US Muslims see a growing media bias

Posted on by Bob Pitt

On a typical workday, Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations talks to a dozen or so print and broadcast reporters.

“The vast majority does a pretty good job and they need to be congratulated,” he said.

It’s another story when Hooper watches cable TV commentators, listens to talk radio or surfs hundreds of anti-Islamic Web sites. “The level of anti-Muslim rhetoric is growing in quantum leaps since 9/11,” he said.

Hooper and other experts addressed “Islamaphobia” in the media during a panel discussion Sunday at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention at the Donald E. Stevens Convention Center in Rosemont.

Web sites are especially virulent, Hooper said. Consider these comments recently posted on the blog of Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).

• “If I happen to wax hateful and angry from time to time when it comes to the subject of Islam, that is the fault of Islam and its thriving terrorist establishment. . . . It is good to hate your enemies: We are going to have to kill them.”

• “Islam is not only a cult, it’s a political movement. As such it contravenes the constitution and espouses treason.”

• “I hate is-lame with an incandescent intensity.”

(Spencer says he does not hate Muslims. Postings from others “are unmoderated and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jihad Watch or Robert Spencer.”)

Anti-Islamic prejudice “is increasingly bleeding into mainstream media,” Hooper said. After Sept. 11, columnist Ann Coulter wrote, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Before Sept. 11, Coulter “would have faced swift repudiation from her colleagues,” Hooper said. “Now it’s accepted as legitimate commentary.”

Chicago Sun-Times, 4 September 2006

Basildon Islamic Centre gutted by fire

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sarfraz Sarwar and Basildon Islamic CentreBasildon’s Islamic Centre has been almost destroyed in a suspected arson attack.

The fire raged through the Triangle Community Hall in High Road, Laindon, which is leased to the Muslim community group, at about 3.30am yesterday. A large crowd gathered to watch as five crews of firefighters battled to contain the blaze. It severely damaged about one-third of the building, with the roof worst affected.

Sarfraz Sarwar, the centre’s founder and leader, said: “We are just lost for words at the moment. The building is completely gutted. The police think it was arson. But my aim is to get this busy place sorted out one way or another, and to keep on working. We are not going to run away or be defeated. We would like to carry on our community services as usual in a small corner of the town.”

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‘Speak out against terror’, Australian Muslim leaders are lectured

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamic leaders must do more to denounce terrorism and direct young people away from extremists, Treasurer Peter Costello said yesterday. In a wide-ranging critique of the failure of Muslim leaders in Australia to speak out against extremism, Mr Costello also backed calls by the Prime Minister for Islamic migrants to learn Australian values.

“This is where we really need the Islamic leadership of this country to stand up and contend unequivocally that terrorism, no matter who it is perpetrated by, is never justified under the cover of religion and to make it clear to would-be converts when you join this religion, you do not join a radical political ideology,” Mr Costello said.

Daily Telegraph (Australia), 4 September 2006

White extremists use terror videos to threaten Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Far-right extremists have adopted the tactics of Islamic jihadists by posting videos on the internet in which they threaten to behead British Muslims.

The films show balaclava-clad white British men brandishing guns, knives and clubs, calling on all Muslims to leave the United Kingdom or be killed. One appears to be a soldier who has served in the Gulf. In one film a man tells Muslims to “go home” or risk being burnt alive. He threatens: “I’ll cut your head off,” and claims to have “comrades” across Britain who have “had enough”.

The videos have all been made since the arrest three weeks ago of suspects connected to the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic jets. Their style mimics the “martyrdom videos” of Islamic radicals talking about their plans for terrorist outrages against the West.

The release of the videos on YouTube, an American-based open-access website, coincides with reports of a rise in the number of attacks on mosques. Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said the videoed threats were extremely worrying. “There is no question there has been an increase in attacks on mosques and Muslims,” he said.

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US Muslims plagued by discrimination after 9/11 attacks

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement have come to plague American Muslims in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11. There have been suspicious looks, slurs, physical attacks, extra screening at airports and arrests on groundless charges. And it seems to be getting worse. A recent Gallup poll showed that 39 percent of Americans admit to being prejudiced against Muslims and that nearly a quarter say they would not want a Muslim for a neighbor.

“Most Americans don’t know Muslims except for those they work with in an urban environment so all the information they get is through the media,” said Dawud Walid, director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

After having shown some restraint in his rhetoric after 19 Muslim men affiliated with Al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush has of late been using far more inflammatory language such as “Islamofacists”, Walid said. “When the religious and political leaders use polarizing language these are the unfortunate side effects. It stretches from the likes of (Christian Coalition leader) Pat Robinson all the way up to President Bush.”

AFP, 3 September 2006

Charles Johnson is not impressed, seeing this as yet another example of the mainstream media falling for “CAIR’s spurious claims of an ominous rise in ‘hate crimes’ against Muslims”.

Little Green Footballs, 3 September 2006

Another hate-filled rant from Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmel“More than 30 Muslim groups, along with Muslim MPs and peers, demanded that the Government change its foreign policy in order to placate terrorists. This blackmail was followed by a demand from other representatives [in fact, just one representative – ed.] that a pair of Islamic religious festivals should become official holidays and that Islamic laws relating to marriage and family life be applied in Britain. These were not moderate attitudes.

“In Australia, the government has adopted a robust approach to such extremism. It has said that those Muslims who want to live under sharia law should leave the country, and that Australian Muslim leaders need to denounce terrorism in all its forms around the world.

“By contrast, rather than challenging the ideology driving Islamic terror, Britain remains paralysed by the back-to-front thinking which blames its own policies for the terrorism that threatens it. This paralysis is largely caused by multiculturalism, the doctrine which holds that minorities cannot be held responsible for the wrong that they do since they are always somehow the victims of the majority.

