Former editor of the now defunct Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine Andy Armitage replies to the Guardian piece on the split in GALHA. He continues to defend his decision to publish the notorious article by Diesel Balaam. “Neither the writer of that article nor we as editors are racist. We criticise religions and do not care about the racial origin of people who practice them.”
Needless to say, Robert Spencer is fully behind Andy. Dhimmi Watch, 2 January 2006
A message of support from the British National Party: “Well done to Anthony Browne for putting across the case against Political Correctness so well….”
BNP news article, 4 January 2006
The Metro article that the BNP applauds, which plugs Browne’s views on political correctness, in fact features a photograph of Anthony Browne the children’s fiction writer! Hopefully, he’ll sue.
Islamophobia Watch comes in for some stick from Robert Spencer and his chums. We are pleased to hear that Spencer is not a supporter of imperialist warmongering. In the event of a decision by the US government to bomb Iran, we are sure we can count on his resolute opposition to such an act of aggression.
A British Muslim leader has told the BBC he believes homosexuality is “not acceptable” and denounced new same-sex civil partnerships as “harmful”.
Head of the Muslim Council of Britain Sir Iqbal Sacranie said introducing the partnerships did “not augur well” for building the foundations of society. Nevertheless, he told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, everyone should be tolerant.
Peter Tatchell of gay rights group OutRage! said: “It is tragic for one minority to attack another minority.”
The BBC News report concludes with a further quotation from Tatchell that is even more jaw-droppingly hypocritical: “Both the Muslim and gay communities suffer prejudice and discrimination. We should stand together to fight Islamophobia and homophobia.”
In reality, Tatchell’s position is that, so long as mainstream Muslim organisations refuse to take a progressive stand on gay rights, he will refuse to co-operate with them in opposing anti-Muslim bigotry – indeed, he feels entitled to form a bloc with the Right in whipping up Islamophobia.
Needless to say, in the case of other religions he doesn’t apply the same stringent criteria in building alliances. He is quite happy to form a bloc against Robert Mugabe with Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube, whose views on homosexuality, we strongly suspect, are hardly more progressive than Iqbal Sacranie’s.
The GALHA dispute (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here) finally makes the mainstream press.
According to Imaan, a support group for gay and lesbian Muslims, the anti-Islamic views of GALHA are just the tip of the iceberg in the gay community. “These comments are completely outrageous,” said Imaan’s spokeswoman, Rasina X. “In lots of ways the gay community reflects the straight community but Galha has gone beyond what the average straight person thinks. These comments are disgusting. They are worse than what the BNP would publish. It is racist.”
Followers of Islamophobia Watch will be familiar with Anthony Browne of “Islam really does want to conquer the world” notoriety, the man who was paid for an anti-immigration article by a right-wing US website. Well, Anthony has authored a new Civitas pamphlet entitled The Retreat of Reason, which attacks the scourge of political correctness. As you might expect, he repeats the endless right-wing refrain that multiculturalism has produced Muslim “ghettos” which in turn produced the July bombings in London.
Among the politically correct “myths” that Browne denounces is the view that anti-semitic attacks are carried out by white skinheads, whereas in reality (according to Browne) the perpetrators are young Muslims.
Civitas press release, 2 January 2006
And what is the source of Browne’s information? If you consult pp.12-13 of his pamphlet, you’ll find that it’s taken from a report entitled Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union commissioned by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which the EUMC refused to distribute because of its unreliability. In his recently published book Beyond Chutzpah (p.35), Norman Finkelstein writes:
“the EUMC maintained that the report … was ‘biased’ and ‘lacking in empirical evidence’. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana concurred that ‘it did not meet the criteria of consistency and quality of data’. In fact, the data assembled in the Manifestationsreport, the standards it used to measure anti-Semitism, and the conclusions it reached barely rose above the comical.”
Which hasn’t prevented Browne’s pamphlet being hailed by Melanie Phillips.
Postscript
Also worth noting are the following passages from Browne’s pamphlet:
“One of the most successful campaigns for victim status has been by Muslim groups in Britain, notably the Muslim Association of Britain, which increases its clout by inflating the number of Muslims in Britain by a million more than the official census, and by accusing anyone who tackles its extremist Islamist agenda of ‘Islamophobia’. Although it has a thoroughly oppressive agenda (supporting terrorism against innocent civilians, promoting the rights of husbands to beat their wives and the execution of gays), the MAB passes itself off as oppressed so convincingly that it has fooled the PC establishment, notably the Guardian, Independent and BBC, into promoting it unquestioningly” (p.43).
