Anti-sharia protestors bound over

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cathedral protestTwo men who protested against adopting Muslim laws in Britain during an Easter sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury have had charges against them dropped.

Kyle Spotswood, 26, and Sidney Cordle, 52, from Sheffield, were arrested after waving placards and shouting in front of the pulpit as Dr Williams spoke.

The men were bound over to keep the peace at Canterbury Magistrates’ Court.

The Canterbury Cathedral protest came after Dr Williams spoke about the UK adopting aspects of Islamic Sharia law.

Mr Spotswood, of Dagenham Road and Mr Cordle, of Knowle Lane, were arrested in March after they interrupted Dr Williams’ Easter Sunday sermon at the cathedral.

They stood in front of the pulpit shouting and waving placards which read “Support the persecuted church” and “No to Sharia law”.

The men were charged under section two of the 1860 Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act, which says it is an offence to disrupt a cathedral service.

Speaking outside court, Mr Spotswood said: “I would like to take this opportunity to issue a challenge to the Archbishop of Canterbury to take part in a public debate at the venue of his choice to discuss what should be the Christian response to Sharia law.”

BBC News, 7 April 2008

In 2006 Spotswood stood unsuccessfully for Sheffield council as a Christian Peoples Alliance candidate.

Muslim war graves defaced in France

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Arras cemetery desecrationUp to 148 Muslim graves in France’s World War I cemetery have been desecrated in an incident that has drawn strong condemnation from the country’s president.

A pig’s head was hung from one of the several tombstones targeted by vandals who also wrote slogans insulting France’s Muslim justice minister, officials said on Sunday.

Describing Saturday’s incident, Jean-Pierre Valensi, the state prosecutor for Arras, said “the slogans directly target Islam and they gravely insult Rachida Dati, the justice minister”, who is the daughter of North African immigrants.

The Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, in the northern town of Arras, commemorates the victims of a series of long and bloody battles for control of northern France at the start of World War I. Inaugurated in 1925, the cemetery houses the remains of some 40,000 soldiers, half of them in named graves.

The Muslim quarter includes 576 tombs, grouped together and turned towards Mecca. Saturday’s attack targeted this section of the cemetery.

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All is not lost – Europe can resist Islamification says Pipes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes5“Some analysts of Islam in Western Europe argue that the continent cannot escape its Eurabian fate; that the trend lines of the past half-century will continue until Muslims become a majority population and Islamic law (the Shari’a) reigns.

“I disagree, arguing that there is another route the continent might take, one of resistance to Islamification and a reassertion of traditional ways. Indigenous Europeans – who make up 95 percent of the population – can insist on their historic customs and mores. Were they to do so, nothing would be in their way and no one could stop them.

“Indeed, Europeans are visibly showing signs of impatience with creeping Shari’a. The legislation in France that prohibits hijabs from public school classrooms signals the reluctance to accept Islamic ways, as are related efforts to ban burkas, mosques and minarets. Throughout Western Europe, anti-immigrant parties are generally increasing in popularity.”

Daniel Pipes in the Jerusalem Post, 2 April 2008

Pipes names Dutch far-right racist Geert Wilders as one of the “staunch individuals” who “may represent the vanguard of a Christian/liberal reassertion of European values” and who could “provide a crucial boost for those intent on maintaining the continent’s historic identity”.

Fascists ask: ‘Which future for Britain’s children?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Which future for Britain's children“… it’s the future of our children that I believe is the most important issue people should have on their minds when they vote on May 1st. The two photos are of schoolchildren from Yeovil in Somerset visiting a mosque, and children in an Easter bonnet parade organised by local BNP councillors in Broxtowe.

“Voters have got to decide which road they want this country to go down because in a few years time we might not be able to make a choice.

“With the building of new mosques becoming an issue for many local authorities, it is vital that there are BNP representatives on councils to ‘whistleblow’ when the ‘Old Gang’ parties try to usher these applications through with out consulting with the public.”

Voice of Freedom editor Martin Wingfield plugs the next issue of the British National Party’s paper.

Martin Wingfield’s blog, 4 April 2008

Columnist challenges women to wear hijab for a day

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing in the Louisiana State University newspaper The Daily Reveille, Shirien Elmasraya proposes to her fellow students that they should share her experience of wearing Islamic clothing:

“Ever wonder what it’s like for women that wear hijab – or the head scarf? I certainly get some crazy questions sometimes. ‘Do you take a shower with that on?’ is pretty common. And so is, ‘Do you wear that because you’re bald?’ That one’s my favorite. I certainly don’t mind the questions, and I am happy to answer them whenever I get them. But, now it’s your turn. I challenge the women on this campus to walk a day in my shoes. I challenge women to wear hijab for a whole day on April 25, 2008 and then talk about the experience afterward.”

Welsh soprano takes legal action against BNP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Katherine Jenkins’s representatives last night confirmed they had started legal action to remove the singer’s image from an online video produced in support of the extremist British National Party. In a four-minute video posted on website YouTube on March 8, by a user calling himself “Egbert Saxon King”, the Welsh mezzo-soprano’s image is used in a bid to stir up opposition to plans to build Wales’ largest mosque in Cardiff.

