“Reading the script had not prepared me for the sea of white, middle-class people falling about in laughter at silly jokes about minority communities.”
In a letter to the Guardian Rabina Khan explains why she has withdrawn from a National Theatre discussion on Immigration in Literature, which is part of series of platforms on the play England People Very Nice.
Britain overturned its policy on a key Middle East issue yesterday by agreeing to talk to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement which fights Israel and is banned as a terrorist organisation by the US.
Bill Rammell, the Foreign Office minister, told MPs the government would authorise “carefully selected” contacts with the political wing of Hezbollah, which is represented in the Lebanese parliament. Other EU countries, including France, already deal with the group.
The move, urged privately by British diplomats for some time, may be partially intended to encourage the US to follow suit as Barack Obama’s administration pursues a fresh approach of engagement with parties shunned by George Bush.
“We have reconsidered our position on no contact with Hezbollah,” the Foreign Office said, “in light of more positive recent political developments in Lebanon, including the formation of the national unity government in which Hezbollah are participating. We are exploring certain contacts at an official level with Hezbollah’s political wing, including MPs.”
Presumably no ban on Ibrahim Moussawi, then – Pauline Neville-Jones won’t be happy.
Update: Then again, the Jewish Chronicle claims that Jacqui Smith hasn’t yet made up her mind. Though David Toube ofHarry’s Place thinks it’s a done deal.
Southeast Los Angeles County, which has struggled for years with public corruption investigations and bruising politics, is emerging from Tuesday’s municipal elections with a pair of black eyes. In the mostly Latino cities of Bell and Cudahy, candidates have been smeared as terrorists, had their cars vandalized and had bricks thrown through windows, and a former mayor was accused of raping a young girl in Tijuana.
Over the weekend, Bell City Council candidate Ali Saleh was alerted about fliers someone found at a local grocery store. Someone superimposed Saleh’s face on a picture of a man holding a sign that read, “Islam will dominate the world.” The flier also showed pictures of radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada Sadr, the burning towers of the World Trade Center and terrorists wearing black hoods and standing over a kneeling hostage, presumably about to be executed. At the bottom of the flier was a message to voters: “Vote NO Muslims for the City Bell Council 2009.”
The 33-year-old Saleh, who grew up in Bell, said he never expected his candidacy to lead to an attack on the city’s Lebanese American and Muslim community, which numbers about 2,000. Saleh was one of two Lebanese Americans running for council, along with Hussein Chahine. They lost. “Politics can get dirty. But usually they just say something about you,” Saleh said. “But when you come and tell people not to vote for any Muslims, you’re talking about an entire group. I was born in this country. I want to be part of this American democratic system. This is very upsetting.”
Over at Indigo Jo Blogs Yusuf Smith calls for Muslims to protest against the anti-Sharia demonstration in Trafalgar Square this Saturday – a stunt organised by the Worker Communist Party of Iran. Personally, I think there’s just as good a case for communists to protest against it, given that the sectarian idiocies committed by the nutters of the WPI are a total embarrassment to any real Marxist. The question is – is it really worth organising against an event which in all probability will make the tiny March for Free Expression of 2006, in which the WPI shared a platform with hard-right racists, look like a mass mobilisation?
A government-funded group has called on police and council bosses to ban a public meeting which is being held in Queens Park on Tuesday night.
The Hizb ut-Tahrir political party has scheduled a public meeting at 7.30pm at Queens Park Community Centre, in Westbourne Road, about a perceived bias by Western governments against Muslims. The meeting is entitled “The Campaign To Destroy Islam”. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website says the group wants to unite all Muslim nations in a unitary Islamic state, or “caliphate”, headed by an elected caliph. This would be established using political methods.
But the Quilliam Foundation, a Government-funded think tank, has described the group as “extremists”. James Brandon, spokesman for the Quilliam Foundation, said: “Hizb ut-Tahrir is one of the more extreme British Islamic groups. The Government has considered banning it in the past. It has got a confrontational, aggressive agenda. The agenda is to radicalise Muslims to take over the world.”
Mr Brandon said his group had contacted Bedfordshire Police, Bedford Borough Council and Queens Park Community Centre to try to have the meeting cancelled.
Yes, that’s the same Quilliam Foundation who defended Geert Wilders’ right to speak at a meeting in the UK, on the grounds that banning him offended the principle of free speech. Maajid Nawaz stated piously:
“Banning Geert Wilders from the UK is not the solution. Just as the ideas of non-violent Islamist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir should be tackled through debate and argument, so should those of Wilders and others. Freedom of speech should be protected – so long as people do not use this freedom to call for violence against others.”
So, at least we know what a load of nonsense that was. The reality is that the Quilliam Foundation opposes freedom of expression for Islamist sectarians but defends it for far-right racists.
