Drink-soaked popinjay may initial Euston Manifesto

Posted on by Eddie Truman

HitchDrink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay (not our description) Christopher Hitchens today teased the 977 lonely hearts the Euston Manifesto has brought together with a suggestion he may consider initialing the document. “So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one.” Hitch reveals that he has “been flattered by an invitation to sign it, and I probably will”.

There will be sighs of relief amongst many on the left who were likewise flattered to be asked to sign an attempt to establish a left neo-conservative grouping in the UK but read the manifesto and instantly realised what was going on.

See Christopher Hitchens, “At last our lefties see the light”, Sunday Times, 30 April 2006

Martin Sullivan adds:  And now Mad Mel has declared herself “delighted” by the Euston Manifesto – “it’s great to see such a brave statement of decent principles and an open denunciation of the left for being on the wrong side of history. Such a challenge from within its own ranks is essential if the left is ever to stop causing so much lethal damage to the west”.

Meanwhile, online signatories to the Euston Manifesto have been outlining their motives for signing. Harriet Baber explains that “we liberals need to take back the Enlightenment” – which apparently means supporting human rights, “not peace, non-interference in the business of sovereign nations or respect for other cultures”. Neil Denny has signed in protest at a situation in which “to declare a support for Enlightenment values is to seemingly out oneself as an Islamophobe and a racist”. And Aidan Fleming adds: “The curse of democracy is the Qur’an. All supporters of the Euston Manifesto Group should read, The Sword Of The Prophet by Serge Trifovic. It should be declared that ISLAM is not a religion but a non-democratic political organisation.”

Concerns raised as innocent Muslims detained

Posted on by Eddie Truman

Senior members of Scotland’s Pakistani community last night revealed that they had approached the chief constable of Strathclyde Police to complain about the number of innocent Muslims being detained at Glasgow Airport. Ashraf Anjum, president of the Glasgow Central Mosque, the largest in Scotland, said he had personally raised the issue with Sir Willie Rae last month in response to a growing number of incidents being reported to him.

Sunday Herald, 30 April 2006

Times attack on Muslim college

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Islamic college accused of teaching extremist doctrine has hit back dismissing the article in The Times newspaper as immature and unfounded and describing it as a classic example of an Islamophobic report that incites to violence and hatred.

Hawza Ilmiyya in London, a Shiite seminary, labelled Sean O’Neill’s report as totally biased, erroneous and shocking, that was done to “provoke tension in different parts of society between Muslims and non-Muslims” and which has since led to the institution receiving threatening phones calls and death threats.

The article entitled: “Muslim students ‘being taught to despise unbelievers as filth’”, claimed that anonymous students from the college were disturbed and worried over a medieval text being taught that apparently described non-Muslims as “filth” and likened them to dogs and pigs.

But the college has rejected the portrayal of its academic environment as a “hotbed of religious intolerance and extremism” as going against the very ethos upon which it was established in 2002 – “to train religious scholars and Imams to serve the growing needs of the Muslim community in Britain”.

Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour, the Director of Studies at the college, said that neither he nor any of his students had ever learned to “despise” anyone. “We do not even despise Sean O’Neill who has written this sensational and confusing report,” he said.

Continue reading →

Europe threatened by Muslim hordes (part 346)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jamie Glazov interviews Morten Messerschmidt of the Danish People’s Party. “Tell us the impact that Muslim immigration is having on Europe”, Glazov asks, to which Messerschmidt replies:

“It is well know that the Muslim immigrants are disproportional in representing crime records; that the hate towards Jews is increasing in Europe, because of these groups. The serious mistreatment of women, which we see in the Muslim world, is now also taking place in Europe. Therefore, we know that the lack of labor-participation, which is connected to these people living on welfare, is an economic threat to the stability of our societies. In many European countries we speak about the necessity of changing the welfare-payments, but the truth is that if we did not have the Muslim burden, many of these changes would not be required.”

Front Page Magazine, 26 April 2006

The roots of the BNP’s appeal

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When employment minister Margaret Hodge said eight out of ten white voters might vote BNP in Barking, it was linked by many in the media to a new report called The BNP: The Roots of its Appeal. This report is produced by Democratic Audit, an academic research unit based at the University of Essex, and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

“In fact the report is far more sober and nuanced in its assessment of the BNP threat than the media spin would suggest. It mentions polls in London in 2004 that found 23 percent of respondents said they ‘might vote’ for the BNP, as opposed to those who ‘could never vote’ for them. But it also cites poll data that 64 percent of people across Britain expressed a strong dislike for the BNP. This ‘seems to confirm the existence of a large majority of voters for whom extremist parties advocating racist ideas are an anathema’, the report’s authors write….

“The authors explain how important it is for the BNP to be able to repackage racism in terms of defences of ‘free speech’ or attacks on Islam. ‘It is this stance that allows them to campaign viciously on race and especially against Muslims while retaining an outward air of respectability,’ they write.”

Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker, 29 April 2006

See also “Livingstone slams claim that 1 in 4 Londoners support BNP”, UAF news report, 25 April 2006

For the Democratic Audit/Rowntree Trust report, see (pdf) here

US university won’t reprimand professor for racial slurs

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Distancing itself from the remarks, Michigan State University (MSU) said professor Indrek Wichman was exercising his free speech right when describing Muslims as “brutal and uncivilized” and telling Muslim students to return to their “ancestral homelands.”

“He was cautioned that any additional commentary … could constitute the creation of a hostile environment, and that could … form the basis of a complaint,” Terry Denbow, a spokesman for MSU, was quoted as saying by Detroit Free Press. He stressed that the remarks, though “very inappropriate,” do not violate the university’s antidiscrimination policy.

