Birmingham University apologises to Muslim students

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.

Continue reading →

From demonisation to empowerment

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Livingstone and Bari“A bold attempt to shift the ‘Muslim debate’ away from media demonisation was made today. The London Mayor Ken Livingstone launched a new report aimed at dismantling barriers of discrimination faced by Muslims. Standing alongside Dr Muhammad Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, Livingstone attacked the ‘breathtaking verbiage’ being pumped out daily by the national press.

“The report made grim reading. Muslims suffer the worst education failure rates, huge barriers to employment, bad housing and chronic political under-representation. Livingstone said the real problem was not Muslims wanting to be separate, but instead unprecedented levels of discrimination preventing them from getting on in society.”

BLINK news report, 24 October 2006

See also Guardian, 24 October 2006 and  GLA press release, 24 October 2006

Yet another ‘Ban the Veil’ headline in the Express

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Schools Told Ban the VeilA city with one of the country’s largest Muslim populations is to ask schools to ban veils in the classroom.

Education leaders yesterday confirmed that they are drawing up guidelines stating that both teachers and pupils must not wear them during lessons. The school chiefs claim that veils – called niqabs – could stop teachers identifying troublesome children.

They also fear that they could even lead to health and safety problems in Bradford, where around 15 per cent of the 470,000 population are Muslim. Spokesman Anthony Mugan said: “We would advise against the wearing of veils in schools because of reasons which will be listed in new guidelines.

“These will include the problems they could cause in identifying pupils, possible problems with communication and health and safety issues. However, it is up to individual schools to make the final decision as it is with the schools’ uniform policies.”

The new guidelines are being hammered out between Bradford City Council and a private contractor, Education Bradford, which runs the West Yorkshire city’s schools.

Bradford is the neighbouring local authority to Kirklees, where teaching assistant Aishah Azmi was suspended from a school in Dewsbury for refusing to remove her veil in class.

The move comes after a Daily Express telephone poll in which more than 99 per cent of readers supported the call for Britain to follow the lead of many Muslim countries, including Turkey and Egypt, and ban the veil.

Continue reading →

Fascists warn against irresponsibility of Labour leaders’ anti-Muslim campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In the past few weeks an astonishing reversal of opinion has come from the lips of Labour MPs queuing up to attack the Muslim faith. Those who for years have courted the Muslim vote are now outdoing the BNP in raising awareness of the growing threat of Muslim to national security…. Labour is playing with fire to win back the white working class vote…. It’s a dangerous game the Labour establishment has chosen to play, one which could lead to serious disorder and bloodshed. Do Blair and Straw really want to see a civil war on the streets of West Yorkshire, Birmingham and Oldham?”

BNP news article 21 October 2006

Sun backs Trevor Phillips

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Prejudice is a worm that thrives in the dark and shrivels in the daylight. So says Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality.

“What he’s rightly saying is that the only solution to the tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims – and the bloody riots he predicts may come – is an open debate. A debate unfettered by the political correctness that stops people on either side speaking boldly about our differences – how to resolve them or live with them.

“He has a point: A poll reveals nearly three-quarters of Britons won’t speak their minds over veils in case they cause offence. Which is mainly because many Muslims over-react to the slightest criticism of their religion. Such hypersensitivity impedes progress.”

Editorial in the Sun, 23 October 2006

Veil debate ‘has fuelled far right’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Veil debate ‘has fuelled far right’

By Louise Nousratpour

Morning Star, 23 October 2006

Anti-racism campaigners welcomed Labour deputy leadership candidate Jon Cruddas’s warning on Sunday that the debate around the Muslim veil has “emboldened the far right.”

The Dagenham MP said that friends of his who live in the Muslim community felt “hunted” and that hysteria over the issue had reinforced a sense of isolation and insecurity. “I think it has had a terrible effect. It will embolden the far right, no doubt about it, and I know that for a fact locally,” Mr Cruddas warned in an interview with GMTV.

He stressed that the government must go about dealing with community segregation in a “much more systematic way” in terms of public policy about the labour market, housing and health inequalities.

“They should be the terms of debate, rather than a really dangerous bidding war about who can be so muscular around issues of minorities, asylum and immigration, because that just feeds the far right and the centre of gravity just moves off that way,” Mr Cruddas insisted.

