FBI recruiting Muslim spies, group says

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Michigan Muslim organization said Thursday it has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate complaints alleging the FBI is asking followers of the faith to spy on Islamic leaders and congregations.

The Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan sent a letter last week to Holder after mosques and other groups reported members of the community have been approached to monitor people coming to mosques and donations they make.

Sandra Berchtold, a spokeswoman in the FBI’s Detroit office, had no immediate comment.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said such complaints aren’t new, but concerns grew after a recent revelation the FBI planted a spy in a Southern California mosque.

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Racist escapes terror charge after threat to behead and bomb Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Neil MacGregorThe Crown Office has been accused of double standards by Scotland’s biggest Islamic group for not bringing terrorism charges against a man who threatened to blow up a mosque and behead Muslims.

The Scottish Islamic Foundation (SIF) has written to Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini querying the decision to prosecute Neil MacGregor for a breach of the peace, not terrorism offences.

MacGregor, 35, has admitted threatening to blow up Scotland’s biggest mosque and to behead one Muslim a week until every mosque was shut down. He will be sentenced at Glasgow Sheriff Court on Friday.

“There has been criticism for the lack of exposure this case has got, but this stems from how the case was originally handled,” SIF chief executive Osama Saeed said. “Had he been a Muslim, we suspect that counter-terror police would have been involved from the outset, and it would have been processed in a completely different manner.”

Mr Saeed drew a parallel with the case of Mohammed Atif Siddique, a student from Alva, Clackmannanshire, who was jailed for eight years for internet-related terrorist crimes.

“No-one seems to have looked into the internet habits that radicalised MacGregor to take copycat revenge for (British hostage] Ken Bigley’s assassination in Iraq,” he said. “We can be sure if he had been Muslim and had been inspired to replicate it, the result would have been quite different.”

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‘St George banned but it’s OK for Muslims to abuse our troops’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paul RayPatriotic Brits blasted a council yesterday for barring a St George’s Day parade – after letting Muslim fanatics abuse our soldiers.

Anyone wanting to stage an event in Luton, Beds, has to seek permission from the council’s Safety Advisory Group. But while fanatical Muslims were given the green light to gather and scream insults when the Royal Anglian Regiment returned from Iraq last month, an application for a St George’s Day celebration this month was turned down.

Approval has also been granted for events to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed and the death of his grandson.

Daily Star, 15 April 2009

Of course, the Daily Star omits to mention that the individual who applied to organise the St George’s Day parade was Paul Ray, author of the far-right Lionheart blog, who is currently on bail facing a charge of incitement to racial hatred. See here and here.

See also Tabloid Watch which comments:

“What is so disconcerting about all this is the way the Star is fuelling the delusional hate-filled rantings of people like Paul Ray with stories like this. The story is clearly supporting his agenda in the way it frames this story. It pushes a false claim about St George being banned despite a weekend long event dedicated to him and sets up a ‘them and us’ clash against Muslims. The Star sides with Ray, Ray sides with the BNP. So where does that leave the Star?”

Update:  The Star has now amended its headline to remove the reference to St George being “banned”.

Raids and reports fuel Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A high-profile counter-terrorism raid, in which 12 Pakistani students were arrested on Wednesday of last week, has raised key issues over civil liberties and the “war on terror”.

Despite days of searches of at least ten properties and the huge resources thrown into the case, at the start of this week the police had still not found any clear evidence of a terrorist plot.

No evidence had been found of bombs, bomb-making parts, chemicals to make explosives, a bomb factory, weapons or ammunition.

Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester police, has admitted that it is possible nobody could be charged with terror offences.

A number of other high-profile raids, including Forest Gate in 2006, have created huge embarrassment for the authorities after innocent people have been arrested.

Fahy said, “There will always be a situation where either we can’t achieve the evidential threshold or as a result of the investigation we find that the threat was not how it appeared to us at the time.”

There is deep concern and anger that the last week’s events will lead to an increase in Islamophobia. The government has attacked Pakistan for its supposed inability to tackle terrorism, and the media has blamed “lax” student visas for the problem.

Socialist Worker, 18 April 2009

Another defence of ‘Enlightenment values’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing at Comment is Free, Faisal Gazi (aka “Sid”, David Toube’s alter ego who posts at Pickled Politics) reviews From Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan Malik (a supporter of the former ultraleftists turned right-wing libertarians who once traded under the name of the Revolutionary Communist Party). Gazi writes:

“… the grievance culture of radical Islam is winning the battle against Enlightenment values, helped along, Malik believes, by multicultural policy and laws like the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006), which has made it an offence to incite hatred against a person on grounds of their religion. Its aim was to protect the faith and dignity of minority communities. But the paradox is that these laws are now exploited to undermine the civil liberties of those very same communities they were meant to protect.”

Well, we haven’t read Malik’s book, so we can’t comment on the accuracy of this summary of his argument. But if Gazi thinks that the Racial and Religious Hatred Act set a precedent for undermining civil liberties he obviously hasn’t bothered to study the subject. The legislation was in fact sabotaged by the “Lester amendment”, which produced a completely toothless law that can never be used to mount a successful prosecution of anyone.

