The right wing Progress Party (FrP) regains lost ground and now has the support of 29.4 per cent of the electorate, according to Norstat’s February poll. This is up by 6.3 points from January, and only 3.6 points behind the Labour Party.
The poll was made for the newspaper Vaart Land, shortly after FrP-leader Siv Jensen made her controversial speech in which she said that “Norway is undergoing a subtle islamification”, and after Justice Minister Knut Storberget announced his turnaround on the police hijab-issue.
“The young men whom you call ‘radicalised Britons’ and ‘extremists’ are just honest Muslims who take their scriptures seriously (‘We are fighting British jihadists in Afghanistan’, 25 February). They sincerely believe what all Muslims are taught to believe: that the Koran is the inerrant word of God. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, will Afghanistan be lost in the faith schools of Birmingham?”
A London bus driver today accepted £30,000 in damages from the Sun over a claim that he ordered passengers off his vehicle so that he could pray.
The story in March last year caused Arunas Raulynaitis considerable distress and embarrassment, his solicitor, Stephen Loughrey, told Mr Justice Eady at the high court in London.
Loughrey said the newspaper now accepted that the allegations were entirely false and that Raulynaitis did not order any passengers off, there was no rucksack and no one refused to reboard because they feared he was a fanatic.
“The article went on to allege that the passengers later refused to reboard the bus because they spotted a rucksack and feared he may be a fanatic and therefore, it is to be inferred, a terrorist,” Loughrey told the court.
“While it is the case that Raulynaitis did pray on the bus, he did so during his statutory rest break, as he is of course entitled to do. Not a single passenger was inconvenienced in any way. It transpires that an individual who noticed Raulynaitis at prayer chose to film this act on a mobile phone and sent the video to the Sun, which then reproduced stills from it alongside the article, as well as the footage itself on the Sun’s website.”
Loughrey said the article not only created an utterly false impression of Raulynaitis’s attitude toward his passengers, but also wrongly cast serious aspersions on his religious faith.
He added that News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that publishes the Sun, had already published an apology and agreed to pay substantial damages plus costs.
Progress Party leader Siv Jensen’s statement in a speech on Sunday, that Norway is undergoing a subtle islamification has sparked controversy. Conservative Party deputy leader Per-Kristian Foss likens it to the attacks on Jews in the 30s.
• There are certain points of resemblance to the 30s fear of other minorities, in this case the Jews, Foss says.
• It is of course not true that there is any islamification of the Norwegian society, he says.
In her speech to the right-wing Progress Party (FrP) national board on Sunday, Siv Jensen warned against what would happen if what she called “a subtle islamification” of Norway would continue. She pointed to what had happened to the Swedish city of Malmoe, where according to Jensen Sharia laws had been introduced in sections of the city, and where the police hardly dared to enter.
A retired judge wants two Ontario universities to bar Muslim students from being awarded scholarships he has established, though the spokesperson for one institution says her school won’t support a proposal that “flies in the face of everything we stand for.”
Paul Staniszewski said he objects to the “medieval violence” used by the Taliban – such as when Taliban militants recently kidnapped and beheaded Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak – and he wishes to “disqualify” Muslim students from receiving financial aid he has paid for.
“I’m reacting to what’s going on to people who aren’t even soldiers, who are having their heads beheaded and this stuff is shown on the TVs and everything else,” Staniszewski told CTV.ca in a phone interview from his Tecumseh, Ont., home, just outside of Windsor.
“I am doing the same thing these people are doing, except I’m not cutting off heads, I’m cutting off applications for help in their studies,” he added later in the interview.
“Government officials will spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to attend a lecture by an Islamic extremist whom Jacqui Smith is under pressure to ban from Britain.
