A pig’s head was found dumped outside a mosque in south Wales hours before the holy festival of Ramadan began, police have said. It was discovered outside the Jamia Mosque in Newport at 2230 BST on Saturday, 23 September. Gwent Police were called to the scene and have begun a hate crime inquiry to identify the culprit in what is being seen as “premeditated” attack.
See also WalesOnline, 30 September 2006
“We will not be browbeaten by bullies,” Home Secretary John Reid told Labour conference, vowing to have the “courage and character to stand shoulder to shoulder” with Britain’s Muslim communities to stand up to “extremist bullies.”
Taking his cue from Tony Blair, he posed new Labour as a kindly knight in shining armour prepared to defend Muslims against the evil in their midst.
Like the Prime Minister – but unlike the security services in the US and Britain – he makes no link between the danger of domestic terrorism and the blood-soaked state terrorism launched by Washington and London against Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both Mr Blair and George W Bush claim that incidences of terrorism across the globe break out because “these people hate our way of life.”
This is childish nonsense. Even the most extreme expressions of Islamist terror justify their acts as a response to military attacks on and occupations of Muslim lands, which long predate September 11 2001.
But US Republican and new Labour neoconservatives cannot accept that global insecurity is a direct result of their own propensity for war and subjugation.
That’s why Mr Reid resorts to pompous claptrap that blames Britain’s Muslim communities for the small groups of misguided people who seek to combat state terrorism with individual terrorism.
For him and his boss, everyone who condemns imperialism’s crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine or who identifies the link between those crimes and the bombs in Britain and elsewhere is dabbling in an extremism that provides a milieu within which terrorists can thrive.
How dare they try to blame others for the mess that their policies have created?
New Labour’s belief that it has a right to define Muslims as either “moderate” or “extremist” on the basis of whether they back the government’s criminal policies is a disgrace.
It is also a confirmation that, when it comes to bullying the poor and powerless, government ministers are past masters.
Morning Star editorial, 29 September 2006
“There have been regular attacks to demonise Islam for many years, but until recent weeks, it has been expressed either in the form of gutter language by bigots, racists and extremist elements or voiced more discretely and subtly by more presentable sectors of society. Whenever political or religious leaders wanted to revile Islam they often have often used phrases like Islamic terrorists, Islamic extremists, Islamic radicals, etc. They often add such anti-Islamic provisos to say that though Islam does not teach and support terrorism, phrases like terrorists are using a ‘twisted form of Islam’ (Prime Minister, Tony Blair, after July 7 terrorist atrocities) or that terrorists subscribe to ‘a branch of Islam that condones violence’ (The Times, September 30, 2001) or ‘Muslims have to look at why their religion breeds so many violent militant strains’ (The Guardian, October 6, 2001) are deemed acceptable.
“However, in the last few months the discourse has changed and it became an open season to demonise Islam. The watershed was US President George W Bush’s intemperate language last month when he described terrorists as ‘Islamic fascists’ – provocatively evoking, comparisons between Islam and the tyrannical fascist regimes of the past, effectively demonstrating that the war against terror is in reality a war against Islam and Muslims. The new series of attacks on Islam reached new heights with the tactless comments made by Pope Benedict XVI during a visit to Germany earlier this month. Previously it had been inconceivable that the spiritual head of one billion Catholics could make such an outspoken attack on Islam.”
“Reid is keen to dismiss the idea of a clash of cultures because it undermines everything he believes; he ignores the evidence and refuses to recognise that it’s happening now. And he attempts to explain it away by arguing that the ‘meaning of Islam has been hijacked by extremists who are using it to sustain a violent and indiscriminate war’. According to Reid the people who bomb, threaten, and kill are not Muslims ‘in the true sense of the word’….
“That the Home Secretary tried to enlist Britain’s Muslim communities to do more to combat the extremists in their midst is an indication of his lack of understanding of the situation. He makes the mistake of believing that everyone aspires to see the world through the liberal looking glass. It is self delusion of the most dangerous kind. Muslims view the world according to the dictates of their own beliefs; their truths and realities are not the truths and realities of Western middle class liberals. All Muslims have as their long term aim the subjugation of the world under an Islamic theocracy – ‘Muslims do not need British values. We believe Islam is superior, we believe Islam will be implemented one day’.
