Carey backs Pope and issues warning on ‘violent’ Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CareyThe former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.

Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.”

Times, 20 September 2006

North London Mosque attacked after Pope’s speech

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Finsbury Park MosqueThe North London Mosque witnessed an attack at 1am on Tuesday 19 September 2006 as two unknown men entered the premises breaking two windows in the process and tried to set a fire. Police were contacted immediately after the two men were spotted, but they failed to act on time. The mosque, formerly known as Finsbury Park Mosque, previously hosted Abu Hamza as its Imam.

It may be that such attacks, coming so soon after the Pope’s address at the University of Regensburg, could have been incited by his remarks condemning the Prophet Muhammad’s actions as “evil and inhuman” and Islam as a faith that he claimed was “spread by the sword”. It could be that the mosque, once home to Abu Hamza and his followers, has become a target for those determined to act on the Pope’s words by, what they believe, is ridding England of intolerance and extremism.

The attack on the Mosque itself, however, “smacks of extremism and is reminiscent of the infamous ‘wars of religion’ that plagued Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, now seen as the historical pinnacle of religious intolerance”, said Harris Bokhari, MAB spokesperson.

“The fact that the mosque is now managed by the mainstream Muslim community reflects the efforts on its part to combat its extreme elements, and is a change that should be welcomed and applauded as opposed to being subjected to hostility. In light of this crime coupled with atrocities currently taking place against Muslim innocents in other parts of the world, the Muslim Association of Britain are organising a ‘Regional Day of Commemoration’ in Manchester on Friday 22nd September.”

Red Hot Curry, 20 September 2007

Kofi Annan warns against clash of civilisations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called on Tuesday for sensitivity towards religious beliefs and sacred symbols, warning that mistakes – intentional or not – could trigger a global war of religion. He said the international migration movement, which brought millions of people of different creed and culture to live together, has not united them.

“The misconceptions and stereotypes underlying the idea of a clash of civilisation have come to be more and more widely shared. Insensitivity towards other people’s beliefs or sacred symbols – intentional or otherwise – is seized on by those who seem eager to foment a new war of religion, this time on a global scale,” Annan said in an address opening the political debate in the UN general assembly.

News24.com, 19 September 2006

Pope protests – part of Islamic plot to dominate West

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the Muslim uproar has a goal: to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shariah norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.”

Daniel Pipes offers his insights into the Pope Benedict controversy.

New York Sun, 19 September 2006

Muslims are the BNP’s new target

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why Muslims are these men’s current target

By Geoff Brown

Morning Star, 20 September 2006

A sinister alliance has developed between far-right groups and Islamist extremists who are united in their hatred of Jews, Israel and zionism and are contributing to increasing anti-semitism in Britain.

At least that’s how Ruth Gledhill of The Times reported the findings of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism.

Continue reading →

Defend Pope against Muslim intimidation – Sean Matgamna

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sean Matgamna“The effort to silence the head of the Catholic Church is a grim joke, but not one to laugh at. Secularist glee at the sight of the Pope being anathematised in this clash of two, mutually exclusive, ‘infallible’ religions, needs to be tempered with awareness of the seriousness of the situation which is summed up in the outcry against the Pope. (As it was in the recent Muslim outcry against the Danish cartoons.) If the spiritual absolute monarch of a billion and a quarter Catholics can be treated like that, the cause of free speech and freedom to criticise religion, is surely in a very bad way….

“The right to secular free speech, and the right to write and publish freely (under the laws against incitement to violence, and the laws of libel) is taken for granted in the western bourgeois countries. It is written into the constitution of the USA. It had to be won in centuries of struggle…. Today, militant, and even, comparatively speaking, some varieties of ‘moderate’ Islam, oppose all of that…. Now, we have reached the stage where the revelation, which should surprise nobody, that the Catholic Pope doesn’t like Muhammad, or Islam, that he thinks his own religion better, the true religion, and says so, more or less, unleashes organised, obstreperous outrage across large parts of the globe! He is forced to deny that he said what he said, and what he clearly intended to say!

“… I repeat: if political Islam can do that to the Bishop of Rome, what can it not do to secularists, male and female sexual rebels, infidels, apostates from Islam, and socialists in the countries where it is dominant, and in the communities in Western Europe where it is immensely powerful? What does it do? Everywhere it is repressive, often murderously.

“It is to give to George W Bush and Tony Blair too much credence to conclude that because they talk of a clash of civilisations, there is no problem. Yes, there is! … Political Islam exerts a relentless pressure, in part by way of its ability to intimidate and cow the invertebrate ‘liberals’. The demands that their religion, its prophet, its doctrine and its practices, should be above the criticism, mockery and contempt of non-Muslims needs to be resisted and defied.”

