Why watered down religious hatred legislation won’t work

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why watered down religious hatred legislation won’t work

By Ken Livingstone

Morning Star, 25 June 2005

The government’s new Bill proposing a ban on incitement to religious hatred, which last week passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247, has been the subject of much controversy.

As mayor of the most diverse city in the world, I strongly support this Bill, and welcome the fact that the overwhelming majority of Londoners do so too.

Our polls show that 72 per cent of Londoners support a ban on inciting hatred against people on grounds of their religion, while only 15 per cent oppose it.

Unfortunately, this mass public support for the Bill has been ignored by the media, who have concentrated on publicising the vocal objections of the Tory party and a few well-known celebrities, who have tended to portray the Bill as a form of blasphemy law.

The position under existing race relations laws is discriminatory and clearly unacceptable.

Some faith groups such as Jews and Sikhs are currently protected from incitement to hatred, whereas members of other faiths such as Hindus and Muslims are not.

This has left a dangerous loophole in the law which is being exploited by the extreme right.

The British National Party has been energetically propagating its racist filth by whipping up Islamophobia, playing on post-9/11 stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists.

Continue reading →

In defence of the religious hatred bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

George Carty emails us to ask: “How can you brand opponents of the [religious hatred] bill in general as Islamophobes, given that Amir Butler (very sympathetic to the Islamist cause) opposed similar laws in Australia?” (For Butler’s views see here.)

I suppose there are several answers to this.

First, there are also Muslims who oppose the religious hatred bill in Britain – Dr Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament is one, and I believe the Islamic Human Rights Commission takes a similar position.

But these are hardly mass organisations. The Muslim Council of Britain is the umbrella body for the majority of Muslim organisations in the UK, with over 300 affiliates, and it is solidly behind the bill. I suspect that you will find that Amir Butler’s views are those of only a minority of Australian Muslims.

Also, the arguments used by the likes of Amir Butler, Dr Siddiqui and the IHRC are essentially pragmatic – that the legislation will act to the detriment of Muslims – which is rather different from the arguments put forward by non-Muslim opponents of the bill.

Continue reading →

Douglas Wood and Danny Nalliah – the parallels are obvious

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Douglas Wood and Danny Nalliah

“Douglas Wood lost his freedom at gunpoint; Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot lost theirs by court-ordered political correctness. We know who rescued Mr. Wood; who will save the pastors?”

Diana West draws a parallel between the repression suffered by Australian hostage Wood at the hands of terrorists in Iraq and that suffered by two right-wing Christian fundamentalist pastors who have been convicted of vilifying Islam in the state of Victoria.

Washington Times, 24 June 2004

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer applauds this as an example of “clear thinking”!

Dhimmi Watch, 25 June 2005

Labour left fails to stand up for right to incite anti-Muslim hatred, AWL complains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, as opposed to ethnicity, is a major attack on freedom of speech. It means extending the blasphemy laws which still, at least in theory, protect Anglican Christianity from rational public debate, to shield all religions with authoritarian impartiality.

“The bill is partly a cynical pitch to win back Muslim voters outraged by Blair’s warmongering and erosion of civil liberties (like the expansion of state funding for faith schools, and defence of the hijab) and partly the brainchild of a Prime Minister with a lot of respect for religious superstition and very little for human rights.

“So why did the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose leaders have boasted that they will be ‘setting the agenda’ for this Parliament, fail to rebel?

“Unfortunately, on this issue as on many others, these MPs are highly representative of a left which is increasingly losing its political bearings. The ‘religious hatred’ law has elicited not a squeak of protest from the trade union movement; meanwhile the National Union of Students, on the initiative of the SWP and their Stalinist friends Socialist Action, has positively endorsed new Labour’s assault on respect for rational thinking and free speech.”

Sacha Ismael of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq provide us with a good illustration of which section of the left has really lost its bearings. The section of the left that supports the right to incite hatred against Muslims and sneers at the defence of the right to wear the hijab.

