Ilan Halimi’s family boycotts protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ha’aretz reports that the family of French murder victim, Ilan Halimi, are refusing to attend a demonstration against the murder because of the participation of the racist right. According to Ha’aretz:

“The rally – which is due to be attended by over 100,000 people and numerous public figures, including government ministers – has become controversial due to the planned participation of representatives of two right-wing political movements, the National Front and the Movement for France (known by its French initials MPF).

“On Friday, the anti-racism organization MARP announced that it would refuse to attend the rally for this reason, charging that both movements were using Halimi’s murder to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment and thereby encouraging racism. The National Front, for instance, described the murder as ‘the result of 40 years of uncontrolled immigration’, while the MPF denounced ‘the Islamization of France’.”

Jews sans frontieres, 26 February 2006

Protest to Telegraph over call for Qur’an ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Danish publisher Bookwright has circulated an appeal in response to Patrick Sookhdeo’s interview in last week’s Sunday Telegraph:

Sunday Telegraph article calls for the Qur’an to be Banned

An article by Alasdair Palmer in last week’s Sunday Telegraph (19 Feb 2006) entitled “The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state” contains the following paragraph:

“… For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops. It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book. Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.”

You will probably know that the publication referred to is the Bewley translation of the Qur’an which is rapidly being recognised as one of the most accurate and readable translations. Not only does Palmer’s interviewee advocate banning the sale of the Qur’an but describes its contents in such a way as to suggest it is nothing more than a handbook on terrorism. He falsely claims that it “calls for the killing of Jews and Christians”.

The Qur’an does not call for Jews and Christians to be killed. This claim is a malicious lie. Furthermore the interviewee urges that the Qur’an itself be made illegal. It is outrageous that the Sunday Telegraph should promote such a viewpoint, particularly in the context of recent events. We cannot permit Allah’s Book to be traduced in this way in the National Press and allow the Sunday Telegraph to promote such an abhorrent view of the Qur’an.

It is important to note that this article represents a new and more sinister development. Previously, we have had attacks on the person of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the bearer of the revelation. This attack is on the revelation itself, and thus indicates a new and more dangerous front opened in the war on Islam. Certainly the minimum we can do is send an e-mail to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph expressing our outrage at this unprecedented open attack on the Qur’anic text.

The editor’s e-mail address is:

Sarah Sands: sarah.sands@telegraph.co.uk

Please forward this mail to as many people as possible and urge them to write to the Sunday Telegraph.

Open season on Islam – Salma Yaqoob

Posted on by Bob Pitt

salmayaqoob“The reverberations from Muslim protests offended at the cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) continue to resound. Despite peaceful protests in London by Muslim Association of Britain and Muslim Council of Britain, the organisers still found themselves subject to an attack in the Sunday Express (February 12) for failing to do enough to tackle extremism. On the same theme, the British National Party, fresh from their acquittal of inciting racial hatred, have announced plans to turn the May local elections into a ‘referendum’ on Islam. Other far right groups have made threats of book-burning sessions of the Qur’an. For Muslims, past echoes of Nazi demonisation of the Jews don’t seem so far away.”

Salma Yaqoob in the Muslim News, 24 February 2006

Australian politician says: disloyal Jews should go home

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a controversial speech to the Sydney Institute, Federal Treasurer Peter Costello warned that Jews should pledge allegiance to Australia or go home. Jews who value Halacha (Jewish law) over Australian law “should be refused citizenship if they apply for it. Where they have it they should be stripped of it if they are dual citizens and have some other country that recognises them as citizens.”

“Before entering a synagogue visitors are asked to put a yarmulke on their head,” Mr Costello said. “This is a sign of respect. If you have a strong objection to putting something on your head don’t enter the synagogue.” He warned Jews, “before becoming an Australian you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objection to those values, don’t come to Australia.”

In a rebuke to “mushy multiculturalism” he said “there is one law we are all expected to abide by – it is the law enacted by Parliament under the Australian Constitution.” If Jews, and for that matter Aboriginies, wish to live by a different cultural or religious law then they should move somewhere else. The problem is what to do with the children of disloyal Jews and Aboriginies who were born here.

