Islamist extremists at a British university tried to impose a Taliban-style culture of intimidation, creating a “chilling effect” on the lives of staff and students.
A confidential report on the radicalisation of British universities found that Islamists at City University London engaged in “sub-criminal extremism”, abusing staff and students and leaving them feeling threatened.
More than 200 objections have been lodged against a mosque proposed for Worongary. The extended period for submissions has now closed and the fate of the proposed Islamic building lies in the hands of town planners and councillors.
The proposal has ignited passions in the community, with two protests on site attracting hundreds of people and prejudicial graffiti sprayed in the area.
A petition against the mosque collected more than 1600 signatures, while more than 200 objections were received by the Gold Coast City Council during the submission period, which was voluntarily extended for two weeks by the applicant – the Islamic Multicultural Association of the Gold Coast.
If approved the mosque would cater for a maximum of 40 people at a time.
Objections lodged ranged from traffic concerns, many taking pains to say it was not on religious grounds, to a mosque in a “Christian” community inviting conflict and even increasing the “carbon output” in the green area.
Tentative links are developing between supporters of the reactionary Tea Party movement in the US and right-wing fringe groups in Britain opposed to what they call the “Islamification” of Europe.
The movements are not yet formally aligned, but the racist English Defence League (EDL), which insists that Islamic fundamentalism will soon engulf Britain, is busy building bridges with US figures who take a similar anti-Islamic position.
One such is candidate for the California state legislature Rabbi Nachum Shifren, who plans to visit England next week in a trip partly sponsored by the EDL. The trip was organised by EDL activist Roberta Moore, who has formed a “Jewish division” of the group. She said that the rabbi would speak at an October 24 rally in London.
“He plans to speak about the dangers of Islamification both in this country and in America,” she said. “We have the same objectives as the groups in the US, and we want to exchange information and work with them.”
Nottingham University Professor Matthew Goodwin, an expert on extremist groups in Britain, warned:
“We’re seeing groups across Europe trying to form a transnational challenge to Islam. Going to the US is particularly interesting because the far-right in Britain has never gone that way before. It has always gone toward Europe. If it does forge strong links to the Tea Party, it would be important because the Tea Party has significant resources.”
Rabbi Shifren, who has given anti-Islamic talks at Tea Party events, boasted in an interview that he planned to warn Britons their country is being lost as “fundamentalist Islam” gains strength. “I see England going down and I want to cry out and do everything I can to prevent that, to work with the EDL,” he said.
The architect of France’s burka ban has accused Britain of “losing the battle against Islamic extremism” by failing to introduce one of its own.
Jacques Myard, a senior member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, said relaxed UK policies had “opened the door to terrorism”. He added: “Allowing women to exclude themselves from society by wearing the full Islamic veil makes radicals extremely comfortable, and Britain should realise this.”
Mr Myard made his outspoken comments to British journalists in Qatar, where he was defending his country’s recent banning of the veil at the Qatar Foundation Doha Debates, which are broadcast by the BBC this weekend.
His words will inflame tensions between London and Paris on the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings, which the French have regularly blamed on lax policing. Referring to the 2005 atrocity in which 52 died and 107 were injured Mr Myard added: “Britain has suffered a number of high-profile failures in its fight against extremism in recent years. These could have been prevented if all signs of extremism were curbed, as they are in France.”
Asked if Britain should introduce its own burka ban, Mr Myard replied: “Of course – it is fundamental to ensuring that extremism is kept in check.”
Despite his strong defence of the burka ban in Qatar, Mr Myard lost the Doha Debate entitled ‘This House believes France is right to ban the face veil’. He was defeated by a team of London journalists, made up of Mehdi Hassan and Nabila Ramdani, as 78 per cent of voters rejected the motion.
Some 350 million people across 200 countries are expected to watch the debate when it is broadcast by channels including BBC World on Saturday and Sunday.
Well, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph and a Civitas press release, it does. Alveena Malik, one of the contributors to a new report from the right-wing think-tank entitled Women, Islam and Western Liberalism, is quoted as writing that “the wearing of religious symbols, including the full veil, should be a fundamental human right of an individual in both the public and private sphere”.
