“The religious bigots are at it again, and this time it’s closer to home. Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently wrote to Charles Kennedy threatening to withdraw Muslim votes from the Liberal Democrats unless the party drops its opposition to the incitement to religious hatred law…. I sincerely hope that Charles Kennedy continues to back Evan Harris and that he has the balls to tell Mr. Sacranie where he can shove his Muslim votes.”
‘Anti-Islamist’ crusader plants new seeds
“Despite the apparent decision by President George W. Bush against re-nominating him to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), ‘anti-Islamist’ activist Daniel Pipes is working as diligently as ever to protect the United States and the Western world from the influence of radical Islamists.”
Daniel Pipes (the man who describes Muslims as “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene”) exposed by Jim Lobe.
The reality of l’affaire du foulard
The French hijab ban, now in place for almost a year, has both veiled the country’s social problems and unveiled its racism, Naima Bouteldja argues.
Far-right leader’s conviction upheld
An appeals court upheld the conviction of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-right leader, yesterday for racist remarks against Muslims made in a newspaper interview.
Le Pen, leader of the National Front party, was ordered to pay a £6900 fine for inciting racial hatred in comments in Le Monde newspaper two years ago.
Le Pen has been convicted of racism or anti-Semitism at least six times. He blames immigrants, especially those from North Africa, for high unemployment and wants to deport all illegal immigrants.
In the interview, Le Pen urged the French to beware of “the day in France when we have 25 million Muslims, not five million” – the estimated population of Muslims in France.
The appeals court in Paris said such comments could incite hatred. “In denouncing such a threat, Jean-Marie Le Pen tends to stir in the reader a feeling of hostility and rejection toward Muslims depicted as dominators,” the written ruling stated.
Associated Press, 25 February 2005
In defence of secularism: Religion must be pushed back
“I would like to say that the proposed legislation in France banning conspicuous religious symbols in state schools and institutions is essential and an important step forward in the defence of secularism and women’s and children’s rights, but it is not enough. We have to go further.”
Azar Majedi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, who evidently understands neither Marxism nor secularism, advocates state repression of religion.
See here.
The BNP and Islam
“It is not a question of race for us now, but of radical Islam and terrorism.”
British National Party leader Nick Griffin, in an interview with the London listings magazine Time Out, expounding the BNP’s new tactic of promoting their racist propaganda in the form of Islamophobia.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s conquest of Europe
Islamists have established a base in Germany and are working to subvert western democracy. So Lorenzo Vidino claims.
Pipes defends Le Pen
“One does not have to be a Le Pen fan to acknowledge that his views, however crudely expressed, represent an important outlook in the national debate over immigration and Islam. Le Pen should be able to state them without fear of getting in trouble with the law.”
Daniel Pipes defends Jean-Marie Le Pen’s right to incite racial hatred.
Nick Cohen’s bloc with the right
In the 20 February issue of the Observer, the paper’s resident Islamophobe Nick Cohen devotes his column to an attack on the dossier produced by the mayor of London in response to the campaign against Yusuf al-Qaradawi (“Ken Has a Lot to Be Sorry For“).
Cohen’s article is merely the latest episode in his long-running – and apparently unending – vendetta against those of us on the left who have retained our old-fashioned sympathies with the victims of imperialism and racism. In Cohen’s view we are all “pseudo-leftists” who have abandoned the gains of the Enlightenment and are “moving to the right, often to the far-right” to form a bloc with “obscurantists, theocrats and fascists”.
It seems to have escaped Cohen’s attention that on this issue he is the one who is in a bloc with the right. It is the extreme right-wingers in the field of Islamic studies such as Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer with whom Cohen finds common ground over Qaradawi. Those on the liberal, progressive wing of western academia, such as John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Raymond Baker, all recognise Dr al-Qaradawi’s role as a reformer and democrat.
Meanwhile, the excellent Abu Aardvark recounts how Dr al-Qaradawi has been denounced on a jihadist chat room for his corrupting influence in promoting freedom, individual choice and tolerance.
As for the mayor’s dossier, it can be consulted online here, and readers can make up their own minds whether Cohen has answered it effectively.
They do not vilify our ideas, they vilify us
The right to blasphemy is not the right to religious hate. Shakira Hussein draws on her own multi-religious background to challenge her childhood hero, Salman Rushdie. (Contains a useful comment on the Australian religious vilification case.)
Open Democracy, 22 February 2005
For Rushdie’s article see here.