‘1 in 10 British Muslims won’t shop a terrorist’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Tens of thousands of British Muslims would NOT shop someone they believed took part in a terror attack. A shock News of the World poll today reveals almost ONE IN TEN would not tell the police if they suspected a fellow Muslim was involved in an atrocity. With a million Muslims over 16 in Britain, it suggests a staggering 90,000 would turn a blind eye. And the figure is even worse among Muslims aged between 16 and 24, with 15 per cent saying they would not tell. Our poll also shows six per cent – or 60,000 Muslims – think attacks like the July 7 bombings are justified.”

News of the World, 24 September 2006

See also Press Association, 24 September 2006

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Stations say ‘jihad’ car ads go too far

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Some Columbus radio stations have rejected as insensitive an advertisement for a car dealership that invokes Islamic references. The general manager of the dealership, though, says the promotions – which he called “tongue-in-cheek” – will air on some stations beginning next week.

In the spot, Keith Dennis of Dennis Mitsubishi talks about “launching a jihad on the automotive market.” Sales representatives “will be wearing burqas all weekend long,” the ad says. One of the vehicles on sale “can comfortably seat up to 12 jihadists in the back.”

“Our prices are lower than the evildoers’ every day. Just ask the pope!” the ad says. “Friday is fatwa Friday, with free rubber swords for the kiddies.”

Jeff Wilson, general manager of Radio One stations WCKX (107.5 FM), WJYD (106.3 FM) and WXMG (98.9 FM), doesn’t intend to air the spot. “We won’t play that,” Wilson said. “With no disrespect to their creativity or their desire to build business, everything we’re about is promoting the values of diversity. To air things of that sort would go against our mission statement.”

Representatives of WSNY (94.7 FM), WBNS (97.1 FM), WWCD (101.1 FM), WJZA/WJZK (103.5/104.3 FM), and WODB (107.9 FM) also said they won’t air the ad.

But Aaron Masterson, general manager of Dennis Auto Point, which writes and produces its own commercials, promised that the commercial will air. “It starts next Friday morning,” Masterson said. “As far as I can see, the top 10 stations – minimum – in the market. We made it very clear we wanted market saturation to get the point across.”

Columbus Dispatch, 23 September 2006

‘We’ve stopped standing up for Britain’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Minette Marin (2)Minette Marin is upset by a report that Gloucestershire police have turned down some white would-be recruits, on the (according to her, self-evidently absurd) basis that they want to raise ethnic minority recruitment to 7% of the total by 2009 (last year the figure was 1.6%). She writes:

“What, in this lamentable story, is this guilty obsession with race, this daft and patronising determination to exclude and demoralise the indigenous people? It is actually imposed in Gloucestershire by people who are mostly white males themselves. What is wrong with them? Why are they unwilling to hold the line against thoughtless, intrusive, guilt-ridden, destructive stupidity? One word for it is self-hatred. Another is decadence.

“It is for the same reasons, whatever they may be, that we are so obviously failing to hold the line against the extremes of Islam. We no longer carry high the standard of free speech for fear of offending people, usually Muslims. Stalwart citizens have recently felt it their duty to reprimand the Pope and a former Archbishop of Canterbury for discussing Islam and violence – for even raising such offensive questions.

“The results, for which we have only ourselves to blame, are alarming. Anyone who heard it must have been horrified by a British Muslim haranguing John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday. Abu Izzadeen, the Jamaican convert who had heckled the home secretary at a meeting with Muslims, sounded even more terrifying on the air. Aggressive, illogical and blustering, he expressed his hatred of our government and its ‘crusade’ against Muslims. He thinks free speech and democracy are incompatible with Islam.

“When Humphrys asked him what was wrong with democracy, with trying to change things through Britain’s democratic process, he replied that ‘democracy means sovereignty for man, Islam means sovereignty for sharia … The UK doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to Allah’, and Allah has put Muslims on earth to implement sharia (Islamic law). So, Humphrys insisted, ‘the Islamic process but not the democratic process?’ ‘Yes’, said Izzadeen confidently, ‘that’s right’.

“It would be comforting to assume that Izzadeen is solitary and ignorant. Unfortunately he isn’t. An NOP poll for Channel 4 found that almost one in four British Muslims believed that the slaughter in London on July 7 was justified. Muslim community leaders can say what they like about Islam being all about peace; it’s perfectly clear that not all Muslims see it that way. For a long time now they have spread rage and resentment among their people and we have lacked the will and the instinct for self-preservation to resist it.”

Sunday Times, 24 September 2006

These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the outpourings of “mainstream” right-wing commentators like Marin, with her indignant concern for the oppression of “the indigenous people”, from the sort of filth you read on the BNP website.

Mosque set ablaze in Brittany town of Quimper in western France

Posted on by Bob Pitt

QUIMPER, France — Intruders set a mosque ablaze in this city in western France early Sunday and scrawled swastikas on the outside walls, officials said.

Firefighters called to the scene at 4:20 A.M. local time extinguished the blaze, said Philippe Paolantoni, deputy prefect of the region, in Brittany. The prosecutor’s office opened an investigation.

Damages to the mosque were modest despite four separate fires set inside the Penhars Mosque, one of two Muslim places of worship in Quimper.

