‘NUT wants to promote Islam in our schools!’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“This follows on from the union recently establishing a political fund based on 1% of members annual union subscription, to ‘campaign against racist and fascist’ candidates and parties at election time – in particular, the British National Party! So there you have it folks – on the one hand these bigots seek to promote Islam in our schools, whilst on the other they want to oppose Britons defending their Christian culture and heritage at the hustings and, presumably, elsewhere!”

The fascists of the BNP take their inspiration from yesterday’s front page article in the Daily Express.

BNP news article, 26 March 2008 

Britain targets Muslim women to fight extremists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a school in south London, women in headscarves are learning English, childcare skills and citizenship, to smooth their integration into British life. The courses are encouraged under a new government policy to “empower” Muslim women, ultimately to combat the threat from Islamist violence, a threat made brutally clear when four homegrown suicide bombers killed 52 people in London in 2005.

The policy’s backers say the main goal is for Britain’s estimated 800,000 Muslim women to become more influential in their communities, which might stem the threat from disaffected young Muslim men. “Muslim women have a unique role to play in tackling the spread of violent extremism,” Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said as she unveiled the plan, backed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

In a document published in January, Blears highlighted figures showing almost two-thirds of Muslim women in Britain are “economically inactive” – as opposed to about a quarter of all women. Her plan would see tens of millions of pounds spent through local communities to raise their involvement. But despite visible backing for the scheme from Brown, some Muslim community leaders are alienated by the way it has been presented.

“Why is it that anything that has to do with Muslims, has to do with terrorism?” said Reefat Drabu, Chair of the Social and Family Affairs Committee of the Muslim Council of Britain. While in favour of female empowerment, she said linking it with reducing the threat of terrorism was ludicrous. “If they want to combat terrorism, they really need to get out of their denial and realise that they need to look at the policies, as far as foreign policies, policies at home, domestic policies to win the hearts and minds of people,” she said.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee said Blears’ initiative was missing the larger point – discrimination. “What Blears seems to fail to recognise is that women are unequivocally recognised by Islam as the moral authority in their homes,” the organisation commented on its Web site. “They do not need condescending advice on how they can better fulfil their roles in this sphere.”

Reuters, 26 March 2008

Al-Jazeera’s newest (Jewish) star

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Nothing demonstrates the dangerously misplaced sympathies of Canada’s intellectual elite so much as the case of Avi Lewis. A former host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Jewish Lewis is Canada’s answer to Keith Olbermann. But what has everyone in Canada talking is not his past career but his new job: Lewis has joined Al-Jazeera, the Middle East broadcaster that serves as a leading purveyor of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

“That the ambitious 40-year-old presenter has departed the state-funded CBC for an international network with exponentially bigger budgets and audiences isn’t a huge surprise. But Lewis’s career move underscores that the Canadian Left is all too willing to forge an unholy alliance with the official tribune of radical Islam.”

Kathy Shaidle at Front Page Magazine, 26 March 2008

Scholar denounces Muslim baptism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Allam BaptismA Muslim scholar involved in high-level dialogue with the Vatican has denounced the Pope’s baptism on Saturday of a prominent Italian Muslim convert.

Aref Ali Nayed, the head of Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, called the baptism of journalist Magdi Allam a deliberate and provocative act. The Vatican has not yet commented, but its official newspaper said the gesture aimed to promote religious freedom.

In a stinging rebuke of Saturday’s televised ceremony, Mr Nayed denounced what he called “the Vatican’s deliberate and provocative act of baptising Allam on such a special occasion and in such a spectacular way”. Mr Nayed said Pope Benedict XVI’s actions came “at a most unfortunate time when sincere Muslims and Catholics are working very hard to mend ruptures between the two communities”.

The Jordanian scholar has been at the forefront of an initiative gathering more than 130 Muslim scholars who recently wrote to the Pope and other Christian leaders calling for greater dialogue and good will between Muslims and Christians.

BBC News, 26 March 2008

Hijabs at a Harvard gym

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ruth Marcus“It’s a measure of America’s multicultural journey over the past half-century that we’ve gone from ‘God and Man at Yale’ to Allah and Woman at Harvard. In a contretemps scarcely imaginable in William F. Buckley’s day, Harvard has closed one of its gyms to men for six hours a week so that Muslim women can exercise comfortably. ‘Sharia at Harvard,’ warned blogger Andrew Sullivan. A Harvard Crimson columnist blasted ‘Harvard’s misguided accommodationist policy.’

“Meanwhile, a separate controversy has flared over broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer from the steps of Harvard’s main library during Islamic Awareness Week. Three graduate students, writing in the Crimson, argued that the prayer sowed ‘seeds of division and disrespect’ by declaring that ‘there is no lord except God’ and that ‘Mohammad is the Messenger of God’. Harvard, they wrote, ‘should not grant license to any religious group, minority or otherwise, to use a loudspeaker to declare false the profoundly important and personal beliefs of others.’ …

“My reaction is more along the lines of: ‘Get a grip.’ It’s reasonable to set aside a few off-peak hours at one of Harvard’s many gyms. It’s not offensive to have the call to prayer echoing across Harvard Yard, any more than it is to ring church bells or erect a giant menorah there.

