Evidence of extremism in mosques ‘fabricated’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Euston MosqueA rightwing thinktank which claimed to have uncovered extremist literature on sale at dozens of British mosques was last night accused of basing a report on fabricated evidence.

The report by Policy Exchange alleged that books condoning violent jihad and encouraging hatred of Christians, Jews and gays were being sold in a quarter of the 100 mosques visited. But BBC2’s Newsnight said examination of receipts provided by the researchers to verify their purchases showed some had been written by the same person – even though they purported to come from different mosques. Several receipts also misspelled the names or addresses of the mosques where the books were supposedly sold.

The report, the Hijacking of British Islam, was based on the work of four teams of two researchers each who visited 100 mosques. They claimed to have found the controversial material in bookshops attached to 25 mosques, including one at Regent’s Park, London, and others in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Oxford and High Wycombe.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “Policy Exchange produced a report that was given a lot of publicity, and Newsnight deserve credit for exposing the incredibly shoddy and dubious methodology that Policy Exchange have resorted to. It would seem that Policy Exchange had already decided what they wanted to say about mosques and just went out to find or should I say invent the evidence to justify their prejudices.”

Guardian, 13 December 2007

For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 December 2007

The Newsnight investigation concentrated on mosques in and around London but, as Osama points out, questions about the credibility of the Hijacking of British Islam report were raised at the time by the Edinburgh Central Mosque – where nobody had come across the literature that Policy Exchange claimed to have discovered on their premises.

For some useful background on Dean Godson and Policy Exchange, see Tom Griffin’s article at SpinWatch.

Huge rise in Scots with racist prejudices

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“Scots are becoming increasingly prejudiced against Muslims, according to a wide-ranging survey carried out after the terror attacks of July 2005 but before the strike on Glasgow Airport this summer.

“Half of those questioned in the government study said Scotland would lose its identity if more Muslims come to the country – up on the 38% who said the same in 2003 when a similar survey was taken.

“The number of Scots who would be unhappy if a relative formed a close relationship with a Muslim was also up over the three years, from 20% to 24%, but while almost one-third of Scots believe there is sometimes a good reason to be prejudiced – an attitude which is on the rise – the number of people who are prejudiced against gays and lesbians is decreasing.”

The Herald, 12 December 2007

See Attitudes to Discrimination in Scotland 2006.

Quebec union leaders call for hijab ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Claudette CarbonneauMONTREAL — No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec’s two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants’ union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission Monday.

“We think that teachers shouldn’t wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not,” said Rene Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour. “The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service … in order to ensure the secular character of the state,” said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Quebec union of public employees.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new “charter of secularism” that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau [pictured], president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions. Such a charter is needed “to avoid anarchy,” Carbonneau said Monday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation’s 300,000 members at the commission’s hearing on the integration of immigrants in Montreal. That’s the same point of view as the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Quebec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

The unions’ anti-religious attitude – especially the idea to ban hijabs on teachers – got a cold reception from groups as disparate as a Muslim women’s aid organization and the nationalist St.-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montreal. “What that would do is close the door to Muslim women who want to teach,” said Samaa Elibyari, a Montreal community radio host who spoke for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. “It goes against religious freedoms that are guaranteed in the (Quebec) Charter of Rights.”

Elibyari said Muslim women routinely face discrimination in the workplace. They don’t need unions on their back, too, she said. “When a young teacher calls a school to see if she can do an internship, and is asked on the phone straight out: ‘Do you wear the veil?’; when a cashier at a supermarket is fired and her boss tells her ‘The customers don’t want to see that,’ referring to the veil; when a secretary gets passed over for promotion even if she succeeds in all her French exams, and is told ‘take off that tablecloth’ – is that not discrimination?” Elibyari asked.

Canada.com, 10 December 2007

To believe in a European utopia before Muslims arrived is delusional

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It has become a Europe-wide habit to refer to Muslims in particular and migrants in general as though they are barbarians who must either be civilised or banished, before they pollute the egalitarian societies in which they were either born or now live. Lacking all sense of humility, self-awareness and historical literacy, Europe’s political class acts as though these communities not only manifest homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, political violence and social unrest, but also as though they invented them and introduced them to an otherwise utopian continent….

“Herein lies the problem with Enlightenment values, as they have been promoted in recent years. The values are fine. But those who champion them most fervently also do so most selectively. They embrace Muslim women campaigning against sexism, but ignore those fighting racism, Islamophobia or war. They attack Muslim fundamentalist homophobes on housing estates, but align themselves with Christian fundamentalist homophobes in the White House. They demand secularism and assimilation, but view every action by Muslims and immigrants as essentially foreign or religious.”

Gary Younge in the Guardian, 10 December 2007

‘Gut-wrenching bigotry’ at the WSJ

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Juan ColeJuan Cole responds to Mitt Romney’s speech arguing that his adherence to Mormonism was no obstacle to standing for the US presidency:

“The unsavory aspects of this entire discourse are apparent in the op-ed of Naomi Schaeffer Riley for the Wall Street Journal. While she depicts Mormons in a positive light, she displays the most gut-wrenching bigotry toward Muslims. She writes: ‘A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That’s roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: Why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders?’

