Fascism is new buzz word among Republicans

Posted on by Bob Pitt

President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a “war against Islamic fascism”. Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq.

Bush used the term earlier this month in talking about the arrest of suspected terrorists in Britain, and spoke of “Islamic fascists” in a later speech in Green Bay, Wis. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House press briefings. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., in a tough re-election fight, drew parallels on Monday between World War II and the current war against ‘‘Islamic fascism,” saying they both require fighting a common foe in multiple countries. It’s a phrase Santorum has been using for months. And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday took it a step further in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, accusing critics of the administration’s Iraq and anti-terrorism policies of trying to appease “a new type of fascism”.

The White House on Wednesday announced Bush would elaborate on this theme in a series of speeches beginning Thursday at the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City and running through his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 19. “The key is that all of this violence and all of the threats are part of one single ideological struggle, a struggle between the forces of freedom and moderation, and the forces of tyranny and extremism”, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Bush aboard Air Force One.

Conservative commentators have long talked about “Islamo-fascism”, and Bush’s phrase was a slightly toned-down variation on that theme.

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‘Boycott stamp depicting Muslim holiday’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The US Postal Service recently decided to introduce a new postage stamp celebrating Eid. One US commentator is not best pleased:

“I am against those who use their extremist beliefs of their religion to attack people, entire families, destroy lives, homes, and countries in order to gain attention to their ’cause’. It is these people, these radical, rebel extremist, terrorists that thought nothing about boarding planes on 9/11 bent on destroying the United States and its people.

“Therefore, I am supporting a boycott of the issuance of this USPS postage stamp, and I urge everyone reading this column to do the same. Using this stamp would be like a slap in the face to those who have lost their lives at the hands of the very people this stamp now honors. Being politically correct can only go so far!”

New Albany Tribune, 29 August 2006

Britain is ‘a hornets’ nest of Islamic extremists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Daily Mail editorialises about the claim in the US magazine New Republic that Britain now presents a greater security threat to the United States than Iran or Iraq:

“Which country poses the greatest threat to America’s homeland security: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea? None of the above, according to a growing body of opinion across the Atlantic. The answer, say many American pundits, is the United Kingdom.

“At first sight, this looks outrageously ungrateful. After all, aren’t British troops dying every week, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, for an American foreign policy slavishly followed by Tony Blair? Yet the more you think about the charge – spelt out in the current New Republic magazine and echoed by American think-tanks of every persuasion – the more truth you can see in it. Hasn’t Britain indeed become, in the words of Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation, ‘a hornets’ nest of Islamic extremists’? How have we let this come about?

“Much of the answer lies in our authorities’ spineless refusal to confront Islamic extremism for fear of being thought anti-Muslim. Americans gape in disbelief when our senior policemen’s first reaction to every terrorist atrocity is to try to appease religious extremists. Or when Ministers employ apologists for terrorism as special advisers to the Foreign Office.”

Daily Mail, 30 August 2006

Hopefully, Mockbul Ali will sue.

‘Islamophobia and anti-semitism are much alike’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said Islamophobia, which has been fueled by the Sept. 11 attacks in the West, is similar to the anti-Semitism movement seen in 1930s. Ihsanoglu said, “I do not think the current situation is good for either the West or for the Islamic world. The two civilizations should cooperate because hostility against the West increases parallel to the rise of Islamophobia.”

Zaman, 30 August 2006

Media and politicians incite Islamophobia in the West

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The banning of Muslim prayer from planes and the demands that Muslims should carry special IDs is showing the rapid rate at which Islamophobia is spreading in the Western world.

Islamophobia, quickly increasing following the Sept. 11 attacks has now reached dangerous levels. According to the Gallup Research company, 39 percent of American citizens believe that Muslims should carry a special ID card in society. The occurrence of two events after the revelation of these frightening poll results, however, increased anxiety about the issue.

A U.S. citizen and Muslim, Ahmed Faruk, was kicked out of a plane for praying in his seat. In another event, two passengers were prevented from boarding a flight bound for England from Spain after pressure from the other passengers. The other passengers complained that the two people were terrorists, basing their accusations only on their Middle Eastern appearance.

American specialists speaking to Zaman said that it was politicians and the media which were contributing to the rise of Islamophobia in the West. Joseph Grieboski, Institute on Religion and Public Policy Chairman, said: “The media does nothing to help demonstrate the positive impact of Islam in the U.S.” National Council of Churches (NCC) Chief Bob Edgar said there were two groups that were doing adding pressure on the Islamic religion: the U.S. Government and the Christian religious right. Edgar added “Unfortunately, our government spends more time with the far evangelical Christian right.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Research Center Director Mohamed Nimer emphasized that the U.S. Government did not acknowledge that Islamophobia was an epidemic and serious problem. Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University said there is a “strong and growing” Islamophobic minority in the U.S.

