If these are ‘moderate’ Muslims, give me the lunatic fringe any day, says Liddle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

If these are ‘moderate’ Muslims, give me the lunatic fringe any day

By Rod Liddle

Evening Standard, 23 August 2005

I hope you’ve already got your tickets for today’s gig at the London School of Economics by Imam Zaid Shakir. It’s going to be a sell-out and Zaid will be reprising his popular hit: “We Are All Collateral Damage in the War Against Terror”.

The good imam is one of those “respected” and “moderate” Muslims who has “condemned” the terrorist attacks upon London last month “unequivocally”.

You may judge for yourself whether that cumbersome superfluity of quotation marks is warranted by mulling over his assertion that both the 7 July terrorists and our own Prime Minister are “self-righteous murderers whose motives and proclamations mirror each other.”

For Mr Shakir, there is no distinction whatever to be made between a democratically elected politician and a fanatical medieval nutter with seven pounds of gelignite strapped to his waist. There’s condemned unequivocally and “condemned unequivocally”.

I don’t know if Ticketmaster has any seats left for Zaid’s performance, but you can always check the man out by tapping “Muslim Council of Britain” into Google and scrolling down its list of affiliates: Zaid’s gig is keenly awaited by a whole bunch of respected, moderate Muslims (you can supply your own quotation marks from here on in).

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MCB demands BBC apology

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Flooded by a torrent of support e-mails and messages from Muslims and non-Muslims, Britain’s biggest Muslim group demanded the BBC Tuesday, August 23, investigate and apologize for a “dishonest” piece of journalism made by the broadcaster on the respectable Muslim organization.

“Today, we sent a formal letter to the BBC with a point-by-point response to the Panorama program, demanding an investigation into the dishonest and distorted piece of journalism and a clear apology,” Inayat Bunglawala, media officer of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), told IslamOnline.net by telephone. “It is a calm and factual letter about the distortions in Panorama,” he added. “The BBC must apologize not only to the MCB but to all British Muslims.”

The program was broadcast Sunday night, August 21, entitled “A Question Of Leadership.” It suggested the MCB is “in denial” about extremist views among its members. The BBC program quoted former MCB member Mehboob Kantharia as saying the MCB was unwilling to accept the reality of the situation and therefore unable to deal with the issue in hand. But when contacted by the MCB, Kantharia said his statements were taken out of context.

“We have spoken with Mr. Kantharia, who asserted to us that he did not mention the MCB by name but his remarks were edited by the BBC to create suspicions about the MCB,” Bunglawala told IOL.

Earlier, MCB Secretary General Sir Iqbal Sacranie said in a statement e-mailed to IOL that the program was “deeply unfair”. He said the program used “deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to malign the Muslim Council of Britain and with the barely concealed goal of drawing British Muslims away from being inspired in their political beliefs and actions by the faith of Islam.”

After Sunday’s broadcast, the MCB has received a torrent of support e-mails and messages from across the UK, denouncing the program for tarnishing its image, Bunglawala said.

“It has the opposite effect to what the Panorama team and the pro-Israeli lobby intended to do,” he said. “Instead of dividing British Muslims, it brought about an unprecedented unity and even Muslim organizations that have been critical of the MCB in the past like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Human Rights Commission have issued statements of support on their Web sites.”

Islam Online, 23 August 2005

For the MCB’s letter to the BBC, see (pdf) here.

Surely all terrorists are Muslims?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Red Eye ad“The plot: A terrorist corners a luxury resort hotel manager on a red-eye flight. He blackmails her into changing the hotel room of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, so that terrorists can launch a Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) into his suite….

“Some comments by posters on this site predicted I would hate ‘Red Eye’ because the main terrorist, Jackson Ripner, played by Cillian Murphy (of Irish descent and with blue eyes), was not Islamic. But, are the terrorists, for whom Ripner works, Islamic? Perhaps. Before the missile is launched, you can hear those for whom Murphy is working speaking almost inaudibly. If you listen carefully and speak Russian, as I do, they are saying, ‘Adin, Dva, Tri, Chetiri’, which translates to ‘One, Two, Three, Four’. They could, therefore, be Chechnyan terrorists.

“And that’s my one criticism of the movie. To wit, that director Craven doesn’t tell or impress upon you whether the terrorists are Muslim, in another politically correct move, designed to dodge the criticisms of Islamist groups, like CAIR.”

Debbie Schlussel reviews the movie “Red Eye”.