Solidarity, 23 June 2005

FA rules Religious Observance to extend to all faiths

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The English Football Association (FA) congratulated itself this month for finally accepting that its rule on Religious Observance in amateur leagues should be extended to religions other than Christianity.

For the first time, the FA acknowledged that just as amateur Christian players are not obliged to play on Good Friday or Christmas day, their Muslim counterparts should be afforded the same rights without fear of reprimand. The success was effectively due to The Muslim News campaign to correct this blatant discrepancy.

Embarrassingly, it took the case of Abram Moss Warriors and the highlighting of the rationale by The Muslim News for the FA to concede that its diversity policy was alarmingly outdated, having failed to take into account England’s growing Muslim population.

In 2003, the Manchester-based team, made up of mostly 12-year-old Muslims, were penalised with a £250 fine and excluded from their local cup for merely requesting the rescheduling of the kick-off time for a game during Ramadan that year. The Warriors’ appeal to Lancashire FA was rejected and met with patronising advice on the appropriate age for fasting.

Muslim News, 24 June 2005

UN officials seek Guantánamo Bay visit

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Manfred NowakGENEVA — U.N. human rights investigators, citing “persistent and credible” reports of torture at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, urged the United States on Thursday to allow them to check conditions there.

The failure of the United States to respond to requests since early 2002 is leading the experts to conclude Washington has something to hide at the Cuban base, said Manfred Nowak, a specialist on torture and a professor of human rights law in Vienna, Austria. “At a certain point, you have to take well-founded allegations as proven in the absence of a clear explanation by the government,” Nowak said.

Associated Press, 23 June 2005

The lynching of a Lodi family

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In less than a week of recklessness reporting, the Bay Area media has destroyed a humble Pakistani family and three other men. The carnage was unbelievable. In a frenzy race for the ratings, the media descended to Lodi, a small town south of Sacramento, in search of the “terrorist cell” they learned about in a federal criminal complaint. Everybody took at face value the veracity of an FBI affidavit and the most imaginative headlines started to come out of the editor’s brains. The San Francisco Chronicle, northern California biggest paper, went along with the FBI version with astonishing words, quotes and statements: terror cell, training with al-Qaida, how to kill Americans, terrorism inquiry to spread, number of people committed to al-Qaida have been operating in and around Lodi, to carry out his jihadi mission, targets include hospitals and food stores, and could have poisoned the ice cream.

San Francisco Bay Indymedia, 23 June 2005

See also “FBI ‘witch-hunt’ in Lodi, California”, Not In Our Name, 23 June 2005

The force of racism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

forza“Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty.”

The Wall Street Journal, 23 June 2005 gives Oriana Fallaci a sympathetic hearing.

This is the woman whose right to free speech is defended by the likes of Nick Cohen and Melanie Phillips. Ms Fallaci is typical of the sort of poor innocent who could be imprisoned for up to seven years in Britain if the new religious hatred bill becomes law, we are warned.

Another excellent reason to support the bill, if you ask me.

Opposition to anti-incitement bill defeated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

So the predicted backbench rebellion failed to materialise, and yesterday the new bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247. Interesting that the Lib Dems found themselves in a bloc with the Tories in opposing the bill.

It’s not every day that this member of the Islamophobia Watch collective applauds the politics of Gerald Kaufman MP, but I can’t help approving of the attack he launched on the Tories in the course of the debate:

“The problem with interventions by Conservative Members is they are totally unrepresentative of the population as a whole in that hardly any of them are open to the kind of humiliation that many members of our communities are open to. If they were, they would not be criticising this legislation.”

He went on to refer to “the case of Mrs Shahzada, a constituent of mine who went to a shop in central Manchester soon after 9/11. She wears a veil over her face, and the shopkeeper refused to serve her because she was, to his perception, a Muslim. That was hatred against an individual, not a criticism of Islam. It is about time that we had an Opposition who understood the kind of country that we live in today.”

Hansard, 21 June 2005

Continue reading →