‘Anti-Muslim’? – not me guv, says Robert Spencer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer ponders the question: “am I indeed, and is the entire Jihad Watch enterprise, ‘anti-Muslim’?” The answer, you’ll be surprised to hear, is no – though “the jihadists and their allies would say yes”.

Spencer observes: “If jihadists use the Qur’an, Sunnah, and Islamic law to justify their violence, and I explain how they do it, I do not become anti-Muslim, any more than a scholar of the Hitler period becomes a Nazi if he writes about how the Nazis appealed to ordinary Germans.”

Yusuf Smith gets a name check as someone who, in an earlier exchange with Spencer, supposedly “saw a call for equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies, including freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, and equal employment opportunities, as a challenge to his religion”.

Jihad Watch, 19 October 2005

Dutch ban on veil – ‘a victory for secularism and women’s rights’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In a move applauded by all those seeking an end to religious influence in society the Dutch government has started the process of banning the burkha from all public places in the Netherlands. This follows on from similar rulings in Belgium. France enacted laws late last year to prevent religious symbology in schools and despite early objection from fundamentalist groups this has now become universal. Margret De Cuyper of the Den Haag women’s forum hailed it as a victory for a secular Dutch society and for women’s liberation from male formulated clothes of control. She said, ‘Women have lived for too long with clothes and standards decided for them by men, this is a victory’.”

Indymedia, 18 October 2005

Tariq Ramadan – ‘extremist preacher’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_Ramadan“Obviously, even if Blair affirmed that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ after the attacks on London, they clearly have not when it comes to extremist preachers. And that, quite clearly, is what Tariq Ramadan is…. In France, during most of the 1990s, Ramadan preached to young Arabs the solution to their everyday problems: Islamic fundamentalism.”

Olivier Guitta makes an idiot of himself.

Tech Central Station, 18 October 2005

The mystery of ‘Sid’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mohammed Sidique KhanNasreen Suleaman examines the background of 7/7 bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan. It knocks on the head those ignorant theories, emanating from both the Right and the “Left”,  that multiculturalism resulted in segregration which then led to the adoption of the extremist views that produced the London bombings.

The Beeston of Khan’s youth was a largely white neighbourhood – and indeed he seems to have spent most of his time in the company of white English lads. Over the past few months I have spoken to many of those white childhood friends, friends who knew Khan as Sid, and they all tell a similar story.

Their accounts of Khan’s upbringing and character show a man who spent most of his formative years not really mixing with other local Muslims.

And, says Ian Barrett, unlike the other children of Pakistani parents, he was not under any family pressure to take an interest in Islam.

“The other Pakistani lads would have to go mosque because their families would say ‘You’re going to mosque.’ But Sid didn’t go,” says Ian. “He didn’t seem interested in Islam and I don’t ever remember him mentioning religion.”

Khan was, by all accounts, an exceptionally well integrated person. His anglicised name “Sid” was just one symbol of his willingness to take on a British identity.

BBC News, 19 October 2005

‘The threat of quiet Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Just about every conscious human in the free world knows about Islamic suicide bombers, train bombers, and night club bombers. Everyone knows that Muslims flying large commercial planes crashed into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon on 9/11. Those are the actions of the obvious terrorist side of Islam….

“‘Peaceful Islam’ has been just as busy as the terror wing. Large numbers of Arab-Muslims have immigrated all over the world. European countries are alarmed at the number of Muslims within their borders. The attack on America was like a fire-bell ringing, waking other countries up to the growing masses of Muslims in their midst. It was noticed that these Muslims made no effort to blend in with the local population. Instead, Muslims banded together, taking over neighborhoods and eventually driving out the non-Muslims. Any acceptance of the local culture and customs was strongly discouraged and often severely punished. These Muslim neighborhoods set up their own legal system of Islamic law, ignoring the laws of the land. Immigrants were encouraged to have very large families to form huge voting blocks to maneuver Muslims into positions of power within the government.”

Another helpful contribution to community relations from the inimitable Barbara J. Stock.

Renew America, 19 October 2005

GALHA issues statement

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The GALHA committee has issued a statement regarding comments in the Autumn 2005 issue of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine.