Workers’ Liberty, 20 September 2006

Pope pursues medieval Islamophobic fantasy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Madeleine Bunting argues that the Pope is a dangerous bigot suffering from “a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered Catholic triumphalism”. She writes:

“By an uncanny coincidence the legendary Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci died last week…. the Pope had already run into controversy in Italy by inviting the rabid Islamophobe to a private audience just months ago. This is the journalist who published a bestseller in 2001 which amounted to a diatribe of invective against Islam. This is the woman who was only too happy to fling out comments such as ‘Muslims breed like rats’ and ‘the increasing presence of Muslims in Italy and Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom’. At the time of her papal audience, Fallaci’s ranting against Islam had landed her in court and there was outrage at the Pope’s insensitive invitation. The Pope refused to backtrack and insisted the meeting was purely ‘pastoral’.

“Put last week’s lecture in Bavaria and the Fallaci audience alongside his vocal opposition to Turkish membership of the EU, and the picture isn’t pretty. On one of the biggest and most volatile issues of our day – the perceived clash between the west and the Muslim world – the Pope seems to have abdicated his papal role of arbitrator, and taken up the arms in a rerun of a medieval fantasy.”

Guardian, 19 September 2006

Pope Benedict trashes John Paul II’s legacy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“As protests against the Pope continued to rumble around the Muslim world yesterday, Catholics began asking themselves if this highly intelligent man can really have been so crass as to have ignited the passions of millions of Muslims without realising that he was doing it.

“If the alternative version is more credible – that he knew exactly what he was doing – then the next question arises: why? The gloomy conclusion of some Vatican experts is that there was no inconsistency in the Pope’s choice of the words ‘inhuman and evil’ – quoted from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus – to characterise Islam. Such a negative view, they say, is consistent with all his words and actions with regard to Islam.

“Their claims make for a tragic contrast with the decades devoted by John Paul II to the challenge of bringing Islam, Judaism and Christianity closer together after many centuries of hatred and bloodshed. Now all that hard work, rowing against the tide of history, seems to be at risk.”

Peter Popham in the Independent, 19 September 2006

UK Government trying to divide Muslim families

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim News Tuesday expressed its exasperation at the latest call by Home Secretary John Reid for Muslim parents to spy on the behaviour of their sons as suspected terrorists.

“The Home Secretary is generating a new climate of fear against Muslims, by not only suggesting they are all potential terrorists, but appears to be also trying to divide Muslims families,” The Muslim News Editor Ahmed J Versi said.

“There are times when we must confront them to protect them from harm. So I appeal to you to look for changes in your teenage sons – odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends. And if you are worried, talk to them before their hatred grows,” he said.

Versi said that the Home Secretary suggested that it was becoming “worse than looking for reds under the bed” and that Reid could be next asking Muslims to empty the pockets of their children every night, check all their emails and log all webpages they visit.

“He is taking to extreme lengths the Government’s false premises about so-called extremism. What is he asking Muslim parents to spy on? To watch when they are ever late and then report suspicions to anti-terrorist police to intervene and have them interrogated for 28 days? It a pure farce,” he said.

“Even more dangerous is the impression the Home Secretary is giving to the rest of society that when parents can’t trust their children not to be terrorist, who can,” the editor warned.

Muslim News press release, 19 September 2006

Return to the dark ages

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Pope’s response to the anger his statements sparked in the Muslim world was more offensive than the statements themselves. He apologised not for what he said, but for Muslims’ failure to grasp the intended meaning.

“That the Pope should have quoted from a Byzantine text on Islam is hardly surprising. The line of continuity between Emanuel Paleologos’s conception of Islam – quoted in the papal speech – and Benedict’s has never been severed. The massive body of terms, images and narratives on Islam which the church inherited from the middle ages survives intact. There, Islam is depicted as a false creed propagated through violence and promiscuity, with Muhammad as scoundrel, magician, heresiarch, and precursor of the anti-Christ…. The Reformation further developed this literary corpus and ensured its transmission into modern Europe. In a 17th-century Christian text, Muslims are described in the most chilling of terms. They are ‘poison, scabies, venomous snakes … the dogs in the church’.

“Even if this metaphorical language has retreated in favour of the profane language of reason and subjectivity, its structural foundations remain. Islam is still perceived as the other, the embodiment of evil. Only in this context can we make full sense of the Pope’s statements, and indeed of much of what is said today on the subject of Islam. We must defend freedom of expression, but freedom of expression should not be used as a disguise for the incitement of hatred of other races and religions.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 19 September 2006