“Yesterday, the Mail revealed how the Home Secretary was facing demands to deny a visa to Ibrahim Moussawi – a spokesman for the Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah – to come to speak at a British university. Now it has emerged that the lectures Moussawi plans to deliver are targeted at Whitehall officials who deal in foreign affairs and extremism. They will each spend up to £1,890 of taxpayers’ cash attending the Political Islam event at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) next month.
“Moussawi – who is among the key speakers at the week-long course – is scheduled to address two sessions on March 25 and is expected to be paid for the talks. Another speaker at the event is the UK-based extremist Dr Kamal Helbawy, a former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood – a group said to have inspired Al Qaeda [sic].
“Last night, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a researcher for the Centre for Social Cohesion, a respected think-tank, said: ‘In their willingness to pay extremists like Dr Helbawy and Dr el-Moussawi, SOAS are helping these men present themselves as mainstream figures. ‘It is particularly worrying that the target audience includes Government officials and the police, who may find themselves paying for advice on tackling terrorism from its very exponents’.”
And Daily Mail home affairs editor James Slack writes: “So here comes the acid test: is Jacqui Smith, as she proclaims, an enemy of extremism in all its forms, or a cowardly hypocrite? In October, the Home Secretary announced ‘tough new measures’ to deny entry to Britain to anybody ‘engaged in fostering, encouraging or spreading extremism and hatred.’ In recent weeks she has put them to use by banning a Dutch MP with hugely controversial views on Islam, and a notorious anti-gay US preacher. But will she be prepared to apply the same new standards to Islamic extremists who preach a hatred of Jews?”
Update: Entirely predictably, if a trifle belatedly, the “left-wing” blog Harry’s Place – which is increasingly indistinguishable from the Daily Mail – joins in the witch-hunt.
German state bans on religious symbols and clothing for teachers and other civil servants discriminate against Muslim women who wear the headscarf, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 67-page report, “Discrimination in the Name of Neutrality: Headscarf Bans for Teachers and Civil Servants in Germany,” is based on extensive research over an eight-month period. It analyzes the human rights implications of the bans and their effect on the lives of Muslim women teachers, including those who have been employed for many years. It says that the bans have caused some women to give up their careers or to leave Germany, where they have lived all their lives.
“These laws in Germany clearly target the headscarf, forcing women who wear it to choose between their jobs and their religious beliefs,” said Haleh Chahrokh, researcher in the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “They discriminate on the grounds of both gender and religion and violate these women’s human rights.”
The British government’s brand new counter-terrorism strategy is already in disarray – and ministers have only themselves to blame. The souped-up plan to fight al-Qaida, confound dirty bombers, halt suicide attacks and confront “extremism” in the country’s Muslim community was unveiled by the prime minister with much fanfare on Tuesday. But even before the 175-page “Contest 2” document had been launched, the credibility of its promise to engage with the Muslim mainstream had been thrown into question by the decision of Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, to cut all links with the Muslim Council of Britain.
Blears had been gunning for the MCB, the country’s main Muslim umbrella body, which has shown increasing independence in recent years, particularly in relation to British foreign policy. The pretext was a statement about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza signed by the MCB’s number two, Daud Abdullah, which Blears interpreted as a call for attacks on British ships if they were sent to intercept arms supplies to Hamas. Ten days ago, in a tone more associated with Raj-era colonial governors than democratic politicians addressing independent community bodies, Blears delivered an ultimatum to the MCB: either it sacked its elected deputy general secretary or all contacts would be severed.
Never mind that Gordon Brown’s idea about policing Palestinian waters has been kicked into the long grass of international talks; or that Abdullah, a Caribbean-born veteran of Grenada’s leftwing New Jewel Movement (later overthrown by Ronald Reagan) made clear he was not calling for such attacks – let alone attacks on Jewish communities, as Blears claims in a letter in today’s Guardian. All links have now been suspended. And if there were any doubt that the attempt to isolate Britain’s most significant Muslim body was linked to the new anti-terror policy, the timing of the ultimatum for the eve of the launch made clear that for Blears they were all of a piece.