“I share the apprehensions stirred up by the more radical followers of Islam, with their drive to restore the caliphate and subjugate women. But I come to this issue as a member of another minority religion, Judaism, whose adherents often seek flexibility from the majority culture in order to practice their faith. As with Islam, my religion’s more observant believers endorse practices – segregating the sexes at prayer, excluding women from engaging in certain rituals – that I find disturbing, bordering on offensive. I have relatives who would shrink from shaking my hand. Still, I would defend to the death their right not to touch me.”

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post, 26 March 2008

Cf. Debbie Schlussel’s comments

‘Why I won’t be gagged’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“There is so much violence worldwide perpetrated against Christians in the name of Islam. Yet I, as a Christian priest, am not supposed to notice it. I am expected to keep my mouth shut and certainly not to write about it in a daily newspaper. Where are the official complaints from the Archbishops, the rest of our failed and spineless hierarchy and the General Synod? Recall the spirit of appeasement from the 1930s. It was disastrous then and it will lead to a much greater disaster today.”

Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange responds to the recent assault on Canon Michael Ainsworth.

Northern Echo, 25 March 2008

Danish Islamophobia kills Muslim teen

Posted on by Bob Pitt

COPENHAGEN — Danish Muslims link the racist murder of a Muslim teen last week to an increasing Islamophobic atmosphere fanned by the reprinting of a cartoon satirical of prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

“Deniz Ozgur Uzun was killed because of his dark, Middle Eastern skin,” Jihad Abdelalim Alfara, the chairman of the Islamic Council in Denmark, told IslamOnline.net. Uzun, a 17-year-old Turk attending a technical high school, was distributing newspapers in the Amager district of Copenhagen Wednesday when he was verbally harassed by three Danes, aged 15, 17 and 18.

“They tried to provoke him with racist slur,” said Abdel-Hamid Hamdi, head of the Shura Council of the Islamic Council in Denmark. “He ignored them and went his way before they stopped their car and started assaulting him.”

A friend of Uzun, identified by the media as Mohammed, said the three attacked Uzun with a baseball bat and a hammer, leaving him unconscious. The Muslim teen was put on life support at a hospital in Copenhagen with “severe brain damage” before he was pronounced dead the next day.

Alfara, the Muslim community leader, believes the racist attack is directly linked to an Islamophobic atmosphere in the Scandinavian country fanned by the recent reprinting of the prophet cartoon. “Was it necessary to have someone killed for people to realize that racism is on the rise in Denmark following the cartoon crisis?”

Islam Online, 24 March 2008

Torygraph warns against Islamification of Britain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The increasing influence of Islam on British culture is disclosed in research today that shows the number of Muslims worshipping at mosques in England and Wales will outstrip the numbers of Roman Catholics going to church in little more than a decade…. The projections show that, if the Churches do not reverse their historical decline, there will be more active Muslims than Christians in Sunday services across Britain before the middle of the century.

“The figures, based on Government and academic sources and the latest edition of Christian Research’s Religious Trends, come amid growing tensions over the place of Muslims in British society. They follow fierce rows over the extent to which Islamic law should be recognised and over claims that “no-go” areas for non-Muslims are emerging in parts of the country.”

Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2008

Qaradawi urges killing of Wafa Sultan (according to Robert Spencer)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yusuf_al_QaradawiAccording to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Yusuf al-Qaradawi has taken time out from calling for gay men to be stoned to death in order to urge the murder of Wafa Sultan:

“… now he has directed his rage against Sultan, a fifty-year-old Syrian-American psychologist: ‘She said unbearable, ghastly things that made my hair stand on end’. Specifically, ‘she had the audacity to publicly curse Allah, His Prophet, the Koran, the history of Islam, and the Islamic nation’. He repeated that she ‘leveled accusations against Islam and the Muslims, and cursed Allah, His Prophet, the Islamic nation, the shari’a, and the Islamic faith and culture’. These are serious charges, and Qaradawi states them in terms that his jihadist minions will understand as meaning that she must be killed.”

Front Page Magazine, 25 March 2008

Even the MEMRI-edited transcript of Qaradawi’s Al-Jazeera broadcast provides no basis for this hysterical nonsense.

Why I left the BNP – they hate all Muslims, says councillor

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“My mistake was joining the BNP. They assured me that they were a non racist party. Well, I can assure you they are racist. They refer to anybody who is non white as ‘Pakis’. This shows their ignorance. At first when racial remarks were made at meetings, I put this down to sheer ignorance and bigotry but in the short time I was a member the situation became intolerable and the last straw came when I tried to help a Pakistani family who are also Muslims. Now, the BNP hate all Muslims with a vengeance. They don’t think that there is good and bad in everyone.”

Pat Pattison, a town councillor in North Wales, explains why he broke from the British national Party.

Lancaster Unity, 25 March 2008