Mad Mel to join BNP?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmelMelanie Phillips explains why Britain is under threat from the Muslim hordes:

“Like much of Europe, Britain’s demographic composition is changing radically and very fast. At the most conservative estimate, its population of sixty million will rise over the next three decades by six or seven million, with 83 per cent of that new growth coming from immigration and most of that from the third world. The undesirability of such a drastic – and never debated – development is one of Britain’s great Unmentionables….

“The prevailing culture of non-discriminatory entitlement and minority rights meant the courts came to thwart all government attempts to enforce immigration controls. At root was the judges’ belief that the citizens of the world were entitled to exactly the same rights as the citizens of Britain. The result has been the deconstruction of British citizenship and the loss of sovereignty over national borders, laws and values…. the resulting chaos has made security impossible as the intelligence service has no means of keeping tabs on suspected terrorists.

“This was one of the key drivers behind the creation of what is known derisively as ‘Londonistan’, as Britain became the epicentre of the Islamic jihad in Europe. The country’s homage to freedom of speech, generous welfare entitlements and the fact that immigrants could simply lose themselves in the system turned Britain into a magnet for Islamist terrorists and extremists. But anyone who questioned the desirability of such trends was promptly denounced as a racist. Immigration was held to be an absolute good. Multiculturalism became the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by an army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values….

“The more the free world defends itself, the more the Islamists claim they are under attack. So the more atrocities there are against the west, the more the Islamists claim they are victims of Islamophobia…. The national identity of Britain is based on a particular culture, history, language, religion, law, customs and values. It cannot still remain recognisably itself if it makes itself home to large numbers of people who cannot or do not wish to assimilate into that identity. That’s not racism. It’s national survival.”

TCS Daily, 11 May 2006

I’m increasingly coming round to the view that the ideal political home for Phillips would be the British National Party.

Le Pen convicted of inciting race hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jean-Marie Le PenFrance’s highest court yesterday convicted the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen of inciting racial hatred for telling a newspaper in 2003 that Muslims would one day run France and strike fear into the hearts of the non-Muslim population. The ruling by the Court of Cassation came just over two years after Le Pen was originally convicted in the same case.

In February 2005, an appeals court confirmed the 2004 ruling against the president of the National Front party. Le Pen was ordered to pay a €10,000 (£6,800) fine for his remarks in Le Monde and an additional €5,000 in damages and interest to the League of Human Rights, which had filed suit.

Le Pen’s party blames Muslim immigrants for an array of social woes in France, which has western Europe’s largest Muslim population. The National Front contends that Muslim immigrants are taking jobs from the French. The National Front leader is looking to run in next year’s presidential election.

In the 2003 interview Le Pen urged the French to beware of “the day in France when we have 25 million Muslims, not five million” – the estimated population of Muslims in France today – because “it is they who will command”.

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Saudi woman insulted in Germany over veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Saudi woman claims to have suffered humiliation and abuse at a German airport for refusing to take off her veil in public for a security inspection. Saudi daily Al-Watan reported on Wednesday that the incident occurred two days ago at Munich airport, exposing the growing animosity and anti-Muslim sentiment in Western countries.

The paper quoted the woman as saying that she and her daughter were returning home after spending time in Germany for medical treatment. They stopped at the inspection point and the mother asked a female inspector if she needed to take off her coat but got no answer, while another female employee answered brusquely that she had to remove it.

“After we crossed the inspection point,” the woman said, “an employee came to me and asked to remove my veil, which I refused to do, asking her to use the electronic detector and pass it on my head. “The employee refused and started yelling at me, attracting the attention of the people around, so I asked her if I can do it in an isolated place or behind a curtain … So she started cursing me as she indicated a small room,” the woman said. “I was trying to fight my tears and told her that her behavior is not respectful and does not reflect the democracy they talk about,” she said.

The woman then said that “a man came close to me and also started yelling at me and hitting me on the shoulder screaming ‘this is Germany’. “Then,” the woman said, “the supervisor intervened and called on the employee who hit me to apologize, but he refused and started yelling again without taking into considering my old age and illness”.