Which is not at all the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from Civitas, who have been the source of a series of scaremongering publications directed against the Muslim community.
Indeed it’s not so long since the Civitas blog carried a piece that quoted al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri as saying that every veil-wearing Muslim woman in the west was “a soldier in the battle of Islam against Zionist-Crusader”, went on to assert that the niqab represented a serious security threat and concluded that “there are enough genuine concerns as to who and what may really lie behind the veil to justify its proscription in public places”.
Bill O’Reilly and his inflammatory speech was on The View this week, and everybody knows it. But, the attention should go elsewhere.
His baseless anti-Muslim rhetoric that led Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to walk off the set earlier this week was a ratings boon for him and the show. O’Reilly appeared on the Glenn Beck show and The View hosts are scheduled to discuss Thursday’s show on Monday.
The show is likely to grab more ratings and headlines, but really, it’s time to shift gears and focus on the anti-Islam hysteria sweeping over the U.S. Bill O’Reilly is getting bashed in the press, but thousands, maybe millions, agree with him. Some of them are silent. Many are not. It has become mainstream to bash Muslims.
John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani at the Huffington Post, 16 October 2010
Writing on his Telegraph blog Andrew Gilligan reports, under the headline “Labour-linked extremist ‘banned from UK'”, that Qazi Hussain Ahmad the former president of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan has had his visa revoked.
You don’t have to be an admirer of Jamaat-e-Islami to recognise that Ahmad is a mainstream political figure in Pakistan. He was the parliamentary leader of the MMA alliance that won 11% of the vote in the 2002 elections to the National Assembly.
Given Gilligan’s notoriously light-minded attitude to factual evidence, anything he writes has to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, after the exclusion of Zakir Naik, I wouldn’t put anything past the present government.
See also Salon, 15 October 2010
In a speech to supporters, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday that multiculturalism in Germany has not met with success. She stressed that immigrants must learn to speak German and integrate into German society. Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have “utterly failed,” according to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“This approach has failed, utterly failed,” said Merkel, head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in a speech to the party’s young people’s association in Potsdam on Saturday. She added that not enough was done in the past to support the movement. “The failures of the last 30 or 40 years cannot be resolved so quickly,” she said.
The comments followed a similar speech from Christian Social Union (CSU) chief Horst Seehofer, sister party to the CDU, who on Friday evening declared his party’s stance against multiculturalism. “Multiculturalism is dead,” he said, to great applause.
See also AFP, 16 October 2010
And “Turkish president concerned over growing anti-Muslim mood in Germany”, IRNA, 16 October 2010
Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer continued his anti-immigrant attacks on Friday night, addressing the youth wing of the conservatives and telling them “multiculturalism is dead.”
“We as the (Christian Democratic) Union stand for the dominant German culture and against multiculturalism – multiculturalism is dead,” he said according to news magazine Der Spiegel.
Speaking at the Junge Union national meeting in Potsdam, Seehofer’s latest attack on the idea of Germany being a country of immigration followed his recent call to stop Turks and Arabs from moving to Germany.
Yet he said his speech was not a lurch to the right, rather an attempt to “stop the right-wing loonies,” he said, adding that “political seducers” must be deterred from parliament by addressing the concerns of voters.
Those who wanted to live in Germany had to be prepared to accept the daily culture of the country, he said, although did not specify how this should be defined.
Chancellor Angela Merkel was more moderate, Der Spiegel reported, but seemed to echo some of Seehofer’s sentiment when she said, “We feel bound to the Christian image of humanity, that is what defines us,” she said. Those who do not accept this, “are in the wrong place here.”
Germans should also talk about their values and their increasing alienation from religion, in order to affirm their sense of country and society, she added.
Regarding the idea of allowing highly-qualified people to come to Germany to fill the skills deficit, Seehofer said the emphasis should initially be on training unemployed people here before bringing people into the country. Germany should not become the “social security office for the whole world,” he said.