed out that Mr Pipes’s logic lay behind the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that that conflict has “decreased, not increased our security.”

Mr Pipes responded by smearing critics of neoliberal terrorism as “poor benighted souls,” drawing howls of anger.

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Hitch confronts ‘the Islamist menace’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HitchensIn the Winter 2007 issue of City Journal Christopher Hitchens reviews Mark Steyn’s book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, not uncritically. He does take issue with Steyn’s sneers at Martin Amis, pointing out that liberals like Amis share much of Steyn’s hostility towards Islam and Islamism.

Hitchens writes: “Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.” To prove his point Hitchens quotes Amis’s vile anti-Muslim diatribe from last September – which proposes subjecting the Muslim community as a whole to travel bans, racial profiling, strip searches and deportation – while at the same time describing his chum as “profoundly humanistic and open-minded”.

(To be fair, Hitchens does baulk at a statement from Sam Harris, who has written: “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.” Hitch characterises this as an “irresponsible remark”. You could say.)

The basic problem with a lot of liberals, Hitchens says, is that “they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the ‘Third World’.” Furthermore, this inexplicable sympathy with the oppressed has given rise to “the stupid neologism ‘Islamophobia’, which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism”.

Like Steyn, Hitchens warns against “the Islamist project of a ‘soft’ conquest of host countries”. He tells us that “Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s ‘real’ spokesmen … encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish”. With evident approval, Hitch cites Steyn’s complaint that “most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another ‘faith community’ … and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism”.

Overall, despite minor criticisms, Hitchens endorses “Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization”.

Muslim majority schools ‘pose security threat and should be closed’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An influential government education adviser said today that schools dominated by Muslim children should be closed and replaced with “multi-faith” academies to integrate pupils. Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, said the concentration of ethnic minorities and religious groups in certain schools had created a “strategic security problem”.

He said that allowing significant numbers of ethnic minority children to lead virtually separate lives was fuelling extremism and harming academic standards. The call for forced integration came as a Government commissioned report is this week set to recommend that values such as justice and tolerance should be at the centre of citizenship classes for secondary pupils.

Daily Mail, 22 January 2007

Inayat Bunglawala on Enlightenment values

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Inayat“Last Saturday I took part in a panel discussion on ‘Enlightenment values and modern society’ as part of a large conference on the theme of the clash of civilisations, organised by the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.

“It has been disconcerting recently to see that many of the most vocal advocates clamouring for the spread of Enlightenment values have also been those most keen on waging war on Iraq and now, Iran. Still, I argued that the peaceful spread of the values of the Enlightenment offers protection for people of different faiths and none. The Qur’an itself calls upon people to be prepared to question inherited beliefs and urges them to examine the universe around them and use their reason….

“A couple of the speakers at Saturday’s conference, including the American neocon columnist Daniel Pipes (founder of the McCarthyite outfit Campus Watch), pointedly criticised Livingstone for hosting the highly influential Egyptian Islamic scholar Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi when he visited the UK in 2004. Yet Livingstone was surely right: how can you hope to challenge someone’s views if you do not engage with them? Engagement in that case certainly seemed the more ‘enlightened’ policy to me.

“Unless, of course, the kind of engagement you are really calling for is one from 50,000 feet in the air.”

Comment is Free, 22 January 2007

And while we’re on the subject of the Clash of Civilisations conference, one of the questioners from Daniel Pipes’ side was Stephen Schwartz’s sidekick (sorry, “European director”) Irfan al-Alawi, who also featured in a recent broadcast by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (watch video here). Yet, when al-Alawi appeared in the “Undercover Mosque” documentary, he was filmed with his face obscured, on the basis that he feared violence as a result of his campaign against the proposed Islamic Centre at Newham in London! Which just goes to illustrate the dishonest scaremongering tactics employed by that programme.

In Tuscan hills, mosque stirs deep fears

Posted on by Bob Pitt

COLLE DI VAL D’ELSA, Italy — For centuries, bells in a towering Catholic church have tolled daily in this honey-colored town that embodies Tuscan serenity with its landscape of cypress trees and rolling farmland.

But now the start of building work for a mosque in a town park has shattered that tranquillity, laying bare deep suspicions of Muslims which underlie a broader unease in Italy over its growing immigrant population.

A severed pig’s head was found outside the mosque site in an apparent mafia-style intimidation effort a month ago, while construction that began with the mayor’s blessing is now accompanied by noisy protests.

The mosque’s opponents say they have nothing against Colle di Val d’Elsa’s roughly 400 Muslims, but fear it will trigger an influx of others bringing extremist influences. They also complain it takes up too much space in a communal park.

“This is not a big city and we don’t know if there will be an invasion of Muslims,” said Letizia Franceschi, a lawyer who leads a group against the mosque. “Unfortunately, it is written in all the national newspapers that in many mosques they preach hatred and teach activities that are illegal in our country.”

Outside the mosque site, a small group of longstanding residents protests regularly in tents with the Italian flag fluttering on top. Many driving by wave and honk in support.

Prominent signs reading “Yes to integration, No to occupation” and “The park is for everyone, not the mosque” dot a farm opposite the site. Local newspapers run headlines asking who financed the mosque, echoing a wider fear that it could be funded by extremist groups.

If completed, Colle di Val d’Elsa’s mosque will become only the fourth major mosque in Italy. After meeting for years in a small, dark room with Oriental rugs on the floor and pictures of the holy city of Medina on the walls, the town’s Muslims were ready for a larger space, said their Sunni Muslim imam, Feras Jabareen.

He has tried to show locals they have nothing to fear and that he preaches moderate Islam, to no avail. The Muslim community has signed Italy’s only existing declaration of cooperation with a town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the mosque site in a goodwill gesture recently.

“The construction of this mosque has unfortunately become politicized, making it easy to create controversies and accusations,” said Jabareen, clutching prayer beads. “Rome has the biggest mosque in Europe – do people think Muslims come to Rome just because it has the biggest mosque? That’s absurd.”

Colle di Val d’Elsa’s mayor is tired of the controversy. The town has rejected two requests for a referendum on the issue. “A wall between the two communities is the last thing we want,” said center-leftist mayor Paolo Brogioni. “The Muslims are just as much residents of the town as any other.”

Reuters, 21 January 2007