Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Press whips up Islamophobia over spoof call for ban on Peppa Pig

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Metro Peppa Pig ban (2)

Not content with their annual campaign to cancel Christmas, Muslims are demanding a ban on the popular children’s cartoon series Peppa Pig, because it is an “insult to Islam”. Or so you would conclude if you believed reports published yesterday by the Metro and Mirror.

According to this story, which quickly spread across the internet, a British Muslim named Zayn Sheikh had posted a Youtube video calling for a campaign to ban the children’s cartoon character after it inspired his young son to want to be a pig rather than a doctor. Instead, Sheikh argued, Muslims should be promoting an alternative cartoon of his own creation called Abdullah the Cat.

Pamela Geller was among those who swallowed the story whole. “On the day after a Muslim beheaded an elderly woman in broad daylight as she was gardening”, an indignant Geller wrote, “you would think that Muslims in the UK would be anxious to prove that they were a loyal, non-lethal population. No, instead they’re more demanding and supremacist than ever, now calling for a ban on a cartoon pig.”

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Dawkins links to ‘Horrific Muslim Infiltration of Britain’ video

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard Dawkins links to Horrific Muslim Infiltration of Britain video

Celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins has tweeted a link to a Youtube video featuring a demonstration in Luton by Anjem Choudary’s gang of provocateurs.

The video is a clip from the 2012 BBC documentary My Hometown Fanatics: Stacey Dooley Investigates, which was flawed in itself, not least because it gave credence to English Defence League views on Choudary’s group without sufficiently emphasising how small and unrepresentative it is.

But the objection isn’t so much to the content of the Youtube video as to the title it has been given. It tells us a lot about Dawkins that he finds a reference to “the horrific Muslim infiltration of Britain” unobjectionable.

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Another flop for the fascists in Cricklewood

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anti-SEA protest August 2014

Today the far-right South East Alliance staged a demonstration in Cricklewood, for the third time this year. They claimed to be protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood, who were once supposed to have an office there. As before, a large number of anti-fascists turned out for a counter-demo organised North West London United, among them Brent Council leader Muhammed Butt and London Assembly member Murad Qureshi.

It wasn’t looking good for the SEA, with a mere 15 “patriots” taking to the streets to resist the threat of Islamo-fascism. Having eventually managed to drag themselves out of the pub, they gathered on Cricklewood Broadway shortly after 1pm and seemed rather uncertain as to why they were there, shouting about Muslim grooming gangs and Muslim paedos. What that had to do with the Muslim Brotherhood was unclear.

Things picked up a bit for them an hour or so later when SEA leader Paul Pitt/Prodromou arrived with some more supporters, bringing flags and a few sheets of A4 paper with the words “Ban the Muslim Brotherhood” printed on them. The SEA’s banner was unfurled, featuring the slogan “One nation, one aim, one future” (presumably inspired by “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”), alongside those of two other far-right groupuscules, the Scottish Defence League and Scottish Volunteer Force.

The SEA hung around for another hour, during which they shouted incoherent abuse at the counter-demonstrators and delivered a couple of speeches nobody but themselves could hear. They were then escorted out of Cricklewood under police protection.

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Former BBC presenter rants about ‘Rotherham p*kis’, denounces ‘horrific Muslim infiltration of Britain’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sam MasonA former BBC presenter sacked following a racist call to a taxi firm has been criticised for a series of Facebook comments – slamming Rotherham “P*kis”.

Ex glamour model Sam Mason, 45, was removed from her position as a local radio host after asking a cab company to send a ‘non-Asian driver’. She has now taken to Facebook and launched a racist tirade about the sex abuse scandal in Rotherham where the perpetrators were Asian.

In one post, on the public page, she said: “Dirty dirty filthy p*ki Rotherham bastards. Some p*ki woman is blaming the government for not looking after the p*ki community! Wtf is that all about? Jesus Christ. Now, anyone i offended by booking my daughter a taxi can you please fuck off.” (sic)

Mason was sacked from BBC Radio Bristol in 2008 after a recording of her conversation with a taxi operator was handed to The Sun newspaper. She was booking a taxi for her 14-year-old daughter when she said:  “A guy with a turban is going to freak her out. She’s not used to Asians.”

When the operator said it would not be possible to carry out her wishes, she said: “You’ve managed it before.” She was then refused a cab and was told: “We would class that as being racist. We can’t just penalise the Asian drivers and just send an English one.”

Mason has now shocked friends and followers were her latest outbursts.

She posts a link to a four-minute video entitled “The Horrific Muslim Infiltration Of Britain – Luton 2012”. She writes: “If in any doubt, watch this. Rotherham is just the tip of the ice berg. How many of these are in Syria fighting for IS? Don’t let the b*****ds back. F**k PC.”

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Lock up Muslims who travel to Syria, says Boris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Conservative Party Conference ContinuesLondon mayor Boris Johnson devotes his column in today’s Daily Telegraph (“Do nothing, and we invite the tide of terror to our front door”) to the murder of James Foley and ISIS’s success in extending its control over areas of Syria and Iraq.

Johnson asserts that we “need to be far more effective in preventing British and other foreigners from getting out there”.