“I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge. Islam is not ‘the faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers’. Islam is the religion of probably 1.3 billion persons, a fifth of humankind, which will probably be a third of humankind by 2050. Islam existed for 1400 years before the 9/11 hijackers, and will exist for a very long time after them. Riley has engaged in the most visceral sort of smear, associating all Muslims with the tiny, extremist al-Qaeda cult.

“We could play this game with any human group. Some Catholics were responsible for the Inquisition. Shall we blame Catholicism for that, or all Catholics? Of course not. Jewish Zionists expelled hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Is that Judaism’s fault or that of Jews in general? Of course not.”

AlterNet, 9 December 2007

‘Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Sunday Telegraph interviews a young woman who was shamefully treated by her family after she converted from Islam to Christianity. With the assistance of such “experts” as Maryam Namazie and Patrick Sookhdeo – of, respectively, the ultra-left sectarian Worker Communist Party of Iran and the right-wing evangelical Barnabus Fund – the case is used to illustrate the supposedly barbaric culture that prevails within Muslim communities in the UK.

Namazie offers her opinion that “many of the deaths classified as ‘honour killings’ are actually murders of people who have renounced Islam”. Needless to say, the Torygraph doesn’t ask her to provide any evidence for this claim. Nor is there any attempt to demonstrate that hostility towards those who change their religion is any more prevalent among Muslims than in other faith communities.

No, the predictable line is that violent hatred of apostates is rooted in Islam. And Sookhdeo is on hand to provide the appropriate quote: “Most Muslim scholars say that Muslim religious law – sharia – requires the death penalty for apostasy.” The Torygraph concludes: “Given the acceptance by some that Muslim religious law does indeed require that apostates be killed, it is hardly surprising that many ordinary Muslims think that it is their religious duty to carry out that punishment – or at least to threaten it.”

Martin Amis can’t be trusted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When an audience member last week returned the writer to the delicate question of his controversial 2006 remarks, he explained that they came shortly after the revelation of an Islamist plot to blow up 10 transatlantic flights in transit, saying: ‘You can pretend to be a pious post-historical automaton and not have these responses or you can admit to having transient retaliatory urges.’

“But against whom precisely are these ‘transient retaliatory urges’ experienced, if they must later be denied? I have retaliatory urges myself when I hear of Islamist terror plots, but against the planners and perpetrators of the potential carnage: I wish to see those people pursued, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to lengthy imprisonment. These urges are not transient in the least: they are constant.

“I do not, however – and I don’t mean this piously – wish at any point to retaliate against the pleasant Pakistani man who works all hours in our local dry-cleaners, or the Turkish bank teller down the road. To do so would clearly be obscene. Yet the lingering notion of an entire community’s culpability sporadically crops up among Amis’s ‘urges’….

“There is a world of difference between encouraging a minority community … to help defeat terrorism originating from fanatics within its ranks, and holding it communally accountable for that terrorism. The former may well provide our police with a tip-off that averts the next British suicide bomber; the latter will trigger attacks upon elderly Muslims who have never espoused jihadism.”

Jenny McCartney in the Sunday Telegraph, 9 December 2007

Canadian Muslim women’s soccer team fights ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sixteen-year-old Sheena Alami calls the flap over Islamic hijab headscarves that has sidelined her Edmonton soccer team shocking. “I was really disappointed that this whole issue was taking place in Canada because we’re supposed to be a multicultural society accepting of different cultures and religions,” she said yesterday.

The Alberta Soccer Association has temporarily banned Alami and her teammates on the Al-Ikhwat (Sisterhood) soccer team from playing until it makes a ruling on the safety of hijabs on the field. Alami, a Grade 10 student at Harry Ainlay Composite High School and the daughter of Afghani immigrants, says she’s worn a headscarf while playing soccer and basketball for years.

Thirteen of the 18 women on the team wear hijabs, and they secured a letter of support from the Edmonton and District Soccer Association. “They said, ‘No problem’,” she recalled. “And we were so relieved and so happy.”

The summer went smoothly but shortly after the indoor season kicked off last month, a Calgary referee barred Safaa Menhem, 14, from playing while wearing a hijab – and an ASA ban on the entire Edmonton Al-Ikhwat team followed.

The ASA allowed Menhem to join her teammates on the pitch last week, while wearing a modified hijab tied at the back of the neck rather than under her chin, but has yet to rule on the Edmonton team.

Edmonton Sun, 9 December 2007

A paranoid, abhorrent obsession

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Last week Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch polemicist, spoke to a gathering of what The Spectator called ‘Britain’s biggest brains – politicians, editors, academics’. She told them that they were ‘actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself’. Apparently, a good Muslim has no choice but to strive ‘to establish Sharia law’. Martin Amis, too, has recently informed us that moderate Muslims, if they ever existed, have lost out to radicals in Islam’s civil war. In any case, Islam is ‘totalist’: ‘There is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.’ Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet’s billion-plus Muslims.”

Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, 8 December 2007