The leader of the British First Party set up a stall with the Union flag and launched a tirade of offensive racist abuse, a court heard. Kevin Quinn, 44, was charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence, after police were called to the shopping precinct in St Andrews Road, South Oxhey, on December 1, 2007.
Witnesses told St Albans Crown Court how they were offended by the racist and foul language used by Quinn with the aid of a megaphone. The first of the prosecution witnesses, Valerie Gay, was on the way to work in Woolworths when she saw the demonstration with a man on a megaphone and people handing out leaflets.
Asked by Isabel Delamere, for the prosecution, what she noticed first, Mrs Gay said: “It was the bad language being used to be honest. He was going on about a young lass that went to Sudan and he was using F and B words saying it was unfair she should be executed for naming a Teddy Bear Mohamed.” She added: “He was saying it was unfair she went out there to teach those retards and for that she was being executed.”
Mrs Gay said Quinn “definitely” used the word retard as it hit hard because she has a family member that is disabled. “He said we should execute the f****** Bs in this country and send them back home and before much longer it won’t be our country. I was shocked. I couldn’t understand why people have to be so racist. I believe in letting people lead their own lives,” she said.
The owner of an electrical store in the precinct, Ken Shah, who fled Uganda 30 years ago, heard a man shouting that Tony Blair should be called Tony Mohamed, the court heard. Mr Shah said: “They were shouting about Tony Blair should be Tony Mohamed because of all the immigrants coming in, and what is wrong with this country and about immigration and schools full of immigrant children.”
Quinn of Ousland Road, Queens Park, Bedford, denies intending to cause harassment, alarm or distress and using insulting words or behaviour, motivated by hostility towards members of a religious group.
The trial continues.
Watford Observer, 3 March 2009
You’ll note, by the way, that contrary to the Watford Observer headline Quinn has in fact been charged with religiously aggravated harassment and not with incitement to racial hatred – a much more serious offence which carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison – as he undoubtedly would have been if his abuse had been directed against the Jewish rather than the Muslim community. The reason is that Muslims are legally defined as a multi-ethnic faith group and so, unlike Jews or Sikhs, are not covered by the racial hatred law.
Nor is Quinn being charged with incitement to religious hatred. The reason is that the religious hatred bill was sabotaged by the “Lester amendment” which rendered the Racial and Religious Hatred Act almost completely useless when it comes to prosecuting far-right racists like Quinn who direct their hatred against the Muslim community.
The Roman Catholic Church has severely criticised a proposed new code of conduct for teachers which it says will force Christian schools to actively promote Islam and gay rights. The Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has warned the General Teaching Council, by the professional regulatory body, that many teachers will quit the profession because they will not be able to accept the revised code of conduct in good conscience.
The legally-binding code would discriminate against Christian teachers in recruitment and in the classroom, they say. Principle 4 of the code demands that teachers “proactively challenge discrimination” and “promote equality and value diversity in all their professional relationships and interactions” before they can be registered.
The Christian Institute, a charity that supports worshippers who feel discriminated against in the workplace, claims the GTC code could be used by educational establishments to insist that staff promote homosexual rights or other religions such as Islam, going against the beliefs of many Christians.
It fears teachers could be turned down for jobs unless they agreed to use materials designed by homosexual rights groups in the classroom, and would face disciplinary action if they tell pupils in RE lessons that Jesus Christ is the only means to salvation.
The fiercely anti-Islam Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been traveling through the U.S. this week on a highly-publicised trip to meet with politicians, promote his controversial film “Fitna”, and raise money for his legal defence back home.
Although Wilders’s stated goal has been to campaign for free speech, his trip has been sponsored and promoted by an unlikely coalition of groups united primarily by their hostility towards Islam. His backers include neoconservative and right-wing Jewish groups on the one hand and figures with ties to the European far right on the other.
Since he was charged with incitement to hate and discrimination in the Netherlands in January and denied entry to Britain earlier this month on public safety grounds, Wilders has become something of a cause celebre for the U.S. right.
This week, he gave a private viewing of his 17-minute anti-Islam film in the U.S. Senate, where he was hosted by Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican. He also appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s and Glenn Beck’s popular right-wing TV shows, met privately with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and hobnobbed with former U.N. ambassador John Bolton at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
On Friday, he capped his busy week with an appearance at the National Press Club. At the event, he reiterated his calls for a halt to immigration from Muslim countries and pronounced, to raucous applause from the audience, that “our Western culture based on Christianity, Judaism, and humanism is in every aspect better than Islamic culture”.
His chief sponsors during the trip have primarily been neoconservative organisations such as Frank Gaffney’s Centre for Security Policy, David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre, and Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which is also helping to raise money for Wilders’s legal defence.
