Fascists launch local election campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP election campaignThe BNP reports on the launch of its local election campaign:

“BNP leader Nick Griffin spoke of the significance of the day of the launch; Good Friday was deliberately chosen to emphasise that Britain was fundamentally a Christian country and that the elections on May 4th offer the electorate an opportunity to vote for the continued demise of our traditions and values under the failed trio of Old Gang parties who continue to pander to the twin evils of multiculturalism and globalisation and further have failed to grasp the very real threat posed by militant Islam, or a renaissance of traditional western European Christian values under the stewardship and guidance of the British National Party.”

BNP news report, 14 April 2006

Army report accuses Rumsfeld

Posted on by Bob Pitt

RumsfeldDonald Rumsfeld was directly linked to prisoner abuse for the first time yesterday, when it emerged he had been “personally involved” in a Guantánamo Bay interrogation found by military investigators to have been “degrading and abusive”.

Human Rights Watch last night called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate whether the defence secretary could be criminally liable for the treatment of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi al-Qaida suspect forced to wear women’s underwear, stand naked in front of a woman interrogator, and to perform “dog tricks” on a leash, in late 2002 and early 2003. The US rights group said it had obtained a copy of the interrogation log, which showed he was also subjected to sleep deprivation and forced to maintain “stress” positions; it concluded that the treatment “amounted to torture”.

Guardian, 15 April 2006

See also Human Rights Watch news release, 14 April 2006

Negative American views about Islam ‘worrying’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Attitudes towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam in the US are troubling and have not been improving over the last few years, Arab-American academic Dr Samer S. Shehata has stated, quoting results of a number of opinion polls conducted in the US. “A high percentage of Americans hold negative attitudes toward Islam, and many Americans believe that Islam – more than other religions – encourages violence,” he told Gulf Times.

An Assistant Professor of Arab Politics at the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies in the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Dr Shehata had given a presentation on Thursday at the inaugural symposium of SFS in Qatar.

“Americans are generally more willing to impose extra security measures on Arab and Muslim-Americans and limit Arab and Muslim immigration into the US,” he explained.

The academic pointed out that although survey data about American attitudes towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam before September 11, 2001, is not readily available, one could reasonably assume that there has been a significant increase in negative feelings toward these groups and religion since 9/11.

According to the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, attitudes toward Islam have been holding relatively stable during the last three years with about 33-36% of respondents saying they hold unfavourable attitudes towards Islam compared with 38-40% who hold favourable attitudes toward the religion. Pew is a highly respected and non-partisan research organisation that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

Other polling has produced slightly more troubling findings. According to the Washington Post/ABC News polls, the percentage of Americans who hold unfavourable views of Islam has risen over the last three years.

Gulf Times, 15 April 2006

A useful summary of polls testing US opinion about Islam, though it omits this recent CBS poll, which found that 45% of Americans hold negative views of Islam, confirming the result of an ABC poll in March.

Posted in USA

US barring of Muslim is still a puzzle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_RamadanUS government lawyers clarified some mysteries and deepened others in the case of Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim scholar and leading European theologian of Islam who has been barred by the Bush administration from traveling to the United States since July 2004.

Papers the government presented at a hearing in a US court Thursday in New York revealed that, contrary to officials’ statements, a clause in the USA Patriot Act that bans any foreigner who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity” was not the reason Ramadan’s US visa was revoked. The government said it did not intend to bar Ramadan in the future based on that clause, sometimes called the ideological exclusion provision.

But the government also said Ramadan’s case had been and remained a national security matter, and that statements he made in recent interviews with US consular officials in Switzerland had raised new “serious questions” about whether he should be allowed to come to the United States. Neither the government’s documents nor its lawyer, David Jones, an assistant US attorney, explained why Ramadan was banned or provided any detail about the administration’s new concerns in his case.

The hearing, before Judge Paul Crotty in US District Court in New York, came in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three academic and writers’ organizations who had invited Ramadan to speak at conferences. The groups claim their constitutional rights have been violated because they cannot meet with Ramadan in the United States.

New York Times, 14 April 2006

See also Islam Online, 14 April 2006

Terror law an affront to justice – judge

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A high court judge branded the government’s system of control orders against terrorism suspects “an affront to justice” yesterday and ruled that they breached human rights laws. The ruling by Mr Justice Sullivan came after a challenge to the first control order issued against a British Muslim man, alleged by the security services and the home secretary to have been planning to travel to Iraq to fight UK and US forces.

