Five Chinese Crackers debunks the Mail‘s recycled “Muslim medics refuse to roll up their sleeves in hygiene crackdown” story.
Conference declares terror un-Islamic, condemns hostility to Muslims
DEOBAND — Denouncing terrorism in all its manifestations, top Muslim groups in India on Monday adopted a declaration calling it “un-Islamic” and terming it against the Islamic principle of “peace”.
The Anti-terrorism Conference organised by Islamic seminary Darul Uloom in Uttar Pradesh’s Deoband town was attended by clerics, scholars and religious leaders from several sects and groups across the country.
The conference, however, expressed its deep concern and agony on the present global condition in which most of the nations are adopting an adverse attitude towards Muslims. “It is a matter of greater concern that the internal and external policies of a country are getting heavily influenced by these forces,” it said.
The gathering also condemned attempts to implicate Muslims and particularly religious institutions for terrorist acts. “The disease (terrorism) has been diagnosed in a wrong way. Whenever there is any incident of terrorism, every possible attempt is made to link it to Muslims and particularly who have studied in madrassas and some religious institutions. This is totally wrong,” said Adil Siddiqui, public relations officer of Darul Uloom.
Airport tells faithful to take off turbans, veils
Security at Brisbane Airport has gone into a spin after an unprecedented crackdown on turbans and other culturally-sensitive headgear worn by passengers. A federal investigation has been launched into an edict by the company in charge of the airport’s security to demand passengers remove for security checks religious headwear, including turbans, veils and Jewish skull caps.
At least one international flight was delayed at the weekend when staff from the company, ISS Security, demanded 13 people of the Sikh religion remove their turbans and a Muslim woman to take off her face veil. The Department of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development is investigating whether the clampdown by ISS breached federal airport policy.
It is standard airport practice around the world that religious headwear is only removed after conventional screening methods raise an alarm. But ISS employees yesterday said a directive was issued on Saturday demanding all passengers remove their religious headwear for security checks, regardless of whether there was any cause for suspicion. “We were told you have to take them off, or you’ll be stood down,” one worker said.
Obama camp claims smear over turban photograph
Barack Obama’s campaign team accused Hillary Clinton’s beleaguered staff yesterday of mounting a dirty tricks operation by circulating a picture of him in African dress, feeding into false claims on US websites that he is a Muslim.
David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, described it as “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election”. Obama has spent much of the campaign emphasising he is a Christian not a Muslim and did not study at a madrasa.
The picture showing Obama in a turban during a visit to Kenya in 2006 first appeared on the Drudge Report website yesterday. The site said it was circulated by Clinton’s staffers. The picture was taken when Obama went on a visit to Africa as a senator. Obama, whose father was Kenyan, visited Wajir in Kenya’s north-east, close to the Somali and Ethiopian borders, and was dressed by locals as a Somali elder.
Tells you something about the current atmosphere in the US that claiming a politician is a Muslim can be characterised as “shameful, offensive fear-mongering”.
Britain sent hundreds to face torture
Britain sent hundreds to face torture
By Louise Nousratpour
Morning Star, 26 February 2008
FORMER SAS soldier Ben Griffin revealed yesterday that British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were “deeply involved” in US torture flights.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, British special forces, operating in a joint US/UK task force, have been responsible for the detention of “hundreds, if not thousands” of individuals, he said. These detainees have since ended up in Baghdad’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo Bay and other secret CIA locations.
“During my time as member of the US/UK task force, three of my colleagues witnessed a brutal interrogation in which near-drowning and electric cattle prods were used,” Mr Griffin told a Stop the War Coalition press conference. “The special forces’ policy of detention and not arrest was regarded as a clumsy legal tool used to distance British soldiers from the whole process. But my colleagues and I were in no doubt that anyone we detained, including non-combatants, would subsequently be tortured.”
Last week, Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted to MPs that two US rendition flights transporting terror suspects had landed on British soil. But Mr Griffin said that this “pales into insignificance” to the actions of British forces, adding: “For the government to claim that they only became aware of the use of British territory this week is disingenuous.”
He rejected claims that the British army had acted as a bulwark against US torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing: “In my experience, the opposite is true – that British soldiers have become more like their US counterparts. The British army has accepted illegality as the norm.”
Sharia law ‘would undermine British society’ – Cameron
Muslim Sharia law would undermine society if it was introduced in Britain, Conservative leader David Cameron said today. Mr Cameron said it would in fact lead to a “legal apartheid”. He added that “state multiculturalism” was also the wrong way to tackle integration.
He said: “I don’t believe that by introducing Sharia law, we will make Muslims somehow feel more British – more content with life here and more happy to work for a common good.
“In my view the opposite is the case: I think it would be to head in the wrong direction. The reality is that the introduction of Sharia law for Muslims is actually the logical endpoint of the now discredited doctrine of state multiculturalism instituting, quite literally, a legal apartheid to entrench what is the cultural apartheid in too many parts of our country.
