Another week, another racist onslaught against Muslims

Posted on by Eddie Truman

Another week, another racist onslaught against Muslims

By Eddie Truman

“Ban The Veil” screamed the Daily Express, in Glasgow Imam Shamsuddin is subject to a violent assault, in Liverpool a Muslim woman has a veil ripped from her face by a man shouting racist abuse, in Falkirk a mosque was deliberately set ablaze.

The cause of this renewed wave of attacks on the Muslim community?

Home Secretary Jack Straw’s political ambitions. Such is the all pervading climate of Islamophobia, it is now regarded as a political badge of honour to outbid your political rivals in being seen to be racist towards Muslims.

So now we have a situation in which Labour Party, yes Labour Party, ministers are falling over themselves to match the rhetoric of the British National Party. Incredibly, Race Relations minister, yes you read that right, Phil Woolas, joined the row over the teaching assistant suspended for wearing a veil by demanding that she be sacked.

Continue reading →

‘Why these “leaders” are a pain in the burkas’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“People are sick to death with pussy-footing around Muslim sensibilities and fed up with stories about veils, crucifixes and terrorist sympathisers having more rights than the average Joe.

“Last week I said let’s treat Muslims the same as every other Brit and I am delighted to see that at last some politicians are waking up, smelling the coffee and realising that I am right. It’s great that Race Minister Phil Woolas has finally discovered a backbone and told the Dewsbury Dalek that she either lifts the veil or picks up her P45. David Davis from the Tories is also right to warn Muslim leaders that they are ‘creating apartheid by shutting themselves off’.

“Now a new poll this weekend shows clearly that 57 per cent of voters want Muslims to do more to fit in. But still the so-called Muslim leaders don’t get it, do they? Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council Of Britain, says: ‘No group in Britain has been as systematically vilified in recent years in the media as British Muslims’.

“Oh, Inayat, please put a sock in it will you, mate. Look, no group in Britain has been such a pain in the burka as some of the Muslims in recent years and no group has contained elements that wanted to blow themselves and the rest of us up. The problem lies with your community and their failure to integrate, not with the majority population. The sooner you realise that and cease celebrating your victimhood and stop bleating about Islamophobia, the better for all of us.”

Jon Gaunt in The Sun, 17 October 2006

Continue reading →

Universities urged to spy on Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lecturers and university staff across Britain are to be asked to spy on “Asian-looking” and Muslim students they suspect of involvement in Islamic extremism and supporting terrorist violence, the Guardian has learned.

They will be told to inform on students to special branch because the government believes campuses have become “fertile recruiting grounds” for extremists.

The Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centres of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to “collaborating with the ‘secret police'”. It says there will be “concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (eg Muslims)”.

Wakkas Khan, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, said: “It sounds to me to be potentially the widest infringement of the rights of Muslim students that there ever has been in this country. It is clearly targeting Muslim students and treating them to a higher level of suspicion and scrutiny. It sounds like you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent.”

Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students, said: “They are going to treat everyone Muslim with suspicion on the basis of their faith. It’s bearing on the side of McCarthyism.”

Guardian, 16 October 2006

Labour demonising Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Labour peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, has accused the Government of sustaining “a constant theme of demonising” the Muslim community. Lord Ahmed told BBC Radio 4’s ‘Sunday’ programme that it had become fashionable amongst ministers to “have a go at the Muslims”.

Criticising the way the Government treats Muslims in the UK, Lord Ahmed argued: “If you look at every bit of rhetoric that has been coming out of the Government departments and very senior people it has been sort of targeting at the Muslim community leadership. That has opened up a way for the neocons, the right wing people who have been attacking the Muslims. Islamophobia has become a contemporary form of racism.”

Asked whether he was accusing the Government of putting out a coordinated plan to demonise Muslims, Lord Ahmed responded: “Well it seems like that. The Prime Minister talked about the Muslim leadership not doing enough when 100 of us were working throughout the whole year – those of us involved with the 7/7 inquiries – all of us together worked with the Government. That is why we made 64 recommendations and how many did the Government implement? Well I think there is only probably one, or one and a half.”

Lord Nazir insisted the Muslim community was working hard to stem the fermentation of extremism within localities.

Yet he was less complimentary of governmental efforts, as he rhetorically stated: “What has the Government done in terms of parallel communities, deprivation, ghettos that exist with the Muslim communities? There is a desperate need for economic regeneration and also economic and financial help in those communities so they can also enjoy the wealth of our nation.”

His comments come on the back of the row sparked by Jack Straw who last week revealed he asks Muslim women attending his surgery to remove the full-face veil.

