Demonising Muslims must stop, says CPB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Communist Party of Britain national membership organiser Geoff Bottoms told the party’s political committee on Wednesday evening that “new Labour ministers should stop demonising Britain’s Muslims.” He said that, instead, ministers should “start addressing the real causes of terrorism, which are rooted in the policies of British and US imperialism.”

Mr Bottoms added: “Jack Straw’s criticism of the full veil worn by a small minority of Muslims has nothing to do with women’s liberation, while Ruth Kelly’s threat to excommunicate Muslim organisations which criticise government foreign policy will do nothing to foster community cohesion,” adding that “her approach befits her membership of the ultra-right-wing Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei.”

The committee welcomed the stand taken by university vice-chancellors and students and lecturers’ unions against government plans for them to inform on Muslim and “Asian-looking” students to Special Branch.

Morning Star, 20 October 2006

Muslim staff banned from Paris airport

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Four Muslim baggage handlers are appealing against a decision to bar them from working at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

They say that the local government’s decision to revoke their security passes is evidence of anti-Muslim discrimination. A local government spokesman says the decision was based on an assessment of the terrorist risk. He denied the move was linked to the men’s religion.

Lawyers acting for the four men say that dozens of other Muslims who work at the airport have also been stripped of their security passes, leaving them unable to work.

The four men, who are of North African origin, say they were summoned by security officials for interviews concerning their employment in August. A few days later they were told that their airport passes, which gave them access to the area near runways, were being withdrawn.

A lawyer acting for the men said the baggage handlers were told they had been barred because they had “not shown that their behaviour was unlikely to violate airport security”.

As well as appealing against the local authority’s decision, the baggage handlers’ lawyers have submitted a criminal complaint for alleged discrimination against the men on the grounds that they are Muslims.

Continue reading →

Complaints of anti-terror police harassing Muslim communities

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Intelligence gathering operations by police in Tayside, aimed at preventing a future terrorist attack, have led to a deterioration in relations with Islamic communities, a leading Muslim organisation has warned.

The Muslim Association of Britain (Mab) said it had received numerous complaints over moves by Special Branch officers to contact university associations, businesses and members of the Islamic community, claiming that members of the public were being subjected to harassment.

It has now written to Tayside Police to lodge a formal complaint over the Special Branch Community Contact Unit (SBCCU), which was established in the wake of last year’s terrorist bombings in London to provide information on potential extremism.

The force has defended the measures, claiming they have led to closer community links and are likely to be taken up by other forces in Scotland.

Osama Saeed, Mab’s Scottish spokesman, said young Muslims had been approached by members of the unit and quizzed about their political views at their homes, workplaces and Islamic society meetings at Dundee and Abertay universities.

Plain-clothed officers had spoken to Muslim students at freshers stalls during the first week of university, asking them questions about their views on the conflict in Lebanon, he said: “Obviously, if people are talking about bombings or killing infidels, they would be reported to police. But it’s not clear what sort of other activities are supposed to be reported. Parents are concerned that their children are coming under the eye of the police.”

The Herald, 20 October 2006

Via Rolled Up Trousers

‘Racial abuse’ hurled at mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A man has been arrested following reports that worshippers at a mosque on Tyneside were being racially abused.

Officers were called to the west end of Newcastle after it was reported that a man was shouting racial abuse at visitors to the building. A 38-year-old was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated harassment and is currently in custody assisting police with their inquiries. An officer suffered minor injuries to his leg during the incident.

Anyone with any information or who witnessed the incident, which took place in the early hours of Thursday, is asked to contact police.

BBC News, 19 October 2006

Posted in UK

NUJ forces Daily Star to abandon anti-Muslim ‘spoof’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A staff revolt at the Daily Star prevented publication of a spoof Islamic version of the paper called the “Daily Fatwa”.

The mock-up “Daily Fatwa”, which promised a “Page 3 Burkha Babes Special” and competitions to “Burn a Flag and Win a Corsa” and “Win hooks just like Hamza’s”, was prepared to run as page 6 in Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Star, one of the stable of newspapers owned by publisher Richard Desmond. The page also included a spoof leader column under the headline “Allah is Great” but left blank save for a stamp with the word “Censored”.

But shortly before the Star was due to go to press on Tuesday evening, concerned members of the National of Journalists (NUJ) called an emergency meeting in the 9th floor canteen of Desmond’s Northern & Shell building beside the River Thames. After 25 minutes, the NUJ chapel passed a motion saying that the article was “deliberately offensive” to Muslims.

