The Church of England said yesterday that police counter-terrorism operations were directed disproportionately against Muslims and risked alienating them. In a submission to the Commons home affairs committee, the church’s mission and public affairs council supported a proposed law against incitement to religious hatred, including towards Muslims, to preserve community relations.
Tariq Ramadan under vile press campaign in France
Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan is at the center of a vile campaign by rightist French magazines and newspapers, which accuse him of spearheading what they called the political Islam drive in Europe.
Seeking to blemish his reputation after he had been catapulted into the limelight as a paradigm for moderate Muslims, L’Express magazine ran a front-page photo of Ramadan titled, “The man who wants to establish Islamism in France”. The ferocious attack came hard on the heels of Ramadan’s success in grabbing the attention of the third round of the European Social Forum, which concluded on October 17.
Why was this man barred from the US?
“Have you read or listened to any of my material? Can you prove your allegations?” Prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan was left asking these questions when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security revoked his visa in August.
Ex-Muslim’s site trashes Muhammad
“Claiming Muhammad’s teachings are the root of terrorism, a website founded by an ex-Muslim attempts to dispel the oft-quoted statement ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. Headed by Ali Sina, FaithFreedom.org presents articles and commentaries that debunk much of the Quran and charge that Islam’s founder, Muhammad, was a rapist, pedophile, mass murderer and an ‘evil man’. On the site, which features the description ‘Islam and Quran denounced by ex-Muslims as the root of terrorism’, Sina promises that if anyone can prove him wrong in his assertions about Muhammad and Islam, he will take the site off the Internet.”
Huwaydi, Qaradawi and the Aardvark
The accusation against Yusuf al-Qaradawi that he had called for the abduction and killing of US civilians in Iraq, during talk to the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate in Cairo at the end of August, has received widespread coverage, despite the fact that Dr al-Qaradawi himself immediately denied the accuracy of the report in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Abu Aardvark reveals that leading Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaydi obtained a recording of the Cairo meeting and was able to confirm the truth of Qaradawi’s denial. Abu Aardvark also complains that “a number of American magazines and newspapers have expressed no interest in this information when I presented it to them. As I feared, the conventional wisdom has congealed around a lie”.
See here.
Islamophobia divides the left in France
The new school term in France is the first under the new law which bans Muslim girls from wearing a Muslim headscarf to school. The vast majority of the young women involved (in general between fourteen and eighteen years old) have agreed under duress to remove the headscarf in school. The hundred or so who have refused have been separated from their fellow-pupils and kept in a separate room (often with separate break-times, no right to use the library and no attention from teachers, despite the legal obligation to provide teaching). Over the next three weeks they will be called to disciplinary committees and expelled from schools. They will join an unspecified number who have been too intimidated to turn up at school since the passage of the law.
John Mullen (LCR Montreuil) on Socialist Unity Network website
Tariq Ramadan denied US visa to teach at Notre Dame
Interview with Tariq Ramadan on Democracy Now! 13 September 2004
Guardian readers hail France’s secular success
Letters defending the French hijab ban.
In the Guardian, 8 September 2004
Turkey’s Muslim millions threaten EU values, says commissioner
A European commissioner set off a furious row yesterday after warning that Europe’s Christian civilisation risked being overrun by Islam.
Fritz Bolkestein, the single market commissioner and a former leader of the Dutch liberals, said the European Union would “implode” in its current form if 70 million Turkish Muslims were allowed to join.
He predicted that Turkish accession would overwhelm the fragile system and finish off any lingering dreams of a fully-integrated European superstate.
In a speech at Leiden University, he compared the EU to the late Austrian-Hungarian empire, which took so many different peoples on board in such a haphazard fashion that it eventually became ungovernable.
Calling demography the “mother of politics”, he said that while America had the youth and dynamism to remain the world’s only superpower, and China was the rising economic power, Europe’s destiny was to be “Islamised”.
Fouad Ajami on Tariq Ramadan
“The liberty of an open society can never be a suicide pact, and the freedom of the academy is never absolute.” Predictably, Fouad Ajami adds his voice to the chorus of right-wingers supporting Professor Ramadan’s exclusion from the US.
Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2004
For a profile of Ajami – “the bigot’s favorite native, always ready to provide the needed soundbites to rationalize the latest racist thinking or imperial adventure” – see Muslim WakeUp! 7 September 2004