Continue reading →

Mad Mel fights for ‘cultural survival’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmelMelanie Phillips subjects us to yet another episode of her paranoid “Eurabia” ravings, according to which 1.6 million British Muslims are engaged in the “Islamicisation” of a country with a total population of 60 million:

“The Christian values that once defined national identity have simply collapsed, creating a cultural vacuum which Islam – Britain’s fastest-growing and most assertive religion – is busily filling.

“Those who defend the Muslim veil are grossly misreading the situation. It is not some picturesque religious garment equivalent to the often curious attire worn by members of other religions. It is associated instead with the most extreme version of Islam, which holds that Islamic values must take precedence over the secular state. Only a small minority of British Muslim women choose to wear this veil. But unlike other religious attire, it is thus inherently separatist and perceived by some as intimidatory. That is why it is unacceptable.

“Belatedly, there seems to be a dawning recognition in Government of the extreme danger into which British society has been placed both by the doctrine of multiculturalism, which holds that upholding majority values is somehow illegitimate, and by the official policy of appeasing Islamic extremism. Hence Mr Woolas’s remarks, the show of ministerial support for Jack Straw, and the threat last week made by Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly to withhold funding from Muslim institutions that do not combat extremism….

“This is not about prejudice or discrimination. It is about cultural survival.”

Daily Mail, 16 October

The BNP and BA

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It is now becoming a daily event to report yet another skirmish in the clash of civilisations, another casualty in the war between (on one side) Islamic intolerance, their collaborators in the liberal-leftist ruling ‘elite’ who want to promote multiculturalism or post-multicultural integration and the forces of tradition, democracy, nationhood and sovereignty on the other.”

Fascists offer their take on the BA crucifix row.

BNP news article, 15 October 2006

‘The veil is banned in hospitals’ (well, one hospital)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Veil is Banned“The backlash against the veil grew yesterday as it was banned from hospitals. Muslim medical students were barred from wearing it when they talk to hospital patients. The move was ordered to ‘help to aid good communications’ between Muslim medical students, their colleagues and patients. Details of the purge of faceless medics surfaced as the nationwide storm about Islamic veils continued….

“The bar on a full-face veil was ordered at Birmingham University school of medicine. Chiefs decided that Islamic women can cover their faces in lectures and around campus but not in the ‘clinical environments’ of hospital buildings and GPs’ surgeries. Its women Muslim students must show their faces if they are talking to patients in hospital or surgery or if they are in meetings with other medical staff…. Only in the sterile surroundings of an operating theatre can they cover their faces – with regulation surgical masks.”

Daily Express, 16 October 2006

Fascists back ministers over Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP demonstration“New Labour ministers are scrambling over one another to become number one hate figure amongst the Muslim community, leaving BNP spokesmen trailing, by a series of statements which show that some of our rulers are capable of speaking the truth and acknowledging commonsense after all.

“For years the BNP has been warning of the threat of militant Islam to the British way of life and the rapid pace of Islamification following concession after concession from public bodies, government agencies and private businesses, these concessions being made all in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘understanding’ in a multicultural society. For those warnings BNP spokesmen and women were condemned as ‘racist’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘bigoted’, ‘intolerant’ and any epithet media pundits chose to use in order to end the debate about the presence of Islam in this country.

“The Crown Prosecution Service went one further and in a stitch up involving the BBC and West Yorkshire Police BNP leader Nick Griffin was arrested in December 2004 and charged with several counts of using language which might be likely to incite racial hatred. His ‘crime’; at two private BNP meetings in West Yorkshire he called Islam ‘a vicious wicked faith’…. Mr. Griffin’s warning now seems a distant echo compared to the repeated calls in recent days from government ministers for Muslims to start adapting to our British way of life.”

BNP news article, 15 October 2006

Selective blindness

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“London Mayor Ken Livingstone put his finger on a huge problem when he noted that, although there are a mere couple of hundred ‘potentially violent’ Muslims in London, they are getting far more than their fair share of headlines and other groups, with extreme right-wing views, are being virtually ignored in the national press.

“The mayor is certainly correct in his assessment of the emphasis in the press, but that is not the whole story by a long way. It is true that the BBC and most of the national daily papers have descended into the pit of sensationalism and are now verging on racism in their overemphasis on any story involving Muslims, veils and anything that can be used to justify this government’s extremist and rabid crusade against what it sees as the unacceptable face of Islam, whether veiled or not.

“However, this is not a one-way traffic. The hysteria that the press is apparently attempting to stir up is being fuelled and fed by Labour politicians who should know a damn sight better.”

Editorial in Morning Star, 16 October 2006

Let’s ban difference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Jack Straw has taken a bit of a pounding lately after calling on Muslim women to scrap the veil on the grounds that it is a ‘visible sign of separation and difference’. I think that this criticism is unfair. It’s not as though he whipped up anti-Muslim hysteria or anyone got hurt.”

“Harry Perkins” sarcastically demolishes Straw.

Reclaim Labour, 16 October 2006