Category Archives: Left Wing

Jim Fitzpatrick attacks anti-EDL demonstration

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Former Labour Government minister Jim Fitzpatrick is accusing anti-fascist campaigners of stirring up fear in London’s East End over an aborted march that was planned by the English Defence League this Sunday.

The EDL march was called off after an Islamic conference at Stepney’s Troxy venue was cancelled. But Unite Against Fascism is urging supporters to turn up anyway at Stepney Green Park this coming Sunday for a rally.

That infuriated Mr Fitzpatrick, who told the East London Advertiser this morning: “The EDL are not coming to the East End any more. So much effort was put in by the police and local authority which got the Troxy event pulled. Yet ‘Unite Against Fascism’ is going ahead with its march that will do nothing for the community.

“At best it is causing concern in the community and at worst stirring up fear and anger. Why are they not trying to reassure the community? It is dangerous for them to use EDL as a stick to stir up the community.”

The Poplar & Limehouse MP is accusing the organisers of using the EDL for their own propaganda when the danger has passed.

Unite Against Fascism’s website this-morning says its rally at Stepney Green Park and march to Whitechapel is still going ahead on Sunday “to hammer home the message that the EDL are not welcome in Tower Hamlets.

East London Advertiser, 16 June 2011

Police escort EDL supporters out of Whitechapel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police chiefs in London’s East End are today calling for calm in the community after minor clashes in Whitechapel last night believed to involve members of the English Defence League.

Tension has been high since the EDL planned to march next Sunday to Stepney’s Troxy venue where an Islamic conference was due to take place. The EDL called off its march, claiming “victory” after the Troxy cancelled the conference. But some of its supporters were alleged to have turned up at Whitechapel last night.

Tower Hamlets deputy Police Commander Colin Morgan said in a statement: “There are rumours of anti-Muslim activity. But there is a big difference between what is actually happening and what people say is happening. I would ask community leaders to do all they can to call for calm and for people not to believe rumours which have no basis in fact.”

Organisers of a counter anti-fascist rally at Stepney Green Park are going ahead on Sunday claiming the EDL is still a threat in the East End. About 20 EDL supporters were reported to have arrived at Whitechapel Underground station last night looking for a pub, but were spotted by market traders and Asian youths.

Eye-witness Glyn Robbins, one of the rally organisers, told the East London Advertiser: “This group can’t control its membership. They came to the East End to prove their prowess, which vindicates our position. Sunday’s rally must go ahead.”

Police turned up and escorted the men inside the pub back to the Underground station.

Deputy police commander Morgan’s statement continued: “Tensions were running high between 50 youths outside the pub and a group inside who they believed to be members of the English Defence League. Officers escorted the group back to Whitechapel station to prevent disorder.”

Police were called again at 8pm to reports of EDL supporters outside the East London Mosque in Whitechapel, but found no sign of them. Instead, there was a crowd of up to 700 people. One youth was arrested for possessing a hammer, Scotland Yard later confirmed.

East London Advertiser, 15 June 2010

Meanwhile, Jim Fitzpatrick MP has denounced Unite Against Fascism for going ahead with an anti-EDL demonstration on Sunday, accusing UAF of accusing the organisers of using the EDL for their own propaganda when the danger has passed. Fitzpatrick told the East London Advertiser:

“The EDL are not coming to the East End any more…. Yet ‘Unite Against Fascism’ is going ahead with its march that will do nothing for the community. At best it is causing concern in the community and at worst stirring up fear and anger. Why are they not trying to reassure the community? It is dangerous for them to use EDL as a stick to stir up the community.”

Spanish government announces plans to ban veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cruzada contra el burkaSpain’s government plans to ban the use of the Islamic burqa in public places under a proposed new law on religious freedom, the justice minister said Tuesday.

“We believe that there are things like the burqa which are hard to reconcile with human dignity and which especially pose problems of identification in public places,” Francisco Caamano told reporters. The new law “will have to include measures on these symbols which impede identification in public places” for reasons of “security”, Caamano said.

His remarks came a day after the mayor of Barcelona, Jordi Hereu, announced it would be the first large city in Spain to ban the use of the full-face Islamic veil in public buildings.

Two other towns in the northeastern region of Catalonia, Lerida and El Venrell, have recently imposed bans on the use of the Islamic veil in public buildings. Two more, Tarragona and Gerona, are considering similar measures, as is Coin in the southern region of Andalucia.

AFP, 15 June 2010

Catalan town council to vote Friday on veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spain’s northeastern town of Lerida is to vote Friday to ban the wearing of the burqa in municipal buildings, the mayor’s office said, in an apparent first for the country.

A proposal was being drawn up and the majority socialists were behind the push to ban the face-covering Islamic veil in the municipality’s buildings, a spokesman for the mayor’s office said Wednesday.

The town had asked its legal services to look into the possibility of banning the garment in all public spaces in the name of the fundamental rights of women, the official said.

“We cannot regulate the usage of the burqa in the road, but we can do that in municipal buildings,” he said.

Few women wear the full veil in Lerida, a town in the Catalonia region that has about 140,000 residents, one-fifth of whom are immigrants including from North Africa.

AFP, 26 May 2010

Quebec: ‘secularists’ demand that religion should be excluded from the public sphere

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CCIEL logoQuebecers fought hard to free themselves from the Roman Catholic Church’s control during the Quiet Revolution and they must prevent newcomers from imposing religious values here again, speakers said last night at the start of a three-day conference on secularism.

