Muslim women redefine feminism

“They speak in a heavily accented version of English, suffocating beneath tent-like cloaks. Voiceless and enslaved, these Muslim women wrap themselves up in head scarves in public. While the rest of American women take the slightest sunray as a signal for baring flesh and flaunting assets, these fully covered women stand out as more than unfashionable but as victims of oppression.

“Such are the tragic misconceptions of American Muslim women-barbaric, veiled housewives victimized by an Islamic lifestyle. To about 10 million Muslim women, that lifestyle includes the female head covering, an Islamic dress code called Hijab and a symbol of modesty and freedom.”

Hanan Salem in The Connection, 1 May 2008

Stop pandering to Muslims says ‘silent majority’

BMSD logoThe government’s attempts to placate Muslims will cause long-term damage to communities, a charity said yesterday.

The warning came from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, chair and co-founder of the British Muslims for Secular Democracy, a new organisation claiming to represent the “silent majority who feel no conflict between their faith and democracy”.

Speaking before the launch, attended by Baroness Kishwer Faulkner and former Islamist Ed Husain, the journalist said the government was pandering to Muslims by granting too many concessions, fuelling their separation from the rest of society.

“The government has found a way of placating Muslims in a way that will only damage us in the long term, Muslims wanting separate schools or different measures. There must be one law for all. This differential accommodation leads to us being pushed to the edges. How is it that the Sikhs and Hindus can live in democracy but not Muslims?”

She added: “The perception is that Muslims receive a disproportionate amount of attention and funding and that perception is justified. This ridiculous, distorted, exaggerated single identity has made us no friends.”

Guardian, 2 May 2008


But what else can you expect from an organisation whose leading figures include Taj Hargey and Shaaz Mahboob? And since when did these characters represent the majority of British Muslims, silent or otherwise?

Update:  See Yusuf Smith’s comments on Indigo Jo Blogs, 4 May 2008

Jews and Christians should be closer to Muslims – Qaradawi

Qaradawi Weiss and Cohen“Muslims have no problems at all with the Jews themselves. Our main conflict is with the Zionist movement. I hope that the Neturei Karta can introduce its stance to the Arab media so that people can know that there is a big segment of Jews opposing the Zionist entity.”

The noted “anti-semite” Yusuf al-Qaradawi comments on his meeting with Ahron Cohen and Yisroel Dovid Weiss.

It is a relief to hear that Cohen and Weiss emerged from their meeting with Qaradawi unscathed. After all, we have it on the reliable authority of Peter Tatchell that Qaradawi’s message is “destroy the Jews – all of them“.

Gulf Times, 1 May 2008

See also Islam Online, 1 May 2008

Alan Craig loses fight over election broadcast

A Christian party has lost a High Court bid to have its party election broadcast (PEB) repeated, after claims it was censored by the BBC and ITV. Christian Choice said the BBC forced changes to its description of a Muslim group in a PEB aired in London. Alan Craig, the party’s candidate for London mayor, had argued the action breached his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights – which guarantees the right to freedom of expression.

BBC News, 30 April 2008

Mad Melanie Phillips is not happy: “There is clearly no limit to British pusillanimity and sheer unadulterated funk when it comes to calling Islamic radicalism by even the most polite and restrained of proper names.” Melanie Phillips’s blog, 29 April 2008

Mad Mel warns against ‘the progressive Islamisation of London’s East End’

Jamme Masjid mosque with minaret“From the East London Advertiser comes further news of the progressive Islamisation of London’s East End, and the lengths to which Ken Livingstone is going to court the Muslim vote for tomorrow’s mayoral election.”

Melanie Phillips responds to the report that – shock, horror – Ken Livingstone has pledged to help raise funds for a major revamp of the Jamme Masjid mosque in Brick Lane. And, what’s worse, the proposed development would feature a minaret.

“The height of this proposed minaret is no incidental matter”, Phillips informs us. “The fact that it would tower over Brick Lane is designed to make a powerful symbolic statement of the supremacy of Islam over that area and the subjugation of all non-Islamic creeds. Like the proposed vast Olympic village mosque, also in east London, it is thus in itself an act of jihad against British society. That is what Ken is endorsing.”