Muddassar Arani, solicitor for the Briton, who is of Arab heritage, said: “This was the first British Muslim subject to a control order and he’s being treated as a second-class citizen. “It is clear the home secretary is acting as the judge, jury and prosecutor.”

Guardian, 13 April 2006

Poll: sinking perceptions of Islam in US

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Although Americans believe they are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

Forty-five percent of respondents queried April 6-9 said they have an unfavorable view of Islam, a rise from 36 percent in February. And the public’s impression of Islam has diminished even more compared with four years ago. In February 2002 – less than six months after the terrorist attacks of September 11 – the country was evenly divided in its impression of Islam.

Americans today are also more likely than not to believe that Islam encourages violence, at least in comparison to other religions around the world.

CBS News, 13 April 2006

Posted in USA

‘Oriana Fallaci has enrolled in the Society of Jesus’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the Islamization of the West is neither a phantasm nor merely something feared: it is an intention and a fact that emerges from an objective examination of the evidence. Moderate Islam, properly so called, does not exist because there is no institutional and moderate form of Islamic theology. There are moderate Muslims, and some of them see things with a clear and long-term perspective. But Islam itself, or rather the institutional religious culture of the Muslims, has reacted in its encounter with modernity by entrenching itself in fundamentalist positions….

“There is, therefore, an objective convergence between the trend in Islamic theology and the ideology of the terrorists…. This is why it would not only be prudent, as cardinal Giacomo Biffi has suggested, to discourage Islamic immigration in Europe, it would be masochistic to encourage it without demanding reciprocation in terms of integration. Islam is not compatible with liberal democracies…. Unfortunately, open and liberal society becomes paralyzed when it encounters a closed and incompatible civilization…. in Islam, there is no foundation for tolerance in the broad sense that characterizes our secular societies.”

Two Jesuits assess Islam in a recent issue of the Italian Catholic journal Studium. Sandro Magister suggests that this is part of a shift (see for example here) towards a more aggressive approach to Islam on the part of the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI.

Chiesa, 10 April 2006

Robert Spencer applauds this indication of “anti-dhimmitude and clear-eyed realism at the Vatican”.

Dhimmi Watch, 12 April 2006

EU lexicon to shun term ‘Islamic terrorism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The European Union, tiptoeing through a minefield of religious and cultural sensitivities, is discreetly reviewing the language it uses to describe terrorists who claim to act in the name of Islam.

EU officials are working on what they call a “lexicon” for public communication on terrorism and Islam, designed to make clear that there is nothing in the religion to justify outrages like the September 11 attacks or the bombings of Madrid and London. The lexicon would set down guidelines for EU officials and politicians.

“Certainly ‘Islamic terrorism’ is something we will not use … we talk about ‘terrorists who abusively invoke Islam’,” an EU official told Reuters. Other terms being considered by the review include “Islamist”, “fundamentalist” and “jihad”.

The latter, for example, is often used by al Qaeda and some other groups to mean warfare against infidels, but for most Muslims indicates a spiritual struggle. “Jihad means something for you and me, it means something else for a Muslim. Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within yourself,” said the official, speaking anonymously because the review is an internal one that is not expected to be made public.

EU counter-terrorism chief Gijs de Vries told Reuters that terrorism was not inherent to any religion, and praised moderate Muslims for opposing attempts to hijack Islam.

“They have been increasingly active in isolating the radicals who abuse Islam for political purposes, and they deserve everyone’s support. And that includes the choice of language that makes clear that we are talking about a murderous fringe that is abusing a religion and does not represent it.”

Reuters, 11 April 2006

This is the sort of thing that reduces Robert Spencer to apoplexy.

Update:  Yes, predictably, Spencer is not pleased, particularly with the stuff about the concept of jihad encompassing spiritual struggle when, as he never ceases to tell us, “the word in the Qur’an is clear, and it means warfare”.

Dhimmi Watch, 11 April 2006

Giraldus Cambrensis also takes exception to the EU position on jihad: “I should here remind readers that the title of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf also meant ‘my struggle’.”

Western Resistance, 11 April 2006