An event he held at a Boston-area synagogue was sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential group whose board members include casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, and neoconservative writer David Frum, who attended Wilders’s Friday event in Washington.
His trip has also been heavily promoted by conservative blogger Pamela Geller, who sponsored a reception for him in Washington on Friday. Geller is perhaps best known for alleging during the 2008 presidential campaign that now-President Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of the late Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X; she also continues to argue that Obama is a secret Muslim.
A less well-known but key backer of Wilders’s trip has been the newly-formed International Free Press Society (IFPS), which is headed by Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard and upon whose advisory board Wilders sits. The IFPS has been instrumental in promoting Wilders’ case as a free-speech issue, joining him in calling for an “International First Amendment”, and it was a co-sponsor of Friday’s event at the National Press Club.
While the IFPS has strong ties to neoconservatives – its staff includes members of Pipes’s and Gaffney’s organisations – it also has ties to the European far right, and specifically the Belgian rightist party Vlaams Belang (VB), or Flemish Interest.
The IFPS’s vice president Paul Belien is married to Vlaams Belang MP Alexandra Colen, and has been a fierce defender of the party against its critics. And in 2007, Hedegaard and Belien – along with IFPS board members Bat Ye’or, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, and Sam Solomon – appeared with VB leader Filip Dewinter at the CounterJihad conference in Brussels. Although “the VB did not organise the conference, it provided an important part of the logistics and the security of those attending,” according to Belien.
Inter Press Service, 28 February 2009
See also “Synagogue hails Dutch lawmaker as a hero”, Jewish Telegraph Agency, 27 February 2009
A demonstration against the play England People Very Nice was held outside the National Theatre on Friday. At one point a large banner was displayed from a balcony.
The controversial play by Richard Bean looks at immigration in London’s East End. It is directed by the National’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner who says that the play “lampoons all forms of stereotyping: it is a boisterous satire of stereotypes of French, Irish, Jews, Bangladeshis, white East End cockneys, Hampstead liberals and many others. Every stereotype is placed in the context of its opposite and it clearly sets out to demonstrate that all forms of racism are equally ridiculous.”
The outdoor demonstration preceded a Platform event during which the play’s writer Richard Bean was due to discuss his work. The protest, under the banner “Love Theatre Hate Racism”, was organised by Bethnal Green playwright Hussain Ismail. Cllr Abjol Miah, leader of the Respect group on Tower Hamlets Council, was present with several objectors from the East End.
“I am passionate about theatre and I don’t think theatre should be used to peddle racist filth under the guise of comedy and serious theatre.” Hussain Ismail told the small crowd of passers-by on the riverside who stopped to listen to speeches. “We don’t need to be told about multi-culturalism by an elitist institution that does not represent multi-cultural London. What we need to do is to challenge the racist rubbish.”
See also Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2009
The battle for the hearts and minds of young Muslims in London is being lost because the vast majority of imams that practise here cannot speak English, leaving a vacuum that jihadist groups ruthlessly exploit.
So says Ed Husain, 34, co-director of the counter-extremist think-tank Quilliam and himself a “reformed jihadi” who knows what it’s like to be young, impressionable and subject to unchallenged Islamist rhetoric.
In London, he singles out the huge East London and Regent’s Park mosques as being of particular concern. “Hizb-ut Tahrir, an organisation which refuses to condemn suicide bombers, still holds meetings inside Regent’s Park Mosque every Saturday, despite widespread public protest but the imam there, a foreigner, does nothing to stop it,” says Husain.
“And at the East London Mosque, which has thousands of congregants, the main imam is a guy who trained in Wahabist Saudi Arabia. One of their trustees, Azad Ali, employed as a civil servant, was recently suspended from his job at the Treasury because he suggested killing British troops fighting in Iraq is justified.
“And in their bookshop there are volumes such as Milestones which is known to be Bin Laden’s bible. It has chapters entitled ‘the virtues of killing a non-believer’ and argues that ‘attacking non-believers in their territories is a collective and individual duty’.”
Husain, living in Essex with his London-born Muslim wife, Faye, 30, and their 18-month daughter, Camilla, knows the East London Mosque all too well, he says. As a former radical activist for Hizb in charge of recruitment at Newham College campus in the 1990s, it was his stamping ground, but since he wrote his 2007 memoir The Islamist – about how he became a fundamentalist at 16 only to reject it five years later – it’s too dangerous for him to return.
“I’ve received personal death threats from those quarters. I’ve had emails warning me that if I go back, I’ll be whipped and hanged.”
“When the death threats impact your family, it’s extremely hard to take,” he says. “Recently my wife was watching The Islam Channel on digital satellite television when a piece came on that was so full of hostility and hatred towards me that she fainted – clean passed out – from the shock.”