A debate about Muslim women wearing full-face veils erupted after Cabinet Minister Jack Straw said that he asked women to remove them when they came to see him in his constituency. The Prime Minister has also branded the veils a “mark of separation.”

In contrast to Mr Cruddas’s comments, Commission for Racial Equality chairman Trevor Phillips defended Mr Straw’s right to air his views about the veil and attacked the Muslim community for turning “the most neutral of comments into yet another act of persecution.”

Continue reading →

Authoritarian currents swirl in debate on veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

 

Authoritarian currents swirl in debate on veil

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 22 October 2006

The controversy over women’s veils is the latest example of Muslim religious/cultural practices being held up to disproportionate scrutiny.

This is a reflection of the fear-driven paranoia about Muslim terrorism and, mistakenly, all Muslims. Or, it is part of a political strategy to divert attention away from the catastrophic failure of the “war on terrorism” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Israeli Occupied Territories.

It’s easier to blame a minority than confronting our complicity in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians abroad and, second, our gnawing panic that rather than curbing terrorism, we are fanning it.

It’s also hard to accept that the niqab — the garment that covers the woman’s body, including the face — is not a Muslim issue alone but rather one central to democracy.

That a majority of Muslim women do not wear the niqab, or even the hijab, the head scarf, does not nullify the right of those who do.

Otherwise, a democracy ends up emulating either tyrants (Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, or the late Shah of Iran and the late Kemal Ataturk of Turkey) who persecute hijabis, or unforgiving clerics (the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran and Saudi Arabia) who persecute non-hijabis.

The only sound democratic approach is to leave the decision to the sovereignty of the individual woman.

Those who argue that Muslim women may be under male pressure to conform are being as patronizing as the men who assume women are incapable of independent judgment even in free and democratic societies.

Some Muslim women might face social and religious pressures but we can’t know that they are subjected to any more of it than women in other religious communities. They may face less, given the lack of a central authority in Islam.

Continue reading →

Muslim family shot at in west London

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim family of four were shot at when their car was hit by a bullet while out shopping in west London, The Muslim News reports exclusively in this week’s issue of the paper.

The incident, which is believed to be the first of its kind in the latest wave of Islamophobia attacks in the UK, took place, when the family from Bosnia were loading items in their car at Denham Car Boot Sale, near Uxbridge. The local police described the shooting, which happened on October 14, as a racial and religious hate crime, but were unable to comment further.

The father of the family told The Muslim News that he was in the car at the time but that his wife and two infant children were standing outside. “I was more concerned about the children. We adults might not die from a badly aimed bullet, but the children, it could easily have killed them,” the 45-year-old father said.

The shooting comes amid a series of attacks, mainly against Muslim women, documented in The Muslim News, which have been blamed on House of Commons leader Jack Straw and other ministers making demands on Muslims, including the removal of the face veil.

The Bosnian father also criticised Straw for provoking the shooting, saying that people like him “who incite religious hatred in people are also criminals”. “You can see we are Muslims through our dress, and my wife was wearing the niqab. It is amazing how these people could have such monstrous minds and such hatred within,” he said.

Muslim News, 23 October 2006

Ignorance behind veil uproar: Ridley

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yvonne RidleyAward-winning British reporter Yvonne Ridley has blamed the ignorance of Western politicians and media for the ongoing debate about the face-veil and other misconceptions about the status of women in Islam.

“Having been on both sides of the veil, I can tell you that most Western male politicians and journalists who lament the oppression of women in the Islamic world have no idea what they are talking about,” Ridley, who reverted to Islam two years after a brief detention by Taliban, wrote in the Washington Post Sunday, October 22.

“It is with disgust and dismay that I watch here in Britain … Straw describes the Muslim niqab as an unwelcome barrier to integration,” said a mocking Ridley. “Even British government ministers Gordon Brown and John Reid have made disparaging remarks about the niqab – and they hail from across the Scottish border, where men wear skirts.”

IslamOnline, 22 October 2006

Hmm … given that George Galloway is reportedly considering standing for Respect in Scotland, I’m not sure he’ll regard that as an entirely helpful comment.

See also Washington Post, 22 October 2006