UPI, 10 May 2006

Yet more self-justifying nonsense from Tatchell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Outrage Protest (2)Peter Tatchell has a letter in the latest issue of Tribune, replying to Kirsten Hearn’s criticism of OutRage!’s call for Unite Against Fascism to exclude the Muslim Council of Britain and its general secretary Sir Iqbal Sacranie from the platform of February’s UAF conference. Tatchell says that Hearn’s article “symbolises the political dishonesty and opportunism of the pro-Islamist left”.

Kirsten Hearn wrote, in opposition to OutRage!’s position on the UAF conference: “To suggest we jettison the Muslim community from the anti-fascist movement at a time when the fascists are advancing by attacking Muslims is obscene…. Specifically, the MCB is an umbrella and mainstream body representing more than 450 Muslim organisations and therefore must be central to anti-fascist unity in this country.”

In reply, Tatchell claims that he merely criticised UAF for inviting Sacranie as an individual, on the grounds that he had made homophobic comments: “My objection was to Sir Iqbal Sacranie. I suggested replacing him with a liberal, progressive Muslim speaker. To me, that does not sound like ‘jettisoning’ the Muslim community.”

But the Outrage! press release called for a ban not just on Sacranie but on the MCB as a whole. OutRage! urged UAF to “withdraw your invitation to Sir Iqbal and the MCB”, on the basis that “the MCB is not a liberal, progressive organisation. It represents only conservative, reactionary opinion. It is not a suitable partner organisation for the movement against fascism”. Tatchell cannot claim that he is unaware of the representative character of the MCB. He himself has described the MCB as “a mainstream organisation … which is the umbrella organisation of all Muslim groups in this country”. Yet this was the organisation that he wanted excluded from the UAF conference platform, to be replaced by one of several suggested individuals none of whom represents any significant force at all among Muslims in Britain. What does that amount to, other than “jettisoning the Muslim community”?

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Criminalising dissent in the ‘war on terror’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In practice, the introduction of the new offence of glorification is likely to widen the net beyond incitement but in an entirely arbitrary way. Noticeably, the whole debate on the glorification clause has been conducted on the tacit assumption that only Muslims will be prosecuted. Charles Clarke makes much of the idea that juries know instinctively what glorification means and will take notice of the context in assessing whether glorification has occurred. In fact, given the arbitrary nature of terms like ‘glorification’, juries will be forced to make entirely subjective decisions and, in the current context of Islamophobia, it is likely that they will be much readier to convict someone who has already been labelled a Muslim extremist by the press.”

Arun Kundnani argues that the new crime of “glorifying” terrorism, recently introduced under the Terrorism Act 2006, will lead to the suppression of legitimate debate on the causes of terror.

IRR news, 2 May 2006

Islamophobia, a retrospective

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“If propaganda is a weapon of war, Islam is under carpet bombing. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels described the methods, which define those used today: ‘Concentrating the fire of all the media on one particular point – a single theme, a single enemy, a single idea – the campaign uses this concentration of all media, but progressively…’

“Theme: ‘War on Terror’ Enemy: Muslims. Addressing the 2006 AIPAC ‘Now is the Time to Stop Iran’ Conference, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Gillerman summarized the Idea: ‘While it may be true – and probably is – that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim.’ Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami put it another way: ‘the West needs an enemy, and this time it is Islam. And Islamophobia becomes part of all policies of the great powers, of hegemonic powers’.”

Trish Schuh in Counterpunch, 6 May 2006

German minister wants to end discrimination against Muslims … by banning hijab from schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim minority in Germany is suffering from a growing religious discrimination with many Germans wrongly associating Islam with terrorism, a federal minister admitted on Sunday, May 7.

“Muslims are lately being confronted with mounting rejection which feeds from fear,” Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries told the weekly Welt am Sonntag. She said many Germans were not able to properly distinguish between Islam and terrorism. “As a consequence many Muslims are faced with discrimination because of their faith as some people link the Muslim faith automatically with Al-Qaeda and terrorism,” added Zypries.

