Human rights campaigners are calling it the “November surprise” – a last-minute amendment smuggled into a Pentagon finance bill in the US Senate last Thursday. Its effects are likely to be devastating: the permanent removal of almost all legal rights from “war on terror” detainees at Guantánamo Bay and every other similar US facility on foreign or American soil.
‘Muslim apartheid burns bright in France’
“It is perhaps pointless to look back at the shamefully irresponsible immigration policies that have brought so many European countries to this explosive point…. However, we might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part, but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously so.
“Muslims vary and their beliefs vary. But the response of some Muslims to frustration – whether or not the fault of westerners – has been to retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists. Yet although we know this, and despite the Salman Rushdie affair, despite the bombs and assassinations that led up to 9/11, despite the recent atrocities, we seem unwilling to recognise that what this can mean is deliberate separatism – apartheid. Islam in the European ghetto can mean an unwillingness to integrate at all, a desire to practise the faith with as little interference from the geographical host country as possible.”
Minette Marin in the Sunday Times, 13 November 2005
I mean, these foreigners, they come over here and insist on living in areas with the worst housing and, try as you might, you can’t dissuade them from taking low-paid jobs or remaining unemployed, which ensures that they can’t move out of those areas. For some unknown reason, some of them even see the need for the sort of defensive solidarity that results from living together with fellow members of their own oppressed minority community. And they even insist on the right to follow their religious beliefs free from state interference. Clearly the existence of ghettos is entirely the responsibility of the people who live in them and has nothing whatsoever to do with the racism of the “host” society.
Spectator reveals ‘Eurabian nightmare’
This is the cover to the current issue of the Spectator, for which editor Boris Johnson has commissioned several articles responding to the conflict in the French banlieues. (“Eurabia” refers to the demented “Muslim takeover” conspiracy theory invented by Bat Ye’or – a sort of present-day Islamophobic equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
Rod Liddle (“The crescent of fear“) writes: “… there have been whole legions of pundits wheeled out to offer an explanation. It’s deprivation, a lack of integration, poverty, unemployment, incipient French racism and so on. But the dreaded ‘M’ word has scarcely been mentioned at all; these were ‘young’ rioters or sometimes ‘immigrant’ rioters – they were never Muslim rioters. Islam was almost never mentioned … the suspicion persists that it is the North Africans who do not wish for integration – much as they might whine about a lack of employment opportunities – even more than the indigenous French…. It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être.”
Mark Steyn (“It’s the demography, stupid“) concedes that all Muslims are not the same: “… it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques – and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims – have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.”
Right-wing Christian evangelist Patrick Sookhdeo (who was given a platform by Johnson earlier this year to denounce “The myth of moderate Islam“) poses the question “Will London burn too?” He thinks it likely: “A book published in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe gives instructions for how Muslim minorities are to work towards achieving domination of European countries through a policy of concentration in geographical areas.”
France and the Muslim myth
“Analysts and commentators often seek to find evidence to support their well-established ideas in any given event…. But little compares with the extraordinary way in which the disturbances of the last two weeks have been hijacked by those who appear set on either finding, or creating, a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and the West. Take one particularly egregious example. Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, described the riots in France as ‘a French intifada, an uprising by French Muslims against the state’.”
Jason Burke in the Observer, 13 November 2005
Muslim warns of community fears
A leading Welsh Muslim has warned that the detention of a Libyan man in Cardiff six weeks ago is damaging race relations in Wales. Mohammed Javed, chair of the Cardiff Police Advisory Committee, said the case had panicked the community.
“People in Islamic communities are asking, ‘Who is next?’,” he said. “If people can come and pick anybody without disclosing why they are doing it, it will affect race relations in Wales. This one arrest has already made quite a bit of difference to race relations here.”
‘Islam is a riot’
“The best thing about the rioting in France is that it proves once and for all that pandering to Islamists is always a bad idea. Even when you provide them with all the perks available to sluggards in a socialist society, it’s no guarantee they won’t turn right around and bite the hand that feeds them. So, just in case anybody ever asks you to name the biggest difference between a French Muslim and a French poodle, you now know the answer….
“Each time I hear people defending Islam, pretending that it’s merely another humanistic faith like Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism, I wonder if they would have insisted that National Socialism was just another political party, and that being a Nazi was no different from being a Republican or a Democrat….