In order to suggest that this is a specifically British issue, he adds sarcastically: “I am interested to see how many Belgians are there.” Obviously not interested enough to check the figures, though. A report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation estimated that, as of December 2013, up to 296 Belgians had travelled to Syria to participate in the resistance to Assad. The figure for the UK was 366.

Johnson, however, apparently knows better than the ICSR’s researchers how many fighters from the UK are in Syria. He tells his readers that there are “perhaps five or six hundred Britons currently out there”. Where he gets that statistic from is unclear. Five hundred – the figure suggested by Sir Peter Fahey of ACPO – is at the top of the range of official estimates of the number of people who have gone to Syria to join the opposition forces since the outbreak of civil war there in 2011.

It is thought that half of these individuals have since returned to the UK, while as many as 40 fighters have lost their lives. So the number of people still out there is probably little more than a couple of hundred. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that the majority of them joined ISIS rather than the other anti-Assad opposition forces – who have been engaged in armed conflict not just with Assad’s regime but with ISIS too.

The majority of young Muslims who travelled to Syria would have been motivated, not by the desire to join a murderous gang of fanatics, but by the entirely admirable wish to defend the Syrian people against the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. It seems likely, therefore, that the number of UK citizens who have joined ISIS is in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Not that any of this enters into Johnson’s assessment of the situation. He writes: “The police can and do interview the returnees, but it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.”

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South Park creator sings song at ‘Ground Zero mosque’ protest – shock revelation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The report by the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero on yesterday’s right-wing protest against the Park51 development features the astonishing news that “Trey Parker sang his original song about stopping the Ground Zero Mosque”. Presumably they mean Trade Martin. Martin’s song has been ridiculed as the sort of tasteless parody that the creators of South Park might come up with, and it would appear that the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero agrees.

Khalid Mahmood helps right-wing press whip up Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Times and Express front pages

These are the front page headlines from two of today’s newspapers.

The Times headline parrots an earlier Newsweek article entitled “‘Twice as many’ British Muslims fighting for ISIS than in UK armed forces”. The source for this claim is Khalid Mahmood MP, who is a member of the Political Council of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society and has a record of scaremongering over extremism within the Muslim community, most recently during the so-called “Trojan Horse” witch-hunt of schools in Birmingham.

Mahmood told Newsweek that at least 1,500 young British Muslims have been recruited by extremists fighting in Iraq and Syria over the past three years, whereas there are only 600 Muslims serving in the armed forces (the official figure is in fact 640).

There has been a systematic campaign by the British media to exaggerate the threat posed by young Muslims who have left the UK to fight in Syria, but nobody other than Mahmood himself, who offers no evidence at all to back up his claim, has ever suggested there are anything like 1,500 of them.

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Fascists unite to oppose mosque in New Addington

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP New Addington mosque meetingNotice announcing the cancellation of the BNP meeting, and Richard Edmonds addressing the audience with Cliff Le May looking on

Last week Labour and Conservative politicians in New Addington, including local Tory MP Gavin Barwell, united to issue an admirably firm statement opposing an anti-mosque campaign by the far-right British National Party. The fascists were not happy. They accused the statement’s signatories of “putting ethnic minority groups before the indigenous Brits” and setting aside their political differences to “conspire on an issue they all very much agree on – the Islamisation of Britain”.

The joint statement was important for its exposure of the BNP’s central role in the anti-mosque campaign, which has reportedly been run by the party’s Croydon & Sutton organiser John Clarke. The BNP itself has tried to play down its involvement, claiming that it was merely responding to a local initiative, having been “approached by concerned residents seeking the BNP’s knowledge and experience in dealing with proposed mosques popping up in every town and village in our green and pleasant land”.

As one of the BNP’s opponents told the Inside Croydon blog: “They are pretending to run a community campaign, claiming it’s not political. They are leafleting, knocking on doors, as well as running a street stall once or twice per week.”

The culmination of the BNP’s fraudulent “community campaign” was to be a public meeting on Sunday at the Addington Community Association centre. However, the ACA cancelled the booking, apparently in response to pressure from Croydon council, leaving the BNP without a venue. But they arrived at the ACA anyway and held their meeting outside the building, self-righteously complaining that they were the innocent victims of an attack on free speech.

Very few of those mythical local residents who had supposedly turned to the BNP for leadership actually turned up for the meeting. Considering that the party claimed to have persuaded two thousand people to sign its anti-mosque petition, and had invited them all to attend, the level of support was derisory. Inside Croydon estimated the numbers at “fewer than 30”. Nor were any “concerned residents” represented on the platform, which consisted of just two speakers, both of them notorious fascists.

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Mordechai Kedar joins Geller at pro-Israel, anti-Islam rally

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mordechai Kedar at AFDI rally August 2014Yesterday Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative held a rally in Union Square, New York, under the slogan “We the living support Israel”.

In an apparent attempt to boost turnout – even Geller must be aware that the vast majority of New York’s Jewish community, including committed supporters of the state of Israel, will have nothing to do with her – the event was subtitled “And minorities persecuted under Islamic rule”.

According to Geller, an individual who enjoys at best a tenuous relationship with reality, the event attracted “thousands” of AFDI supporters, though it’s odd that her website contains no pictures of this vast throng. From photographic evidence, it looks as though the attendance was at most a couple of hundred. A report at the Huffington Post puts it at “around 150”.

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