St Andrews’ Students Association rejects witch-hunt against Khatami

Posted on by Bob Pitt

KhatamiA storm of protest is expected to greet a controversial Iranian former president in Scotland next week amid growing opposition to his visit.

The move to honour Mohammad Khatami by St Andrews University has attracted a furious response from exiled Iranians, the Israeli government, politicians and students across the UK, who claim he ran a tyrannical regime.

He will receive an honorary degree when he officially opens the university’s Institute for Iranian Studies during his visit on Tuesday.

A university spokesman said Mr Khatami’s visit reflected the international standing of the institution and added that the historic seat of learning had received messages of support from senior government officers and politicians.

But angry cries were led by Laila Jazayeri of the Association of Anglo-Iranian Academics in the UK who attacked his human-rights record while in office.

She said: “Khatami has always been a central pillar of the theocratic and brutal regime in Iran, which is responsible for the execution of more than 120,000 Iranians.

“It is ironic that Khatami should be invited to St Andrews University when, during his presidency, the Iranian regime responded to the just demand of students for democracy by ordering vicious dawn attacks on dormitories.

“Students were beaten using knives, chains, and batons, resulting in fatalities and hundreds wounded. Some were even thrown out of the second and third floor windows.”

The move has also infuriated Scottish Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson, who described the decision as a slur on Scotland. He said: “St Andrews University should be ashamed. Khatami’s presence in Scotland would be an insult to freedom, democracy, and human rights. I call upon Sir Menzies Campbell as chancellor of St Andrews University to withdraw the invitation to this odious man.”

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Did Italian right-winger take inspiration from Maryam Namazie?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniela SantancheBritain and Australia are not the only countries where debate is raging over the Islamic veil. In Italy, the issue burst into the news this week after the interior ministry ordered round-the-clock police protection for an MP, believing she had been threatened for expressing her views on the subject.

Daniela Santanche, an MP for the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, clashed in a TV chat show with the imam of a mosque near Milan. After Ms Santanche insisted that the Qur’an did not call for women to wear a veil, the other guest, Ali Abu Shwaima, angrily replied: “I am an imam and I will not permit those who are ignorant to speak of Islam. You are ignorant of Islam and do not have the right to interpret the Qur’an.”

The ministry said it had been advised that the words used by the imam might amount to a coded death sentence – which the imam has vigorously denied.

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Ian Buruma and Muslims – what a liberal wimp

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nick Cohen 2Reviewing Ian Buruma’s book Murder in Amsterdam Nick Cohen takes exception to Buruma’s willingness to appease the Muslim hordes:

“Buruma shows that Muslim immigration pushed the fantastically vituperative van Gogh and at least a part of the Dutch left into the appalled realisation that they were going to have to fight the old battles for free speech and the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. Interestingly, given his anti-fascist pedigree, Buruma won’t go along with them.

“He doesn’t quite say it, but he implies that it is one thing to make a stand against the ayatollahs’ Iran or al-Qaeda in the Middle East, and quite another to take on the same ideas at home when they are found in a minority community that is already vulnerable and often powerless….

“Murder in Amsterdam is well written, well researched and often wise, but a faint whiff of intellectual cowardice rises from its pages none the less.”

New Statesman, 30 October 2006

It’s reassuring to know that, unlike the cowardly Buruma, Cohen has the courage to wage a battle against the vulnerable and powerless.

Why Labour should reject Jack Straw’s comments on veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims under siege

Owen Jones, Poplar & Limehouse Constituency Labour Party, surveys the responses to Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab.

Labour Left Briefing, November 2006

“Ministers caught telling the truth!” announced the BNP on their website on 15th October as they hailed “a series of statements which show that some of our rulers are capable of speaking the truth and acknowledging commonsense after all.” No wonder the BNP feels vindicated. Over the past month, the already besieged Muslim community has faced a barrage of denunciations from the British political establishment.

The increasingly thuggish John Reid fired the opening shots in east London on 20th September by haranguing Muslim parents to spy on their own children “before their hatred grows and you risk losing them forever.” This carefully choreographed political stunt was followed by a further tirade at Labour Party Conference in which he pledged that Islamist terrorism would have “no no-go areas”. David Cameron momentarily forgot his cuddly rhetoric and pledged “break up Muslim ghettos.”

However, it was Jack Straw who opened the floodgates of the current deluge of anti-Muslim hysteria. His description of the niqab – a full body veil worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women – as a “sign of separation and difference” was music to the ears of the right wing media. “Ban the veil!” screeched the Daily Express, revealing that 98% supported such a ban in order to “safeguard racial harmony”.