Dervish weblog, 24 February 2006

Or, for the actual story, see The Age, 24 February 2006

Unite: biggest conference against fascism for years

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UAF conference 2006Over 600 anti-fascist activists from around the country met in London on Saturday of last week for a lively and determined conference organised by Unite Against Fascism. The conference discussed stopping the British National Party (BNP) at the 4 May local elections.

Several speakers highlighted how the BNP was seeking to exploit the current climate of Islamophobia, especially in the wake of the anti-Muslim cartoons row and the recent acquittal of BNP leader Nick Griffin on four race hate charges. The Nazis are trying to bill the May elections as a “referendum on Islam”.

The conference was the largest of its kind for over a decade, attracting a third more delegates than Unite’s previous national meeting held in February last year.

Socialist Worker, 25 February 2006

See also the conference report on the UAF website

Cartoon protests: uniting against Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The anger following the publication of racist depictions of the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, and their republication across Europe, has continued to find expression in meetings and protests. And the right wing columnists and politicians have continued to pump out their bile. First Islamophobia, the last ‘respectable’ form of racism, was used in an attempt to scare Muslims into submission. Then, when some dared to protest against the onslaught, Muslims were once more attacked for daring to assert themselves. Trevor Kavanagh, writing in the Sun on Monday of this week, was typical. ‘The strident voice of assertive Islam is here to stay,’ he wrote. ‘Flames are being fanned to intimidate the West and its allies in the Muslim world.’ He evoked the image of ‘women walking the streets of Britain wearing Taliban-style burkas’. Italian government minister Roberto Calderoli, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, wore a T-shirt with the cartoons on them. After an outcry he was forced to resign from the right wing government. But continued racism has not silenced Muslims, or those on the left who remain determined to defend them.”

Joseph Choonara looks at the discussion on how to fight back after thousands of people have protested over the publication of racist cartoons.

Socialist Worker, 25 February 2006

Cartoon furor exposes double standards

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cartoon furor exposes double standards

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 23 February 2006

Gary Younge, the New York-based black British columnist, has written this about the Danish cartoon controversy in The Nation magazine:

“Muslims have, in effect, been vilified twice: once through the original cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them. Such logic recalls the words of the late South African black nationalist Steve Biko: `Not only are whites kicking us, they are telling us how to react to being kicked.'”

Confusion continues to mark the Western response to the issue. Some of this is because we are in uncharted waters. But something else is at work — double standards and insidious attempts at delegitimizing the Muslim protests.

Notorious British historian David Irving has just been sentenced in Vienna to three years for denying the Holocaust. Radical British Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri has been jailed, among other things, for inciting hatred. About time.

Yet there’s silence from freedom of speech advocates who were on their pulpits just days ago.

Continue reading →

Freedom of speech or Islamophobia?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Freedom of speech or Islamophobia?

By Owen Jones, Poplar & Limehouse Constituency Labour Party

Labour Left Briefing, March 2006

The publication of a dozen caricatures of the prophet Mohammed by newspapers across Europe has sparked a global explosion of Muslim rage. Particularly incensed by the portrayal of Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban, thousands of Muslims have protested across Europe and the Islamic world, culminating in the torching of Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus and the deaths of several protesters.

According to Jyllands-Posten, the rightwing Danish newspaper that originally published the cartoons, the right of freedom of speech is under siege. France-Soir launched an impassioned defence of secularism with the assertion that: “Yes, we have the right to caricature God.” The Daily Telegraph has gone even further. In a recent editorial it demanded that: “Muslims must accept the predominant mores of their adopted culture… Those Muslims who cannot tolerate the openness and robustness of intellectual debate in the West have perhaps chosen to live in the wrong culture.”

Continue reading →

Sucking up to Islam will never appease the zealots, Wheen warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Francis WheenSucking up to Islam will never appease the zealots

By Francis Wheen

Evening Standard, 21 February 2006

I toddled down to Trafalgar Square last Saturday to observe the latest mass rally against Danish cartoonists.

The protesters were on their best behaviour, unlike the demagogues who addressed them. Certain placards – “Don’t they teach you manners in Denmark?”, “Learn to apologise properly” – suggested this whole crisis could have been avoided had the Danes studied Lady Troubridge’s Book of Etiquette more attentively.