As those who have had the misfortune to read his incoherent Harry’s-Place-inspired posts at Pickled Politics will have observed, Gazi combines an endorsement of “Enlightenment values” with a total inability to respect empirical evidence or rational argument.

Terror plot: ‘they have no evidence whatsoever’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

'Terrorist' arrested 2A spat between British and Pakistani officials has followed the arrest of 11 Pakistani nationals in northern England on Wednesday.

Pakistani intelligence officials and a senior Pakistani government official claimed that there was no evidence against the Pakistanis arrested in Britain.

The government official told The Daily Telegraph that the suspects were likely to be deported from Britain. “They have no evidence whatsoever. They will release them and then repatriate them under anti-terror laws,” said the government official.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a veteran journalist of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) traced the families of three of the men arrested.

Mr Yusufzai named the three families. He quoted the father of one of the men, who lives in Peshawar, the provincial capital, as saying: “My son has a beard and prays five times a day. Ours is a religious-minded family but this doesn’t mean that my son is part of a terrorist cell.”

In Dera Ismail Khan, also in the NWFP, the father of another student arrested told local reporters that his son was innocent. “I was paying for my son’s education in England for the last two years. He was to complete his studies in six months but his arrest could destroy his career,” he said.

The father of a third student arrested in the UK, speaking from Tank, a southern district of NWFP, said that his 26-year old son had left for UK in the first week of October 2008 to study for a masters’ degree in computer sciences at the Liverpool University. “None of my family members have any link with terrorists.”

Daily Telegraph, 13 April 2009

See also “Terror suspect’s father says Islamophobia to blame for son’s arrest” in the Guardian, 13 April 2009

Sadiq Khan: ‘appeaser of terrorism’ (according to Donal Blaney)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sadiq KhanSadiq Khan is the Labour MP for Tooting. Khan, whose parents were Pakistanis, has been on a fact-finding mission to Pakistan. I wonder if he got time in his busy schedule to see any relatives?

He’s worked out why it is that young muslims want to wage jihad in Britain: it’s all because of American foreign policy. His solution? Britain should distance itself from its closest ally, the United States.

There was I, thinking that this kind of anti-American sentiment was supposed to disappear after President Bush left the White House in January. The arrival of the Chosen One, Barack Hussein Obama, was to herald a new dawn. Evidently not, in the case of Sadiq Khan, who is reading straight from the George Galloway “Blame America First” playbook of terrorist appeasement and excuse mongering.

Clearly Khan hates the United States and all it stands for. In and of itself that shouldn’t matter: he is free to hold whatever warped views he likes, even if it gives succour to our enemies who want to turn Britain into a shariah law dominated caliphate. And he wonders why he was bugged by the police.

But Sadiq Khan isn’t free to say whatever he wants to for one simple reason – he is a government minister. He is the Minister for Social Cohesion and yet delights in denigrating the nation of 500,000 people living and working in this country. How, pray, does that help social cohesion?

In attacking US foreign policy, was Sadiq Khan speaking for the British government? If not, he must surely be fired.

Blaney’s Blarney, 12 April 2009

See also “Sadiq Khan: one man MCB?” at Harry’s Place and “Muslim MP criticizes killing Muslim terrorists” at USS Neverdock.

The figures for deaths caused by US drone attacks in Pakistan (only 10 of the 60 attacks in 2006-9 hit their targets, resulting in the killing of 14 Al-Qaida members and 687 innocent civilians) are given in The News, 10 April 2009

A new presumption of guilt

Posted on by Bob Pitt

'Terror' arrests in Manchester“We have heard from this government before that ‘we are dealing with a very big terrorist plot’ (Student visa link to raids as PM points finger at Pakistan, 10 April).

“There was the very big ‘ricin plot’ in 2002, with no ricin, plotted by a terrorist ringleader with no ring. (That was just before the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ intervention in Iraq, the WMD being linked by Tony Blair and Colin Powell to the ‘ricin plot’.) There was the plot to bomb Old Trafford in 2004, the evidence apparently being two ticket stubs for different parts of the ground, in the hands of fans of foreign origin.

“Then in February this year there were the high-profile arrests and detentions in the north-west under anti-terrorism laws of nine men on unspecified overseas intelligence linked to a supposed terrorist activities outside Britain. Some were arrested from a convoy taking medicines, computers, toys and such to Gaza – all were innocent. Just as then, on this current occasion no specific plot is identified (despite the wild and denied stories about the Birdcage nightclub and the Trafford Centre).”

“Anyone glancing at your article might suppose that a nasty group of terrorists had already been convicted on the basis of solid evidence. In fact, as I write this, no one has been charged, let alone convicted. It is therefore a matter of serious concern that the prime minister shows such contempt for fair legal process by talking of a ‘very big terrorist plot’.”

Letters in the Guardian, 11 April 2009