Melanie Phillips’s blog, 30 April 2008

Predictably, the fascists of the British National Party find common ground with Phillips on this issue.

See BNP news article, 27 April 2008

Judge in veil case to issue written ruling

A Muslim woman who lost a small-claims suit in Hamtramck district court in 2006 after she refused to remove her religious veil during testimony took her case before a federal judge today, hoping to overturn the district judge’s decision and establish precedent in eastern Michigan courtrooms.

But after 30 minutes of legal arguments, U.S. District Judge John Feikens said that he would issue a written decision in the case. He gave no indication of when he might rule, but hinted through questions to lawyers that he may take no action at all, which lawyers conceded he could do under Supreme Court decisions.

To get into the courthouse today, Ginnah Muhammad had to remove her veil and show a photo ID. She had to remove her veil in a private area in the presence of a female court security officer and show her Michigan license, which contains her photo. After court, Muhammad and her attorney, Nahib Ayad, said she routinely is required to remove her veil in the presence of female security officers when she goes to airports, and is accommodated by female officers.

“If the judge rules in our favor, it would preclude other judges from doing the same thing to others,” Ayad, of Plymouth, said Monday. “It is one of those cases that probably will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Ayad said he would appeal if the decision goes against his client.

Detroit Free press, 29 April 2008

Europe’s debt to Islam given a skeptical look

Aristote au Mont Saint-MichelWhen Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today’s historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe’s reawakening from the Middle Ages.

He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy – a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.

In a new book, he is basically canceling, or largely writing off, a debt to “the Arabo-Muslim world” dating from the year 750 – a concept built up by other historians over the past 50 years – that has Europe owing Islam for an essential part of its identity.

“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Moorish Spain.

Le Figaro and Le Monde, in considering the book in prominent reviews, drank its content in a single gulp. No suspended endorsements or anything that read like a caution.

“Congratulations,” Le Figaro wrote. “Mr. Gouguenheim wasn’t afraid to remind us that there was a medieval Christian crucible, a fruit of the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem,” while “Islam hardly proposed its knowledge to Westerners.”

Le Monde was even more receptive: “All in all, and contrary to what’s been repeated in a crescendo since the 1960s, European culture in its history and development shouldn’t be owing a whole lot to Islam. In any case, nothing essential. Precise and well-argued, this book, which sets history straight, is also a strongly courageous one.”

Published less than a month ago, the book is just beginning to encounter learned criticism. Sarcastically, Gabriel Martinez-Gros, a professor of medieval history, and Julien Loiseau, a lecturer, described Gouguenheim as “re-establishing the real hierarchy of civilizations.”

They said that he disregarded the mathematics and astronomy produced by the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries and painted the period’s Islamic civilization exactly what it was not: obscurantist, legalistic, fatalistic and fanatic.

New York Times, 28 April 3008

Daily Star exposes ‘Muslim sickos’

Muslim sickos“Is this the vilest front page headline we’ve ever seen?

“For those wondering – the article isn’t actually about Muslims kidnapping anyone, although you won’t find it on the Star’s website.

“It’s about some Muslims suggesting on the internet that the McCanns were responsible for their daughter’s kidnapping.

“You know, similar to what The Star and Express had to print front page apologies about and pay half a mil in fines for a couple of weeks ago.”

Five Chinese Crackers, 28 April 2008

See also Lee Burrows at How Liberty Dies.

Back Boris, bury Ken says Littlejohn

Richard_Littlejohn“In London, Livingstone is relying on a huge turnout among innercity Muslims. If previous experience is anything to go by, ‘community leaders’ will simply collect the ballot papers from bewildered Muslims, especially women, and ‘help’ them cast their votes.

“Don’t be surprised to discover subsequently that a bloke in a burqa has voted a few dozen times using someone else’s polling cards. Officials would be too petrified to challenge him.

“There’s nothing new in vote-rigging. In 1960, the Mayor of Chicago turned out the dead to push John F. Kennedy over the line in the U.S. Presidential election. The Mayor of London wouldn’t complain if something similar happened in the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets provided it kept him in office.”

Richard Littlejohn offers his thoughts on the London mayoral election.

Daily Mail, 29 April 2008