Urgent action needed to save Babar Ahmad from extradition under unfair laws. Lobby your MP to support crucial amendments to extradition arrangements with the U.S.
Muslims are waging civil war against us, claims police union
“Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared ‘intifada’ against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day. As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were ‘in a state of civil war’ with Muslims in the most depressed ‘banlieue’ estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.”
Straw’s veil comments spark anger
Jack Straw, the ex-foreign secretary, has angered Muslim groups by suggesting women who wear veils can make relations between communities more difficult. The Blackburn MP says the veil is a “visible statement of separation and of difference” and he asks women visiting his surgery to consider removing it.
The remarks attracted an angry response from some organisations representing Muslims.
It was “astonishing” that Mr Straw chose to “selectively discriminate on the basis of religion”, said Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission. Halima Hussain, from civil liberties group the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, asked BBC News 24: “Who is Jack Straw to comment on negative symbols within a religion that is not his own?” Rajnaara Akhtar, who chairs the organisation Protect-Hijab, suggested the “appalling” comments showed “a deep lack of understanding”.
See also “Straw in plea to Muslim women: Take off your veils”, Lancashire Telegraph, 5 October 2006
And Jack Straw, “I want to unveil my views on an important issue”, Lancashire Telegraph, 5 October 2006
Met chief orders inquiry into Muslim PC embassy row
The media are trying to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment over the issue of Alexander Omar Basha, a Muslim police officer guarding the Israeli embassy in London who asked to be transferred to another post during Israel’s war on Lebanon, where he has relatives.
It’s not often this site has reason to endorse the views of a Tory member of the London Assembly, but we note that Richard Barnes blames senior officers rather than PC Basha. The Evening Standard quotes him as saying: “I think it was crass management in the first place. They should have recognised there could have been a problem and not suggested this officer be posted at this embassy.”
Another member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Peter Herbert, has described the row as a “ridiculous fuss about nothing”. He added: “From a security point of view, the Met would be seriously criticised if this guy has relatives in Lebanon and his picture was used around the world to demonstrate the irony about having a Muslim defending the Israeli embassy in the UK.”
Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said just one two-hour slot outside the embassy had been affected. The officer had not refused to do duties and had made a simple request which it was “fairly sensible” to grant, Mr Smyth said.
Postscript: It turns out that PC Basha was never posted to the Israeli embassy in the first place, according to a statement by Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson.
‘Ban Muslim ghettos, says Cameron’
David Cameron today vowed to break up Muslim ghettos in Britain’s cities. In the most frank comments on the issue by a major party leader, he used his keynote party conference speech to say Britain had made an error by allowing ghettos to develop.
“It worries me that we have allowed communities to grow up which live ‘parallel lives’,” he said in an extract of today’s speech obtained in advance by the Evening Standard. “Communities where people from different backgrounds never meet, never talk, never go into each others’ homes,” said the Tory leader.
He said migrants should learn English because contact between people would overcome differences and “the most basic contact comes from talking to each other”. Mr Cameron said that children should be taught “the core components of British identity – our history, our language, our institutions”.
He went on: “We need to have contact. In many of our towns and cities, we have allowed ghettoes to develop. Whole neighbourhoods cut off from the rest of society. Immigrant families who only ever meet people with the same country of origin. We need to find ways to avoid this.”
Evening Standard, 4 October 2006
Significant that, of all the issues dealt with in Cameron’s speech, this is the one the Standard has seized on and advertised with a banner headline.
Has the West been silenced by Islam?
Paul Vallely offers a reasoned assessment.
See also the leader in the same issue – “Beware loose talk about a clash of civilisations“.
Islamic jihad, the Evil Empire and the appeasers
“I’ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. His chapter on ‘Soviet Myths and the Western Mind’ is particularly fascinating, and ripe with parallels to our own battles today against Islamic jihad. As Conquest documents, many Western intellectuals and academics were delusional about the reality of the communist threat. For a host of reasons… many professors, pundits, politicians, and religious leaders refused to believe that Soviet leaders meant what they said about revolution and subversion…. Thus throughout the Cold War the Western resolve to resist Soviet expansionism was undercut by ‘peace’ movements, nuclear disarmament movements, calls for détente and ‘dialogue’, and claims of moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union….
“Alas the lesson has not been learned. As we fight what Norman Podhoretz calls World War IV, the same refusal to take seriously the motives of the enemy, and the same bad Western habit of indulging our own superstitions at the expense of a clear understanding of the enemy, are compromising our actions and policies….
“For centuries now the jihadists have been telling us that they hate the infidel West because it stands in the way of fulfilling Allah’s mandate ‘to fight all men until they say “There is no god but Allah”.’ … Despite this centuries-long, consistent expression of jihadist doctrine, many in the West continue to dismiss it as an aberration or a deformation of Islam, and to look for other economic or political causes.
“Just as Sovietophiles during the Cold War dismissed Soviet expansionism as an understandable response to Western aggression or a traditional Russian anxiety over its long western border, so too today jihadist aggression is waved away as a natural reaction to neo-colonialist sins or autocrats at home or lack of economic development or even sexual frustration – indeed, anything and everything except what the jihadists plainly tell us is motivating them, and what millions of Muslims around the world who support the jihadists clearly understand to be the spiritual imperatives for jihadist violence.”
Bruce S. Thornton at the Victor Davis Hanson website, 4 October 2006
French philosophy teacher in hiding after attack on Islam
A French philosophy teacher yesterday entered his third week in hiding after writing a newspaper comment piece calling the prophet Muhammad a merciless warlord and mass-murderer.
Robert Redeker, 52, who teaches at a suburban Toulouse high school, this week won the support of famous French intellectuals including the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who warned that death threats against him were an attack on freedom of speech akin to the persecution of Salman Rushdie.
The teacher, whose latest book, Depression and Philosophy, is about to be published, does not shy away from controversy. A member of the board of Les Temps Modernes, a review founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, he criticised French pacifists at the start of the Iraq war.
In a comment piece in Le Figaro on September 19, he said Muhammad was “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist”. He called the Qur’an “a book of incredible violence” and contrasted what he said were Christianity’s peaceful roots and Islam’s violent ones, adding: “Jesus is a master of love, Muhammad a master of hate.”
The case has become a political issue. Philippe de Villiers, head of the far-right Movement for France party, suggested that President Jacques Chirac should shelter Mr Redeker at the Elysée Palace.
Erdoğan: Islamophobia a ‘crime against humanity’
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in an interview on Monday with The Washington Post, scolded those who link Islam to the terrorism of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that perpetrate violence in the name of Islam. “The coinage of such terms as ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamo-fascism’, these have injured the Muslim people in the world, and it is best to avoid such characterizations,” Erdoğan said.
Asked whether he planned to communicate that to U.S. President George W. Bush, who frequently invokes such phrases in speeches, he said he has in the past. “In the same way as we consider anti-Semitism a crime against humanity”, he said, “Islamo-phobia is also a crime against humanity.”
Turkish Daily News, 4 October 2006
See also Washington Post, 3 October 2006
College investigates after Qur’an found in toilet
A lower Manhattan university is investigating how a paperback copy of the Quran from the campus library ended up in a public toilet, school officials said Tuesday.
The discovery at Pace University was among three separate incidents in the past two weeks involving vandalism with racial or religious overtones. In the other two, racial slurs were scrawled on a student’s car parked at a satellite campus in Westchester County and on a bathroom wall at the downtown campus.
Associated Press, 3 October 2006
Update: See “CAIR-NY takes part in Pace U mtg on Quran desecration”, CAIR press release, 6 October 2006