“This doctrine has pushed Left-wingers into the arms of Islamic radicals who are sworn enemies of the West. When Trevor Phillips, the black chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, repeated his concerns about the failure of multiculturalism, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone jeered that he expected Mr Phillips soon to join the racist British National Party.

“This was the same Ken Livingstone who last year publicly embraced as a ‘reformer’ Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the Islamic extremist who calls for suicide bombings in Iraq and Israel and perpetrates gross libels against the Jews. Yet despite such an endorsement of true racism and fascism, the Mayor remains popular — and still remains in the Labour Party.

“Such a state of denial goes far beyond the Left. The political and security establishment still refuses to grasp that it is not enough — vital though this is — to thwart terrorist plots and break up terrorist cells. Action also needs to be taken against the paranoid, hate-filled ideas driving so many to these terrible acts….

“Virtually nothing is being done to prevent the recruitment to terror still taking place on university campuses, which have long acted as hotbeds of radicalisation, or in prisons or youth clubs. Even worse, Islamic extremists have been recruited into the very heart of Whitehall as government advisers, in the wholly misguided belief that appeasing religious fanaticism will draw its venom.”

Daily Mail, 2 September 2006

The Clash of Civilizations doesn’t exist … yet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“‘Seriousness’ has become the word of the day for the Islamophobic set. According to some of our more serious hawks, anyone who doesn’t buy that the liberal democracies of the West are engaged in a death-match with hordes of dusky Muslim fanatics is ‘unserious’ about America’s security and can’t be trusted. It’s the latest in a series of attempts to forestall any meaningful discussion of the causes of violent Islamist ideologies, much less how the United States should respond to them. It locks us into the global ‘war on terror’.

“Unfortunately, all too many otherwise sane people seem to accept the terms. But it’s hard to imagine anything more profoundly unserious than taking a dozen complex conflicts that originated in a dozen countries, stripping them of all historical and political context and lumping them together in an amorphous blob called the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. But that’s exactly what we’re talking about.”

Joshua Holland at AlterNet, 1 September 2006

Aussie Islamophobe defends Howard

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Here, as in Britain and the US, Muslim organisations have deliberately installed themselves as permanent aliens and adapted a culture of constant carping about the majority, from whom they maintain their isolation with such bitter determination. Language, culture and secular values unite the English-speaking West. These values have been an attraction to millions.

“But not since World War II have those values been under such sustained attack. This time, it’s coming from the very migrants who might have been expected to show gratitude for being generously received in the nation of their choice – and finding solace in the protection of the system they say they despise. John Howard was at his most diplomatic when he said: ‘There is a section, a small section of the Islamic population, and I say a small section … which is very resistant to integration. Fully integrating means accepting Australian values’.”

Piers Akerman in the Daily Telegraph (Australia), 3 September 2006

The Danish and Iranian cartoon controversies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In an article on US-Iranian relations Haroon Siddiqui takes up the antisemitic cartoon contest in Iran:

“Conspicuous by their silence in all this are those who during the Danish cartoon controversy had mounted a noisy defence of the right to offend. They are neither lining up to reprint the cartoons from Tehran nor are they criticizing the exhibit. It is a predicament of their own making. If they condemn the show, as they should, they’ll open themselves to accusations of double standards, namely, that their defence of freedom of speech last spring was meant only to protect their right to malign Muslims and Islam.

“But anti-Islamic prejudice alone does not explain the West’s conflicting emotions. Some people do believe freedom of speech is absolute. But it is not. It is constrained by the laws of libel and hate. It must be balanced against the right to freedom of religion. It is subject to self-restraint, dictated by our evolving understanding of what is and is not acceptable. The Danish and Iranian cartoon controversies have added another element to this complex equation. The global village demands of us a broadened outlook, one that avoids needless needling across all religious divides in these troubled times.”

Toronto Star, 3 September 2006

‘My vote’s for Trevor, not Ken’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joan SmithJoan Smith takes sides in the dispute between the Mayor of London and Trevor Phillips, the newly appointed head of the CEHR who is of course a great favourite of Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. In particular, and predictably, she endorses Phillips’s views on multiculturalism:

“Phillips’s pronouncements on the subject are robust – earlier this year he suggested that Muslims who want to live under Islamic law (sharia) should leave the country – but more coherent than anything the Mayor of London has come up with. Livingstone’s take on multiculturalism certainly isn’t mine. It’s a form of relativism that allows him to park his values when they’re inconvenient and embrace religious extremists with repellent views on women and homosexuals. Living in a society that has abolished the death penalty, Livingstone welcomes to London a Muslim cleric whose website discusses whether death is the appropriate penalty for gay men, and appears at public events with an academic who refuses to call for a ban on the hideous practice of lapidation….

“In fact, the biggest threat to multiculturalism comes not from organisations such as the BNP but politicians such as Livingstone who refuse to have this debate, seeking to close it down with accusations of racism and Islamophobia. The UK is a diverse society, but it won’t remain so if millions of ordinary people feel they’re not allowed to criticise the minority who hate gay people, treat women as second-class citizens and support political or religious violence.”

Independent on Sunday, 3 September 2006

The “academic who refuses to call for a ban on the hideous practice of lapidation” is of course Tariq Ramadan. As I think we’ve observed before, rejecting engagement with an influential Muslim liberal like Professor Ramadan is a sign that Islamophobia has reached the point of dementia. It can only be a matter of time before Joan Smith joins the likes of Melanie Phillips in ranting on about “Eurabia” and the Muslim plot to destroy western civilisation.