“We must not let other religious groups bring back religious practices,” said conference organizer Djemila Benhabib, co-founder of the Collectif citoyen pour l’égalité et la laïcité (CCIEL). “The rights of women, children and homosexuals are threatened by the demands of reasonable accommodation,” Benhabib told an audience of about 225 at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Her group is part of a diverse coalition of feminists, Quebec nationalists, defenders of gay rights and anti-immigration activists calling on the government to ban all religious symbols and teachings from the public sphere.

Quebec’s Conseil du statut de la femme helped pay for the conference along with the French consulate. The movement also has support from public-sector unions and media personalities including columnists Marie-Claire Lortie of La Presse and Richard Martineau of the Journal de Montréal, who moderated panels at the conference. In March, 100 intellectuals signed a manifesto calling for Quebec to adopt a charter of secularism that would ban all vestiges of religion from the public sphere.

Montreal Gazette, 20 May 2010

Catalan town council to debate veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Spanish town is to debate calls for a ban on wearing the full-face Islamic veil in public amid growing cross-party opposition to the burqa in the country, a local party said Tuesday.

The moderate Catalan nationalists of the Convergence and Union (CiU) party proposed the ban, calling the veil “an obstacle to the dignity and integration of women in our society,” they said in a statement.

The presence in the town Lerida “of Salafist representatives (hardline Islamists) has facilitated the spread of practices incompatible with the values of sexual equality and respect for women.”

El Pais daily said the town’s socialist mayor Angel Ros has also expressed his opposition to the Islamic veil in the past.

Spain’s Labour and Immigration Minister Celestino Corbacho said Monday he was in favour of a ban on the full veil in work spaces. “Totally covering women with a piece of clothing, whatever the symbolism, completely goes against our society and stops the move towards equality between men and women,” he said.

The council debate in Lerida, a town of some 140,000 inhabitants in north east Catalonia, will take place on May 28.

Expatica, 18 May 2010

Christopher Hitchens backs French ‘burqa’ ban, compares veiled women to Ku Klux Klan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hitchens“The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa – whether the garment covers ‘only’ the face or the entire female body – are often described as seeking to impose a ‘ban’.

“To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and – no less important – equal in the face of one another….

“Ah, but the particular and special demand to consider the veil and the burqa as an exemption applies only to women. And it also applies only to religious practice (and, unless we foolishly pretend otherwise, only to one religious practice). This at once tells you all you need to know: Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith, one faith that has a very questionable record in respect of females.

“Let me ask a simple question to the pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa. What about the Ku Klux Klan? Notorious for its hooded style and its reactionary history, this gang is and always was dedicated to upholding Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity….

“Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate….

“My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.”

Christopher Hitchens at Slate, 10 May 2010

IRR publishes briefing paper on the French move to ban the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

IRR logoAs Belgium and France move to ban the burqa, the IRR European Race Audit (ERA) publishes today a briefing paper on ‘The background to the French parliamentary commission on the burqa and niqab’.

It examines how André Gerin, the Communist Party mayor of Vénissieux, ignited the debate on the voile intégral in a country where, it is estimated, that a total of 2,000 women wear the burqa. It describes the various arguments used to justify the ban from upholding laïcité to opposing the rise of Salafism and defending the freedom and dignity of women.

Institute of Race Relations news release, 28 April 2010

Download the briefing paper here.

Jack Straw apologises for 2006 ‘veil’ comments

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Take Off Your VeilAs the burqa debate raged in France this weekend, with the imposition of the first instant fine to a woman found wearing the burqa in a public place in Nantes, here in the UK former Justice Minister, Jack Straw, publicly apologised for having sparked controversy in October 2006 over making public his views that he would prefer Muslim women not to wear a face veil – or niqab – when visiting his MP’s surgery.

At a pre-election hustings event organised in Blackburn yesterday (Sunday 25th April) by ENGAGE, Jack Straw, addressing a packed hall of local Muslim residents, expressed his regret at having caused a negative media storm which he acknowledged may have adversely impacted on the Muslim community.

He said: “To be blunt, if I had realised the scale of publicity that they [his comments] received in October 2006, I wouldn’t have made them and I am sorry that it has caused problems and I offer that apology.

“Can I just say, this is about an issue of communication (you understand). I wasn’t raising it to say it [the burqa] should be banned – quite the opposite. Let me say, I’m not responsible for those in France or Germany or in this country pursuing this. That is their business. I am fundamentally opposed to what they are doing.

“But if you ask me the specific question: Do I regret the fact that it [my comments] had then got taken round the world and taken out of context? Yes of course I do and I go on seeing people – Muslim women, wearing the full veil in my constituency advice surgery. I wouldn’t dream of treating them other than with respect and I think they know from me that I do give them respect and I give them as much help as I give anybody else whatever their faith. And I am really glad to have had that opportunity to clear that up.”

ENGAGE press release, 26 April 2010

See also the Daily Mail, which reports Islamophobic rentaquote Tory MP Philip Davies as saying:

“This seems like a shameless effort to muster up some Muslim votes in his constituency. Jack Straw was more than happy to milk the publicity at the time, but now he has realised that his comments have not gone down too well with is own constituents. It is pretty desperate stuff to be apologising on the eve of a General Election when he has had plenty of opportunity to do so in the past.”

This is the same Philip Davies whose response to a 2007 legal ruling that Muslim women would be allowed to wear the veil in court was: “People are entitled to see what is going on. All this pussy-footing around, judges have no comprehension of the damage they’re doing for community cohesion by coming out with this barmy stuff.”