Danish paper slams ‘special treatment’ for Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The editor-in-chief of the Danish daily embroiled in the cartoons row claimed on Wednesday, February 15, that the press was giving Muslims a special treatment, as his cultural editor defended the decision to commission the lampooning drawings of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

“It turned out that the freedom of the press crumbled much more quickly than I thought,” Jyllands-Posten Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste told the Danish Christian daily Kristelig Dagbladet, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP). “It seems to me that the freedom of the press the world over is being limited as Muslims are being given special treatment.”

Islam Online, 16 February 2006

The BNP is riding the wave of racism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The BNP is riding the wave of racism

By Sabby Dhalu

Morning Star, 16 February 2006

The events of the last few weeks have clarified the serious threat that the growing climate of racism in Britain and the rest of Europe poses to us all.

The BNP has announced its intention to make the forthcoming local elections a “referendum on Islam,” riding on a wave of Islamophobia and rising racism.

BNP leader Nick Griffin and party activist Mark Collett were acquitted recently on half of the charges for incitement to racial hatred. The publication and republication of the so-called Danish cartoons have led to protests across the world.

Racism towards Muslims is being presented under the banner of “freedom of speech.”

All these events indicate a legitimisation and deepening climate of racism.

The use of cartoons to create or strengthen grotesque racist stereotypes of entire peoples is nothing new.

In 1930s Germany, the nazis systematically used such so-called cartoons depicting Jewish people in the most dehumanising manner for the sole purpose of creating caricatures that justified their programme of mass extermination of the Jewish people.

Black people have also been subject to such caricatures and depiction by racists and white supremacists in many parts of Europe and north America.

If published, any such images today rightly receive widespread condemnation.

It is incumbent on all anti-racists and anti-fascists to condemn unreservedly the publication of these racist images, for exactly the same reasons as the cartoons in the 1930s needed to condemned.

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UN calls for Guantánamo Bay to close

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The United States should close down its detention camp in Guantánamo Bay and give its detainees an independent trial or release them, a United Nations report released today suggests. The 54-page report called on Washington “to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

Guardian, 16 February 2006

Tatchell calls for UAF ban on MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP leaflet 3Under the headline “Muslim leader echoes homophobia of the BNP“, the gay rights group Outrage has condemned the decision to invite Sir Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, to speak at the Unite Against Fascism conference on Saturday.

Not that Peter Tatchell is opposed to Muslims speaking at the meeting, of course. He’s prepared to welcome individuals such as “Ziauddin Sardar, Sheikh Dr Muhammad Yusuf or Munira Mirza”, who represent nobody but themselves, while demanding a ban on the MCB, an umbrella body with over 400 affiliates which is the most representative Muslim organisation in Britain. Now there’s a strategy for engaging Muslim communities in the struggle against fascism!

Outrage’s intervention is particularly irresponsible, given that the BNP has announced that it intends to turn its campaign in the May local elections into a “referendum on Islam”. Yet Outrage proposes that UAF should exclude from its conference the main organisation of the Muslim communities who are the direct victims of the BNP’s racism. Some might suspect that Outrage are acting as paid agents of the BNP, trying to disrupt the unity of anti-fascist forces in order to assist the Nazis. But that would be unfair. Outrage in fact provide this service to the BNP for free.

For details of Saturday’s conference, see the UAF website.

The anger at racist cartoons continues

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Trafalgar Square rally (3)From London’s Trafalgar Square to Ramallah in Palestine, from Lebanon to Austria, the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, first printed in a Danish paper, have sparked rage.

Some 20,000 protesters filled Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday of last week for a rally against Islamophobia and incitement. The event was called at short notice by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and others in the wake of the cartoons row.

The protest was also supported by the Stop the War Coalition and CND. Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War, was warmly received by the crowd when she spoke at the rally. She noted that it wasn’t only Muslims who find the cartoons offensive: “They offend me because they offend my politics – they are racist provocations from a racist newspaper.”

Socialist Worker, 18 February 2006

See also the editorial comment, “Cartoon row: standing firmly united“, in the same paper.

Islamophobia in New Zealand

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The election of Aysser Aljanabi, a young Muslim woman, as head girl of St Mary’s College, a Catholic high school in Wellington, has provoked a hostile response in some quarters. “Given what’s going on internationally I can understand some people’s reaction”, Catholic Education Office chief executive Pat Lynch was quoted as saying.

To Patiently Explain, 15 February 2006

Italy minister stirs cartoon row

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Italian government minister says he is distributing T-shirts displaying controversial cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad. Roberto Calderoli, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, is minister without portfolio for institutional reform and devolution.

Mr Calderoli’s comments were made in an interview with the leading Italian news agency, Ansa. The minister is quoted as saying: “I’ve had T-shirts made with the cartoons that have upset Islam and I shall start wearing them today.” He added that it was “time to put an end to this story that we need to dialogue with these people”, and asked: “What have we become, the civilisation of melted butter?”

Italy’s Northern League, of which Mr Calderoli is a leading member, is expected to get about 6% of the vote in the forthcoming general election. Their anti-immigrant election platform has gained them support in the industrial north of the country where the League accuses immigrants of stealing jobs from Italians and being responsible for growing crime rates.

BBC News, 15 February 2006

This is the same Roberto Calderoni who last year called for “Islam to be declared illegal“.

‘What awaits us all’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Tiny little Israel is one of the few reasons that ISLAM has not yet fully conquered the West. But once this nation has succumbed, swallowed up by the ferocious hate-filled forces of ISLAM, the way will be free for ISLAM to swallow up the rest of the Western world. Once they have beaten the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel, securing victory in the Middle East, there will be little to stop them on their path to bring the whole Western World into subjection, and then become the conquerors of the whole world, exactly as they all believe Allah has long intended that they will do.”

Jan Willem van der Hoeven of the International Christian Zionist Center holds forth about the threat posed by the Muslim hordes.

Israel Insider, 13 February 2006

UN report calls for closure of Guantánamo

Posted on by Bob Pitt

guantanamo-bayA UN inquiry into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has called on Washington to shut down the prison, and says treatment of detainees in some cases amounts to torture, UN officials said yesterday.

The report also disputes the Bush administration’s legal arguments for the prison, which was sited at the navy base in Cuba with the purpose of remaining outside the purview of the US courts, and says there has been insufficient legal process to decide whether detainees continued to pose a threat to the US.

The report lists techniques in use at Guantánamo that are banned under the UN’s convention against torture, including prolonged periods of isolation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and humiliation, including forced shaving. The UN report also focuses on a relatively new area of concern in Guantánamo – the resort to violent force-feeding to end a hunger strike by inmates.

Guardian, 14 February 2006

Muslims and the West: a culture war?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John EspositoJohn Esposito writes on the cartoons controversy:

“One of the first questions I have been asked about this conflict by media from Europe, the US, and Latin America has been ‘Is Islam incompatible with Western values?’ Are we seeing a culture war?

“Before jumping to that conclusion, we should ask, whose Western democratic and secular values are we talking about? Is it a Western secularism that privileges no religion in order to provide space for all religions and to protect belief and unbelief alike? Or is it a Western ‘secular fundamentalism’ that is anti-religious and increasingly, post 9/11, anti-Islam?

“What we are witnessing today has little to do with Western democratic values and everything to do with a European media that reflects and plays to an increasingly xenophobic and Islamaphobic society.”

Islam Online, 14 February 2006