Manchester imam ‘backs execution of gays’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A row has blown up over a claim a prominent Manchester Muslim has defended the execution of sexually-active gay people as ‘justified’. Arshad Misbahi, a junior Imam at the city’s Central Mosque is alleged to have confirmed that it is an acceptable punishment in Iraq and Iran. His comments are said to have been made to psychotherapist Dr John Casson who is researching the persecution of gays in Islamic states. But they have been condemned as ‘encouraging conflict between the area’s large gay and Muslim communities’.”

Manchester Evening News, 26 October 2006

Predictably, this “story” originates with Outrage! – who dedicate most of their efforts these days to encouraging conflict between the gay and Muslim communities. Outrage! issued a press release a week ago, based on alleged remarks made by Arshad Misbahi in a private conversation initiated by Casson. This was then taken up by Pink News and Gay.com. As Massoud Shadjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission told BBC News: “Just one man talking to another becomes an issue, Muslims are being put under a magnifying glass. I think that this is part of demonising Muslims.”

Why this fear of Islam?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It’s fashionable nowadays for Britain’s politicians to complain about immigrants who refuse to assimilate. The more right wing among them infer that the presence of a large Muslim community threatens ‘our way of life’ without going into details as to what that way of life actually entails. Not surprising when Britain has become such an eclectic multiethnic melting pot. There no longer is a stereotypical British way of life other than in the pages of an Agatha Christie or a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

“It’s interesting, too, that those who feel intimidated or threatened in the presence of a woman wearing the veil don’t appear to be concerned by the sight of a nun’s habit, Hassidic garb or side locks, Sikh turbans or the shaved heads and orange robes of Hare Krishna devotees.

“Moreover the current ministerial focus on Muslim assimilation is having the opposite effect. Moderate Muslim leaders resented being told by John Reid, the home secretary, to monitor their children for signs of hate. And reports state that since Jack Straw’s comments on the veil, more and more young women are adopting the niqab in protest – a predictable reaction.

“Indeed, the British government appears to be going out of its way to foment an enemy within in keeping with Blair’s struggle against what he calls an evil ideology. It’s no wonder that British Muslims are beginning to feel demonized and marginalized when their own government calls for mosques, faith schools, community centers and Islamic bookshops to be monitored.

“If British Muslims tend to live in close proximity to one another it isn’t the only community to do so. London’s Stamford Hill was and is more reminiscent of Mea Sharim in Israel than a British city suburb. Brick Lane resembles a corner of Bangladesh while Soho is predominantly Chinese. These ghettoized areas aren’t new. They’ve existed for more than half-a-century in some cases and nobody seemed to mind.

“The governmental message is further having an effect on the attitudes of ordinary people. Reports of Muslim women wearing the hijab being insulted in the streets or suffering the indignity of having their head scarves pulled from their heads are rife. In short, Muslims have become fair game for racists and bigots.”

Linda Heard in iViews, 25 October 2006

‘My years in a habit taught me the paradox of veiling’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Karen Armstrong (3)“I spent seven years of my girlhood heavily veiled – not in a Muslim niqab but in a nun’s habit. We wore voluminous black robes, large rosaries and crucifixes, and an elaborate headdress: you could see a small slice of my face from the front, but from the side I was entirely shielded from view. We must have looked very odd indeed, walking dourly through the colourful carnival of London during the swinging 60s, but nobody ever asked us to exchange our habits for more conventional attire.

“When my order was founded in the 1840s, not long after Catholic emancipation, people were so enraged to see nuns brazenly wearing their habits in the streets that they pelted them with rotten fruit and horse dung. Nuns had been banned from Britain since the Reformation; their return seemed to herald the resurgence of barbarism. Two hundred and fifty years after the gunpowder plot, Catholicism was still feared as unassimilable, irredeemably alien to the British ethos, fanatically opposed to democracy and freedom, and a fifth column allied to dangerous enemies abroad.

“Today the veiled Muslim woman appears to symbolise the perceived Islamic threat, as nuns once epitomised the evils of popery.”

Karen Armstrong in the Guardian, 26 October 2006

The ‘long Eurabian night’ closes in on us

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SteynBill Murray summarises Mark Steyn’s paranoid ravings about the Islamisation of Europe in his new book America Alone:

“Birthrates in many European countries fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1 for every woman, compared to regions of the Muslim world where women typically bear seven children each. The result, Steyn posits, will be a dramatic shift in global power in the coming decades, with the chief beneficiary being radical Islam. ‘How bad is it going to get in Europe?” he asks. ‘As bad as it can get, as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it.’

“… Steyn’s choicest attacks are reserved for a Europe run by closeted elites. For the past 60 years, he insists, they have sustained an environment of weak social contracts where the relationship between rights and responsibilities for a European and his or her government ‘is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship’. A European welfare state that promotes dependency and extended adolescence is, in Steyn’s eyes, as grave a cultural sin as can be committed, leading to divided communities, large-scale violence and a wholesale replacement of Europe’s dominant culture.”

