Islam-bashing fails to boost support for Austria’s rightists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

City council elections in the south-eastern Austrian city of Graz on Sunday failed to result in significant support for a local candidate for the far-right Freedom Party (FP) who had lashed out against Islam in a highly controversial campaign.

The top-seeded FP candidate Susanne Winter scored only moderate wins for the party just days after she called the Muslim prophet Mohammed a “child molester” and called for Islam to be pushed “back where it belonged, beyond the Mediterranean Sea”.

Voters in Graz, however, seemed only moderately impressed by Winter’s Islam-bashing. Official results showed the FP gained 3.1 per cent, but remained below expectations with 11.1 per cent. Various polls had showed the party would score between 10 and 13 per cent.

Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache said the FP had reached their goal of getting into the double digits. Winter pursued her campaign “in the face of strong antagonism, defamation and scandalous threats of violence against her,” he was quoted as saying by the Austrian press agency.

Winter’s remarks were followed by a public outcry and triggered an intensive debate about Islamophobia in Austria. According to political analysts, the FP’s anti-Muslim campaign was a calculated gambit to appeal both to a radically xenophobe fringe among Austria’s electorate as well as those alienated by immigration.

The Islam-bashing turned out a “non-starter” for the rightists, with the conservative People’s Party and the Greens benefiting instead, analyst Wolfgang Bachmayer told the public broadcaster ORF.

Earth Times, 20 January 2008

Islamofascism’s ill political wind

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The unfolding presidential elections are laying bare what the real dangers are in the new American condition…. Religious intolerance marks one candidate debate after another – a sweeping denigration of Islam. And it is going to backfire.

“The code word ‘Islamofascism’ has become a staple of rhetoric. It braces the talk not only of pundits, but of all the major Republican candidates – from the tough guy at one end, Rudy Giuliani, who lambastes Democrats for not using the word or its equivalent, to the ‘nice’ candidate at the other end, Mike Huckabee, who defines Islamofascism as ‘the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced’.

“The pairing of ‘Islam’ and ‘fascism’ has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism – indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain.

“… there is a broad conviction, especially among many conservative American Christians, that the inner logic of Islam and fascism go together. Political candidates appeal to those Christians by defining the ambition of Islamofascists in language that makes prior threats from, say, Hitler or Stalin seem benign. The point is that there is a deep religious prejudice at work, and when politicians adopt its code, they make it worse.”

James Carroll in the Boston Globe, 21 January 2008

US hard right backs Nazir-Ali

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When others in his church and nation are often blinded by multiculturalism and rigid political correctness, the Church of England’s ethnically Pakistani Bishop of Rochester often speaks boldly…. Extreme secularists in both Britain and the U.S. naturally prefer to ignore the Jewish and Christian origins of their cultures and democracies. Their extreme version of multiculturalism, while ostensibly intended to protect the dignity of various cultures, instead denigrates Western culture and religion, while enthroning cultures that are hostile to Western democracy. Mainline Protestant clerics, presiding over emptied churches, often enthusiastically endorse this trend. But at least one Church of England bishop of Pakistani origins is warning against the swelling dangers.”

Mark D. Tooley at Front Page Magazine, 21 January 2008

Islam – ‘an intrinsically violent, aggressive and murderous ideology’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP dustbin“The big lie of our times is to deny that Islam is an intrinsically violent, aggressive and murderous ideology. Our lords and masters repeat their PC denial of this blindingly obvious fact in various forms (‘Religion of Peace’, or ‘tiny minority of extremists’etc), in the belief that like some sort of magical spell, it will become true if recited often enough.

“Supporting strands of this web of deceit include claims that Islamic aggression is a recent reaction to the sins of the West (colonialism), or is caused by poverty (buy them off with more jizya), or is carried out by a tiny minority who misunderstand the peaceful commandments of the Koran, or, in a whopper that would be worthy of Goebbels himself – that Islamic terrorism is actually anti-Islamic, as preached by the hypocrite Jacqui Smith.”

A fascist blogger spells out the BNP’s view of Islam. (Not that different from Melanie Phillips’s it would appear.)

Home of the Green Arrow, 20 January 2008

Another paranoid anti-Muslim rant from Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Once again, Britain’s ‘moderate’ Muslim community is upping the ante against the British society in which it resides. The Sunday Telegraph reports that senior Muslims are pushing to integrate sharia law into English law. Dr Suhaib Hasan who, we learn, has been presiding over sharia courts in Britain for more than 25 years, is anxious to dispel any idea that sharia means flogging, stoning or amputations. Good grief no, perish the thought apparently it’s ‘only’ about family law.

“Uh huh. But as Baroness Cox points out in this story, sharia family law is utterly inimical to English law and British values, based as it is on the subjugation of women and the negation of individual freedom….

“And to back up his whole sinister proposal, he makes the utterly false analogy with Jewish religious law…. This is rubbish….

“It is very important that people understand that the pressure to sharia-ise Britain is far more dangerous even than terrorism because – see the government’s embrace of ‘sharia finance’ – its implications simply aren’t understood and it is likely therefore to be accepted. Salami-slice by salami slice, this is how British society will be dismembered.”