Zaman, 28 August 2006

Muslim faith schools defended

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Britain’s race relations chief defended last night the right of Muslims to open their own schools. In remarks that put him at odds with Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, Trevor Phillips said that Muslims had as much right as other religious groups to educate their children according to their beliefs. Last weekend Ms Kelly said the Government had to stamp out Muslim schools that were trying to change British society to fit Islamic views.

But, in a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, Mr Phillips criticised the view, now rapidly gaining ground, that faith schools, and Muslim schools in particular, were incompatible with full social integration. He said: “What the proponents of this view really want to say is one of two things. One, a perfectly valid view, is that religion should be banned from the public sphere and practised only in private if at all. The other, not at all valid in my view, is that Muslims can’t be trusted to run schools, like Christians have done for centuries.”

Times, 30 August 2006

Multiculturalism, terror and shariah

Posted on by Bob Pitt

osama saeed 2“The argument of the government goes roughly as follows. Asians have lived parallel lives in this country for too many years, and because of this segregation, they care nothing at all for white people and are thus quite willing to blow them up on public transport.

“This is simply not true. For one, Al-Qaeda have regard for nobody’s lives, and white people should not take it personally. US, UK, and Australian targets have been hit in Muslim countries, resulting in the deaths of many hundreds of their co-religionists. For Al-Qaeda, there are no rules to the game. They kill, and it doesn’t matter about your creed or colour in pursuit of their goals.

“The second count on which it’s not true is that it bears no resemblance to the bombers we know about to date. Richard Reid the shoebomber was a white convert. The July bombers all spoke English. One was a teaching assistant, one worked in his father’s fish-and-chip shop, one was married to a white Englishwoman, and one was known to have gone on wild drinking binges (thus passing Jon Snow’s integration test).”

Osama Saeed at Rolled Up Trousers, 28 August 2006

Woolas dismisses young Muslim’s views as ‘crap’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasThe Government reacts tetchily to suggestions that British foreign policy has anything to do with the rise in radicalism among young Muslims.

When Muslim leaders wrote an open letter a fortnight ago suggesting just that, Foreign Office minister Kim Howells and Home Secretary John Reid fell over one another to condemn the comments as “irrational” and ” facile”. The Communities minister, Phil Woolas, has taken up the baton at Bolton Wanderers Football Club, dismissing a young Muslim woman’s views as “a load of crap”.

Woolas, launching the Government’s “tackling extremism” roadshow, got into a heated 10-minute discussion with Komal Adris, 27, there on behalf of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. “I told him that foreign policy was a real concern of mine,” explains Adris. “He suggested I had an extremist view and my concerns were illegitimate. I accused him of patronising me.”

Civil servants tried to usher Woolas away – to no avail. The minister snapped: “That’s a load of crap,” before walking off.

Independent, 29 August 2006

Blair’s trail of destruction

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumayya Ghannoushi“At the beginning of his tenure, Blair embarked on a privatisation spree that saw much of our public service sector shift from state ownership and control to those of a cluster of private businesses. Going further than Thatcher herself, he set about privatising schools, hospitals, transport and the mail, scrapping the university grant and breaking the backs of countless students with ever rising tuition fees. Seizing, like his Hobbesian allies across the Atlantic, 9/11’s immense opportunities, he then turned to Britain’s legal corpus with a vengeance, waging endless battles against judges and civil liberties associations.

“Today Blair seeks to destroy another age-old British tradition, multiculturalism, as though it were a passing affliction that could be dispensed with at his royal whim. As they use all the tricks in new Labour’s book of spin to force us into line, he and his ‘communities minister’ ought to bear the following historical fact in mind. Britain’s multiculturalism was not born today or yesterday with the coming of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent: it is intrinsic to the fabric of British society, which is made up of a multitude of races, creeds and sects: Scots, Irish, Welsh, English, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, along with myriad other groups.

“Blair, who would be more comfortable reading the Daily Telegraph than the Guardian, has adopted an extreme discourse that plays on our basic instincts of fear, insecurity and national pride. In so doing, he has shifted a nauseating rhetoric that had long been confined to the British National party and its ilk into the government, and thence to the mainstream of public opinion. That 53% of Britons now see Muslims as a threat is thus hardly surprising. This has been a victory for no one in Britain except the far right….

“Those who cite France as a role model for Britain do not know what they’re talking about. What is shielding France from our 7/7 is not its abysmal record with its minorities, but its more reasoned foreign policy and the distance it has maintained from Bush’s insane wars of aggression.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 29 August 2006