Yesterday anti-terror investigators were again having to defend their tactics after two men arrested in the Forest Gate operation in east London were released without charge. While police insist these kinds of raids are necessary to prevent another July 7, many of the innocent men and women caught up in them have had their lives changed, or lost their businesses.
Observer boosts Ann Coulter
A correspondent writes: “Think it’s worth mentioning that the latest Observer‘s review section is basically a huge plug for Ann Coulter’s new book. Her visage dominates the front page and there’s a gushing two page interview inside. Her nauseating racism is presented as ‘controversial’ bravery, ever-so-witty, she’s-got-a-point-y’know – all the usual trashy excuses that petit-bourgeois fuckwits trundle out for bigotry. Seems to me that the paper has made a strategic editorial decision to line itself up with this kind of Liberal Islamophobia and is pushing it systematically. Hardly surprising given its Bomb The Darkies position over the war, but still worth noting.”
Quite right, we should have posted on this. See the Observer, 11 June 2006
‘The Muslims are coming!’
The moment of Melanie Phillips’ panicked self-defenestration before the advancing Islamist horde is surely imminent, Andrew Murray suggests.
Jihad Watch on Dr Bari
Newly elected general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohammed Abdul Bari, has given an interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he puts over a characteristically restrained and moderate message. But this is just not good enough for our friend Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. He takes it as evidence that Dr Bari “holds to the same goal as that of the Al-Ghurabaa types, but is just slicker about it”. As for Dr Bari’s suggestion that relations between the police and Muslim communities in London would be improved by the recruitment of 3,000 more Muslim policemen, Spencer comments sarcastically: “Foxes Guarding the Henhouse Alert.”
‘England afraid to fly its own flag’
One of our readers has drawn our attention to an article by one Modi Kreitman that recently appeared in the Israeli online publication YNet News. It is headlined “England afraid to fly its own flag”, and Kreitman writes: “Following warnings by extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, in which the group said that the red cross in the England flag symbolizes the ‘blood thirsty crusaders’ and the occupation of Muslims, some of the largest companies in England have ordered their workers not to wave the flags.”
The origin of the YNet News report is an article in the Sun newspaper which contains the following passage: “Anjem Choudary, a former leader of the Islamic extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, claimed the St George flag symbolised a bloodthirsty past. He said: ‘The cross does represent Christianity and for Muslims it also represents a crusader history of occupation and murder’.”
If you read the original piece, you can see how Kreitman has distorted it. In the Sun article, Choudary’s comment is given as an example of how some British Muslims refuse (for perfectly legitimate reasons, I would say) to wave the St George flag. There is no suggestion that Choudary issued any threats, nor does the Sun claim that the various companies that they say have banned the St George flag did so in response to threats from Choudary or anyone else. The Sun‘s argument is that the ban was motivated by the view that the flag is associated with racism and it blames “political correctness” for the decision.
So, basically, the YNet News article is a pack of lies.
Observer apologises to Mad Mel
“Owing to an editing error last week, we failed to make clear that a letter from Chris Doyle, carried in response to our publication of an extract from Melanie Phillips’s new book Londonistan, was written in his capacity as director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding. That extract (Comment, 28 May) may have given the impression that Ms Phillips’s book connects all British Muslims to a campaign of violence, whereas she stresses that the vast majority are peaceful and law-abiding. She also draws a distinction between Islam, which should be respected, and Islamism, which, she believes, is the use of that religion for violent ends.”
Editorial statement in the Observer, 11 June 2006
Evidently written in response to a complaint by Mad Mel herself. Readers of Islamophobia Watch can make up their own minds as to whether this characterisation of Phillips’ attitude to Islam is accurate.
Guantánamo suicides a ‘PR move’
A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a “good PR move to draw attention”. Colleen Graffy told the BBC the deaths were part of a strategy and “a tactic to further the jihadi cause”.
Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the BBC the men had probably been driven by despair. “These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly,” he said. “There’s no end in sight. They’re not being brought before any independent judges. They’re not being charged and convicted for any crime.”
That view was supported by British Muslim Moazzam Begg who spent three years in Guantanamo. He said of the camp’s inmates: “They’re in a worse situation than convicted criminals and it’s an act of desperation.”
But earlier, the camp commander, Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair. “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said. “They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
Anti-terror police target schools and youth groups
Politicians, human rights lawyers, Muslim organisations and teachers have expressed dismay at a Scottish Special Branch initiative that sends officers to schools to encourage teachers to inform on pupils who are suspected of flirting with Islamic extremism.
Special Branch (SB) in Tayside is also operating in youth groups at Dundee’s universities and using everything from Asian corner shops and supermarkets to mosques and restaurants to gather intelligence on potential terrorist threats.
‘The latest hand-wringing on multiculturalism and its first cousin, immigration, in reality is a debate about Muslims’
Muslim-bashing dilutes our democratic values
By Haroon Siddiqui
Toronto Star, 11 June 2006
Bigotry increases in times of trouble, as we have seen in our own age.
An anti-French backlash was palpable in English Canada when bilingualism was introduced in 1969 and a year later we had the FLQ crisis. I felt it in the Prairies when the paper I worked for, The Brandon Sun, had the foresight and courage to support the Official Languages Act and oppose the War Measures Act.
The recession of the early 1990s stoked anger at multiculturalism and helped spawn the anti-immigrant Reform party.
The 1990 Oka crisis, the 1999 Mi’kmaq fisheries dispute in Nova Scotia and the Nisga’a land deal in British Columbia led to charges that “race-based rights” for First Nations would undermine common Canadian values.
On all those occasions, as also during the recent standoff in Caledonia, pessimists said racism lurks just below the surface and can bubble up any time. Congenital optimists like myself dismiss such episodes as aberrations, confident that the Canadian social equilibrium will always reassert itself.
The post-9/11 period, even while helping Canada become more Canadian, is slowly Americanizing our public discourse. It has fanned an anti-Islamism that resembles the old anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.
The arrest of 17 Muslims on terrorism charges has made matters worse, and also rekindled the debate on multiculturalism: Are we being too tolerant of different cultures? Do we instill enough “Canadian values?” Should we make newcomers sign a code of ethics?
How racism has invaded Canada
“This has been a good week to be in Canada – or an awful week, depending on your point of view – to understand just how irretrievably biased and potentially racist the Canadian press has become. For, after the arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on “terrorism” charges, the Toronto Globe and Mail and, to a slightly lesser extent, the National Post, have indulged in an orgy of finger pointing that must reduce the chances of any fair trial and, at the same time, sow fear in the hearts of the country’s more than 700,000 Muslims. In fact, if I were a Canadian Muslim right now, I’d already be checking the airline timetables for a flight out of town. Or is that the purpose of this press campaign?”
Robert Fisk in The Independent, 10 June 2006