Mark Steel on the plot to kill the pope that wasn’t.
SPD leader compares migrants who reject ‘integration programmes’ to hate preachers, says they have no right to live in Germany
Sigmar Gabriel, the head of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party, is calling for tougher integration policies in his country.
In an interview with Spiegel Online on Monday, he said that immigrants who refuse to participate in programs offered by the government to help foreigners integrate are as unwelcome as hate preachers who have found homes in some of the country’s mosques and receive their funding from abroad.
The SPD leader’s comments attracted criticism from the Green Party. Veteran Green politician Volker Beck described his words as the “beating of the drum against immigrants with cheap populist politics.”
Harvard faces protests over honour for Martin Peretz
Harvard academics and students are demanding that the university rescind a plan to honour the editor-in-chief of a leading Washington political magazine this week after he wrote that Muslims are unfit for the protections of the US constitution and said that “Muslim life is cheap”.
Martin Peretz has partially apologised for the comments but critics say they are only the most recent of a long line of bigotted columns in theNew Republic by the former Harvard professor that have drawn accusations of double standards in how the American media confronts prejudice.
Peretz caused a stir when he wrote in a column earlier this month that Muslims in the US should not be entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech. “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims … So, yes, I wonder whether I need honour these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse,” he said.
The comments provoked criticism from bloggers and academics but were initially ignored by mainstream newspapers despite Peretz’s prominence – among other things he is a close friend of the former vice-president Al Gore – and the influence of his magazine.
Some of the strongest criticism has come from Harvard, where some students and academics are demanding that the university cancel a ceremony on Friday to name a $500,000 (£322,000) social studies chair after Peretz.
“Such an invitation lends legitimacy and respectability to views that can only be described as abhorrent and racist in their implication that the rights guaranteed by the US constitution should be withheld from certain citizens based on their religious affiliation,” student organisations said in a letter to the university that has been signed by more than 400 people.
Among the critics is Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, who described Peretz’s views as hateful. “If you had said this about blacks, Jews or Catholics, it would be a scandal,” he told the Boston Globe.
See also the Daily Beast, 19 September 2010
How Jews view the Sweden Democrats
Interesting piece in Haaretz on relations between Sweden’s Jewish community and the far-right party that has just secured a presence in parliament.
Yay! Ed Husain is leaving the country
Yes, Ed Husain is indeed leaving the UK. Having spent the past few years trying to poison public opinion against mainstream Muslim organisations here, Husain is evidently off to the US to do the same there. According to the Jewish Chronicle he’s resigning from the Quilliam Foundation to become a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations.
And good riddance, I say. At least the Muslim community in the UK will be spared the further attentions of this contemptible little man. Of course, you might say I’m biased. My past experience of Husain has involved him sending a threatening email to a London Assembly member in whose office I worked demanding that he stop me criticising the Quilliam Foundation and, when that failed, hiring libel lawyers in an attempt to silence me. And all this while Husain’s employment at Quilliam was being subsidised by public money.
CAIR and other organisations in the US Muslim community should prepare themselves for a Husain-inspired campaign of misrepresentation and slander against them.
Germany: charges against Milli Görüş leaders dropped, investigations discontinued
The Munich prosecutor has dropped all serious charges against top officials of the Muslim group Milli Gorus and several other Muslim organizations.
Six officials had been charged with fraud, money laundering, the support of terrorist organizations and association with criminals. In the spring of 2009 there were extensive raids.
According to the German daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the 19 month investigations into the groups have been discontinued.
The General Secretary of the organization, Olaz Ucuncu said he suspected there was a “political background” to the investigation. The investigators “found nothing,” he said.
The allegations were so severe that at the time, the Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere excluded the Islam Council from the government-sponsored Islam Conference. Milli Gorus is one of the dominant groups in the Islam Council.
The conference brings together politicians and representatives of the Muslim community to discuss integration.
However the 2010 conference was boycotted by several groups due to the exclusion of Milli Gorus and only two of the country’s four largest Muslim umbrella groups were at the discussions.
Ucuncu told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that it is unlikely that Milli Gorus will wish to take part in future Islam Conferences organized by the government.
Independent exposes harassment of British Muslims at UK airports and seaports
Hundreds of British Muslims leaving and returning from holidays abroad face harassment and intimidation by security forces when they pass through UK airports and seaports, an investigation by The Independent has found.
