Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Baroness Cox claims Sun misrepresented her views on sharia law

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Baroness Cox with David HorowitzRichard Bartholomew draws our attention to the interesting news that the Sun and Daily Mail have withdrawn their reports of Baroness Cox’s speech at the Christian Broadcasting Council symposium at the House of Lords earlier this week, in which she warned of the threat from sharia law in the UK.

An email from Cox replying to a complaint about her reported statements on sharia has been posted on Expose. It reads: “Thank you for your email of yesterday, raising your concern over the words printed in the Sun newspaper (21 March) which were attributed to me. I emphasise that I did not make the remark and the Sun has apologised to me personally and I hope will publish a correction.”

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More on Baroness Cox and the threat of sharia law

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CBC House of Lords Symposium

It turns out that the meeting at the House of Lords on Monday where Baroness Cox made her hysterical claims about the threat of sharia law was the annual symposium of the Christian Broadcasting Council, of which Cox is vice-president. It was titled “Islamist Resurgence: Shari’a and freedom” and Cox was billed as speaking “on matters arising out of her Private Members Bill on Gender Equality and Shari’a”.

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‘Ken Livingstone: I will make London a beacon of Islam’ (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ken Livingstone has promised to turn London into a “beacon” for the words of the Prophet Mohammed in a sermon at one of the capital’s most controversial mosques.

Mr Livingstone, Labour’s candidate for mayor of London, pledged to “educate the mass of Londoners” in Islam, saying:  “That will help to cement our city as a beacon that demonstrates the meaning of the words of the Prophet.” Mr Livingstone described Mohammed’s words in his last sermon as “an agenda for all humanity.”

He praised the Prophet’s last sermon, telling his audience: “I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands [its] words and message.” He also promised to “make your life a bit easier financially.”

Mr Livingstone was speaking at last Friday’s Jummah prayer at the North London Central Mosque, also known as Finsbury Park Mosque, formerly controlled by the terrorist recruiter Abu Hamza.

Hamza was removed in 2003 but the mosque is now controlled by an Islamist organisation, the Muslim Association of Britain, which has been linked to the banned terror group, Hamas.

Andrew Gilligan’s Telegraph blog, 19 March 2012

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Do young British Muslims support ‘honour’ violence?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily Mail honour violence

Here is a classic piece of Islamophobic reporting by the Daily Mail, featuring the paper’s usual contempt for factual accuracy when it comes to coverage of the Muslim community.

Headlined “More than two thirds of young British Muslims believe ‘honour’ violence is acceptable, survey reveals”, the article begins: “Most young British Muslims support violence against women who ‘dishonour’ their families, a Panorama investigation will claim today.”

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Islamophobia, violence and the far right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniel Trilling has an interesting article in today’s Guardian. Responding to the findings in the new report From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, Trilling asks: “Is Britain’s far right preparing for armed conflict? And could a catastrophe of the kind that struck Norway last summer be on its way here?” He writes:

As electoral success has melted away since the BNP’s collapse at the 2010 general election, the hardcore is now left exposed. At the same time, a younger generation has been attracted to the adrenaline-pumping street politics of the English Defence League, which adapts its language to better suit the realities of multicultural modern Britain. It claims merely to oppose “militant Islam”, but its supporters have carried out numerous violent attacks on Asian Britons, on their shops, homes and places of worship. Shut out from mainstream politics, some far-right supporters may well turn to violence, seeing it as the only way to achieve their goals. Indeed, it has happened in this country before – most recently in 1999, when David Copeland, a neo-Nazi who had drifted through the BNP, set off a series of nail bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, killing three people and maiming 129.

However, Trilling argues that the main threat from the far right is not political violence and terrorism but rather the impact of its ideas on wider society:

The greater danger remains where it always has done: in the elements of far-right propaganda that overlap with mainstream political sentiment. Few people in Britain would agree that race war is on its way, but how many would agree that immigration has gone “too far”; that multiculturalism has failed or that the west is locked in a “clash of civilisations” with Islam?

By his murderous actions in Norway last summer, Anders Breivik has become the new face of far-right terror. Yet he did not tear Norway’s society apart in the way that, say, the rhetoric of Geert Wilders threatens to do in Holland. There, his nonviolent Freedom party has been able to extract reactionary anti-Muslim concessions from the Dutch coalition government in return for support on economic policies. In France, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen has made halal meat a major issue in the presidential election, and encouraged Nicolas Sarkozy to compete with her furiously in the immigrant-bashing stakes.