And further on: “Now, one of the biggest issues facing Britain is the rise of radical Islam among Britain’s growing Muslim communities. The politically correct response – and that of the British government – is to pander to Islamic militancy by, for example, curbing the freedom to debate Islam, creating tax-funded Islamic schools and campaigning for Muslim Turkey to be admitted as the biggest member of the European Union” (p.54).
But Browne is prepared to give credit where its due. He applauds “Peter Tatchell, a man of such uncompromising principles that he has infuriated many on the relativist left” – in particular with his hysterical campaign against Yusuf al-Qaradawi (p.25).
“If a population ‘at odds with the modern world’ is the fastest-breeding group on the planet – if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions – how safe a bet is the survival of the ‘modern world’?”
Mark Steyn in the New Criterion, January 2006
Melanie Phillips is impressed (“great piece by Mark Steyn”), but Robert Auster feels that Steyn’s emphasis on demographic changes and the West’s “lack of civilizational confidence” (due to “the progressive agenda – lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism”) underestimates the evils of Muslim immigration.
See Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 2 January 2006 and View From the Right, 1 January 2006
Chantal Carnes didn’t recognize herself. A friend had e-mailed her a blogger’s article. It described Carnes as a supporter of terrorists, a fan of suicide bombing. Her friend thought the article was a joke. “No, dude,” Carnes said. “This is really serious.”
Carnes, a Chicago resident who converted to Islam 11 years ago, was scheduled to speak at a spiritual retreat for Tampa Muslims this weekend. But after bloggers alleged that the event was a thinly veiled terrorist indoctrination, anonymous callers bombarded the Muslim American Society of Tampa with death threats and curses. The director of the Lithia church camp that was to host the event decided to close the camp for the weekend after she, too, received threats.
On Dec. 27, blogger Joe Kaufman began writing about an event he called “a jihad retreat for children.” Over the course of the week, he wrote that Carnes was “well known in the radical Islamist American community.” He wrote that the retreat’s other speaker, Mazen Mokhtar of New Jersey, was linked to al-Qaida. Other bloggers quickly picked up the theme. “You gotta start your kids on the road to martyrdom early, or there’ll be no one left to murder,” a blogger known as “Ace of Trump” wrote about the retreat.
“The Extreme Right has finally found a clever way to arrest America’s march towards asserting its foundational principles of equality, religious freedom, and the rule of law. Their strategy is to transform the war on terror into a war against Islam and use security needs to subvert constitutional protection.”
Louay Safi on the threat posed by the Islamophobic Right in the US. He continues:
“Robert Spencer, a prolific anti-Islam writer and a leading Islamophobe who is bent on distorting Islam and demonizing Muslims, has persistently argued that violence and terrorism employed by Muslim extremists is rooted in the Quran and its message. Spencer calls the Quran, a book sacred to Muslim, ‘the jihadists’ Mein Kampf’, in reference to Hitler’s memoir. He openly blames the Quran for giving impetus to the terrorist open war against the West.”
Media Monitors Network, 29 December 2005
A good article, but I rather doubt that the Bush administration pays much attention to the ravings of Jihad Watch. If they found Daniel Pipes a political embarrassment, what must they make of Robert Spencer? Spencer’s role is rather to whip up anti-Muslim bigotry among the general populace in order to prime public opinion to accept Bush’s imperialist warmongering abroad and suppression of civil liberties at home as a necessary defence against the Islamic hordes.
Human rights campaigners demanded a full inquiry yesterday into mounting evidence that MI6 agents were involved in the abduction and torture of terror suspects in Greece.
The Ministry of Justice in Athens has launched its own inquiry into allegations that 28 Pakistanis were held and mistreated in the wake of the July 7 London bombings.
Greek lawyer Frangiskos Ragoussis has filed a criminal complaint against eight Greek agents and one British agent – Athens MI6 station chief Nicholas Langman – for the alleged abuses. If formal charges are filed, Mr Ragoussis said that he will seek Mr Langman’s extradition.
The controversy deepened after British newspapers colluded with a voluntary government “D-notice” to prevent them from naming Mr Langman, although Greek Sunday newspaper Proto Thema – with the biggest circulation in the country – had already revealed his identity, adding that he had plotted the operation on Greek soil.