“Reid and the rest of the utterly gutless creatures that constitute the liberal establishment are trying to appease themselves out of a predicament with Islam that is entirely of their own making. They refuse to recognise that to the Muslim mindset appeasement and diplomacy as signs of weakness to be taken advantage of; Reid’s interventions are encouraging the very clash of cultures that they are designed to deny.”
Joe Priestley on the BNP website, 28 September 2006
“I never thought this could be possible, but I agree with Angela Merkel. The Deutsche Oper should not have suspended its staging of Mozart’s Idomeneo because of the scene depicting the severed heads of the Buddha, the Greco-Roman god Neptune, Jesus, and prophet Muhammad (interestingly, Moses’ head was missing from the gruesome procession).
“When the controversial Danish cartoons were published last year, I saw them as a symptom of rising Islamophobia in Europe, particularly as they appeared in a rightwing paper under a rightwing Danish government notorious for its hostility to religious and ethnic minorities. And when a few weeks ago the Pope quoted a Byzantine emperor equating the Muslim faith with evil and inhumanity, I wrote that this was unacceptable coming from the representative of the largest religious institution in the world.
“Things are different this time. What we are dealing with is a creative artistic interpretation of the theme of the eclipse of the sacred…. So long as a creative and artistic work does not stigmatise a specific group, ethnic or religious, or seek to vilify it, it remains perfectly legitimate and within the parameters of free thought and expression. We need to draw a clear line between free thought and expression and the stirring of hatred against other races and religions. Mozart’s Idomeneo should not have provoked this noise and controversy, and should not have been cancelled.”
Soumaya Ghannoushi at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 28 September 2006
The Campaign on American-Islamic Relations is encouraging its supporters to respond to a piece by Frank Lasee, a Republican representative on the Wisconsin State Assembly, who wrote:
“The Pope’s comments were right on the mark. Islam is NOT a religion of peace. It doesn’t have a peaceful history of co-existence. And has created empires whose main goal was to convert or destroy all non-believers. Islam IS a religion intent on conquering the world. This global domination is preached and encouraged by Imams in mosques. And it is a central theme in the Koran, the Islamic Bible, and is an important part of their history.”
“Radical Muslims illogically promote the idea that the war against terrorism is a war against Islam. Many mosques seethe as hotbeds of anti-American hatred, yet we hear little opposition from the faithful – even the ‘home-grown’. The same is true in European counties where Islamic communities spawn violence. Certainly, not all Muslims follow this mantra, but where is the outcry in opposition to the militant fanatics in their midst?
“Islam cannot be discussed by non-Muslims without insult being inferred. Their standards regarding freedom of speech differ greatly from Westerners. Islamic law stipulates Muslims can peacefully co-exist with Christians and Jews only if the non-Muslims acknowledge their second-class status; agreeing to such harsh restrictions in numerous areas of society, as the inability to hold authority over Muslims, being subject to imposition of extra taxes, and not insulting Muhammad. A perceived slur, even unintentional, results in the revocation of the non-Muslim’s conditional co-existence.
“We are in the midst of a clash of civilizations, in which one side desires supreme dominance. As Muslim populations swell throughout Europe and the United States, this crisis will exacerbate. As long as parents find pride in their children’s martyrdom as human missiles, with no sane voices calling for a halt to the madness, implications for the future are terrifying. It is inconceivable that Christians or Jews would behead those with whom they disagree, or celebrate their holiest of days with a call for the execution of the religious leader of another faith; though such actions are commonplace for practitioners of the ‘religion of peace’.
“If we care about our progeny, we must address this malevolence with swift certainty. Otherwise, how do we answer the generations we leave exposed to irrational fundamentalist zealots posing as credible religious agents?”
Carol Turoff, in the Conservative Voice, 28 September 2006
“The wide gap between U.S. President George W. Bush’s words and deeds vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims doomed to failure his speech at the United Nations on September 19, which could neither appease Muslims nor pacify the ever growing Islamophobia.
“President Bush has denied that the West is engaged in a war against Islam as a ‘false propaganda’, but confirmed his country’s determination to carry on with its ‘war on terror’ and its ‘great ideological struggle’ at the start of the 21st century exclusively against Muslims and Muslim countries.
“Bush is also on record as saying that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and praising Islam’s ‘commitment to religious freedom’, statements that were criticized by the popular U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson.