GALHA press release, 16 October 2005

This statement can only be welcomed. On the other hand, the contact given is GALHA secretary George Broadhead, who is himself the author of an article in the same issue of G&LH magazine which includes the following passage:

“There are two terms that, increasingly, annoy us: Islamophobia and moderate Muslims. What we’d like to know is, first, what’s wrong with being fearful of Islam (there’s a lot to fear); and, second, what does a moderate Muslim do, other than excuse the real nutters by adhering to this barmy doctrine?”

Broadhead’s assertion – in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 – that there are no such people as “moderate Muslims”, and that all adherents of Islam are implicated in the actions of a minority of extremists, strikes me as only marginally less poisonous than the material in G&LH magazine from which the GALHA committee now seeks to dissociate itself.

Incidentally, the GALHA website contains the following information about the author of the most blatantly Islamophobic article in G&LH magazine: “Diesel Balaam works in the television industry. He was co-author with Sukie de la Croix of the satirical column Emerald City News which appeared weekly in London’s Capital Gay from 1987 to 1992. Their book of short stories Black Confetti: New Fairy Tales for an Old Country was reviewed in the Spring 1996 issue of Gay and Lesbian Humanist.”

So GALHA members who deny any knowledge of who Balaam is are perhaps being a trifle disingenuous.

Mad Mel backs Blair

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmelMelanie Phillips complains that objections to the new anti-terrorism bill “betray more than a touch of hysteria and irrationality”. In contrast to her own balanced and reasoned contributions the debate, that is. According to Mel:

“The unpalatable fact is that this country has left itself wide open to terrorism. The judges pose as our society’s bulwark against tyranny. But frankly, they are the very last people upon whom we can rely. For with their obsession with ‘human rights’, it is the judges who have imperilled our safety by turning Britain into a magnet for terrorists and subversives. Through their interpretation of human rights law they have destroyed our border controls so that extremists could pour into the country knowing they would never be pursued.

“The judges frustrated all attempts to deal with illegal immigration, thwarted other countries’ desperate attempts to get Britain to extradite terrorist suspects, produced the lunatic situation where people who are a danger to this country cannot be deported in case they may be ill-treated, and when the government tried to lock them up instead to safeguard the public ruled that this too was contrary to human rights law….

“Other countries are far more robust. France has recently thrown out a number of Islamist extremists without demur. Even ultra-liberal Holland is planning to ban the burka in public places – following the example of several towns in Belgium and Italy – because a garment which conceals everything except the eyes obviously makes identification impossible and is therefore an unacceptable security risk.”

Daily Mail, 17 October 2005

Nick Cohen boosts Maryam Namazie

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Namazie“A week ago, at a reception in one of London’s dowdier hotels, Maryam Namazie received a cheque and a certificate stating that she was Secularist of the Year 2005. The audience from the National Secular Society cheered, but no one else noticed.”

Nick Cohen in the Observer, 16 October 2005

Oh, I don’t know. Islamophobia Watch picked up on it. Cohen observes that “Maryam Namazie’s obscurity remains baffling. She ought to be a liberal poster girl” (sic). Perhaps Namazie’s obscurity is not unconnected with the fact that she’s a member of the central and political committees of a barking far-left sect, the Worker Communist Party of Iran (WPI), whose hysterical Islamophobia, while it obviously appeals to a fellow bigot like Cohen, would repel any principled liberal.

As for the so-called “Sharia courts” in Canada to which Cohen’s article refers, details can be found in the Canada section of this site. What was in fact proposed was to allow Muslims the same right to faith-based civil arbitration that had been available to Catholics and Jews in Ontario since 1991. The WPI’s response to the proposal was:

“The struggle to establish Islamic tribunals in Canada, like similar efforts to enforce the hijab in public institutions and schools in France, is not merely a cultural effort to pursue cultural rights. Both the aims of and the forces behind these efforts are political. These attempts are part and parcel of one of the most reactionary global phenomena in recent history, i.e. the movement of political Islam.”

The Ontario proposal provoked a racist backlash throughout Canada against Muslims and their supposed barbaric religious practices, which it was claimed had no place in a civilised Western society. And it was another WPI central committee member, Homa Arjomand, who played a leading role in encouraging this upsurge of Islamophobia. For her trouble, she became the “poster girl” of the most hardline right-wingers, receiving plaudits from the likes of Front Page Magazine.

It can’t be long before Cohen and the WPI go the whole hog and join their friends in GALHA – with whom they have co-operated closely in the anti-Qaradawi campaign – in promoting an anti-Muslim agenda that is indistinguishable from the vile propaganda of the racist Right.