In an e-mail to the university’s Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) on February 28, Wichman wrote: “I counsul [sic] you dissatisfied, agressive [sic], brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems [sic] to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile ‘protests’.” He was referring to global protests against Danish cartoons that ridiculed Prophet Muhammad.

“If you do not like the values of the West – see the 1st Ammendment [sic] – you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.”

The Muslim Students’ Association called Monday for the university to issue a letter of reprimand. They have met several times with university officials since February 28 and went public with the e-mail Monday because the school had not acted. The student group also wants the university to implement diversity training programs for faculty and a mandatory freshman seminar on hate and discrimination.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America’s largest Muslim civil liberties group, has also urged the university to reprimand the professor.

“The university needs to take appropriate disciplinary action in this case to demonstrate through its actions that anti-Muslim bigotry will not be tolerated on campus,” Dawud Walid, head of the Michigan chapter of CAIR, said in a statement on the group’s website. He said that it is “unconscionable” for a professor to use his university e-mail account to “foster a hostile learning environment for Muslim students.”

Continue reading →

Pipes warns against sharia law … in Tennessee!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes 9-11In the USA the case of Bill Hobbs has become a cause célèbre for the Right.

In February, as part of his defence of Jyllands-Posten’s decision to publish anti-Muslim caricatures, Hobbs invited readers of his weblog to “exercise your right to free expression by drawing pictures of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed”. As his own contribution to this worthy cause, Hobbs posted a stick drawing of the Prophet holding a bomb. The cartoon was entitled “Mohammed Blows”.

In response to a (Christian) critic who accused him of showing “distasteful insensitivity to people of other faiths”, Hobbs wrote: “I am insensitive toward religions that have a large number of adherents who are running around blowing stuff up and threatening to kill non-believers over cartoons. Yes, I plead insensitivity. I would prefer my children not grow up in a world governed by Islamofacists.”

As a result of the furore, Hobbs resigned from his job as an editor and news writer on the marketing and communications staff at Belmont University in Nashville, the assumption being that he jumped before he was pushed. Hobbs was immediately adopted as a hero by right-wing bloggers in the US. And now Daniel Pipes has waded into the fray. According to Pipes, writing at FrontPage Magazine, “this firing in Tennessee amounts to a capitulation to Islamic law. Each surrender means the Shari‘a will move inexorably forward.”

I used to think that Pipes was perhaps marginally less barking than Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, but these days it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell them apart.

UAF rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Unite Against Fascism/ Love Music Hate Racism and present:

Rally against racism and fascism

Saturday April 29th 2006, from 12 noon, Trafalgar Square, London

This event will celebrate our multi-racial, multi-faith society. The Nazi BNP want to spread hatred and divide us. Join us in sending a message that we will not be divided – no to racism.

•  Use your vote to stop the BNP on 4 May

•  Unite Against Fascism

•  No to Islamophobia

French presidential hopeful decries ‘Islamization of France’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MOSQUEES_ROISS_001.5E0MYJ.S.pdfA far-right French politician launched his 2007 presidential campaign on Sunday, April 23, denouncing what he called the “Islamization” of the country and declaring Islam incompatible with France’s secular values.

“I am the only politician who tells the French the truth about the Islamization of France,” Philippe de Villiers, head of the anti-immigrant Movement for France (MPF) party, said in a Europe 1 radio interview, kicking off his campaign for the election next year.

On measures France should take to fight what he called its Islamization, Villiers said Paris should stop all mosque construction, impose a citizen’s charter demanding the strict separation of religion and state and freedom to change religions and demand strict respect for the equality of men and women.

It should also ban all Islamist organizations suspected of links to terrorism and expel any persons threatening the security of the French population, he added.

He further charged that Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport was endangered by Islamist radicals who he said had infiltrated the ground staff there, releasing on Thursday, April 27, a book entitled “The Mosques of Roissy” detailing his charges.

Villiers has stirred up controversy in recent weeks with increasingly tough statements about Muslims, which critics call racist and officials describe as exaggerated.

Islam Online, 24 April 2006

See also Reuters, 23 April 2006

Muslim ‘must pay for visa checks’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mohammed Umar Haleem KhanA Muslim student had to pay extra for security checks when applying for a visa to visit the United States, because his name was Mohammed. Mohammed Umar Haleem Khan, 22, was told by US Embassy officials that “a lot of bad people” shared his name. The Manchester Metropolitan University student had to pay an extra $80 (£45) to have his fingerprints checked against a US terror suspect database.

Mr Khan was planning to work for the Camp America project in Philadelphia. He said: “She asked me all the usual questions like what was my purpose for visiting and what was the nature of my job and then she said there was a problem with my name. She said there were a lot of bad people in the world with that name, meaning terrorists…. I’m sure that if some white candidate came along there would have been no problem.”

Mr Khan added that he had never visited Afghanistan or any other trouble hotspots and could think of no reason why his name would cause a problem.

A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain Inayat Bunglawala said: “This is a worrying incident and seems to fit a recent pattern whereby the USA appears to be treating all Muslims as potential terrorists just because of their religion. Although Muslim parents name their children from a wide variety of names – just like other parents – many of them, especially those from the Indian subcontinent, will often give their male children the name of Muhammad as a kind of respectful prefix in honour of the Prophet, even though the actual name by which these children are known will be something else.

“US Embassy officials ought really to have had the training to cope with basic elements of Muslim culture which would help prevent these kinds of unfortunate situations.”

BBC News, 24 April 2006