‘Facts for Islamic apologists who justify London bombings’

“Ken Livingston, the London Mayor, was not the only British Islamic apologist who implicitly tried to justify the London bombings by suggesting that ‘decades of western intervention in the Middle East and the Iraq war could have influenced the bombers’. I have heard many Islamic apologists who are poorly educated in Islam, state similar excuses. Knowingly or unknowingly these Islamic apologists serve to hearten the Islamic extremists.”

FaithFreedom.org, 7 September 2005

So what was the cause of the London bombings, then? Well, apparently it all goes back to the Battle of the Ditch in 5 AH (627 AD), which shows that Muslims just want to kill non-Muslims, and to the Battle of Kerbala in 61 AH (680 AD), which shows that Muslims have no hesitation in killing each other. It’s just a bloodthirsty religion.

Encounter with an angry Muslim academic

Richard L. Rubenstein – an “expert” on the dreadful threat to Europe posed by Muslim migrants –  recounts a confrontation with Professor Mohamad Al-Khadry at an academic conference in Krakow. “His worst spleen was reserved for Bat Ye’or and MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute). He labeled Bat Ye’or a bigot, a racist, and an ‘Islamophobe’ and attacked MEMRI as a ‘pro-Israel propagandist website’.”

Front Page Magazine, 7 September 2005

Spleen could hardly be put to more appropriate use, I would suggest.

Opposition to Sharia courts goes global

An upcoming international demonstration designed to pressure Queen’s Park [home of the Ontario Legislature] into rejecting shariah courts continued to grow yesterday, even as the premier promised any decision on a faith-based court system will not jeopardize women’s rights.

They [women’s rights] will not be compromised,” Premier Dalton McGuinty told reporters at a news conference in Toronto yesterday.

So far, Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, Paris and Los Angeles are among the confirmed participants in tomorrow’s protests. They will join similar demonstrations in Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Montreal and Victoria.

Ontario Attorney-General Michael Bryant delayed a highly anticipated decision on the future of faith-based arbitration this summer, choosing to wait before making changes to a law that allows any set of principles – including religious ones – to be used to privately settle family disputes.

Critics say Ontario has become the target of an international political movement by extremists to entrench Islamic law in Western democracies.

“This has nothing to do with the faith of Islam. It’s political Islam,” said Homa Arjomand, founder of the International Campaign against Shariah Court in Canada [and central committee member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran]. “Ontario is an easy target because we have multiculturalism.”

National Post, 7 September 2005

‘Muslim opinion’ be damned

“Every attempt to appease ‘Muslim opinion’ preserves, promotes, and emboldens our enemies. Every concession to angry Muslim mobs gives hope to the Islamist cause. Every day we allow terrorist regimes to exist gives their minions time to execute the next Sept. 11. America needs honest leadership with the courage to identify and defeat our enemies – ‘Muslim opinion’ be damned.”

Another commentator unconvinced by the Bush administration’s “Muslim outreach” strategy.

Mens News Daily, 6 September 2005 

Karen Hughes – pawn of Wahhabism

“One of President Bush’s closest confidants, Karen Hughes, on Friday addressed the annual conference of an organization whose primary purpose is the propagation of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabist Islam – and which has praised suicide bombers, whose president has publicly denied that al Qaeda was behind 9/11, and whose web site to this day sells a book that lavishes praise on Osama bin Laden.”

The “Muslim outreach” strategy comes in for some stick from Joel Mowbray.

Townhall.com, 6 September 2005

See also Frank Gaffney in the Washington Times, 30 August 2005

‘Radical Muslims’ meet to discuss ban

A radical Islamic group yesterday drew 1,000 delegates to a London conference as it debated how to fend off Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plans to ban it in Britain.

Hizb ut-Tahrir leaders also used the forum to react angrily to new claims that the organisation – already barred from operating in universities – is engaged in a secret campaign to recruit students to its cause.

The political group, which advocates the establishment of a theocratic state and Islamic governance in the Middle East, is likely to be targeted by the Government in any crackdown on alleged radicals in the wake of the London bombings.

Dr Imran Waheed, the Birmingham-based spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK, denied accusations the group has supported violence or is responsible for the radicalisation of young Muslims.

He said the conference, held at a Quaker meeting house in Euston, central London, was intended to prove his organisation was not engaged in “evil ideology”.

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Mad Mel and Robert Spencer denounce FO memo on Qaradawi

Melanie Phillips (“Britain’s Foreign Office fifth column”) has a rant at the Foreign Office memorandum recommending that Yusuf al-Qaradawi should not be banned from Britain, as Mel and her mates have been demanding.

As always when reading Phillips’s tirades, you have the sense of stepping into a parallel universe – one in which Britain’s “own Foreign Office is acting as a kind of appeasement fifth column in the very heart of government”; one in which “there has never been a single authoritative challenge to the veracity or integrity of MEMRI’s authoritative translations, which have opened the eyes of the west to what the Arab and Muslim world is really saying”.

As for Mockbul Ali, the author of the FO’s document, with its accurate characterisation of MEMRI’s role, Mel comments: “when Ali gets to the Jews, his guard slips and he endorses the conspiracy theory which is the signature of the Islamic extremist.”

But Mel does have a good word for one person. Yes, it’s our old friend Nick Cohen, whose “fine polemic in the Observer” receives her enthusiastic endorsement.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 5 September 2005

Meanwhile over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer too rallies to the defence of Yigal Carmon and his associates: “What did MEMRI do? It printed what Qaradawi said. And once again doing so has been characterized by jihadist Muslims and their allies as ‘hatred’.” As for the memo’s point that Qaradawi’s view on Palestine and Iraq are not unusual amongst mainstream Muslims, Spencer retorts: “That’s true: they’re not unusual. Neither was Nazism among Germans.”

In the comments section to this post we have the usual paranoid ravings about how the FO’s policy on Qaradawi “will grant the jihadists every single thing that they wish for, without having to fire a shot, and reduce us all to dhimmi servitude” … plus declarations of support for Peter Tatchell and the Worker Communist Party of Iran.

Dhimmi Watch, 5 September 2005

Outraged Europeans take dimmer view of diversity

It was less than genteel, not the kind of thing a Londoner liked to admit, but Matthew Pickard couldn’t help himself when drawn into a discussion about the recent bombings on the city’s transit system. There is an “undertow”, he said, a feeling of resentment toward ethnic communities that had long been welcomed.

“My friends, who are all educated and professionals, they’re saying, ‘What gives those people the right to come up from other countries and set up homes and set up families and then start bombing and maiming people?’,” the 33-year-old engineering consultant said. “They just don’t move in and integrate with society. They move in and take over. I just think enough’s enough.”

Los Angeles Times, 5 September 2005

Revealed: the heroin smuggling shame of Islamic leader’s father

The Mail on Sunday makes an issue of the fact that Inayat Bulglawala’s father was convicted of smuggling heroin back in the 1980s. As Inayat patiently explained to them: “We have a principal in Islam that sins are not inherited. It wasn’t me who committed the crime.” Other papers, to their credit, appear to have ignored the Mail‘s crude stitch-up. However, it did strike a chord with the fascists.

See BNP news article, 4 September 2005