Is Islam good for London?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Is Islam good for LondonThe Evening Standard reports on yesterday evening’s discussion, organised around this question.

Rod Liddle is quoted as saying: “Islam is masochistic, homophobic and a totalitarian regime. It is a fascistic, bigoted and medieval religion.” He and Joan Smith argued the case for the negative. However, when you see that those presenting the case in favour included Ed Husain and Michael Burleigh, it would appear that Inayat Bunglawala was the only voice of reason in this skewed debate.

Video links here.

See also Inayat’s post at Comment is Free.

‘Undesirables’ debate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Problem of the AlienPete Tobias takes issue with last night’s Evening Standard debate, “Is Islam good for London?”

“… the issue is not so much the outcome as the title of the event itself. How would any minority group feel if it were to find itself the subject of such a public debate? What might be the response if the Evening Standard invited readers to consider the question ‘Is Hinduism good for London?’ or question the value of the contribution made by any other minority group to the capital’s well-being? The problem lies in the fact that the question is being asked at all, and the improbability of any other religious or ethnic group having the same question asked about it should set a number of alarm bells ringing.

“I suppose we should be grateful that the Evening Standard was at least kind enough to frame its prejudice as a question. Just under 100 years ago, the same newspaper ran a series entitled ‘Problem of the Alien’, assuring its readers that the city was being ‘overrun by undesirables’ who had set up ‘vast foreign areas’ and were ‘a growing menace’. They were referring, of course, to the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, among them my great-grandparents.”

Comment is Free, 14 November 2007

No-Goh policy on mosques and Islamic immigration

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A 10-year ban on Islamic immigration to Australia and on the construction of any Islamic schools or mosques is the main election policy for one of Macarthur’s federal election candidates.

Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile Group) candidate Godwin Goh said his party, if elected, would also lobby the NSW Government and Federal Government to change any anti-vilification or anti-discrimination laws that could make such a proposal illegal. Mr Goh said he wanted: “No Muslim immigration for 10 years, no setting up schools and mosques, too.”

The Liberal MP for Macarthur, Pat Farmer, rejected Mr Goh’s proposal. “Immigration requests need to be analysed on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “You can’t throw a blanket over the top of everybody and say they’re all terrorists and all incite violence. That’s wrong and that’s not the Australian way.”

When asked to respond to Mr Goh’s proposed 10-year ban on Muslim immigration, schools and mosques, the Labor candidate for Macarthur, Nick Bleasdale, said: “Let me make it clear. I’m totally opposed to the development of the new Islamic school and the community has my full support on the issue. Make no mistake, this issue has nothing to do with race.It’s based on the fact that such a large development will undoubtedly have an impact on our semi-rural way of life….”

Mr Goh is opposed to all Islamic schools because, he claims, they teach extreme versions of Islam. He cited as an example an Islamic school in Victoria. “The teacher asked the students who their hero was and they all said Osama binLaden,” he said. “The teachers are brainwashing. Can’t you see it’s brainwashing? What about Australian heroes? Sport heroes? Such brainwashing, this is when these children have been taught this kind of teaching in their formative years. When they grow up they’re going to idolise the greatest of all terrorists….”

Camden Advertiser, 14 November 2007

‘Look who’s versed in hatred’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

allison pearson“Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, has the cheek to compare modern Britain to Nazi Germany. ‘Every society has to be really careful so the situation doesn’t lead us to a time when people’s minds can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s. If your community is perceived in a very negative manner, then Muslims begin to feel very vulnerable,’ he says.

“Hang on. How vulnerable do the rest of us feel hearing that at least 2,000 of our fellow citizens are involved in terrorist activity? In Nazi Germany, Dr Bari may recall, it was Jewish children who were rounded up to be killed. Not the Jewish children who were trained to do the killing.

“Still, I’m glad to see Dr Bari is worried about minds being poisoned. Maybe he is familiar with the poetry of Samina Malik, a 23-year-old self-styled ‘lyrical terrorist’. Say what you like about Pam Ayres, she never wrote a poem called How To Behead: ‘It’s not as messy or as hard as some may think/It’s all about the flow of the wrist. No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream/But ignore the donkey’s ass/And continue to slice back and forth.’ Miss Malik shared her charming light verse with other like-minded people on the internet, before being arrested and convicted a few days ago under anti-terrorist laws.

“The news that Samina Malik held down a job at WHSmith at Heathrow on the air-side, for crying out loud, proves just how insanely tolerant Britain is, despite the intolerable provocation of men like Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari.”

Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail, 14 November 2007

Update:  See “Comparisions with the 1930s”, MCB press release, 15 November 2007

Muslim minister sues over claim of intimidating voters

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Britain’s first Muslim Government minister yesterday launched a libel battle in the High Court over claims that he organised “gangs of Asian thugs” to intimidate voters in a local election.

International Development Minister Shahid Malik is said to have “overseen and directed” up to 200 Asian Labour activists to help secure victory for a Muslim councillor. The men are said to have breached electoral rules by escorting voters to the polling station while telling them in Urdu to choose the Muslim Labour candidate. Mr Malik is also accused of encouraging ethnic division in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, by urging Asians to vote for “their Muslim brother” rather than according to their political opinion.