A window was found open, apparently used to access the inside of the mosque, Paolantoni said, adding that a passerby alerted firefighters after seeing swastikas scrawled on the outside walls of the mosque and flames inside.

There are occasional reports of attacks on Muslim places of worship in France, as well as on Jewish synagogues, and authorities have increased surveillance

The attack on the Quimper mosque came as Muslims in France began celebrating Ramadan, the annual period of fasting.

Associated Press, 24 September 2006

Spain’s former PM Aznar criticizes Muslims for demanding pope’s apology

Posted on by Bob Pitt

AznarFormer prime minister Jose Maria Aznar has criticized Muslim demands for the pope to apologize for his remarks about Islam.

Speaking Friday night at the Hudson Institute, a thinktank in Washington, Aznar noted the nearly 800-year Moorish occupation of Spain, which began in the year 711 with an invasion from North Africa.

He said in English: “I never (heard) any Muslim apologize (to) me (for) conquer(ing) Spain and to maintain a presence in Spain during eight centuries.”

“What is the reason … we, the West, always should be apologiz(ing) and they never should … apologize? It’s absurd.”

He also criticized an initiative launched by his Socialist successor, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, to encourage dialogue between the West and Muslim countries. It is called the Alliance of Civilizations and has been formally adopted by the United Nations.

Aznar said some Muslim countries such as Iran are too radical to engage in dialogue with. “For me the alliance of civilians is a stupidity,” Aznar said.

International Herald Tribune, 23 September 2006

Congressional report stitches up US Muslim community

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Marc LynchThe House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has released a new report, “Al-Qaeda: The Many Faces of an Islamist Extremist Threat”. Marc Lynch is less than impressed:

“Some of the sourcing is hilarious. You’d think that the House Intelligence Committee could do a better job of sourcing a translation of a major statement by Osama bin Laden than the website jihadunspun (footnote 5), wouldn’t you? But there’s one place where the report does go a bit farther: on the alleged threat of homegrown American Muslim extremism. I’d go so far as to say that the lazily produced padding about al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (!), and even Iraq, was just thrown together as a vehicle to deliver a set of rather extreme views about the threat posed by the American Muslim community…. The whole narrative thrust of the report hypes the threat of homegrown terrorism and the need for more intense scrutiny of the American Muslim community.”

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‘Fury as BBC gives preacher of hate a platform’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abu IzzadeenThe Daily Mail reports: “The BBC sparked fury today for giving prime-time exposure to a known Islamic extremist. Abu Izzadeen appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme on the 8.10 slot normally reserved for ministers…. Listener Alan Newlands wrote saying: ‘I’m outraged by the amount of time you have given to this madman. I’m outraged by the insult to the Muslim community you perpetrated by allowing this man to appear to represent even a tiny minority.’ …  Dominic Grieve, shadow attorney general, said: ‘Abu Izzadeen is clearly a malevolent religious fanatic but he is certainly not representative of the Muslim community in Britain’.”

It’s not often I say this, but I agree with the Mail and Dominic Grieve. Muslims have repeatedly complained about the media coverage given to isolated lunatics like Abu Izzadeen and Anjem Choudary. Yusuf Smith recently commented:

“Until he sloped off to Lebanon, one of Omar Bakri’s ludicrous utterances after another were given front-page treatment by various newspapers and by the BBC, and other fringe figures were invited onto such shows as BBC Radio 4’s Today (particularly when Rod Liddle was in charge). These people are as significant as they are only because they are indulged by the media; their media profile is not matched by a similar standing in the community. The problem is that their demands are often seen by the public as ‘these Muslims’ demands’ when they are in fact the demands of a very small group.”

Sam Harris on liberals and the threat to western civilisation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sam Harris writes in the Los Angeles Times:

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world – for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror”. We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise….

The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals….

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal….

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Yes, you did read that correctly. “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

The neocons’ lexicon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salim Muwakkil analyses the origins and meaning of the term “Islamofascism”:

“Many pundits trace the neologism to historian Malise Ruthven, who used it in a September 1990 article in the London Independent. But Ruthven used it to describe authoritarian Muslim states like Morocco, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Stephen Schwartz, the neocon author of Two Faces of Islam, insists that he is the first Westerner to use the term in the contemporary context.

“But the term gained its greatest currency in the lexicon of pro-war progressives Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, to name three. They argued that the totalitarian aspirations of theocratic groups like al-Qaeda threatened the libertarian freedoms that are the legacy of the Enlightenment.

“These polemicists were less concerned (at least, originally) with the geo-strategic issues that preoccupied the administration’s neocon warmongers, so their arguments had some resonance on the secular left. After all, how could progressives oppose the theocratic agenda of the religious right within the United States and not reject similar developments elsewhere?

“In Hitchens’ last column for The Nation, he wrote ‘the theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it’.

“By framing the war on terror as a struggle between the liberal soldiers of the Enlightenment and the dark forces of theocracy, these progressives gave cover to warmongers with rationales much less lofty. In fact, one of the major ironies is that their support has aligned them with right wing religious groups with their own theocratic agendas.”

In These Times, 21 September 2006