Featuring designs apparently lifted from the website of the Madina Mosque in the Cathays area of the capital, the video claims the mosque would lead to the “Islamification of Wales” and uses a series of dramatic images to contrast stereotypical images of Muslims with stereotypical images of Wales. An image of riots in Bradford, for instance, is contrasted with a tranquil North Wales street market scene.

Viewers are then shown a picture of a woman in traditional Islamic dress, and a picture of Miss Jenkins wearing a Welsh rugby shirt. They are then asked which they would prefer. The video ends with an image of a BNP badge and the text “vote BNP”.

A member of Miss Jenkins’s management team said, “Katherine wants to have absolutely nothing to do with these people. We are trying to trace how someone got the picture. It was not passed on by the photographer or his agent. It is just stirring things up and we are striving to have the image removed.”

Wales Online, 4 April 2008

Blears blames Muslims for social divide

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Blears blames minoritiesCommunity Secretary Hazel Blears stood accused of “scapegoating” immigrants and Muslim groups on Thursday for what she called the development of “social apartheid” in Britain.

In a speech to the Fabian Society in Westminster, Ms Blears claimed that community cohesion could only be maintained by preventing one single faith or ethnic group from dominating a neighbourhood to the extent that others feel “alienated, insecure or unsafe.”

However, the minister said that she saw “nothing wrong” with cultural enclaves of “particular groups” such as “Chinatowns and Little Italys.”

Her comments follow Church of England Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s recent attack on the Muslim communities for supposedly creating “no-go zones” for whites in parts of Britain.

Furious left campaigners and politicians dismissed Ms Blears’s seeming concern as “beyond satire” when “no-one has done more” than new Labour to create poor and ethnic minority ghettos through its big-business policies and anti-terror laws.

Morning Star, 4 April 2008

See also the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Mail.

‘Jihad comes to Wall Street’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“If you’ve seen Geert Wilders’s film Fitna, you may not have noticed a single headline amongst all the bombings, beheadings, and earnest expressions of Islam’s eventual world domination: Halal-fund: investments for Muslims. But the investment vehicles referenced are an essential part of radical Islam’s efforts to insinuate itself into Western societies in order to destroy them from within. And Wall Street, barely out of the woods from its disastrous run-in with sub-prime mortgages – and having lost one of its historic investment houses, Bear Stearns, in the process – is now chasing the very kind of ‘sharia finance’ against which Wilders’s movie warns, a business line that may eventually wind up being even more calamitous than the subprime-mortgage fiasco….

“Sharia is a reactionary-to-the-core medieval Islamic doctrine that claims control over every aspect of every Muslim’s life. It imposes such ‘ethical’ mandates on Muslims as the obligation to discriminate against women and non-Muslims; to kill homosexuals, adulterers, and apostates; to establish and maintain Muslim rule around the world; and to carry out violent offensive jihad against infidels. Notably, for those Muslims who cannot engage in physical jihad using force of arms, sharia requires that they support jihad financially. This is what sharia finance is all about.”

Alex Alexiev at National Review Online, 3 April 2008

Update:   Mad Melanie Phillips entirely agrees: “Of all the manifestations of the Islamisation of the west sharia finance is perhaps the most deadly, because it effectively sells the west to Islam.”

Melanie Phillips’s blog, 7 April 2008

BBC is too scared to allow jokes about Islam, says Ben Elton

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Comedian Ben Elton has said the BBC is too “scared” to poke fun at Islam. He accused the broadcasting company of allowing programmes to run jokes about Christianity and vicars. However, he claimed bosses were too politically correct and worried about a negative backlash to do the same about imams. In an interview, Mr Elton, 48, who admits he has little religious faith, said: “I believe part of that is due to the genuine fear that the authorities and the community have about provoking the radical elements of Islam.” Mr Elton’s comments appeared in Third Way, a Christian culture magazine.

Daily Mail, 2 April 2008

Update:  Elton has received the endorsement of the BNP – and also of an extreme right-wing blogger rejoicing in the entirely appropriate name of Fulham Reactionary.

‘As if it couldn’t get any better… ‘ BNP deputy leader backs Ruoff

Posted on by Bob Pitt

bnp-islam-poster“Incredible headlines in the tabloids today concerning Brown’s arrogance over immigration and his insistence on pushing ahead with replacing the indigenous population with Labour-voting imports…. As if it couldn’t get any better a member of the Church of England General Synod, Alison Ruoff, breaks ranks and demands that no more mosques are built in this country.

“Speaking on a Christian radio station she pulled no punches when stating: ‘You build a mosque and then what happens? You have Muslim people moving into that area, all the shops will then become Islamic, all the housing will then become Islamic and as the Bishop of Rochester has so wisely pointed out, that will be a no-go area for anyone else. They will bring in Islamic law. We cannot allow that to happen.’

“Inayat Bunglawala, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, wasted no time in tagging the issue for the Party adding, ‘These are unfortunately very bigoted and, frankly, xenophobic remarks. These kinds of comments you would expect to come from someone from the BNP not the Church.’ Yes indeed so Inayat and thank you so very much for reminding everybody just in case they hadn’t already got the message.”

Simon Darby’s blog, 2 April 2008