Hijab-wearing television presenters? ‘I’ll dispose of my TV set’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A letter writer in the Torygraph takes issue with Ruth Kelly’s suggestion that British TV should employ hijab-wearing Muslim women in more visible roles:

“On the very day that the Islamic radical Abu Izzadeen declares our Home Secretary persona non grata in a Muslim enclave, Ruth Kelly urges that Muslim women wearing the hijab should be given front-line roles in the media.Utterly predictable, of course, but the moment I see a female television presenter wearing the hijab will be the point at which I shall dispose of my set and surrender the licence. This is Britain, not Saudi Arabia or Iran.”

Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2006

Muslims attack BBC for airing interview with extremist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The chief Muslim organisation in Britain has condemned the BBC for giving a well-known Islamic extremist who hijacked a speech by the Home Secretary a prime-time platform to air his views today.

The decision to interview Abu Izzadeen today during the key 8.10am slot on the agenda-setting Today programme was heavily criticised by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which described Abu Izzadeen as a “thug” and accused the BBC of deliberately trying to generate publicity.

“We have received phone call after phone call from moderate Muslims who are appalled that the Today programme gave such an utterly marginal figure this prime-time spot to spout his bile almost interrupted,” said Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the MCB.

“There was no attempt to balance the interview or challenge his views by having a mainstream Muslim view featured. This really plays into the hands of those who think of Muslims as bigots. People are very upset about this misrepresentation of Islam.”

Times, 22 September 2006

Muslim schoolchildren ‘more liberal and tolerant’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim pupils are more liberal and tolerant than their white counterparts, according to a study released on Wednesday. Nearly a third of white youngsters questioned in Burnley, Lancashire believed that one race was superior, compared with 10% of Asians who thought the same. Almost half of the white pupils felt that respecting others regardless of religion was not important and a quarter did not feel it was important to tolerate people with different views.

More than 400 15-year-olds were surveyed about their attitudes towards race, religion and cultural integration earlier this year. The research was conducted by Lancaster University’s religious studies department. The pupils came from three unnamed non-religious schools, all in deprived areas. One in Burnley, attended mostly by white pupils, and two schools in Blackburn, where one had mostly Indian or Pakistani pupils and the other was ethnically mixed.

Study author Dr Andrew Holden said a “disturbing” finding of the survey was the response to the question of racial superiority. Nearly a third of the white pupils believed one race was superior compared with a tenth in the Asian school and under a fifth in the mixed school. Dr Holden said: “The greater degree of racial tolerance in an overwhelmingly Asian/Muslim populated school again calls into question the common sense assumption that mixed schools represent the most tolerant environments.”

TES, 20 September 2006

See also “Research reveals Muslim pupils more tolerant than non-Muslims”, Lancaster University news release, 20 September 2006

Families of bombers to blame for 7/7 – Paul Routledge

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paul Routledge“John Reid, the Iraq war boaster, may not have been the right man to say it and an East London Islamic centre may not have been the right place to say it. But it still had to be said – even at the risk of upsetting Muslims. There is a threat to the public from home-grown Islamic fundamentalists and British Muslims have a duty to monitor their own community for signs of incipient terrorists.

“They know better than anyone if young Ali is going off the rails, or has come under the ideological spell of a fundamentalist cleric. They see the signs better than a whole station full of coppers. They have a responsibility to take whatever action seems right, including informing the authorities, if someone they know seems to be on the brink of violent jihadism against fellow Britons. That includes parents, siblings, friends, clerics, youth workers and elders of the Muslim community.

“I’m sorry, but as Dr Reid admitted, there is no easy way of saying this. Silence, however, would be more culpable than speaking out. Just imagine if this habit of mind had been the norm before July 7 last year: the young Muslim bombers might have been apprehended before they set out on their deadly mission to London.”

Paul Routledge in the Daily Mirror, 22 September 2006

So, according to Routledge, it would appear that the families of the 7/7 bombers knew, or at least suspected, that the young men were “on the brink of violent jihadism against fellow Britons” but they kept quiet about it.

There is no easy way of saying this, but it still has to be said, even at the risk of upsetting Paul Routledge – he’s an ignorant, bigoted idiot.

‘Confronted by the Islamist threat on all sides, Europe pathetically caves in’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Last week we had the tragicomic spectacle of European Nato countries lining up to decline politely the request to beef up their forces in Afghanistan, many of whom are now fighting in perilously under-resourced conditions against a resurgent enemy. Then on Monday Jacques Chirac went to New York to upend the long, delicate diplomacy designed to deny Iran nuclear weapons. He said France no longer thought the UN should impose sanctions if Iran did not end its uranium enrichment programme…. Then, of course, we have had the predictable European outrage following the latest apparent provocation of Islamic extremists by free speech in the West – Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks last week on Islam….

“… the scale of Europe’s moral crisis is larger than ever. Opposing the war in Iraq was one thing, defensible in the light of events. But opting out of a serious fight against the Taleban, sabotaging efforts to get Iran off its path towards nuclear status, pre-emptively cringing to Muslim intolerance of free speech and criticism, all suggest something quite different. They imply a slow but insistent collapse of the European will, the steady attrition of the self-preservation instinct. Its effects can be seen not only in the political field, but in other ways – the startling decline of birth rates across the continent that represent a sort of self-inflicted genocide….

“The symptoms of this moral collapse may be far away from the affluent and still largely peaceful cities and towns of the old continent – in the mountains of Afghanistan, the diplomatic reception halls of Tehran and the angry Pope-effigy-burning streets of the Middle East. But there should be no doubt that it is closer to home where the disease has taken hold.”