Independent, 19 October 2006

Mad Mel goes ‘behind the veil’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On the Moral Maze last night, which discussed the place of religious symbols such as the Muslim veil and the Christian cross in public life, one of our witnesses was Nai’ma B Robert, a convert to Islam who wore the niqab or full-face veil. She spoke well, although I thought naively, about how she chose to wear the niqab as an ‘act of worship’ – naively because she was unwilling to face up to the political purpose of the veil and its role as a symbol of the jihad which is used to recruit more people to the cause of Islamising society and to demoralise and intimidate its victims. That is why not just the niqab but also the hijab has been banned from public places in Turkey and Indonesia.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 19 October 2006

Feminism, imperialism and the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Muslim women who adopt the veil in Europe may simultaneously be seeking to affirm their religious identity while being determined to enter the public sphere as full and equal citizens. They are often also trying to change the cultural and political meaning of the veil in a contemporary context. For some it may be linked to patriarchal pressure, for others a symbol of identity and emancipation in a commodified and patriarchal society – and for many a response to a religious vocation. Feminist politics needs to be flexible and respond to these complexities. And for Muslim women their religion and even their gender are not the only, or the most grievous, focus of their oppression – their bodies have also been, and continue to be, a battleground for European and US imperialism.

“Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt in the late 19th century, famously justified British colonial rule by arguing that it could liberate Egyptian women from their oppressive veils…. When the US launched its war on terror in Afghanistan in 2001, George Bush glorified his aims by stating: ‘Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes … The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’ The US social anthropologists Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind have noted that the relationship between the neoconservative Bush administration and some US feminists was reciprocal and intimate….

“Those feminists who give well-meaning lectures to Muslim women on what they should think, say and wear are not in the end alone. There is a risk that their powerful female voices will inadvertently sustain another political discourse: the words and actions of an illustrious line of men who continue to justify their imperial ambitions on the bodies, often dead bodies, of Muslim women.”

Maleiha Malik in the Guardian, 19 October 2006

Anthony Glees: Internment should be a policy option

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Academics should think the unthinkable. We should not be blinkered by political correctness. People need to speak up. They shouldn’t be made to be afraid. Increasingly universities are becoming mental corsets because of over-regulation. I’ve had universities threatening legal action, vice-chancellors calling for me to be prevented from doing research. And it’s these people who claim to be for freedom of speech.

“The legal profession has taken the European Convention far too far in a way that is inappropriate in a country that’s at war. The convention is deeply flawed. It was set up in 1948 and it is not right for now. At the moment we are at war, the fact that it is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan conceals that fact. The law has been used to favour the perpetrator, not the persecuted. We need to think about how we should behave to people who consider us enemies, whether they are British citizens or people who are in Britain seeking asylum.

“Internment in the second world war is called MI5’s darkest hour, but internment was a very effective way of keeping the country safe from Nazi subversion. People say that the vast majority of those interned were Jews, and they would be the last people to act in a subversive way. In fact research shows that there were some Jews in Britain as agents of the Third Reich. Their families were in the hands of the Gestapo and they were blackmailed. And some say that internment in Northern Ireland made the situation better. Internment needs to be talked about. There shouldn’t be things that shouldn’t be considered – if they can help.

“The German equivalent of MI5 is called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Liberal democracy will be easily destroyed if we do not act against extremism. We give our enemies the weapons they need to destroy us. We need to be more mindful that there is a threshold that should not be crossed. Not everything is permissible. Wearing the niqab is saying we don’t want to be British. Forty per cent of British Muslims say they want to live under sharia law. That is unacceptable. They should go to a country with sharia law.”

Anthony Glees in the Independent, 19 October 2008

Skin-deep liberalism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Perhaps the bleakest stain in our system’s record is its turning on its least privileged of minorities, pushing it to the corner, surrounding it with suspicion, repressive measures and policies, giving free reign to bigotry and prejudice. Muslims are Britain’s poorest community, five times more likely to live in overcrowded accommodation than their fellow white Britons, four times more likely to be unemployed, twice as likely to have no qualifications, live in social rented accommodation, and suffer from ill health.

“But just as Thatcher had blamed the poor for their poverty, the trend today is to hold this new underclass responsible for its misfortunes in one of the most socially stratified, exclusionist and segregated social systems in the world. From ‘the working class character’ with its ‘laziness’ and ‘lack of motivation’, to Muslim culture and its ‘penchant for isolationism’, our system seems to excel in the creation of scapegoats.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi examines the limitations of Western liberalism.

Guardian Comment is Free, 19 October 2006