Meanie Phillips’s Spectator blog, 20 January 2008

Would a world without Islam be peaceful?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A World Without IslamAbdus Sattar Ghazali summarises Graham Fuller’s article “A World Without Islam” published in the January 2008 edition of the Foreign Policy journal. He writes:

“Fuller has done a great job in spelling out the real root of the contemporary problems which lie in imperialism/colonialism, more than religion, although certainly religion is a part. His paradigm repudiates biased pundits and neoconservatives who condemn Islam as the root of all conflict.”

Countercurrents, 17 January 2008

UK is ‘slouching towards dhimmocracy’ says Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mad Melanie Phillips condemns on the government’s reported decision to drop the phrase “war on terror” when, according to Mel, what we are facing is “the attempt to murder large numbers of innocent people in the pursuit of a political aim – namely, the Islamisation of Britain”.

Taking her inspiration from Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website, Mel launches an attack on home secretary, Jacqui Smith, for stating that terrorists are behaving contrary to their faith, rather than acting in the name of Islam:

“The speech was a frightening demonstration of intellectual and moral funk. She said: ‘As so many Muslims in the UK and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorise, nothing Islamic about plotting pain, murder and grief. Indeed, if anything these actions are “anti-Islamic”.’

“This is demonstrably ridiculous. The campaign of terror being mounted against the free world is being perpetrated in the name of Islam, sanctioned and even mandated by leading Islamic scholars around the world, and rooted in Islamic theology – and in the history of violent jihadi conquest to which it gave rise that stretches back to the beginning of Islam in the seventh century….

“In its ignorance, panic and confusion over terrorist violence, the government has failed to grasp that Britain is being squeezed by a jihadi pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural aggression, each reinforcing the other and, according to plan, causing the governing class to descend into that state of cultural servitude to Islam known as ‘dhimmitude’.”

Spectator blog, 17 January 2008

Any website bans must include far right, say UK Muslim youth

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A leading British Muslim youth organisation Thursday welcomed the government action against websites promoting hatred but expressed concern about plans announced Home Secretary Jacqui Smith that they could be “discriminatory”. The Ramadhan Foundation said it was “concerned that action is not being taken on far right and fascist websites that also promote violence and hatred.” Many that promote hatred and violence against minority communities that should be also closed, it said.

Mathaba News Network, 18 January 2008

Far-right groups launch anti-Islamisation campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamisation of cities demoFar-right groups are calling for a ban on the building of new mosques as part of a new campaign to stop the spread of radical Islam in Europe. Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Belang party teamed up with radical groups from Austria and Germany on Thursday to launch a Charter to “fight the Islamisation of West-European cities”.

“We are not opposed to freedom of religion but we don’t want Muslims to impose their way of life and traditions over here because much of it is not compatible with our way of life,” Vlaams Belang’s Filip Dewinter told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. “We can’t accept headscarves in our schools, forced marriages and the ritual slaughter of animals.”

In particular, the coalition called for a moratorium on new mosques, which they say “act as catalysts for the Islamisation of entire neighbourhoods.”

“We already have over 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,” Mr Dewinter explained, citing a large new mosque being built in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam. “Its minarets are six floors high, higher than the illuminations of the Feyenoord soccer stadium!” he cried. “These kinds of symbols have to stop.”

However, it is unclear how the group plans to tackle perceived threats such as the teaching of the Koran, apart from holding rallies in European cities with high immigrant populations.

Aside from Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), there was a notable absence of other political heavyweights during the press conference in the Flemish city of Antwerp. A spokesman for Italy’s Allianza Nazionale said he was unaware of the Charter, though his party too was looking at the issue of the new mosques. Dutch right-wing maverick politician Geert Wilders, who is currently producing a film about the danger of the Koran, also stayed away.

But Mr Dewinter seems unruffled by the paltry political support: “This movement may be small today but I am convinced it will grow into something major.”

Radio Netherlands, 17 January 2008

West didn’t incite Islamic extremism, Blair says

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Blair and BushIslamic extremists have no real grievance against the West, former British prime minister Tony Blair says, and Western democracies should stand up and say so.

Mr. Blair said that, faced with terrorism and extremist rage, liberal-minded Westerners sometimes assume that “there’s something that we should be doing, or have done, that is causing this.” In fact, he told a lunchtime audience in Toronto yesterday, extremism is the result of an internal fight over the future of Islam, not any crime or injustice perpetrated by the West against Muslims. “The truth is that they have no sense of grievance against us,” he said.

If democratic countries want to defeat extremism, he said, they have to be ready to say that it is more than the extremists’ methods they abhor. “It is the presumed sense of grievance. It is the idea that we are the cause of an injustice.”

His comments got a round of applause from a sold-out audience in a downtown ballroom. Tickets to the event, An Afternoon with Tony Blair, co-sponsored by The Globe and Mail, went for $400 each.

Globe and Mail, 18 January 2008

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