The allegations were first made by former Conservative councillor Jonathan Scott in a letter to the Dewsbury Press newspaper, after he was unseated as a local councillor. It describes how “Malik’s ethnic entourage behaved no better than BNP thugs” on polling day in the Dewsbury South ward of Kirklees Council. The letter – and a follow-up news story on the same topic – went on to claim that “Malik convinced local Asian voters to vote for Labour candidates… on the grounds that those candidates were ‘Muslim brothers'”.

Mr Malik appeared in court in London to give evidence against Mr Scott, the newspaper and the newspaper’s editor. Mr Malik’s lawyer Adam Wolanksi said the allegations were untrue and caused the 39-year-old MP for Dewsbury to be seen as “a racist and dangerous extremist who is unfit to hold public office”.

Daily Mail, 13 November 2007

British Muslims – ‘not victims but victimisers’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britain’s two million Muslims are being led astray. Instead of facing up to the problem of extremism in their own ranks they are being encouraged to wallow in an imagined sense of victimhood. The result will be an even bigger divide between Islam and mainstream British society and a growing regret among non-Muslims that this country should ever have allowed a substantial Muslim population to spring up in its midst…. Dr Bari was seeking to appropriate for Muslims the role of victims. In fact, because of the growing numbers of militants within their ranks, they are much more accurately cast as victimisers.”

Patrick O’ Flynn adds his ten cents to the misrepresentation of Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari’s views.

Daily Express, 13 November 2007

‘Only people stoking anti-Muslim feeling are idiots like Bari’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jon Gaunt and SunHOW dare Muslim “leader” Muhammad Bari use the eve of Remembrance Sunday to compare the persecution and eradication of six million Jews in Nazi Germany to the way Muslims are being treated today in Britain?

This opinion is almost as ludicrous as his haircut. Or is it just a bad wig? Not only is he insulting the Jews, he is also attacking every one of our forefathers, of all religions, who fought the Nazis to protect free speech in this country. The same free speech and democracy that allows this pious prat to mouth off and insult us all.

Muhammad, I know that you are a teaching assistant. So here’s a quick history lesson for you.

I don’t recall Jews carrying out suicide bombings or calling for their own form of law in Germany. Come to think of it, I don’t think there were stupid Jewish girls using public money to bring court cases about their rights to dress like Daleks in the classroom, or not show their hair if they wanted to be hairdressers. I also don’t think that Adolf would have tolerated “lyrical terrorists” working at Berlin airport, writing poems or threatening to kill Kaffirs (non-believers).

So for Bonkers Bari to suggest that this country is becoming like Nazi Germany, and that people’s minds are being poisoned against Muslims as they were in the Thirties, is just absurd. This is the most tolerant nation in the world. The only people promoting anti-Muslim feeling in the majority population are fools like him, who think that we should all adopt Islamic practices such as arranged marriages and the banning of alcohol.

Instead of telling the nation that has offered him a home how to run itself, Bari should be trying to put his own house in order and clearing the extremist literature off the shelves of the bookshop in the mosque he chairs. But no, he would rather tell us that suicide bombers are really “vulnerable” and isolated. My heart bleeds.

But silly me, of course it’s entirely our fault, or at least the fault of our foreign policies. It’s us who have turned these ordinary British-born and bred lads, who love cricket, into the arms of the extremists. Stone me for daring to believe that we have provided a society in which all religions co-exist, rather than a one-religion state that enforces only one world view through a systematic form of terror and barbaric punishments.

If Bari wants to live in a country like that he should proceed to the door marked Exit and take his Stone Age ideas with him. But no, he would rather stay here and bleat: “There is a disproportionate amount of discussion surrounding us”. I agree.

So I tell you what, Bari, I’ll stop using a disproportionate amount of my time discussing Muslims when some Muslims STOP using a disproportionate amount of legal aid to bring ridiculous cases to court, when they STOP getting disproportionate amounts of time to air their grievances on the BBC and when councils and governments STOP spending disproportionate amounts of my cash and time on trying to appease a minority religion in a Christian country.

But until that happens shut up, Wiggy, for Allah’s sake.

Jon Gaunt in the Sun, 13 November 2007

“How dare Muslim ‘leader’ Muhammad Bari use the eve of Remembrance Sunday to compare the persecution and eradication of six million Jews in Nazi Germany to the way Muslims are being treated today in Britain? This opinion is almost as ludicrous as his haircut. Or is it just a bad wig? … for Bonkers Bari to suggest that this country is becoming like Nazi Germany, and that people’s minds are being poisoned against Muslims as they were in the Thirties, is just absurd. This is the most tolerant nation in the world.”

Well, if it is, that’s because the majority of us are intelligent enough reject the bigoted ravings of idiots like Jon Gaunt.

In any case, none of the Telegraph‘s quotes from Dr Bari make any specific reference to the Nazis. What he said was: “Every society has to be really careful so the situation doesn’t lead us to a time when people’s minds can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s.” If Gaunt really thinks that bigotry and hatred towards the Jewish community during that decade was restricted to Germany, then you can only suggest that he’s in need of a history lesson himself.