The Interior Ministry is sponsoring a mobile exhibition touring the country to draw the line between Islam as a faith and the practices of some Muslims. It aims to distinguish between Islam as a religion that preaches peace and tolerance and parties condoning violence in the name of Islam, said the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the sponsor. The exhibition would visit universities, schools, parliaments, municipalities and cultural centers in the different states.

European officials said recently that the bloc is set to remove derogatory terminology about Islam like “Islamic terrorism” and “fundamentalists” in its new lexicon of public communication.

The minister proposed the introduction of school uniforms to avoid sparking furor over Muslim students wearing hijab. “All school pupils should wear the same school uniform,” she said. The minister believes such uniforms would also help prevent religious and social discrimination in Germany.

Islam Online, 7 May 2006

Observatory on Islamophobia established

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Organisation of Islamic Conference has formed the OIC Observatory on Islamophobia at the general-secretariat in Jeddah, which is mandated to monitor and document all activities indicating hatred of Islam around the world, particularly in Europe, according to Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

Addressing the senior officials’ preparatory meeting to the 33rd session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM) here on Saturday, the OIC secretary general said that the aim of the Observatory was to tackle the issue of Islamophobia head on.

Khaleej Times, 8 May 2006

Qaradawi calls for financial aid to Palestinians

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yusuf_al_QaradawiLeading Muslim scholars will meet in Doha on May 10-11 to discuss the starving of the Palestinian people after the cut in international aid, and are expected to issue a fatwa obliging Muslims and governments to help. “In view of the financial siege clamped on the Palestinian people, it is the duty of Muslim scholars to meet and make their position known to the nation,” prominent scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi told a press conference on Saturday, May 6. Sheikh Qaradawi slammed “the West’s double standards in rejecting the Palestinian democracy simply because its result did not suit them.” He branded this as “political hypocrisy which we reject.”

Palestine Chronicle, 8 May 2006

And while we’re on the subject, an earlier appeal by Qaradawi for financial support to the Palestinians was attacked by the pseudo-left neocons at Harry’s Place, who used excerpts selected by MEMRI from a Qaradawi sermon to accuse him, yet again, of being an anti-semite. “Gene” wrote:

“Maybe Sullivan, Ken Livingstone, Madeleine Bunting and other leftwing Qaradawi apologists still think that when he says ‘Jews’, he simply means Israelis. (I don’t think they really believe that, but let’s pretend they do.) How, then, will they explain away this passage from Qaradawi’s latest sermon, broadcast April 21 on Qatar TV? ‘The Jews throughout the world – despite their well-known stinginess, miserliness, and selfishness, and despite their worship of gold…. The Jews contributed generously to the Jewish state, before and after its establishment, and they are still contributing to this day. Shouldn’t the Arabs and Muslims contribute for their sacred cause?’ Here, inconveniently, Qaradawi refers unmistakably to stingy, miserly, selfish, gold-worshipping non-Israeli Jews. How will the Islamophobia Watchers spin this? Will they even try?”

I’ve asked an Arabic-speaking contact to check out the video extracts from Qaradawi’s sermon on the MEMRI site and he tells me that – surprise, surprise – the MEMRI translation is unreliable. The relevant passage should read something like this:

“The Palestinian people has sacrificed its blood. It has easily sacrificed its souls, for the sake of its cause, its religion, and its homeland. Should we not give them money? The Jews throughout the world – despite what is said about their stinginess, miserliness, selfishness and worship of gold… The Jews contributed generously to the Jewish state, before and after its establishment, and they are still contributing to this day. Shouldn’t the Arabs and Muslims contribute for their sacred cause?”

In other words, rather than saying that he himself thinks that all Jews are stingy, miserly, selfish etc, Qaradawi is saying that contrary to these supposed characteristics the world Jewish community has in fact been extremely generous in its support for the Israeli state, and that the world Muslim community should seek to emulate this generosity in supporting the Palestinians.

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