Jacqui Smith was tonight warned against exercising “double standards” as an Islamic extremist prepared to travel to the UK. Ibrahim Moussawi, a known hardliner with links to Hezbollah, has been invited to speak at a London university.
Earlier this month, she banned the far-Right Dutch MP Geert Wilders from coming to Britain to show his film about Islam as it would threaten “community harmony”. But the Conservatives warned that to ban those who threaten community harmony, while letting in those who glorify terrorism or are part of terrorist groups, would send out the “wrong message”. There must be “no double standards on extremists”, warned Tory security spokesman Baroness Neville-Jones.
Moussawi, who has already made at least two trips to the UK, has been invited to speak on political Islam at the School of Oriental and African Studies next month.
Yesterday, in a letter to Miss Smith, Baroness Neville-Jones said: “You will be aware that Mr Moussawi has links to Hezbollah, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in many countries. Mr Moussawi has also, over the years, made a number of remarks that are extremist, anti-Semitic and inflammatory.
“In October last year you introduced what you described as ‘tough new measures’ to deny entry to extremists. These measures included ‘creating a presumption in favour of exclusion in respect of all those who have engaged in fostering, encouraging or spreading extremism and hatred’. Mr Moussawi has so engaged. In line with your ‘tough new measures’, I trust that if Mr Moussawi applies for entry, you will use your powers to exclude him.”
It appears to have escaped Neville-Jones’ attention that Wilders intended to enter the UK with the explicit aim of inciting hatred against the Muslim community.
Is there any suggestion that Ibrahim Moussawi will be inciting hatred against the Jewish community on his proposed visit to the UK? No. Is Neville-Jones able to demonstrate that he has incited hatred on previous visits to the UK? Again, no. So the charge of double standards is entirely baseless.
The last time the Tories witch-hunted Ibrahim Moussawi was when he visited London to address a World Against War rally in February 2008. Neville-Jones told the Home Office: “it is vital that the Government always makes the security of the UK its top priority. That means stopping those who are likely to foment extremism or promote violence from coming here to speak.”
Here is the speech Ibrahim Moussawi gave at that rally. Perhaps Neville-Jones can direct us to the sections of the speech that promote violence and extremism?
Scotland Yard’s claims to have put its racist past behind it suffered a blow yesterday when it was alleged that senior officers allowed a “culture of apartheid” at a police station where white officers threatened black colleagues and refused to ride in the same van.
The allegations will be heard at an employment tribunal tomorrow and will embarrass the force, whose head, Sir Paul Stephenson, yesterday said the Metropolitan police was no longer institutionally racist. He was speaking at a conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the Macpherson report into the bungled Stephen Lawrence murder investigation.
The allegations of discrimination and victimisation to be heard at a tribunal this week – which the Met will deny – centre on Belgravia police station in central London. A Muslim police community support officer (PCSO), Asad Saeed, claims white officers framed him by alleging he had abused and threatened to assault a drunk vagrant in a McDonald’s burger restaurant in central London.
The officer was ordered to be dismissed, but later reinstated on appeal. Both of the internal police discipline hearings heard allegations of racism that Scotland Yard thought belonged to the canteen culture of two decades ago.
Alfred John, chair of the Metropolitan branch of the Black Police Association, said: “It displays all the hallmarks of a very familiar and disturbing picture.”
Saeed’s MP, George Galloway, said: “It is quite clear there was a culture of overt racism in the station which was tolerated, if not encouraged, by senior management. Asad was wrongly dismissed from the police service.”
A London bus driver today accepted £30,000 in damages from the Sun over a claim that he ordered passengers off his vehicle so that he could pray.
“Government officials will spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to attend a lecture by an Islamic extremist whom Jacqui Smith is under pressure to ban from Britain.
German state bans on religious symbols and clothing for teachers and other civil servants discriminate against Muslim women who wear the headscarf, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.