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US atheist group targets Muslims and Jews

Posted on by Bob Pitt

American Atheists logoCNN reports that the American Atheists organisation are targeting Muslim and Jewish communities with billboards in Arabic and Hebrew describing God as a “myth”.

“We are not trying to inflame anything,” American Atheists president Dave Silverman is quoted as saying. “We are trying to advertise our existence to atheists in those communities. The objective is not to inflame but rather to advertise the atheist movement in the Muslim and Jewish community.”

Yeah, right.

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Fury as judge dismisses charges against Muslim who ‘attacked’ man wearing ‘Zombie Muhammad’ Halloween costume

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Under this headline the Daily Mail takes up the case of Ernest Perce, Pennsylvania director of American Atheists, who claimed to have been assaulted by an angry Muslim while dressed as a “Zombie Muhammad” on a Halloween parade last year. At a court hearing Judge Mark Martin dismissed the charges against the alleged assailant, one Talaag Elbayomy.

The Mail reports: “The American Atheists organisation criticised the decision as ‘completely and unequivocally unacceptable’. It posted on its blog: ‘That a Muslim immigrant can assault a United States citizen in defence of his religious beliefs and walk away a free man, while the victim is chastised and insulted by a Muslim judge who then blamed the victim for the crime committed against him is a horrible abrogation….'”

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Welcome to Britain, where all people are protected from prejudice, unless they are white

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melissa KiteYes, apparently it’s the white majority population who are the main victims of prejudice in the UK. So former Sunday Telegraph deputy editor Melissa Kite, writing on the Daily Mail‘s RightMinds blog, asks us to believe.

The basis for this nonsense is the case of Fireman Sam creator David Jones, who claims that he was questioned for an hour by security staff after making a “light-hearted remark” about a veiled Muslim woman while passing through a scanner at Gatwick airport.

Needless to say, despite the lack of any independent confirmation of Jones’ account, neither Kite’s blog post nor the Telegraph and Mail reports on which it was based saw fit to question whether his version of events was accurate. But why bother with an objective assessment of the evidence when there’s an opportunity to smear Muslims and promote the racist myth that white people are being discriminated against in the interests of appeasing minority communities?

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Atheist crank condemns Muslim ‘brainwashing’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Terry Sanderson NSSUnder the headline “Muslims more successful at enforcing their religion from generation to generation”, the National Secular Society offers its take on the recently published study of Religious nurture in Muslim families carried out by the School of Social Sciences and Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at Cardiff University.

The BBC report pointed out that the authors of the study “said research suggested religion helps minority communities”. They were quoted as stating that “for minority ethnic populations, religion can be an important resource in bolstering a sense of cultural distinctiveness” and that it “can have an especially important role for minority communities in keeping together the bonds between families from the same ethnic background”.

So, not a study whose conclusions would find favour with the National Secular Society, you might think. The response of the NSS, however, is to ignore the Cardiff researchers’ positive assessment of the impact of Islam on Muslim communities and dogmatically reassert their own uniformly negative view of the role of faith in society.

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Ray Honeyford – is he still Boris Johnson’s hero?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Today’s Daily Telegraph has an editorial endorsing the views of the late Ray Honeyford, the former Bradford head teacher whose racist statements were widely condemned in the 1980s.

According to the Telegraph, Honeyford merely “believed that multiculturalism was doing a disservice to children from immigrant backgrounds, who were denied the benefits of full integration with the society into which they would grow up”. The editorial denounces the “vilification of Mr Honeyford”, which supposedly “played into the hands of extremists seeking to foment discord, such as Abu Qatada”. It claims that the lesson to be drawn from the controversy is that “shutting down debate about cultural assimilation is short-sighted and dangerous”.

These arguments are no doubt familiar to Telegraph readers. Back in 2006 one of the paper’s columnists wrote an article that took a similar line on Honeyford and multiculturalism. In an attack on the then Labour home secretary the columnist wrote:

… here is how John Reid could prove that he was really tough. Here is the bravest thing he could possibly say. He should say that the real problem in our society, and the reason we have so many disaffected and alienated Muslim youths, is that for a generation he and people like him supported the disastrous multicultural agenda. The reason that 40 per cent of British Muslims would like some form of Sharia law in this country is that the Left has traditionally deprecated British institutions and even the teaching of English. A truly brave John Reid would now publicly grovel to Ray Honeyford, the Bradford head who called for teaching in English and who was vilified and persecuted by the Left.

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