“These rare expressions of respect to Islam would have been welcomed by Muslims were they not swept to utter oblivion in the collective memory of the American public by his incessantly flowing anti-Muslim terminology: Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, Islamic extremism and extremists, Islamic or Islamist terrorism and terrorists, radical Islamists or Islamist and Islamic radicals, etc.
“His September 19 speech was almost exclusively confined to the Middle East, an overwhelmingly Muslim region. The absence of even a reference to the North Korean pillar of his so-called ‘axis of evil’ was revealing enough that his WWIII ‘on terror’ has shrunk to focus exclusively on the Muslim Middle East.”
Nicola Nasser at Global Research, 28 September 2006
Following on from the editorial in yesterday’s issue, the Evening Standard has published an article by Jonathan Freedland on the proposed West Ham mosque.
Freedland takes a “balanced” view of the issue, condemning “knee-jerk” responses both from the mosque’s opponents, who believe it will become an al-Qaida training camp, and equally from “the planned mosque’s defenders, poised to brand any opponent of the project as an Islamophobe”. It is difficult to believe that, in the event of a proposed new synagogue provoking a similar outburst of hostility towards the Jewish community and its beliefs, Freedland would be quite so ready to place an equals sign between the anti-semitic opponents of the plan and those who took a stand against them.
Freedland tells us that Tablighi Jamaat, the organisation behind the scheme, is “aligned with the Saudi strain of Wahhabi Islam”, when the movement in fact originates in the Deobandist school of Islam from South Asia. It is pretty clear that he has carried out no research whatsoever into the subject.
Freedland recycles the by now well-worn quote attributed to French intelligence that Tablighi Jamaat is an “antechamber of fundamentalism”, whatever that means. He also claims that Tablighi’s “roll call of alumni is damningly said to include the 7 July bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer”. Given that Tablighi has millions of adherents, how can it be “damning” that out of all these millions a couple of terrorists should have once been involved with the movement? Freedland goes on to say that Tablighi’s name has been “linked” (he doesn’t say how) to Richard Reid and Zacarius Moussaoui, and concludes: “Small wonder that locals in West Ham are wary of a Tablighi Jamaat megapolis on their doorstep.” To which we can only reply – small wonder that locals should hold such views if they share Freedland’s ignorance and prejudice.
Freedland’s article contains the obligatory quote from the discredited self-styled expert on Islam, Patrick Sookhdeo, whose claim that the mosque would lead inevitably to “a completely Muslim community … a parallel society”, Freedland asserts, “should not be dismissed out of hand”. Given that Sookhdeo is a forceful proponent of a paranoid fantasy about Christian culture being submerged beneath an alien tide of Muslims, I would suggest that this is exactly how Sookhdeo’s opinions should be treated.
As Sookhdeo told the Sunday Telegraph in a notorious interview earlier this year: ” … in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law. It is already starting to happen and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue.”
And this is the man whose views are given credence by Freedland, who argues that the very size of the proposed centre “could make Sookhdeo’s fears come true”.
Freedland goes on to lecture those dealing with the planning application that “they should insist it is built to be open and accessible to everybody, including those non-Muslims who would never dream of going inside to pray.”
Freedland is evidently oblivious to the fact that Mangera Yvars, the architects responsible for designing the Markaz, state quite explicitly that it is intended as “a place for Muslims and Non Muslims to interact, debate and promote a greater understanding between ideology, faith and humanity”. Abdul Kalik, project director for Tablighi Jamaat, was quoted in Andrew Gilligan’s article (Evening Standard , 17 July) as saying that the centre “would welcome people of all faiths”. The Standard (25 July) published a letter from Ali Mangera of Mangera Yvars responding to Gilligan’s piece, which again emphasised that: “Our aim is to create dialogue between peoples and provide an inclusive centre open to all faiths….”
Not only has Freedland failed to research his article properly, but it appears that he doesn’t even read the paper he writes for.
Freedland concludes by arguing that the Mayor of London should have the final say over whether the scheme goes ahead and advises that “he should put aside the multiple prejudices this question has stirred up”. Freedland might set an example by putting aside a few of his own.
Under cover of support for “local democracy” an editorial in the Evening Standard continues the hysterical Islamophobic campaign against the proposed new mosque in Newham: “Britain is not a Muslim country. There are already ample places for its Muslim population to gather and pray…. London does not need this mosque.”