At Comment is Free Sunny Hundal takes pleasure in the outbreak of in-fighting among the “anti-jihadist neocons”, exemplified by Little Green Footballs’ falling-out with Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller. He notes “the role mainstream media and thinktanks play in supporting this lunatic fringe and their paranoid fantasies”.
See also “Civil war raging in right-wing blogosphere”, Washington Independent, 23 April 2009
Martin Robbins analyses how opinion polls are manipulated to misrepresent the views of British Muslims, and directs us to an interesting, and less biased, poll on the British Born Muslims blog.
Mark Mazower reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
“His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than wrong. Europe is in decline from an ‘adversary culture’, and Muslim immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat….
“Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants, Muslims and ‘non-natives’ as it serves his argument. Europeans, he alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam.
“But the best case of ‘white flight’ he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as indigenous Europeans when just two generations ago they were regarded much as he regards Muslims….
“Caldwell’s fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants have already established what he calls ‘beachheads’ – the idea that the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force – and engineered a reverse ‘colonisation’ of historic cities abandoned by their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less than a ‘project to seize territory’, is well on the way to bringing Europe within the House of Islam.”
About 50 Muslim men took their prayer rugs to the Sliema front yesterday after the planning authority sealed off their place of worship. The Muslims said the Malta Environment and Planning Authority had locked them out of their flat in Sliema where they used to pray, so they decided to take their cause outside.
“We are not here to protest or threaten violence but to express our fundamental human right to gather in prayer,” Bader Zina, one of the leaders, said. According to Mepa, a number of complaints had been received by neighbours and the flat did not have a licence to be used as a place of worship.
The Muslims, many of whom are Maltese, were dressed in traditional clothing. They had a permit and police protection and said this might become a regular appointment until their flat was reopened.
This behaviour did not go down well with a group of Maltese onlookers who warned that if this happened again “there will be trouble”.
“Malta is a Catholic country. They have no right to come here and pray in front of us. I don’t care what they do in the privacy of their own home but not here,” one Maltese woman said.
“We’ve had enough. If you were to do the same in their country they would stone you. I can’t understand how they could have been given a permit for this, including police presence and all!” her husband added, visibly disturbed by what he saw.
“They should go to a mosque. That is where they belong. Or in some hole somewhere. But not here where I get my children to eat and have a good time. I would have had no problem if they were Catholics praying… in Malta we are all Catholics so it’s not a problem, but not them. Even the tourists were disgusted,” he claimed, as his teenage son nodded in agreement.
Mr Zina said they did not want to anger anyone: “All we want to do is praise God”. He said that besides the Sliema flat, another in Buġibba had also been locked up by Mepa simply because it was used by Muslims to gather in prayer. The residents of the flats had to seek alternative accommodation. “Since when do you need a licence to pray? I don’t see anyone closing down other prayer groups.”
Via Islam in Europe
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a group of domestic violence and religious organisations yesterday asked the Michigan supreme court to change a proposed rule that would allow judges to bar Muslim women wearing veils from testifying in court. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for 12 May.
“Judges should not deny anyone access to justice because of his or her religion,” said Michael Steinberg, legal director for the ACLU of Michigan. Steinberg said the ACLU and other groups asked the supreme court to add a sentence to the rule, saying “that no person shall be precluded from testifying on the basis of clothing worn because of a sincerely held belief”.
Steinberg said his request yesterday was signed by religious organisations including the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the American Jewish Congress and Michigan Conference of the United Church of Christ. A group of domestic violence organisations also signed the request in order to allow women who have been sexually assaulted, for instance, to have their day in court without abandoning their beliefs.
See also Michigan Messenger, 30 April 2009
A Tory councillor felt he had e-mailed a “jolly good joke” to all his council colleagues – but he now faces disciplinary action over claims it was racist and sexist.
Chris Walker, who represents Eastwood Park ward, has caused quite a storm among his peers over the pictures of naked women with anti-Islamic text.
The e-mail said Islamic men would have to commit suicide if they saw a woman, other than their wife, naked, and that all British women should walk the streets naked on Sunday afternoons to weed out terrorists.
It was accompanied by a number of pictures of naked women, and ended with the words Land of Hope and Glory and a picture of the Union Flag.