Update:  See “Comparisions with the 1930s”, MCB press release, 15 November 2007

Hostility to Islam is not racism (part 596)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sick Face of IslamGay rights are the bellwether that indicates whether a society lives by civilised values, said Polly Toynbee, journalist and commentator, who was the guest speaker at a packed annual lunch of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association on Saturday 10 November in London.

Ms Toynbee, who is one of The Guardian’s senior columnists, told the humanist group that the level of commitment to human rights that any given nation has can be measured by its attitudes to its gay community. By that measure, Britain wasn’t doing too badly. She was critical of religious attacks on the human rights of gay people and alarmed at the rise of religious influence in the political sphere.

It’s easier to oppose Christian homophobia than that which emanates from Islam, she said. “It’s called ‘Islamophobic’ when we fight against the Islamic view of women or gay rights. It’s not Islamophobic. As dedicated humanists, we’re the ones who can say we’re against the whole lot of it. We know we’re not being racist. What they stand for is dreadful and harmful and awful – we are the ones who cannot be silenced. There has been a lot of turning-a-blind-eye to Islam. We are the ones who stand for progressive policies and have a unique voice to say so.”

GALHA news release, 12 November 2007

“We know we’re not being racist”? Is Polly Toynbee not addressing the same Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association whose then magazine Gay & Lesbian Humanist published the notorious “Sick face of Islam” issue only two years ago?

(Sample quotes: “it is not racist to be anti-immigration or anti-Islam” … “the reckless and mismanaged immigration polices of successive governments have led to the demographics of our major towns and cites being for ever changed by huge numbers of foreign settlers” … “the fastest-growing religion is Islam. Chillingly, it continues to grow like a canker, both through immigration and through … unrestrained and irresponsible breeding”.)

Wouldn’t a warning be in order here about how hostility to religious faith, when the faith in question is practised overwhelmingly by non-white minority communities, can in fact very easily tip over into the most appalling racist bigotry? If Toynbee made such a point at the GALHA lunch, it certainly doesn’t appear in their report of her speech.

It’s not that Toynbee is incapable of recognising that attacks on the beliefs and religious practices of a minority ethno-religious group can be a cover for racism. It’s just that she applies double standards.

This was evident in an Independent article from 1997 where she wrote: “I am an Islamophobe…. I am also a Christophobe.” She continued: “If I lived in Israel, I’d feel the same way about Judaism.”

But the fact that she doesn’t live in Saudi Arabia hasn’t prevented Toynbee from denouncing Islam. Restricting herself to condemning the religion that is dominant in the society in which she might live applies only to Judaism, it would appear. No doubt this is because, in the UK, with its long and shameful history of antisemitism, a non-Jew denouncing Judaism would rightly be construed as racist, or at least as giving credibility to racists. And if she was happy to call herself a Christophobe and an Islamophobe, why did Toynbee baulk at calling herself a “Judeophobe”? Perhaps for the same reason?

And, come to think of it, if Toynbee describes herself as an Islamophobe, why does she feel the need to indignantly assert that condemnation of Islam over gay rights is “not Islamophobic”? Or has she changed her position on that in the course of the past decade?

Media report reveals ‘torrent’ of negative Muslim stories

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Christmas bannedA “torrent” of negative stories has been revealed by a study of the portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the British media, according to a report today. Research into one week’s news coverage showed that 91% of articles in national newspapers about Muslims were negative.

London mayor Ken Livingstone, who commissioned the study, said the findings were a “damning indictment” on the media and he urged editors and programme makers to review the way they portray Muslims. “The overall picture presented by the media is that Islam is profoundly different from and a threat to the West,” he said. “There is a scale of imbalance which no fair-minded person would think is right.” Only 4% of the 352 articles studied last year were positive, he said.

Mr Livingstone told his weekly news conference that the findings showed a “hostile and scaremongering attitude” among the national media towards Islam and likened the coverage to the way the Left was attacked by national newspapers in the early 1980s. “The charge is that there are virtually no positive or balanced images of Islam being portrayed,” he said. “I think there is a demonisation of Islam going on which damages community relations and creates alarm among Muslims.”

Among the examples highlighted in the study was a report which claimed that Christmas was being banned in one area because it offended Muslims, which researchers said was “inaccurate and alarmist”.

The report said that Muslims in Britain were depicted as a threat to traditional British values. Alternative world views or opinions were not mentioned and facts were frequently distorted, exaggerated or over-simplified, said the report. The researchers said that the coverage weakened government attempts to reduce and prevent extremism.

A separate opinion poll published by Mr Livingstone today showed that Muslims in London were more likely to feel “British” in their attitudes than other members of the community. More Muslims were proud of their local area compared with other members of the public.

24dash.com, 13 November 2007

Chris Allen, one of the experts involved in the compilation of the report, has recently published an interesting collection, The First Decade of Islamophobia, to mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Runnymede Trust/Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia’s report, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All.