One man interrogated by police over his British credentials was asked whether he watched Dad’s Army, while another was questioned over the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
New figures seen by this newspaper show that the number of innocent people stopped and questioned at airports and other points of entry to the UK has doubled in the last four years, raising serious concerns about racial profiling. Many British Muslims have cancelled future vacations rather than risk being questioned and held for up to nine hours by anti-terrorist officers.
Brooklyn Tea Party anti-mosque demo
More than three dozen self-professed Tea Party members rallied next to the 9-11 memorial at the 69th Street pier on Sunday to condemn controversial mosques near Ground Zero and in Sheepshead Bay.
“Islam has an inherent aggressiveness and the Muslim American Society [the developers of the Sheepshead Bay mosque] are their warriors on the front line,” claimed John Press, president of the Brooklyn Tea Party, which plans to attend a protest outside the Voorhies Avenue mosque site this Sunday. “We have to delay their expansion.”
At least one woman spent the afternoon in a black burka, carrying a sign reading, “I am Nancy Pelosi,” a reference to the Speaker of the House, a Democratic who has become a lightning rod for conservatives nationwide.
Former Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, Blue Collar Corner blogger Andrew Sullivan, Republican congressional candidate Bob Turner and Republican Assembly candidate Nicole Malliotakis all addressed the crowd, although Malliotakis did not take the Brooklyn Tea Party pledge to freeze the budget and reduce capital spending by 15 percent, to fight the so-called Ground Zero mosque and support a divisive Arizona immigration law that allows police to demand immigration papers from anyone they suspect of being in this country illegally.
The Brooklyn Tea Party formed five months ago. Sunday’s rally was its second, and most successful, outing, Press said, adding that party members usually meet informally every Sunday at the Kosher Hut of Brooklyn on Kings Highway in Midwood.
Many Tea Party groups focus strictly on fiscal issues, but the Brooklyn Tea Party has a strong social conservative component in line with Press’s strong “culturist” beliefs. But Press denied that his group’s opposition to the two mosques is racially motivated.
“This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with culture,” he said. “We fully acknowledge some cultures are different and cultural diversity is real. This is not an Islamic country. We have the majority culture based on democracy and the separation of church and state. We have our own holidays, history and heroes – and we must define and protect it.”
Be honest: arguments about halal slaughter aren’t really about food, are they?
Henry Dimbleby, who runs the Leon restaurant chain, has a good piece at the Telegraph countering the hysteria about halal meat.
The majority of the meat we are talking about here is intensively farmed chicken. Both halal and standard birds are raised in exactly the same way and most of the harm inflicted on them will be done so over the course of their miserable short lives. The extent to which halal slaughter adds to this grief is debatable. As with traditional slaughter, it can be done well and it can be done badly.
The standard chickens are either gassed in pens or hung upside down by their feet and dipped in a bath of electrocuted water – a plastic bar being placed on their chest to keep them calm. Halal chickens have their throats cut when they are alive – albeit in many cases they are stunned in a water bath first.
So are the complaints from the National Secular Society to do with animal welfare or religion? The answer is probably in its name.
Second attack on Muslim graves at Yorkshire cemetery
A suspected racist attack on Muslim graves at a Yorkshire cemetery has angered and traumatised relatives.
Vandals attacked at least 20 graves, uprooting or demolishing headstones and timber grave marker boards, at the multi-faith Harehills Cemetery in Leeds. Fencing around graves was ripped up and motorcycle tyre marks were left behind along with beer cans and bottles.
The attack, sometime between Friday and Saturday, is the second attack on Muslim graves in the cemetery this year.
Police were called on Saturday afternoon by tearful relatives who discovered the damage. One woman, Sophie Rashid, had only seen her mother buried two days earlier.
Council park wardens were called in to carry out security patrols over the weekend but families are now calling for CCTV cameras to be installed.
Ms Rashid, who discovered a wooden marker post had been torn up at her mother’s grave, said: “The damage is worse to some other graves. Someone appeared to have ridden a motorbike across graves and there were alcohol bottles and cans strewn about. It is really awful and very upsetting.”
Her uncle, Mohammed Ali said: “It is only Muslim graves which have been damaged, so we can only assume there is a racist element to it.”
Ikhlaq Mir, who arranges Muslim funerals at the cemetery, said that the site affected was a new Muslim section containing about 100 graves.