Funeral director Mr Walker, who is known in the council for his forthright comments, said: “I sent it in good faith, because it just seemed a jolly good joke to me.”
No young person in Scotland should be disadvantaged or bullied on the grounds of their faith or race, said Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop as proposals for Islamophobia school workshops are announced.
The Scottish Government is providing £81,700 for the delivery of 152 Islamophobia workshops in secondary schools across Scotland over the next two years.
The workshops will be delivered by Show Racism the Red Card, a charity with a proven track record of working in schools by using football as a starting point to promote racial and religious equality messages.
The programme will look at the causes and consequences of Islamophobia; encourage young people to develop good relationships with people from different backgrounds and cultures to their own; prepare pupils for life in a multifaith, multicultural world; and provide teachers with a valuable teaching resource for ongoing use in the classroom.
Police use of anti-terror stop and search powers trebled last year, prompting fears that the policy is alienating London’s Muslim communities.
Officers in England and Wales used Terrorism Act powers to search 124,687 people in 2007/8, up from 41,924 in 2006/7, figures released yesterday showed. But only around 1 per cent of those searches ended in an arrest. There were 1,271 arrests in total but only 73 of those were for terror offences.
Nearly 90 per cent of the searches were carried out by the Metropolitan Police, the country’s largest force, which recorded a 266 per cent increase in anti-terror stop and search. The Government said the rise in anti-terror stop and search last year was in part linked to the failed bombings in London’s Haymarket district.
Corinna Ferguson, a lawyer for human rights group Liberty, said: “A threefold increase in anti-terror stop and search is the clearest signal that these powers are being misused. Only 6 in 10,000 people stopped were arrested for terrorism, let alone charged or convicted. And the disproportionate impact on ethic minorities is even greater than in previous years.”
The Muslim Youth Helpline is taking action over the growing distress experienced by young British Muslims, as recent data reveals the proportion of phone calls received from people in anxiety and distress has increased by 57% compared with the same time last year.
Muslim Youth Helpline is the UK’s first and only dedicated helpline for young Muslims. It is operated by volunteers aged 18-28, and has received over 23,000 calls since launching from the bedroom of its founder, then aged 18, in 2001.
The helpline is receiving more calls than can be handled from young British Muslims in distress and to help cope with this demand, Muslim Youth Helpline is working with mainstream support services to help them connect with this hard to reach group and today re-launches its website www.muslimyouth.net as a safe space for young people to help and support each other online 24 hrs a day.
Rukaiya Jeraj, Muslim Youth Helpline spokesperson, said, “We are seeing a worrying increase in the proportion of our callers in serious distress, for example experiencing anxiety or depression, with many talking about self-harm or experiencing suicidal feelings.
“For most young people, finding their place in the world is hard. Young British Muslims not only deal with everyday teenage angst over issues like relationships, but many also contend with a sense of social exclusion, the fear and experience of discrimination, and seeing themselves wrongly portrayed in the public arena as a dangerous presence in society. We believe this is contributing to the problems our callers are experiencing.”
Yes, it’s Taj Hargey – just the sort of “Muslim cleric” who finds favour with the Daily Mail, which devotes a major puff-piece to him. Regarding representative Muslim organisations, Hargey assures his interviewer: “These people are religious fascists. The view that Islam is incompatible with British society is something that the Muslim Council of Britain and their hangers-on have promulgated.”
No doubt Hazel Blears will approve of this too. Surely it can only be a matter of time before Hargey finds himself the recipient of the sort of government largesse presently enjoyed by the Quilliam Foundation.
Speaking of whom, the latest witch-hunting “media alert” from Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz is directed against the Islam Channel, which the Quilliam Foundation accuses of promoting extremism. Among the “extremists” Quilliam objects to this popular TV station giving a platform to is Inayat Bunglawala! Perhaps the next Quilliam press release will be headed “Comment is Free and the promotion of extremism”.
It really is a disgrace that this unpleasant sect, headed by a couple of embittered and and malicious ex-HTers, is supplied with large sums of taxpayers’ money – £1 million according to one estimate – to pursue its vindictive, divisive campaign against mainstream Muslim organisations and individuals.
Update: See also “Quilliam stooges target the Islam Channel” at Engage, 30 April 2009