In The Times, Simon Jenkins suggested that if Muslim women were unable to understand why a “westerner” might be offended by the veil, “it is reasonable to ask why they want to live in Britain.” Jon Gaunt in The Sun offered the nuanced argument that “no group has been such a pain in the burka as some of the Muslims in recent years…” Others took the opportunity to declare open season on the Muslim population. “Muslim cabbie bans guide dog” was the almost farcical Evening Standard headline.

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Battle lines have been drawn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The battle lines have been drawn. First human rights were thrown out of the window by targeting all Muslims as terror suspects. Then there has been the curtailing of the freedom of speech and right to demonstrate by invoking new laws and proposals to spy on Islamic and Muslim groups, including at universities.

“It would appear that the other democratic principle of tolerance is to be prised away in Britain. Should we now expect that the next step will be a new British version of The House Un-American Activities Committee during McCarthyism that blacklists all Muslims?

“The most dangerous path clearly spelt out by the Prime Minister is that the real intent is the sinister attempt somehow to change Islam and its basic tenets. The Government’s offer of a genuine ‘dialogue and open debate’ has proved to be nothing more than a façade as it has not shown the slightest inclination to listen, but rather, it is clear it wants brow-beat the Muslim community and force its own agenda upon it.”

Editorial in the Muslim News, 27 October 2006

Debate on veil shows how West is turning on Islam, scholar warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_RamadanA leading Muslim scholar has said the debate on women wearing veils highlights a growing “global polarisation” between the West and the Islamic world.

Tariq Ramadan, a visiting professor at Oxford University told an interfaith conference in London yesterday that the debate sparked by Jack Straw, who said the veil hampered integration, was part of a global phenomenon in which a “them versus us” attitude was being fostered between Muslims and non-Muslims.

“The atmosphere has deteriorated in the last year or so,” Professor Ramadan said. “It’s not only a British reality, but European and American. To nurture this polarisation is the easiest way for politicians when we don’t have social policy. The most dangerous thing is the normalisation of this discourse.”

Independent, 27 October 2006

Veil hang-ups may pass

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“For years I worked in a school where a number of memorable parents wore the niqab, a full veil. These women taught me a lot about Islam. They also challenged my understanding of inclusion. However strange I felt in our first encounters, I now remember their faces with fondness. Aisha Azmi’s tribunal, coming in the wake of Jack Straw’s discomfort over veil-wearing, challenges our society from the top down.

“When government minister Phil Woolas calls for her sacking, saying she ‘can’t do her job’ I have to ask whether he’s taken any time out of publicity-seeking to explore alternatives. If not, can I call for his sacking?

“When Mr Straw clumsily complains that veils make him ‘uncomfortable’, I can’t help but wonder if the key to community relations really is to keep men like him comfy. Would he like us to fetch his slippers as well? … And when the Prime Minister refers to the veil as ‘a mark of separation’, I have to point out that he usually wears a tie. If ever a silly piece of clothing reinforced separatism it’s that absurd, class-bound strip of silk.”

Huw Thomas in the TES, 27 October 2006

Australian media blamed for Islam bias

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty believes the media is fuelling a growing bias against Islamic Australians, warning that increased vilification of Muslims is fomenting home-grown terrorism.

In a speech delivered in Adelaide, Mr Keelty played down Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali’s inflammatory comments on women, asserting that “many in the community also say offensive things and many of them are white Caucasian Australians”.

He said rising vilification of Muslims was being fuelled by irresponsible media outlets which sensationalised terrorism-related stories with little basis in fact. And he called on Australians to teach the values of democracy and multiculturalism to the younger generation so that “our future is not worse than our past”.

Mr Keelty – who clashed with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in 2004 after the commissioner blamed the suicide attacks on Madrid train system on the war in Iraq – said he met privately with Muslim groups in Adelaide yesterday.

“You hear more and more stories of treatment of the Islamic community that really is substandard by members of our own wider community,” he said at a lunch hosted by the South Australian Press Club. “It is vilification, picking them out of the crowd because they dress differently or they speak differently. If we are not careful we risk raising a generation of Australians who will have a bias against Islam.”

The Australian, 27 October 2006

See also “Australia’s Muslims fear backlash”, BBC News, 26 October 2006

The rape of Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: ‘We are watching the world of yesterday.’

“Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. ‘I am too old,’ he said. However, he urged young people to get out and ‘move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable’….

“Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization…. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.”

Paul Belien in the Brussells Journal, 25 October 2006

Fascists applaud result of Danish cartoons court case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Denmark continues to lead in the way in defending the long cherished European concept of free speech after a court ruled yesterday (26th) that a Danish newspaper did not libel Muslims by printing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that unleashed a storm of protests in the Islamic world. Seven Danish Muslim organisations brought the case against the Jyllands-Posten, saying the paper had libelled the world’s one billion Muslims with the images, which included one depicting the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, by implying Muslims were terrorists.”

BNP news article, 27 October 2006