Gerard Baker in the Times, 22 September 2006

‘Deadly peril of allowing Muslim ghettos to flourish’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In today’s Daily Express, Mark Palmer warns of the threat from “Muslim ghettos”. He makes a comparison with “… the Chinese community, whose members do tend to live in various Chinatown areas of big cities but who, by virtue of their businesses and their appreciation of what this country has to offer, readily feel integrated…. The new Muslim ghettos by contrast are ideal breeding grounds for fanatics and unless we cut off the supply then we might as well admit defeat to the terrorists…. And it is no good Cabinet Minister Ruth Kelly saying that Muslim women wearing hijab, or headscarves, should be employed in front-line roles in the public eye. She thinks hijab-wearing Muslims presenting the news on TV will encourage more Muslim women to apply for jobs in the media. It might – but it will also encourage the likes of Izzadeen to push on with their relentless battle to ‘implement’ Islam. Rather than making Muslims feel more a part of British society, it could just as easily provide them with a further incentive to separate themselves.”

TV roles urged for women wearing hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim women wearing hijab, or headscarves, should be employed in front-line roles in the media, said a report published yesterday by Ruth Kelly, the minister for women. More women wearing hijab needed to be seen in the public eye, particularly on television, to encourage more Muslim women to put themselves forward, it said. Miss Kelly said the Government was giving priority to helping ethnic minority women to overcome discrimination at work and play a more prominent role in public life.

Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2006

Well, at least Ruth Kelly can get something right. Stand by for a spate of denunciations in the Torygraph’s letters column.

Our friend Giraldus Cambrensis provides an example of what to expect: “Ruth Kelly wants more hijabs on TV? Is she is an executive of a TV company? When Muslims comprise only 3% of the population, what do the other 97% of the population want on their telly? Hopefully her words will be treated as the vacuous inanities that they really are. What about the stamp-collectors in Britain? Why are they not represented on the television?”

Western Resistance, 21 September 2006

Islam and European identity – Tariq Ramadan responds to the Pope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_RamadanTariq Ramadan argues that the problems with Pope Benedict’s recent controversial speech go deeper than the mere use of an offensive medieval quotation:

“…. the pope attempted to set out a European identity that would be Christian by faith and Greek by philosophical reason. Islam, which has apparently had no such relationship with reason, would thus be foreign to the European identity that has been built atop this heritage.

“A few years ago, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he set forth his opposition to the integration of Turkey into Europe on a similar basis. Muslim Turkey never was and never will be able to claim an authentically European culture. It is another thing; it is the Other.

“These are the messages that cry out for an answer, far more than talk of jihad. This profoundly European pope is inviting the peoples of the continent to become aware of the central, inescapable Christian character of their identity, which they risk losing. The message … is deeply troubling and potentially dangerous in its reductionism.

“This is what Muslims must, above all, respond to; they must challenge a reading of the history of European thought from which the role of Muslim rationalism is erased, in which the Arab-Muslim contribution would be reduced to mere translation of the great works of Greece and Rome.

“The selective memory that so easily forgets the decisive contributions of rationalist Muslim thinkers like al-Farabi (10th century), Avicenna (11th century), Averroes (12th century), al-Ghazali (12th century), Ash-Shatibi (13th century) and Ibn Khaldun (14th century) is reconstructing a Europe that practices self-deception about its own past. If they are to reappropriate their heritage, Muslims must demonstrate, in a manner that is both reasonable and free of emotional reactions, that they share the core values upon which Europe and the West are founded.

“Neither Europe nor the West can survive if we continue to attempt to define ourselves by excluding, and by distancing ourselves from, the Other – from Islam, from the Muslims – whom we fear.”

New York Times, 20 September 2006

Tory denounces ‘red-brown coalition’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Halfon, political director of Conservative Friends of Israel, reviews Michael Gove’s book Celsius 7/7:

“In stark terms, Celsius 7/7 suggests that just as Fascism subsumed tolerant nationalism and communism engulfed moderate socialism, Islamism has subjugated Islam…. In the bleak world that is painted by Celsius 7/7,  it is the free West – just as in the 1930s – that has allowed this rise in Islamism to continue unabated. Through a mixture of short term self interest and so called ‘realpolitik’, it is the West that is the primary author of its own misfortune…. The West’s lack of will to deal with Islamism, is buttressed by huge sections of the media and elements of the left who view the conflict between the free world and Islamism as one of moral relativism and moral equivalence….

“Moral relativism and moral equivalence have provided a cloak in which the left can embrace Islamism as a means by which to express their hostility to capitalism, the West and particularly the United States. Israel becomes the prism which the left and media establishment can unite against. So Ken Livingstone can nakedly court the Islamic vote in London, by making seemingly anti Semitic remarks and virulent attacks on the State of Israel. We have a grotesque spectacle of the re-emergence of the red-brown coalition in which left wingers – previously campaigners for sexual equality and freedom of speech – form common cause with Islamists whose raison d’etre is repression of minorities and dictatorship.

“There are of course some honourable exceptions. Peter Tatchell being a prime example and the group of left intellectuals behind the Euston Manifesto.”

ConservativeHome.com, 21 September 2006

I was going to comment that, as an alternative to a red-brown coalition, Halfron proposes a blue-red one. Except, of course, that Tatchell and the Euston Manifesto signatories long ago abandoned politics that could in any way be categorised as socialist.