Front Page Magazine, 22 August 2005

Come on Robert, speak up!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MP Stewart Jackson is to play a key role in fostering better relations with the country’s Muslim community, as a member of an Islamic Parliamentary Committee. Mr Jackson, who was elected as Conservative MP for Peterborough city this year, has been made secretary of the All Parliamentary Friends of Islam at a critical time for Muslim relations in the country and around the world. He now plans to play a key role in encouraging the nation to become more knowledgeable and understanding about the Islamic faith and reach out to Muslims in the community.

He said: “What this group is about is trying to improve understanding so that people are aware that Islam is essentially a peaceful and law-abiding religion. It is important that people are aware that the actions that have been carried out by some people in the name of Islam are not representative of the religion. They are only representative of a small, extremist group and it is important that the real face of Islam is put to the community at large.”

Peterborough Today, 22 August 2005

And so far Jihad Watch has failed to take a stand against this abject example of creeping dhimmitude. What is Robert Spencer playing at? Is he prepared to remain silent while members of the Tory party undermine the defence of western civilisation and facilitate Islam’s plans for world domination?

Anti-racism 1, Islamophobia 0

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yessss!! Radio talk-show host Michael Graham, who was suspended by station WMAL last month for describing Islam as a “terrorist organization” (see here), has now been sacked. Strange to relate, some people are not happy. See Front Page Magazine, 22 August 2005

See also Robert Spencer, who posts a link to this “shameful story” under the heading “WMAL fires Michael Graham, earns the opprobrium of all free people”! Dhimmi Watch, 22 August 2005

Further details of the sacking from Islam Online, 23 August 2005

A new era of McCarthyism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A campaign is being orchestrated through the media to destroy the credibility of many of the most important Muslim institutions in Britain, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The impact of this campaign – in the Observer and particularly in John Ware’s Panorama documentary last night – will be a powerful boost for the increasingly widespread view that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim: underneath, ‘they’ are all extremists who are racist, contemptuous of the west, and intent on a political agenda.

“A legitimate and much-needed debate among British Muslims about a distinctive expression of Islam in a non-Muslim country has been hijacked and poisonously distorted. Journalists need to be very careful: we are entering a new era of McCarthyism and, if we are not to be complicit, we need to be scrupulously responsible and conscientious in unravelling the complexity of Islam in its many spiritual and political interpretations in recent decades.”

A good, hard-hitting article by Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian, 22 August 2005

Mind you, Bunting is herself not entirely immune to conventional double standards. She criticises Iqbal Sacrani’s attendance on behalf of the MCB at a memorial service for Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas leader murdered by the Israeli government. Would she similarly criticise the Board of Deputies if they were to send a representative to, say, a future memorial service for Ariel Sharon? I rather doubt it. And, if she did, can you imagine the accusations of anti-semitism that would be screamed at her? Yet, in the course of the second Intifada, the state terrorist Sharon was responsible for killing 4,000 Palestinians, whereas the number of Israeli deaths resulting from the actions of Palestinian militants during the same period was a quarter of that figure.

Why multiculturalism has failed Britain (according to Gilles Kepel)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Gilles Kepel“France, ridiculed when Bernard Stasi and his commission first recommended a ban on all religious symbols in schools, has since excited the interest of those who note that this is, nevertheless, the country with the largest number of Muslims, with a population far greater than either Germany or the UK. The social control, they also remark, exerted by the combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy has led – according to the inverse terms of multiculturalism – to France being spared from terror attacks for the past decade.”

Gilles Kepel in the Independent, 22 August 2005.

Note the use of “the past decade” as the period of comparison. This has presumably been chosen so as to exclude the Paris Metro and other bombings of 1995. The “combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy” didn’t seem to have much effect then, did they? At that time, as I recall, the London Underground was, by contrast, spared any terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists, despite Britain’s commitment to multiculturalism.

Is it stating the obvious to point out that in both cases the bombings were provoked by the foreign policy of the country under attack – in 1995 by French support for the Algerian government’s brutal suppression of the FIS (which had been about to win a democratic election) and in 2005 by Blair’s participation in the bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq?

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Complain to BBC regarding Islamophobic Panorama documentary – IHRC

Posted on by Bob Pitt

IHRC is deeply concerned at Last night’s Panorama, “A Question of Leadership”. A combination of factual errors, distortions, broad stereotypes and glaring inaccuracies shown up in the programme questions the integrity of the programme makers.

A transcript of the programme can be found at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/4171950.stm

Whilst purporting to be an examination of the Muslim Council of Britain, the programme called into question several widely held Muslim beliefs and in particular demonised any aspiration of Muslims in whatever form if based on their religious faith. This extended from an aspiration for shariah to the wearing of jilbaab at school and integration of Muslims into mainstream society.

IHRC alert, 22 August 2005