“Ramadan’s program of ijtihad is not a call for modernizing Islam, but rather, a battle plan for his Muslim audience in the West to follow to Islamize the West. All evidence indicates that Tariq Ramadan’s battle plan is succeeding.”
So Patrick Poole claims at Front Page Magazine, 25 May 2006
Those of us who use Google News have often been appalled by the inclusion of articles from anti-Muslim hate sites. To their credit, Google have now decided to remove some of the most egregious examples of internet Islamophobia.
The New Media Journal was kicked off Google News after posting an article entitled “How Has Islam Enriched Your Life?” by syndicated columnist Arlen Peck. In it, Peck wrote: “It is common for the men to have multiple wives, and harvest many children with each of his wives to train for martyrdom.” He asked: “Is it really tacky of me to smile at the nightly scenes on TV showing Arab, Afghani and Pakistani Muslims bombing mosques and killing their Muslim brothers, sisters and children at a brisk pace because that’s all they know how to do?”
The Journal said it feels it did nothing wrong by running these stories. “Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals,” the Journal posted on its site.
I see that Osama Saeed of the Muslim Association of Britain has welcomed a post at Harry’s Place by Brett Lock of OutRage!, attacking the hysteria over “foreign criminals”. No doubt Lock will soon reciprocate with a favourable comment about Osama’s blog. Or perhaps not. Last year Osama posted a piece applauding a New Statesman article by Peter Tatchell on asylum rights, and as yet there hasn’t been any noticeable warming of Tatchell’s attitude towards the “Islamic fundamentalists” of MAB.
“That Britain is facing a terrorist jihad is already widely known; this morning’s headline news that police have arrested seven terrorist suspects in raids in Greater Manchester and Merseyside reinforces that concern. What is less well-known, is that we are also facing an economic jihad, one that the perpetrators proudly admit to. The ideological basis of economic jihad is the same as that of terrorist jihad: the Koran’s commandment that every Moslem wage war upon non-Moslems for their forcible subjection to Islam.”
Another paranoid rant from the fascists.
Physical and verbal abuse against Muslims in Ireland is on the rise. According to the Equality Authority, negative portrayals of Muslims in the media are leading to more attacks.
Up to 25,000 Muslims live in Ireland.
A number of famous Muslim writers and actors are speaking about Islamophobia in Dublin tonight in a conference organised by the Equality Authority to raise the profile of the issue.
Chief Executive Neil Crowley said: “Xenophobia is a global phenomenon so we would be foolish to think we were exempt from it.”
“And there are indicators that it is an issue here, indicators in terms of reports of physical and verbal abuse and in terms of some media reporting that does stereotype Muslim people.”
He also claimed there were indicators from the Garda Human Rights Office that highlighted difficulties in relations between the Gardaí and the Muslim community.
A martial arts expert who converted to Islam while working as an undercover agent claims Swiss security officers tried to get him to frame a Muslim scholar.
Claude Covassi says that his handlers wanted him to smear Hani Ramadan, brother of Tariq Ramadan. Covassi told the Los Angeles Times that in two years of mingling with members of Geneva’s Muslim community he found no evidence that Ramadan has links to terrorist groups in Iraq.
See also Los Angeles Times, 22 May 2006
“I was in Warsaw to speak at an OSCE conference on Islamophobia when my office forwarded me an article that had just appeared in the New York Sun, a purveyor of incitement and hate, masquerading as a newspaper. Entitled ‘The Three Myths About Islam‘, the article sets out to demonstrate that because of liberal political correctness, Americans had come to believe a number of falsehoods about Islam: namely that it is a peaceful, tolerant and under attack. In fact, according to the author, the opposite is true. The religion of 1.5 billion, he claims, is, by its nature and history, intolerant, aggressive, and violent….
“While the article was clearly disturbing, I might not have become as upset as I did (since I don’t expect anything more from the Sun), had it not been for the fact that the author of this malevolent attack was identified as a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of Washington’s premier think tanks. More troubling is the fact that the article was being distributed to a larger list, via email, by an official at the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the US’s mainstream Jewish organizations….
“From Warsaw, I wrote to the AJC demanding an explanation. I noted that if an Arab American or Muslim American group had distributed a piece called ‘The Three Myths of Judaism’, that had similarly grotesquely caricatured the Jewish faith, that group would have been called anti-Semitic – a rebuke they would have rightly deserved.”
James Zogby writes in The American Muslim, 22 May 2006
Hundreds of people opposed to an application to build an Islamic community centre and mosque on greenbelt land packed out a public meeting last night.
More than 500 people turned up for a community council meeting which would normally attract about 20 residents to discuss the proposals for the new mosque in Newton Mearns, near Glasgow.
One resident said: “Plans have been lodged for a huge floodlit building that would be more at home in Mecca than Newton Mearns. Obviously the local residents are up in arms about this.”
Osama Saeed was at the meeting and reports: “Speaking to Muslims in attendance afterwards, there was a feeling of intimidation from an almost baying crowd. Time after time, mosque opposers claimed they favoured the building of a mosque in the local authority area – just not in their back yard. They would have been as well saying that ‘We are in favour of Asians, just not in this country’.”
There’s a pretty dreadful article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in today’sObserver by Jason Burke, who you’d have thought would know better, and a no less one-sided comment piece by Isabella Thompson. Hirsi Ali is described as a “radical liberal” (!) in the headline to Burke’s article and neither he nor Thompson bothers to address the appalling role she has played in stoking up anti-Muslim hysteria in the Netherlands.
Milena Buyum of the National Assembly Against Racism had a letter in the 5 May issue of Tribune condemning the presence of the British National Party and its front organisation Civil Liberty at the “March for Free Expression” in Trafalgar Square in March. She pointed out: “There is a clear danger that actions such as the Freedom of Speech rally give the extreme Right a cloak of legitimacy.”
In reply, one Mazin Zeki has a letter in the current issue of Tribune (19 May) actually defending the participation of fascists in the demonstration: “Everyone was welcome to the rally regardless of their political or other allegiance. That is exactly how it should be. Free speech is the democratic space which allows the clear and open clash of differences to be resolved…. Free speech cannot be abandoned on the basis of demagogic ‘anti-racist’ demands from self-appointed groups …”.
Zeki continues: “I am submitting a motion in favour of free speech to the annual general meeting of Liberty on May 30 and welcome support from all true democrats including Tribune readers.” Hopefully Liberty’s members will treat Zeki’s arguments with the contempt they deserve.
For a detailed analysis of the forces involved in the “March for Free Expression”, see “The Right, the Left and ‘Free Expression'”, in What Next? No.31