Belgian king renews support for hijab-clad worker

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Belgian King Albert II and Queen Paola have made a rare visit to a factory where a hijab-clad woman was forced to quit her job over death threats, to express their support for the Muslim employee and her factory colleagues against extremist threats.

Naimi Amzil, of a Moroccan origin, was forced to quit her job in the Remmery seafood factory on March 3, after receiving death threats from an extremist group for no reasons other than being a veiled Muslim. Expressing outrage at the extremist threats, the Belgian monarch decided to visit the factory to back the Muslim employee and other factory workers against the extremist death threats.

During a reception party held on the sidelines of the King’s visit Tuesday, April 19, Rick Remmery, the factory owner, said the visit represents a powerful sign of support for the Muslim employee and the factory workers.

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Pope Benedict XVI: Enemy of Jihad

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. ‘Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,’ historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots ‘if it truly wants to survive’.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch holds out hope that the new Pope may mark an improvement on his predecessor who “kissed the Qur’an and pursued a consistent line of conciliation toward the Islamic world”.

Front Page Magazine, 20 April 2005

Melanie Phillips welcomes this as “a typically informed and thoughtful piece by Robert Spencer”. She agrees that “it is only if Christianity manages to retake the lost continent of Europe and revive its abandoned faith that the moral relativism behind whose banner Europe is marching steadily towards the cultural precipice will be defeated – and with it the colonising ambitions of Islam to fill the void”.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 20 April 2005

For Muslim concerns about the Pope’s vision of a “Christian Europe”, see Islam Online, 20 April 2005

This Pope is Catholic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Powerline: The real beef with Ratzinger, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Pope is Catholic.

Aardvark: The real beef with Qaradawi, then, isn’t that he’s a threat to liberal democracy; it’s the fact that he agrees with the substantive tenets of his religion, including those regarding controversial social issues, and takes them seriously. Like it or not, this Islamist is Muslim.

The ever-excellent Marc Lynch exposes Western double-think when it comes to Catholicism and Islam.

Abu Aardvark, 19 April 2005

Faith invaders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“As Britain’s culture wars grow in intensity, and abortion and artistic freedom become hot issues, Cristina Odone reveals that Saudi and US funds are behind the devout religious groups that lead the offensive.”

New Statesman, 18 April 2005

The gist of Cristina Odone’s article is that “foreign spiritual empires are moving in on Britain. Increasingly, foreign-inspired and foreign-financed religious conservatives are influencing the UK political agenda, forming what amounts to a spiritual fifth column”. It is notable that the Roman Catholic church escapes her strictures. Opus Dei doesn’t rate a mention.

Odone draws a parallel between US-backed right-wing Protestant evangelism and Islam. Unsurprisingly, she cites Peter Tatchell’s claim that “an insidious alliance has sprung up between ultra-orthodox Christians and Muslims”.

She warns that “the poorly educated imams of Bradford and Tower Hamlets, ministering to believers who are barely a generation away from the village Islam of south Asia, lack the financial, theological and intellectual firepower to stand up to the missionaries for Saudi-style Islam”. Condescending, or what?

Odone makes much of the fact that some Muslim institutions receive Saudi funding. She sees this as an attempt to introduce Wahhabism into Britain, and blames Saudi influence for the fact that some young British Muslims “lap up a rigid, censorious form of Islam, which includes the strict observance of prayer times, learning the Koran by rote, and a wholesale rejection of the habits, attitudes and values of mainstream society”.

This strikes me as largely fantasy. The Saudis certainly stepped up their financial aid to Muslim organisations worldwide after 1979, in order to counter the appeal of radical Shia Islam inspired by the Iranian revolution. However, while their funding is directed to conservative rather than to liberal Muslims, the Saudis don’t have a record of exporting pure Wahhabism.

In any case, I rather doubt that the scale of funding they provide to Islam in Britain is capable of exerting the influence Odone claims. If some young Muslims are drawn towards fundamentalist varieties of their faith, this is surely to be explained by social factors – not by what the Saudi monarchy does with its oil revenues.

Though you might suspect the article is a conscious attempt by the author to whip up Islamophobia while covering her tracks by criticising Protestant fundamentalism as well, I don’t think that’s actually her intention. However, in the present circumstances – with Islam and Muslims (unlike Christian evangelicals) being consistently portrayed as a threat to liberal values, the gains of the Enlightenment and western civilisation in general – that is in fact the practical impact of her arguments.

Muslim feminism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Toronto Star last week ran a gushing profile of Indonesian Muslim feminist Musdah Mulia, exulting that she ‘blames Muslims, not Islam, for gender inequity’ in the Islamic world. This is closely related to a large-scale and continually growing problem: analysts attribute the actions of the global terrorist movement to a hijacking of Islam, without caring or daring to look squarely at what exactly it is about Islam that gives rise to fanaticism and violence.”

Yes, you probably guessed – another Islamophobic rant from Robert Spencer.

