Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Latest anti-Muslim article from the Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily Mail British man tortured by Muslim gang

This is the Daily Mail‘s latest attempt to fraudulently introduce a “Muslim” angle into a story.

We are told that the criminal gang who recently kidnapped a British citizen and held him to ransom are “believed to be Muslim”. This belief appears to be based exclusively on the reported countries of origin of some of the kidnappers (and ignores the fact that one of them is described as Ukrainian).

Needless to say, no evidence is offered to substantiate the claim that the presumed religious affiliation of these individuals had anything to do with the crime.

Quite the contrary, in fact. Right at the end of the article a Ukrainian Interior Ministry spokesman is quoted as saying: “We do not think there was any Islamic or political motive here. They were just criminals who wanted money.”

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Islamophobia comes to Putson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hereford Islamic Society centre

Although the Muslim population of Hereford is not large – according to the 2011 census there are only 360 Muslims in the whole of Herefordshire, well outnumbered by the county’s 560 Buddhists – the lack of a permanent centre for this small Muslim community has been a problem, as it has outgrown the rented premises it currently uses.

Unfortunately, the proposal to establish what would be Herefordshire’s first Muslim place of worship has faced extreme hostility from a section of the non-Muslim majority population. In 2012 the Hereford Masjid Fundraising Campaign’s Facebook page had to be taken down after being subjected to repeated abuse and threats from anti-Muslim bigots.

Despite this setback the necessary funds were raised and Hereford Islamic Society was able to purchase a vacant building on Holme Lacy Road in Putson with the aim of converting it into a small centre for the local Muslim community. In July the Hereford Times reported that a change of use planning application for the premises had been submitted. Again, this proposal was not universally well received.

Last week BBC News reported that some local residents had organised a public meeting to oppose the plan. One of them, Tracy Rock, was quoted as saying: “It’ll be overcrowded, it’s just not a suitable area for a day centre to be in.” Another opponent, Don Allan, said: “They’re going to be praying there from seven in the morning until 11 at night and we don’t really want that. It’s nothing to do with race or anything like that, just the volume of traffic.”

This objection ignores the very small numbers who would be attending the centre – a peak of around 50 at lunchtime on Friday, according to the applicants, with possibly 12 of them coming by car. There is a Tesco Express just across the road from the proposed centre which is open from 6am to 11pm every day of the week and undoubtedly generates far more traffic than the small-scale activities of Hereford Islamic Society ever could.

But let us concede that Mr Allan’s objections are not motivated by “race or anything like that”. The same cannot be said of Tracy Rock, the other opponent of the centre quoted by BBC News, who appears to have played a leading role in launching a campaign against the plan after it was announced back in July. When a Facebook friend declared “We dnt nd a bloody mosc were English not bloody islamic there takin ova slowly” and suggested stealing “the fuckin shoes they leave outside”, Rock’s reaction was to laugh and agree.

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Gove’s former Spad reveals thinking behind ‘Trojan Horse’ witch-hunt

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Birmingham Mail jihadist plotFor anyone interested in the Islamophobic mind-set that inspired the “Trojan Horse” hysteria about an “Islamist takeover” of Birmingham schools, today’s Sunday Times is worth reading. It features a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Islamist rant by one Jamie Martin, who worked as a special advisor to former education secretary Michael Gove during the period of the Birmingham witch-hunt.

Martin hails Gove’s “rare moral courage” in responding to the alleged Islamist threat there: “we acted to remove the individuals responsible from any involvement in education. We then moved to make sure Ofsted inspections took place without notice, and strengthened our powers to rapidly close schools that did not promote British values”. But then, it’s hardly surprising that Martin should take such a positive view of Gove’s actions – because, as he boastfully reveals, “it was my job to co-ordinate this response”.

Claiming that the UK is under threat from “an aggressive, anti-western belief system”, Martin enthusiastically endorses Tony Blair’s bonkers assertion that “the same ideology that drove the ‘Trojan Horse’ takeover of Birmingham’s schools, leaving children at risk of radicalisation, motivates Islamic extremists from Spain to Syria”. This ideology, Martin declares, “is Islamism, which rejects every tenet of our pluralistic society and will not compromise on its belief in a totalitarian theocracy”.

According to Martin, there has been an abject failure to confront this totalitarian Islamist threat: “Our governing elite, hamstrung by political correctness, has failed to understand or tackle it. Our Muslim communities have failed to confront it. Britain has been left as a weak link in the fight against global terror.”

As is usual in such diatribes, Martin makes no attempt to define Islamism, still less to analyse the very different tendencies that can be grouped under this broad heading. Organisations ranging from terrorists like ISIS to mass reformist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood – along with non-political groupings who adopt culturally conservative interpretations of Islam – are depicted as manifestations of a single ideology which aims at the imposition of a “totalitarian theocracy”.

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The EDL goes to Downing Street

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Downing Street demonstration with Paul Weston

Today the English Defence League brought its alcohol-fuelled racist roadshow to London, “to demand the government take firm action urgently about the many Islamic threats to this country, its people, its culture, its heritage and its future”, as they put it. Coming only a week after the EDL’s Rotherham demonstration, it was always unlikely that the event would attract large numbers.