The most common placard, however, was a simple equation: “War on terror = War on Islam”. What could be more moderate and well-mannered than that? It’s an article of faith for many secular British liberals, too.

The reasoning behind it is that Britain set out to topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. Yet the victims of Saddam’s regime – Kurds and Shias – were themselves Muslims. Did anyone at the rally claim that Saddam also made war on Islam? Of course not.

Nor would they make the accusation against Iran – even though Iranian police arrested 1,200 Sufi Muslims in Qom last week and destroyed their prayer hall. This was an act of straightforward religious persecution, but only Amnesty International has made the slightest fuss.

If Tony Blair really is waging war on Islam, it must be the first struggle in history in which the belligerent continually prostrates himself before the foe he is supposedly attacking. Only last month the Government tried to push through a law criminalising people who criticise religion, a measure introduced purely to placate leading Muslims.

Now we learn from the New Statesman that the Foreign Office wants to establish “working-level contacts” with supporters of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme Islamist group. In a leaked memo to ministers, an FO official explains that “interacting with ‘political Islam’ is an important element of our Engaging With the Islamic World strategy”.

Our ambassador in Cairo seems unconvinced. In another memo leaked to the New Statesman, he complains of “a tendency for us to be drawn towards engagement for its own sake” and a reluctance to notice “the very real downsides for us in terms of the Islamists’ likely foreign and social policies”.

Just so. Since 9/11 earnest progressives have argued that we must work with militant Islam rather than challenge it. Hence the grotesque pantomime horse known as the Respect Coalition.

Meanwhile Tony Blair has been engaging away like billy-o with the famous “Muslim moderates”, awarding them knighthoods and seats on quangos. He insists religion is the solution rather than the problem, since “Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham” – overlooking the fact that Abraham’s example was cited by one of the 9/11 hijackers as his chief inspiration.

So far, however, this ardent wooing seems to be unreciprocated. An ICM poll has found that 40 per cent of British Muslims want sharia law in parts of the country, and one in five sympathises with the “feelings and motives” of bombers who killed 52 people in London last July. Alarming news: but will it prompt a demo in Trafalgar Square? No chance.

BNP to use Prophet cartoon in campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP turban cartoon (3)The British National Party is seeking to exploit controversies involving Muslims in its campaign for local authority elections in May.

The extreme right-wing party, which hopes to field 1,000 candidates in England, will include in its campaign material one of the cartoons which sparked outrage among Muslims across the world, showing the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb in his turban.

One leaflet asks voters: “Are you concerned about the growth of Islam in Britain? Make Thursday 4 May Referendum Day.” It adds: “We owe it to our children to defend our Christian culture.”

Labour MPs condemned the BNP’s attack on Muslims while also urging their party’s leaders to take more seriously the threat from the BNP in its working-class heartlands.

Mainstream parties say the BNP’s campaigning has become more sophisticated. The party is using telephone canvassing for the first time and playing down its hostility to blacks and Asians in order to focus on Muslims. Other campaign literature contrasts the jailing of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza for inciting murder and racial hatred with the partial acquittal of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, who faces a retrial on unresolved racial hatred charges on 15 May.

The BNP, which now has 19 councillors, is expected to focus efforts in areas where it has performed strongly in the past such as parts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and east London, where it won 35 per cent of the vote in recent by-elections in Barking. Its share of the vote rose from 1 per cent at the 1992 general election to 4.2 per cent last year.

Labour MPs are worried that the BNP could capture more council seats by exploiting the disenchantment with the Government among traditional Labour supporters and stoking fears about the Muslim community. The MPs fear that Tony Blair’s determination to retain the support of Middle England could leave Labour vulnerable to a BNP advance in working-class areas.

Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, said: “The BNP’s pitch is to be more Labour than New Labour with a virulently anti-Muslim agenda.” He said Labour’s strategy of targeting swing voters in marginal seats was “diametrically at odds” with the need to reassure traditional supporters about the Government’s record.

Independent, 22 February 2006

See also BBC News, 22 February 2006