Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Loyalist extremist thinks only Muslims should be charged with encouraging crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Willie Frazer as Abu HamzaProtestant Coalition co-founder Willie Frazer appeared at court in Belfast yesterday dressed up as Abu Hamza. You might think that he was trying to draw a parallel between himself and another extremist who has incited hatred on the basis of a warped interpretation of his religious beliefs.

But no. Frazer has been charged under the Serious Crime Act 2007 with encouraging the commission of criminal offences in a speech he made in January during the Belfast flag protests, and he was protesting against a Loyalist militant being prosecuted on the basis a piece of legislation that he claims was meant to be used only against Muslims.

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‘Devout Muslim’ who dealt heroin subjected his wife to a year of ‘hell’ and terrorised her into wearing a veil after she said she wanted to go to college

Posted on by Bob Pitt

That’s the headline to a report in the Daily Mail. The subject of the article is an unpleasant individual from Burnley named Jubel Miah, who was sent to a young offenders’ institution in 2010 for possessing heroin with intent to supply and has just been jailed after being convicted of assaulting his wife.

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World leaders must grasp Islamic heart of al-Shabaab’s terrorism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Barnabas Fund logoWell, that’s what Patrick Sookhdeo of the right-wing evangelical Christian Barnabas Fund says.

Condemning David Cameron’s statement that the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab “don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world”, in an editorial on the Barnabas Fund website, Sookhdeo objects that this was as bad as Cameron’s claim after the murder of Lee Rigby that “there is nothing in Islam that justified this dreadful act”.

“While world leaders continue to fail to understand, or perhaps accept, the ideological basis within Islam for acts of violence,” Sookhdeo asserts, “they will never get to grips with the likes of al-Shabaab. To say that ‘they don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world’ is flagrantly untrue.”

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Vlaams Belang stunt backfires

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Vlaams Belang Freedom or Islam posterLast year the Flemish far-right party Vlaams Belang launched a new front organisation, Women Against Islamisation, with a poster featuring party leader Filip Dewinter’s teenage daughter wearing a bikini and a veil.

Evidently pleased with the publicity generated by this stunt, last week VB followed it up with a new poster featuring a photograph of Anke Van dermeersch, the former Miss Belgium who is leader of the VB group in the Belgian senate, hitching her skirt up her legs. Various hem-lengths are marked, with “stoning” at the top and “sharia-compliant” at floor level. The photo is accompanied by the same slogan that appeared on last year’s poster – “Freedom or Islam?”

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NSS thinks allowing Muslim employees to wear hijab is giving in to ‘Islamist demands’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yesterday it was reported that the clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch had lost two lawsuits brought by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after the company sacked one young Muslim woman and refused to employ another because they wore headscarves. The company announced that it had now changed its policy and would allow employees to wear the hijab.

Most of us would think this was a welcome victory against discrimination. But how does the National Secular Society report it? Under the headline “Abercrombie & Fitch accede to Islamist demands”. It’s the sort of response you would expect from the likes of Pamela Geller.

‘Secularist’ irrationality over the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The level of argument from secularists denouncing the niqab has reached a new low recently. Here, for example, is Joan Smith writing in the Independent on Sunday:

I’m aghast at the prospect of being treated by a health professional in a niqab. Patients often have to discuss intimate matters with GPs and nurse-practitioners, from sexual health to domestic violence. If someone doesn’t trust me enough to let me see her face, I’m hardly going to feel comfortable about her carrying out an intimate procedure such as a cervical smear. Nor is it easy to imagine a man discussing the symptoms of prostate cancer with a health professional whose idea of “modesty” doesn’t allow her to expose her nose.

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Tony Parsons on tolerance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tony ParsonsBack in June, Tony Parsons wrote a column for the Daily Mirror in which he parroted the ignorant view expressed by Andrew Gilligan that there had been no significant upsurge in hate-crime against the Muslim community in the aftermath of the horrific killing in Woolwich on 22 May. Parsons assured his readers: “The ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ is somewhere between a grotesque exaggeration and a plain old lie. The British are a civilised, polite, tolerant people – and even after the hideous murder of young Lee Rigby, that is what we remain.”

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UKIP no longer proposes ‘burqa ban’ law

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UKIP logoUKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall has stated that his party no longer proposes a state ban on the Muslim veil in some public places.

Nuttall told the Huffington Post yesterday that “our view is pretty much that if people need to see your face, then quite frankly it should be shown” – for example in a bank – but that the party would not bring in legislation to impose a ban, because they are “libertarians”.

Not so long ago, of course, UKIP did propose to legislate for such a ban. In its manifesto for the May 2010 general election the party pledged to “tackle extremist Islam by banning the burqa or veiled niqab in public buildings and certain private buildings”.

As Nuttall points out, that was under a different leader – namely Lord Pearson, who had close connections with the likes of Pamela Geller, the US Islamophobe who was recently banned from entering the UK because of her record of anti-Muslim hatemongering.

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Sun calls for restrictions on the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sun Unveiled front pageThis is the front page of today’s Sun. The accompanying editorial is behind a paywall so we reproduce it below.

In contrast to yesterday’s rant by Trevor Kavanagh, the editorial strikes what is, for the Sun, a tone of reasoned moderation.

It comes out firmly against a complete ban on wearing the veil in public, though that stance is hardly going to have any impact on the rights of Muslim women, given that there isn’t the slightest prospect of such a law being introduced in the UK for the foreseeable future.

The Sun even admits that women who wear the veil are not necessarily oppressed or acting under compulsion: “While the Taliban used the burka to suppress women in Afghanistan, those wearing them here are mainly young – and doing so by choice. They see physical modesty as key to their faith. And they already feel ‘liberated’ … from being judged on their appearance.”

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