“Frankly, I’m sick and tired of hearing people parroting the lie that Islam is a religion of peace. I suppose so long as you’re willing to set aside your bible and pick up the Koran and start kneeling to Mecca, they’ll let you live in peace; unless, of course, you belong to a different sect. In which case, in the name of the great and merciful Allah, they’d have no choice but to cut your head off.”
Burt Prelutsky in Mens News Daily, 11 November 2005
Who said that multiculturalism has failed?
Who said that multiculturalism has failed?
By Ken Livingstone
Morning Star, 12 November 2005
Against a backdrop of the London bombings, the scenes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the riots in French towns and cities, a furious debate on racial equality and community relations has unfolded in the media over the summer and autumn.
After the terrorist attacks in July, some commentators and newspapers urged London to abandon its policies of respect for different cultures and celebration of diversity – in favour of what some described as the “French model.”
The suggestion was that London, by celebrating the contribution of different cultures to our city, was emphasising differences rather than what people have in common and encouraging “segregation.”
Only this week, writing in Daily Express, Leo McKinstry ranted that “we are living in the shadow of fear because of our rulers’ attachment to the twin dogmas of mass immigration and cultural diversity.”
“Without giving us any say,” he claimed, “they have imported wholesale the problems of the Third World – from corruption to superstition, from tribalism to misogyny – into advanced, democratic, Christian cultures.”
Faced with the events in France, the opponents of multiculturalism have had to perform unedifying contortions.
Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail inverts reality by claiming that France had abandoned the French model, arguing that the banning of the hijab and other religious symbols was “too little, and maybe too late” and that the warning from France was that “we must end the ruinous doctrine of multiculturalism and reassert British identity.”
The truth of course is that the French model is fundamentally different to that of multiculturalism – as the ban on the hijab so clearly underlines.
But the critics of multiculturalism are simply wrong about what is happening in Britain.
In reality the Greater London Authority’s research shows that the real trend is not of “segregation” of ethnic minorities, but of increased dispersal as new communities become established over time.
‘It’s the demography, stupid’
“The French riots are just the beginning, says Mark Steyn. If we continue to accommodate and appease the young, growing Muslim population, Europe will disintegrate.”
Anti-Prophet cartoons deliberate provocation: expert
The Danish caricatures which showed Prophet Muhammad as a stereotypical fundamentalist would fuel the sense of persecution among young Muslims in the country, a Danish expert warned on Thursday, November 10.
“The cartoons seem to have been a deliberate move by the newspaper to provoke Muslim sentiment in a totally legal manner,” Bjorn Moller, a senior research fellow at the Danish Institute of International Studies told The Christian Science Monitor.
Twelve drawings depicting Prophet Muhammad in different settings appeared in Denmark’s largest circulation daily Jyllands-Posten on September 30. In one of the drawings, he appeared with a turban shaped like a bomb strapped to his head.
Moller said the public expressions of racism are increasing, citing one right-wing member of parliament who compared Denmark’s Muslim community to cancer.
“Things which people wouldn’t have been allowed to say a couple of years ago are now being said openly,” Moller added. It’s becoming more socially acceptable to use that kind of language and that’s bound to alienate Muslims and create fanaticism.
“A growing number of people see being a Dane and being a Muslim as incompatible,” Moller added.
Moller said the right-wing Danish People’s Party, the country’s third largest, is behind controversial government attempts to stabilize Denmark’s growing Muslim community at no more than 10 percent of the total 5.5 million population.
“The emphasis is rapidly becoming to keep out as many people as possible, regardless of whether they’ve been tortured or persecuted,” he said.
Terror bill chilling for Muslims, Blair warned
The anti-terror bill will create a “significant chill factor” in the Muslim community, censor those who criticise British foreign policy and drive extremists further underground, the government’s advisers warned yesterday.
The fears were voiced by the Muslim community working groups set up by the Home Office to prevent the growth of extremism after the July terror attacks. The warning centres on the remaining provisions in the proposed legislation – such as the ban on the “glorification” of terrorist acts – that are likely to become the next focus of parliamentary dissent after Tony Blair’s defeat on holding terrorist suspects for 90 days without charge.
The Muslim community’s police and security working group report makes clear that many believe the present anti-terror regime is already excessive, and that the measures risk provoking further radicalisation of young British Muslims.