Terror suspects sent to Egypt by the dozens

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The United States and other countries have forcibly sent dozens of terror suspects to Egypt, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. The rights group and the State Department have both said Egypt regularly uses extreme interrogation methods on detainees. The group said it had documented 63 cases since 1994 in which suspected Islamic militants were sent to Egypt for detention and interrogation. The figures do not include people seized after the attacks of September 2001 who were sent mainly by Middle East countries and American intelligence authorities. The report said the total number sent to Egypt since the Sept. 11 attacks could be as high as 200 people.

CAIR news brief, 12 May 2005

For the HRW report, see here.

The Mayor of London, political Islam and the Worker Communist Party of Iran

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Effectively, the Mayor of London is appeasing a movement which is quite vicious”, Fariborz Pooya of the Worker Communist Party of Iran explains. “We have seen the activities of this movement in the Middle East, as well as in Europe. This is a fascist movement. It reminds me of Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, who in the late 1930s went to Germany and brought with him a piece of paper, waving it to the crowds, saying here, I have the word of Mr Hitler that he is not going to go to war – who says he’s aggressive? The following year Hitler rolled his tanks into Poland.”

WPI Briefing No.177

So watch out for Dr al-Qaradawi invading London at the head of a Panzer division.

CAIR’s ‘Islamophobia and anti-Americanism’ conference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“For groups like CAIR, especially after September 11, to name-call and label Americans as racists and bigots because they are simply exercising their right to free speech in criticizing Islam and Muslims is nothing short of asinine.

“Americans constantly hear that we ‘just don’t understand Islam’. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s no need for us to understand Islam. It’s not our responsibility to understand any culture but our own.

“It’s very simple: obey American laws, respect the dress codes, uniforms, rules and regulations of the companies that employ you or the schools in which you’re enrolled, and respect the wishes of your American hosts. Then you won’t have a problem.”

Another sensitive, thoughtful contribution to the discussion of Islam from the folks at Jihad Watch.

Dhimmi Watch, 12 May 2005

Nick Cohen: telling lies about Bethnal Green (2)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An entry from Oona King’s campaign diary: “Last week, I was ‘attacked’ at the anniversary of the bombing of Hughes Mansions. The last V2 rocket to fall on London during the Blitz killed 130 people in these flats. Nearly all those who died were Jewish, some of them soldiers home on leave. The eggs and vegetables hurled from the surrounding brick balconies didn’t hit me. They only splattered my jacket, but hit a Jewish war veteran and an elderly Jewish woman. It was disturbing: the kids disrupting the event have no idea that the people they hit are the people who gave us the freedom to be here. After all, neither Bengalis nor black Jews would have lasted long under the Third Reich.”

New Statesman, 16 May 2005

A fair point, and nobody could fail to condemn the behaviour of the young people who disrupted the ceremony. But it’s worth noting that Oona makes no mention of Nick Cohen’s claim that “Muslim youths spat and threw eggs at the mourners and shouted: ‘You fucking Jews’.”

See here.

Muslim school to become state school?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch is outraged to find that an independent Muslim school in Nottingham may be accepted into the state sector.

This would make fully four – yes, that’s four – state-funded Muslim primary schools in the whole of Britain, compared with over six thousand state-funded Christian primary schools.

And how does Spencer interpret this? He thinks it’s an example of the “Islamization of Europe”.

Dhimmi Watch, 12 May 2005

US Muslims seek probe of Gitmo Quran ‘desecration’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the Bush administration to launch a public probe of allegations that interrogators at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay flushed a Quran, Islam’s revealed text, down a toilet. At least four people were killed today in Afghanistan during protests over the alleged desecration.

CAIR news release, 11 May 2005

US Report: anti-Muslim hate crime jumps 52 percent

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A report released by a prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group indicates that anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States increased by more than 50 percent in the past year, from 93 cases in 2003 to 141 in 2004.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) report – the only annual study of its kind – outlines 1522 incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2004, the highest number of Muslim civil rights cases ever recorded in the Washington-based group’s annual report. (Hundreds of anti-Muslim incidents reported immediately following the 9/11 attack were detailed in a separate report.) According to the study, called Unequal Protection,” that figure is a 49 percent jump over the preceding year.

CAIR said factors contributing to the sharp increase in reported incidents included the lingering impact of post-9/11 fears, increased awareness of civil rights issues in the Muslim community, a general increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric, growth in the number of local CAIR chapters reporting cases, and abuses associated with the implementation of national security policies.

(The complete report may be viewed at: http://www.cair-net.org/asp/2005CivilRightsReport.pdf)

CAIR news release, 11 May 2005

‘Muslim Brotherhood – of terrorists’ (according to MEMRI)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MEMRI executive director Steven Stalinsky expresses indignation at reports that the US government has opened channels to the Muslim Brotherhood. He objects that the “pro-jihad terrorist ideology of the Brotherhood” makes it “difficult to understand how anyone in the US would consider a dialogue with the group”.

Front Page Magazine, 10 May 2005

Not so difficult, I’d have thought. In Egypt, under any fair system of election, the Muslim Brotherhood would almost certainly form the largest parliamentary party. Its offshoot Hamas has just polled well in the Palestinian Authority local elections, defeating Fatah in the larger towns. The US State Department has evidently woken up to the fact that it’s a bit counterproductive to call for democracy in the Middle East while at the same time denouncing as jihadists, terrorists and enemies of western civilisation the very forces that democracy will most likely bring to power.

Islamophobia may indeed be a racist tool of western imperialism but, in the form promoted by Steven Stalinsky, Daniel Pipes, Jihad Watch et al, it in fact runs counter to the interests of US foreign policy as understood by its more pragmatic exponents.

Daily Star: ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ encourages Muslim terrorists

Posted on by Eddie Truman

The UK’s Daily Star has a go at using the film Kingdom of Heaven to keep the pot boiling over Muslim terrorist scare mongering.

Apparently Ridley Scott’s epic is promoting “Osama bin Laden’s version of history” – the verdict of Cambridge professor Jonathan Riley-Smith.

Worst of all, Ridley Scott is apparently depicting Muslims as sophisticated and civilised while showing the crusaders as barbarians.

In a separate box out, Daily Star hack Jerry Lawton turns his hand to history in a piece entitled “1,000 years of conflict”.

Back of the class for Jerry though – he says that the Crusades started in 1076 when Muslims captured Jerusalem. Wrong Jerry, that was 400 years earlier in 638. Pope Urban’s call for the retaking of Jerusalem wasn’t until 1095.

Thanks to the always excellent Arab Media Watch for drawing this to our attention.

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