Front Page Magazine, 14 April 2005

“Spencer portrays himself as a scholar of Islam, and that he is not. He misquotes verses of the Qur’an, takes things out of context, and shamelessly lies.” Khaleel Mohammed replies to Spencer. (Errs on the side of mildness, if you ask me.)

Front Page Magazine, 18 April 2005

Nick Cohen: telling lies about Bethnal Green

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Last week, [Oona] King and a group of mainly Jewish pensioners gathered for a 60th anniversary memorial service for the 132 people who died in the last V2 rocket attack on London in 1945. Muslim youths spat and threw eggs at the mourners and shouted: ‘You fucking Jews’.”

So Nick Cohen claims in the Observer, 17 April

Dead Men Left points out that “Jonathan Freedland was at the memorial service Cohen refers to. He witnessed the horrid egging incident, and recorded his account in the Observer‘s sister paper, the Guardian. He is quite clear that no slogans or chants were heard. Cohen, not present at the event, and providing no source, claims that racist abuse was hurled. This gives every appearance of being pure invention.”

Dead Men Left, 18 April 2005

Freedland later returned to the estate where the egging incident occurred, and his findings concerning the motives for the attack are far from clear-cut.

Guardian, 16 April 2005

EU capitulates to Islamo-fascism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

European Union foreign ministers were urged on Saturday to consider the previously taboo idea of dialogue with Islamic opposition groups in the Middle East to encourage a transition to democracy. They also discussed ways to strengthen emerging democracy movements in several Arab states and persuade authoritarian governments to relinquish some power and accept the principle of alternation, diplomats said.

On the second day of an informal brainstorming session at a chateau in Luxembourg, the ministers were presented with a paper that suggested, at least in the form of questions, that the EU should reach out beyond its traditional secular interlocutors.

“In the past the EU has preferred to deal with the secular intelligentsia of Arab civil society at the expense of the more representative Islam-inspired organizations,” the report said. “Has the time come for the EU to become more engaged with Islamic ‘faith-based’ civil society in these countries?” asked the paper co-authored by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and the bloc’s Luxembourg presidency.

Reuters report, 16 April 2005

See also Islam Online, 18 April 2005

The news follows a report that the US State Department has drawn up a memo calling for dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – much to Robert Spencer’s disgust

We look forward Nick Cohen, Outrage, Harry’s Place, the AWL, the Worker Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq et al joining with Spencer in denouncing the State Department and the EU for this abject capitulation to Islamo-fascism.

Mail on Sunday continues in its demonisation of British Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Mail on Sunday has once again proved that old habits die hard. As if it were not enough to witch hunt asylum seekers, or tarnish the reputation of many Muslim leaders, the Mail has again surpassed itself by bizarrely claiming that FOSIS and the Mayor’s office ‘plotted to nail Euan’s girlfriend’.”

FOSIS press release, 18 April 2005

For a response by FOSIS to allegations of anti-semitism in the NUS see FOSIS press release, 13 April 2005

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Ricin: the plot that never was

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A deadly poison said to be at the heart of a terrorist conspiracy against Britain led to a dire warning of another al-Qa’ida attack in the West. The Government was swift to act on the fear that such a find generated. But far from being a major threat, the real danger existed only in the mind of a misguided individual living in a dingy north London bedsit.

Independent on Sunday, 17 April 2005

Met chief issues fresh terror warning

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britain’s most senior policeman has issued a new warning about the threat of al Qaeda terrorists targeting the UK. Sir Ian Blair is calling for new laws to tackle terrorist conspiracies and has asked for the introduction of ID cards to be given further consideration. His comments came in an interview broadcast on the Breakfast with Frost programme. And they follow the jailing of Kamel Bourgass for murdering a policeman and conspiring to cause a public nuisance after police unravelled an al Qaeda ricin poison plot.”

Sky News, 17 April 2005

Ian Blair did go on to say that Bourgass is “one individual, not the whole Muslim community” and that “99.9% of Muslims … are law-abiding people and we’ve got to support them in that and understand the difference”. He raised the question: “What is it that drives a tiny number of young men and women into extreme violence?”

This talk of extremists comprising a tiny minority of Muslims is the sort of wishy-washy liberalism that really irritates Robert Spencer: “99.9%? What was it, then, that made Al-Muhajiroun, a group that openly supported Al-Qaeda and spoke freely of wanting to see ‘the black flag of Islam’, that is, the flag of jihad, ‘flying over #10 Downing Street’, Britain’s largest Muslim group?”

Jihad Watch, 17 April 2005

Anyone who’s loopy enough to believe that the minuscule and marginal Al-Muhajiroun sect (which formally dissolved itself last year) is “Britain’s largest Muslim group” isn’t going to be taken too seriously, though. A bigger threat comes from those who make reference to Islamist extremists being a tiny minority and then use an almost certainly non-existent terrorist plot in order to call for repressive legislation that will impact on all Muslims.

For a response by civil rights organisation Liberty see BBC News, 17 April 2005