‘Bin Laden’ libel case: Murdoch press settles out of court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Wealthy businessman Yousef Jameel settled a libel action today with the Sunday Times which published an article reporting he had links with Osama bin Laden. The Saudi Arabian, whose group of companies includes the major British car dealership, Hartwell plc, agreed to withdraw the libel case on undisclosed terms.

James Price QC, representing him at the High Court in London, told Mr Justice Gray that the article, published in June 2003, was headed “Car tycoon ‘linked’ to bin Laden”. Alongside the article were pictures of Mr Jameel, one of his car dealerships and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York in flames.

It reported that Mr Jameel had been added as a defendant in litigation brought in the United States on behalf of victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.

Mr Price said: “Mr Jameel was concerned that readers of the article may have understood it to suggest that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that he had financially supported Osama bin Laden in connection with terrorism and that he helped fund the training of the terrorists who carried out the attacks.”

Muslim News, 15 June 2005

The kids of Guantánamo Bay

Posted on by Bob Pitt

gitmoBritish lawyer Clive Stafford Smith writes:

“The United States has explicitly misled the public about kids being in Guantánamo Bay…. There are apparently at least six juveniles in Guantánamo Bay … and we know that some are being held in Camp V, which is the most onerous of the camps, with treatment that is shameful for adults, let alone children.”

Cageprisoners.com, 15 June 2005

See also here.

Immigrant groups rally against Dutch policies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

AMSTERDAM — Moroccan and Turkish groups in the Netherlands have set up a new action committee named “Genoeg is genoeg” (enough is enough) to organise a campaign against the Dutch government’s tough immigration and integration policies.

The organisers are calling for a national demonstration on 17 September in Amsterdam. Two spokesmen for the new organisation outlined the plans for the demonstration during a press conference in the Moroccan capital of Rabat on Monday.

Continue reading →

Sweet old lady cruelly treated by Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

sweet_old_lady“Oriana Fallaci is 75 years old. The renowned Italian journalist lives in hiding because of death threats she received after the publication in 2001 of her book The Rage and the Pride. She is dying of cancer. And now she is going to go on trial for ‘defaming Islam’.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch joins Nick Cohen in rallying to the defence of an Italian racist who wrote (in that very same book) that Muslim immigrants had “multiplied like rats“. How could anyone consider taking legal action against such a sweet old lady?

Front Page Magazine, 14 June 2005

Predictably, Melanie Phillips lines up with Robert Spencer in condemning such attempts to “silence necessary criticism of Islam”. By allowing similar legal action under the proposed new anti-incitement law, the British state will “become the tool of clerical fascism”.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 14 June 2005

During an earlier attempt to bring a race hatred case against Fallaci in France, one of her supporters opined that “it should be the rats suing Fallaci for comparing them to Muslims” (see here).

The Left and Islam: a ‘modern day Hitler-Stalin pact’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

unholy-allianceCarol Devine-Molin joins the chorus of right-wingers who applaud the role of former US radical David Horowitz in exposing “the collaboration that exists between Islamo-fascists and Leftists”.

Shamefully, these Leftists have opposed “a righteous war to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, enforce UN resolutions, stabilize a region, and oust a dictator that was clearly funding and harboring terrorists”. By contrast, “the Bush administration and its supporters believe that democratization of the Middle East and concomitant free markets will provide Muslims with greater opportunities and improvement in their overall quality of life. And the majority of Iraqis are clearly on the same wavelength and conducive to the Bush plan”.

ESR, 13 June 2005

Yeah, sure. That must be why the majority of those Iraqis who voted did so for parties calling for an end to the US occupation and opposing the handover of Iraq’s assets to foreign corporations.

But the “Hitler-Stalin pact” business – that rings a bell. Where have we heard that one before? Oh yes, I remember. It was our friend Nick Cohen, berating the Left for engaging with the leaders of faith communities that are under attack: “You have to go back to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 to find a similar accommodation with the dictatorial right.”