Still, this was a national mobilisation – banners from as far away as Bournemouth, Coventry, Doncaster and Clacton-on-Sea were in evidence – and the grandiose objective of the protest was “to make an EDL spectacle big enough and clear enough to echo through the media and into the hearts and minds and conversations of millions of people in this country”. By that measure it would have to be considered a flop.

Only around 250 EDL supporters gathered in Trafalgar Square – endearing themselves to the general public by lurching around drunkenly and setting off a smoke bomb – before staggering down Whitehall for a rally opposite Downing Street, where they were confronted by a counter-protest organised by Unite Against Fascism.

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Yet more anti-Muslim scaremongering from the Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily Mail Changing Face of Britain

This article from yesterday’s Daily Mail is the latest in the newspaper’s long-running series of “Islamification of Britain” scare stories. It begins:

“There are more Muslim children than Christian growing up in Birmingham, figures show. The latest statistics, extracted from the 2011 Census, give an insight into the fast pace of demographic change across Britain. They pinpoint several parts of the country where traditional religious beliefs are being eclipsed for the first time.”

(Quite why Christianity alone should fall into the category of “traditional religious beliefs” is unclear, given that Islam along with Judaism and other minority faiths have a long historical tradition in the UK.)

We are then offered the following table to show how Christianity is being “eclipsed”:

Daily Mail Changing Face of Britain (2)

The examples selectively chosen by the Mail to demonstrate the supposed eclipse of Christianity are of course all areas with untypically large Muslim communities.

The Daily Mirror has done some number crunching of its own and points out that there is in fact a grand total of 7 local authorities across England and Wales where there are more Muslim children than Christian, compared with 340 in which Christian children outnumber Muslims.

The Mirror also notes that there are 21 local authorities where children registered as having no religion outnumber those registered as Christian, although for some reason the Mail seems less concerned about the “eclipse” of Christianity by atheism.

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The untold cases of Islamophobia in schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fourteen year olds resolutely defending hostility towards their Muslim neighbours.

When it was said that nothing justified the abuse of a woman just because she decided to dress differently, the response was that it was because “she probably has a bomb underneath her clothes”.

Muslims were openly derided as terrorists by a significant number of over zealous white students.

Students whom I later realised were themselves victims of a raucous media campaign to give them an enemy and distract them from the disfranchisement and misery faced by many of their families.

Perhaps our words and slides were just too high brow and academic for young minds to relate to.

So when a victim stood to speak honestly and emotionally of her harrowing experiences which included having dogs set upon her and her young children and having an unopened beer can thrown at her whilst she was driving, the unrelenting coldness amongst the audience remained.

Maybe the sight of a young classmate breaking down in tears after relating the incident of seeing his mother racially abused at a local supermarket over the weekend just gone would bring a modicum of sympathy. Again none was forthcoming.

Amongst the young faces and clearly in the minority young Muslim girls wearing hijabs, others without and their male compatriots sat glum faced seemingly unable to speak up or defend their rights to be treated as human beings.

Faisal Hanif recounts his experience of promoting human rights in a Rotherham secondary school.

Asian Image, 15 September 2014

Police investigate as semi-naked man in homemade burka does ice bucket challenge video while waving sausages and bacon outside Bolton mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bolton mosque ice bucket challenge (2)A video showing a semi-naked man wearing a burka while doing an ice bucket challenge outside a mosque is being investigated by police.

The clip shows the man, clutching a packet of bacon, with sausages dangling between his legs, being drenched in water outside the Zakariyya Mosque in Peace Street, Daubhill. The man, wearing only his underwear, socks and shoes and a makeshift burka, makes several offensive remarks about Islam.

Another man with him can be heard telling him to hurry up, to which the man responds that he is not scared.

The video – seen by The Bolton News – was uploaded to YouTube and Facebook but was later removed. It is believed a number of people reported the incident to police, who are now investigating the incident as a hate crime.

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Shiv Malik smears British mosques, with the assistance of the Guardian

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Guardian Isis recruitment moves to British mosques

“Isis recruitment moves on from online networks to British mosques.” Seriously, that’s the title of a report in the Guardian, of all newspapers.

We know that right-wing tabloids have a disgraceful record of publishing inflammatory headlines about British Muslims that lack any factual basis, but you might have thought a progressive broadsheet which claims to uphold journalistic standards would feel obliged to come up with some solid evidence to justify such a damaging accusation. The Guardian article provides none.

The springboard for the allegations that British mosques are being used to facilitate recruitment to a terrorist organisation is an interview with a 19-year-old ISIS supporter named Abdullah, who uses the Twitter handle JihadWitness. He is reported as saying that he “believed active recruitment was now taking place in mosques and other centres across Europe following Isis successes and their announcement that they had established a theological state, or caliphate (khilafah) spanning Syria and Iraq”. He asserts that ISIS is particularly interested in the UK where there is “a large minority of Salafis”.

Evidently the Guardian thinks it’s appropriate to give credence to unsubstantiated claims about links between British mosques and terrorism, made by some obscure jihadi sympathiser whose Twitter feed consists of a stream of admiring comments about extremists around the world, from al-Shabab in Somalia to Abdullah el-Faisal in Jamaica. Did the Guardian‘s journalists make any effort to establish that “Abdullah” is in a position to give an informed account of ISIS’s recruitment techniques in the UK, rather than being just some deluded teenage fantasist?

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