Bloomberg.com, 26 October 2006

‘Fury as BA says it would allow Muslim veil but not cross’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“British Airways has been accused of appalling double standards after admitting Muslim staff may be allowed to wear veils – just weeks after it sent a Christian home for wearing a cross. Check-in worker Nadia Eweida has been on unpaid leave for a month after the airline banned her from wearing her tiny cross on a necklace over her uniform…. She demanded to know why she had to hide her faith from the public when Muslims and Sikhs can openly display theirs by wearing hijabs, turbans, and possibly a full-face veil.”

Daily Mail, 26 October 2006

Of course, the answer is that Muslim women who wear the hijab or Sikh men who wear a turban do so because they believe it is a requirement of their faith. So far as I know, no Christian denomination requires its adherents to display a cross.

Nevertheless, BA’s stupidity in denying Nadia Eweida the right to do so has simply opened the door for racists in the right-wing press to take up the refrain about favours being granted to minority ethno-religious groups that are supposedly denied to the white Christian majority.

Media ‘bullied’ into not discussing Islam, according to Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmel“The head of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, was one of the first in the governing and quangocrat class to sound the alarm over multiculturalism some fourteen months ago when he warned that Britain was ‘sleepwalking to segregation’. He has also said that mass immigration is changing the face of Britain and that Muslims wanting to live under Sharia law should leave the UK….

“But now, Phillips’s position appears to have shifted. Last weekend, he said he was disconcerted that the debate about the veil seemed ‘to have turned into something really quite ugly’ and descended into ‘bullying’. He told BBC One’s ‘Sunday AM’ show: ‘I, this morning, really would not want to be a British Muslim because what should have been a proper conversation between all kinds of British people seems to have turned into a trial of one particular community, and that cannot be right.’

“Ugly? Bullying? ‘A trial of one particular community’? Surely, it’s those who draw attention to Islamic extremism who are mostly on the receiving end of ugly bullying. Any mention of ‘Islamic terrorism’ produces instantaneous denunciation as an ‘Islamophobe’, racist, bigot and all the rest of it – backed up by the implicit threat of violence, a state of affairs which started with the fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie. As a result, the British media are now so cowed and intimidated they refuse to publish much vital discussion about Islam, to the terrible detriment of free and vital debate.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 24 October 2006

Regular readers of this site will of course be well aware of how “intimidated” the British media has been when it comes to attacking Islam and Muslims, particularly in recent weeks during the outburst of racist hysteria provoked and legitimised by Jack Straw’s comments on the veil.

Rowan Williams capitulates to Islamist reaction, Leo McKinstry claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Church of England used to be known as the Tory Party at prayer. Today it is the liberal establishment on its knees. Terrified of giving offence to any minority cause, obsessed with Marxist notions about race and wealth, its leadership has all but given up as a serious force for Christianity.

“Rather than standing up for the faith that built this country, Anglican leaders prattle on about Islamophobia and multiculturalism in a spirit of hand-wringing self-abasement, always demanding that our national traditions be subverted or abandoned in order to accommodate other religions, especially Islam…. Despite the threat of Muslim terrorism since 9/11, which is primarily directed against Judaeo-Christian civilisation, Dr Williams has consistently refused to attack Islamic fundamentalism….”

Leo McKinstry has a go at the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Daily Express, 25 October 2006

McKinstry adds: “The veil is a mark of oppression against women, a reflection of misogynistic determination to keep them isolated from the mainstream of society, as senior Labour figures like Jack Straw and Harriet Harman have pointed out, showing far more moral bravery than Dr Williams has ever done.”

Unite against Islamophobia in Glasgow

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Glasgow demoAround 300 people rallied in Glasgow’s George Square last Saturday to unite against Islamophobia and protest at the wave of racist attacks on Muslims since Jack Straw’s comments about the veil earlier this month.

Glasgow Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain organised the protest at short notice following a brutal assault on an imam at a Glasgow mosque.

It attracted a broad turnout, including many young Muslim women and families. Syma Ismail and her friend Nailah Din are students at Dundee University who had travelled down for the protest. “We’re standing against Islamophobia,” said Nailah. “Jack Straw started this. We’re supposed to have freedom of speech and freedom of expression. If Muslim women want to wear the veil, why shouldn’t they be allowed to?”

Many non-Muslims were also at the rally to show solidarity. “The issue is racism,” said Barrie Levine from Scottish Jews for a Just Peace. “It is important that Muslims and non-Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder against Islamophobia.”

Socialist Worker, 28 October 2006

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Birmingham University dons apologised to the Muslim students who were elected to the students union but prevented from taking office. The 1990 Trust were among those supporting the campaign.

The majority of students voted into leadership positions in 2004 were victims of religious discrimination after the university annulled the vote. All 14 Muslims students were accused of benefiting from election fraud, allegations the university now admit were untrue.

The university made the apology as part of a legal settlement. The higher education institution accepted that there had been no slating or intimidation ahead of the vote.

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