This is the inflammatory post by English Defence League co-leader Kevin Carroll that appeared on his organisation’s Facebook page yesterday. Here are some examples of the responses it provoked among supporters of the “non-violent” EDL. They include calls for arson attacks on mosques and for Muslims to be stabbed, along with appeals to “burn them all” and “kill them all”.
That’s the claim made in the Daily Telegraph by Alan Johnson, Senior Research Fellow at the pro-Israel advocacy organisation BICOM, who is upset about Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s highly-publicised visit to Gaza.
Bob Pitt reviews Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, by Richard Seymour, Verso, 134pp, £9.99.
Labour Briefing, May 2013
The secularists of the British Humanist Association launched a campaign last year to have a statue of the late Christopher Hitchens erected in Red Lion Square in central London. Although this proposal for a permanent tribute to the ex-leftist who evolved into an enthusiastic advocate of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” came to nothing, it understandably generated fierce controversy at the time. Awale Olad, a Labour councillor in Holborn & Covent Garden who was approached by the BHA for his support, replied indignantly that he “would resign before I’d ever support the bust of a pro-war Islamophobe”.
ENGAGE have just published their submission to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe on anti-Muslim hate crime in the UK, as a contribution to the OSCE’s preparation of its Hate Crime Report 2012.
This is a thoroughly researched document which sheds a disturbing light on the widespread occurrence of anti-Muslim acts in Britain. It is certainly a much more substantial piece of work than anything produced by the government-backed TELL MAMA, despite the large-scale state subsidies the latter receives.
Last year, with assistance of the Sunday Telegraph, the Tory right waged an extended campaign to remove Baroness Warsi from her position as co-chairman of the Conservative Party. They succeeded in accomplishing that particular objective last September, but their victory was far from complete. Although he did replace her as co-chair, at the same time David Cameron gave Warsi a senior ministerial position in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and also appointed her as Minister for Faith and Communities.
This was probably enough to appease the reactionary membership in the shires who had been outraged that a Tory party chairman should be anything other than white, Christian and male, but the neocon-Zionist component of the anti-Warsi opposition was far from satisfied. It was obviously only a matter of time before the latter faction would make another attempt to remove Warsi from her position of influence in the party and government.
An opportunity afforded itself last month when Warsi appeared as a platform speaker at a conference in the House of Lords organised by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which was billed as a “critical discussion around the way Islamic societies and Muslim students are represented in the media”. FOSIS is the NUS-recognised representative organisation of Muslim students in the UK, and among those speaking alongside Warsi at the conference were Universities UK CEO Nicola Dandridge, NUS president Liam Burns and the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Hussain, who also hosted the event. This didn’t offer much of a pretext for relaunching a witch-hunt against Warsi, you might think.
However, Warsi’s participation at the FOSIS conference was seized on by the misleadingly titled group Student Rights, which in fact includes few if any students and functions as a front organisation for the right-wing propaganda organisation the Henry Jackson Society. They launched their attack on Warsi with a piece (“FOSIS conference at the House of Lords hides its promotion of extremists”) that appeared on the Student Rights website on 3 April. Tellingly, the first of their objections to Warsi’s participation was that “FOSIS openly endorse a boycott of Israel”, which Student Rights held to be an example of FOSIS’s “divisive methods”. They then went on to accuse FOSIS of associating with “extremists” such as Hamza Tzortzis of iERA, the Muslim group who were recently the victims of a stitch-up over a meeting at University College London, and of questioning the reliability of the conviction of Dr Aafia Siddique.
An Islamic council which mediates on Muslim marriages has defended itself after a member of staff was secretly filmed telling a woman complaining of domestic violence to only go to the police as a “last resort”.
The Islamic Sharia Council, in Francis Road, Leyton, was investigated by the BBC’s Panorama documentary series this week following allegations it was ruling on cases it had no legal authority to get involved in.
Well, that’s what Brendan O’Neill argues at the Telegraph. He asserts that there is no sign of any mass outbreak of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States following the Boston bombing. But then, O’Neill is part of a political tendency – formerly the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party but now organised around the right-wing libertarian online magazine spiked, whose adherents have long argued that Islamophobia is a myth.
The government is “finally dealing” with Islamophobia in the UK, the minister for faith and communities has said in a personal film made for the BBC.
Baroness Warsi visited the Altrincham Islamic Cultural Centre and heard from trustee Amjad Latif about relations with the local community, and attacks on people and buildings.
The former Conservative Party chairman looked at problems relating to attacks and discrimination against ethnic communities, and recalled her description of the ‘dinner table test’.
Dawkins’ comment, tweeted yesterday, is a belated response to this article published in the News Statesman last December.
T
hat’s the headline to a report in the Guardian. Essentially, it’s just a repeat of the nonsense that was published about the iERA debate at University College London last month, although this story concerns an iERA meeting at the University of Leicester.
To the credit of the authorities at that university, and in contrast to their counterparts at UCL, they appear to have taken a stand against this ignorant and bigoted witch-hunting. Contrary to the headline, Leicester University has launched no formal inquiry into the allegation that gender separation was enforced at the iERA meeting.
A university spokesperson is quoted as saying: “The University will not interfere with people’s right to choose where to sit. If some people choose to sit in a segregated manner because of their religious convictions then they are free to do so. By the same token, if people attending do not wish to sit in a segregated manner, they are free to do so.”