Observer, 20 February 2005

So Cohen finds himself in a bloc with the most viciously pro-imperialist, neo-conservative, Islamophobic right-wingers … in accusing the Left of forming a bloc with the Right!

Islamophobe cries calumny

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A recent post here on Tariq Ramadan included, as an example of the sort of company Professor Ramadan’s leftist critics find themselves in, a link to the Fire Tariq Ramadan blog. This prompted an indignant reply from the site’s owner: “Allegations of ‘Islamophobia’ made by goose-stepping Islamist sympathizers to equate any critique of radical Islamists with hatred of an entire group of people. This borders on calumny.”

Fire Tariq Ramadan, 8 June 2005

And this from a blogger whose response to Tariq Ramadan’s observation that Muslims have an increasing presence in Europe was: “I’m sure Theo van Gogh is happy about that. So are the victims of the gang-rapes in Sweden.” (See here.)

Bizarrely we are told that the Islamophobia Watch collective “must be Islamophobes themselves, considering they probably have a low opinion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali”.

Well, speaking personally, I have an extremely low opinion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. However, given that she has publicly renounced Islam and spends her time attacking her former co-religionists, it’s difficult to see how contempt for this appalling right-winger, who plays a major role in stoking up anti-Muslim racism in the Netherlands, amounts to Islamophobia.

Postscript:

For a reply from Fire Tariq Ramadan, see here.

Mad Mel defends right to religious hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“So why is the government going to these extraordinary lengths? The answer is that it is trying to appease the Muslim community which has been pressing for such a law for years. Ministers are desperate to win back votes by Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims which were lost over the Iraq war, and also because they think that if they give the most extremist Muslims whatever they want this will quell Islamist rage against Britain and the west.

“That is why, in a grovelling article in Muslim News before the last election, the then energy minister Mike O’Brien boasted of all the measures the government had introduced at Muslim request, including the religious hatred law. That is why, in a pre-election letter to all mosques Home Secretary Charles Clarke apologised for the failure to get this law through Parliament and blamed it on the opposition parties. If it is now passed, it will shut down legitimate and vital debate about Islam.”

Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail, 13 June 2005

You can just imagine Phillips’ response if someone published an article which accused the government of “appeasing the Jewish community”, or of giving a “grovelling” interview to the Jewish Chronicle, or of giving “the most extremist Jews whatever they want” by taking a stand against anti-semitism, and which argued for the right of racists to promote anti-Jewish propaganda on the grounds that it was necessary to encourage “legitimate and vital debate about Judaism”.

What were they thinking?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

James Zogby assesses the official US delegation to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) “Conference on Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance” convened last week in Cordoba, Spain:

“For the most part, the participants appeared to have been selected for reasons having more to do with domestic political patronage and ideological purity than with the purposes of the conference itself. Most were political conservatives, including the group’s lone Catholic clergyman. One of the delegation’s Jewish representatives has been known to argue vigorously against Israel becoming a ‘nation of all its citizens’ or a ‘democracy’ since that would ‘dilute’ the state. Another appeared to have been selected mainly because he switched his support from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004. And the delegation’s only Muslim representative was an individual who has recently aligned himself with the far-right against all of the US’s Muslim organizations arguing that he alone stands against terrorism, which, presumably, he believes, the others support.”

Media Monitors Network, 14 June 2005

US suspects ‘face torture overseas’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

It is no secret that the US military operates detention centres around the world for the interrogation of terror suspects. The treatment of prisoners in these places – including Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq – has come in for intense scrutiny and evidence of human rights violations has been widely reported.

But less well-documented is the process by which terror suspects are sent by the United States for interrogation by security officials in other countries. This is known as “rendition” and is becoming increasingly controversial because many of these countries – including Syria and Egypt – are accused of using torture on prisoners, not least by the US State Department.

BBC News, 14 June 2005

Gulag