“This wouldn’t strengthen society – it would undermine it. It would alienate other communities who would resent this preferential treatment. It would provide succour to the separatists who want to isolate and divide communities from the mainstream. And it would – crucially – weaken, destabilise and demoralise those Muslims who embrace liberal values and desperately want to integrate fully in British society.”
Speaking alongside Trevor Phillips, the chairman of Equality and Human Rights Commission, Mr Cameron attacked the Government’s idea of multiculturalism. He said:
“I believe that state multiculturalism is a wrong-headed doctrine that has had disastrous results. It has fostered difference between communities. And it has stopped us from strengthening our collective identity. Indeed, it has deliberately weakened it. By concentrating on defining the various cultures that have come to call Britain home, we have forgotten to define the most important one: our own. So we now have a situation where the children of first-generation immigrants – children, let us remember, who have been born and raised here – feel more divorced from life in Britain than their parents.”
Daily Telegraph, 26 February 2008
See also the Guardian, 26 February 2008
Full text of Cameron’s speech here
Witness to discrimination: what would you do?
“The Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war and suicide bombings worldwide have changed not only the way we live but the way we look at those around us, especially Muslims. ‘Islamophobia’ has entered the American vernacular, and the anti-Muslim attitudes and prejudice it describes remain common. But what if you witnessed ‘Islamophobia’ in action and saw someone being victimized because of someone else’s prejudices? What would you do?”
Major survey challenges Western perceptions of Islam
WASHINGTON — A huge survey of the world’s Muslims released Tuesday challenges Western notions that equate Islam with radicalism and violence.
The survey, conducted by the Gallup polling agency over six years and three continents, seeks to dispel the belief held by some in the West that Islam itself is the driving force of radicalism. It shows that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks, the authors of the study said in Washington.
“Samuel Harris said in the Washington Times (in 2004): ‘It is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam’,” Dalia Mogadeh, co-author of the book “Who Speaks for Islam” which grew out of the study, told a news conference here. “The argument Mr Harris makes is that religion in the primary driver” of radicalism and violence, she said. “Religion is an important part of life for the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and if it were indeed the driver for radicalisation, this would be a serious issue.”
But the study, which Gallup says surveyed a sample equivalent to 90 percent of the world’s Muslims, showed that widespread religiosity “does not translate into widespread support for terrorism,” said Mogahed, director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. About 93 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.
In majority Muslim countries, overwhelming majorities said religion was a very important part of their lives – 99 percent in Indonesia, 98 percent in Egypt, 95 percent in Pakistan. But only seven percent of the billion Muslims surveyed condoned the attacks on the United States in 2001, the poll showed.
Moderate Muslims interviewed for the poll condemned the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington because innocent lives were lost and civilians killed. “Some actually cited religious justifications for why they were against 9/11, going as far as to quote from the Koran – for example, the verse that says taking one innocent life is like killing all humanity,” she said. Meanwhile, radical Muslims gave political, not religious, reasons for condoning the attacks, the poll showed.
Headscarf row flares again in Danish parliament
COPENHAGEN — Tension about the possibility of a Muslim politician addressing the Danish parliament in a headscarf has flared again, but Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen tried to calm the debate on Tuesday.
“It’s up to parliament to decide dress codes, and if some people were to get up on the podium wearing a [Muslim] headscarf, I would not leave the room,” Rasmussen told reporters. “In my opinion, people’s ideas and points of view are more important than what they wear,” he said, adding however that “it would be beneficial for Danish society if the public sphere were exempt of some religious displays.”
Rasmussen’s comments came after his liberal-conservative government’s ally, the extreme-right Danish People’s Party (DPP), rekindled a row over whether women wearing the Muslim headscarf, or hijab, should be allowed to address parliament. DPP spokesman Soeren Espersen said last week that Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a Dane of Palestinian origin, should not be permitted to address parliament while wearing a hijab.
She failed in her bid to become the first headscarf-wearing Muslim in Europe to be voted into parliament in last year’s general election, but there is a possibility that she could stand in temporarily for a parliamentarian from the small far-left Unity List Party.
See also Islam in Europe, 24 February 2008
Update: The Copenhagen Post reports that Asmaa Abdol-Hamid has decided to take a one-year break from party politics. She is quoted as expressing her “disappointment in the left wing” over its response to Islamophobia, stating: “while there’s all this hubbub out there over Muslims, with one over-the-top suggestion after the other, the Red-Green Alliance has been disturbingly silent.”
Secularists have nothing to fear from women wearing headscarves
“Secularism, a cherished principle with as many believers as non-believers, does not – should not – preclude the assertion of religious identity. It is a robust enough idea to hold the ring, as a secular state has done in the deeply religious US and India. Secularism can accommodate religious identity, as Turkey is showing by modifying Ataturk’s authoritarian secularism. What remains to be seen across western Europe is whether secularism is hijacked by a racist far right to become a rallying cry, or whether it can find its own way to adapt and modify its traditions to new identities.”
Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian, 25 February 2008