Category Archives: Left Wing

French MPs to denounce Muslim veils, ban later

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s parliament is likely to call in a resolution for a ban on Muslim face veils in public but take longer to turn that policy into law, deputies said on Thursday.

A parliamentary commission studying the sensitive issue, which has been discussed alongside a wider public debate about French national identity launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is due to publish its recommendations next Tuesday.

Polls say most voters want a legal ban on full-length face veils, known here by the Afghan term burqa although the few worn in France are Middle Eastern niqabs showing the eyes. Critics say a law would stigmatize Muslims and be unenforceable.

Jean-Francois Cope, parliamentary floor leader for Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party, told France Inter radio said the plan was for “a resolution to explain and then a law to decide.” A parliamentary resolution would not be legally binding.

Andre Gerin, head of the commission, agreed that deputies needed more time to draft a law, but told the daily Le Figaro: “The ban on the full facial veil will be absolute.”

Police reports say fewer than 2,000 women in France wear full veils, but deputies such as Gerin – whose constituency in Lyon has many Muslim residents – insist this is a growing trend that Paris must legislate to stop in its tracks.

Gerin said France also had to deal with “the French Taliban who force women to be veiled. By ‘Taliban’ I mean the husband, big brother, family, even the neighborhood, because there is a kind of sharia (Islamic law) in some areas. The full veil is the visible part of this black tide of fundamentalism.”

Reuters, 21 January 2010

Denis MacShane tries to witch-hunt Azzam Tamimi … and fails

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Birmingham University has been accused of allowing “a notorious Jew-hater and supporter of terrorist attacks” to speak to students at an event on campus. MP Denis MacShane has written to the university’s Vice Chancellor urging him to cancel a planned talk by Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian-born academic and supporter of terror group Hamas. But the university has refused to intervene, saying the talk should go ahead in the name of freedom of speech.

A spokesman said: “The University of Birmingham has a code of practice on freedom of speech on campus, and those seeking to invite outside speakers onto campus must fill in a freedom of speech request form at least 15 days before the proposed event. The University has received a freedom of speech request from the Islamic Society for Azzam Tamimi to speak on campus and the event will go ahead as planned.

“Universities are plural societies which are home to differences of opinion, debate and views. The University of Birmingham hosts many visitors and events every year and itself is a community of 150 nations situated in a vibrant multi-cultural city. We respect the right of all individuals to exercise freedom of speech within the law; we are also intolerant of discrimination of any kind.”

Birmingham Post, 19 January 2010

Ed Balls accused of ‘double standards’ over mosque schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Schools Secretary Ed Balls has been accused of refusing to ban Islamic schools from smacking children for fear of upsetting Muslim “sensitivities”.

Mr Balls was last week urged to close a legal loophole which gives teachers in Britain’s estimated 1,600 schools associated with mosques the right to smack children – even though it is banned in other schools. He refused, prompting claims that he is allowing an alleged “culture of physical abuse” in some of the mosque schools – or madrasahs – go unchecked.

Smacking is banned in all State and private schools. However, it does not apply to madrasahs, where pupils usually study in the evenings or at weekends, because the ban exempts schools where children attend for less than 12.5 hours per week.

Lib Dem schools spokesman David Laws, who is spearheading the campaign to close the smacking loophole, said: “The Government needs to legislate to protect children – not leave an opt-out simply because it fears some ethnic or religious backlash.”

He was supported by Labour MP Ann Cryer, who said it would be “bonkers” if the Government did not act. She said: “I suspect people are frightened of upsetting the sensitivities of certain members of the Muslim faith.” She denied she was biased against Islamic schools and said classes run by “strange Christian sects” should also be covered by the smacking ban.

A spokesman for Mr Balls’ department denied that his refusal to change the law was based on fears of upsetting Muslim opinion. “We have no evidence the law is being abused or that children are being abused in these circumstances,” he said.

Mail on Sunday, 17 January 2010

If there are any double standards here, they are on the part of Ann Cryer, who is not proposing that the law should be extended to cover Sunday schools run by the Church of England, for example – only to classes run by mosques and “strange Christian sects”, which she evidently regards at the religious equivalent of Islam.

As you might expect, the Mail article has been approvingly reproduced over at Jihad Watch.

What is wrong with this ‘Muslim Eton’?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Bishop of Burnley wants the school placed elsewhere, lest it inflame local bigots. Is that how we do things, though, Your Grace? Work out what the worst people might think and pander accordingly?

“The local MP, Gordon Prentice (Lab), says: ‘The last thing we need is single-sex, single-faith schools for girls.’ Really? The last thing? Let us assume that an all-girl faith school is going to be, relative to the average urban comprehensive, well behaved, hard working, high achieving and safe. Is that the last thing we need? If you made a list of candidates for ‘the last thing we need’, in Britain today, would that be top? …

“I just can’t find room for a girls’ faith school in my vision of a nightmare world. But I understand what the bishop and the MP are worried about. The benefit or danger of separatism is one of the huge unanswered questions about education….

“Nevertheless, Mr Prentice, beware your use of the word ‘we’. You said: ‘The last thing we need is single-sex, single-faith schools for girls.’ Who is ‘we’ in that sentence? You don’t mean teenage Muslim girls, do you? … I can’t solve the social problems of Lancashire or the big philosophical riddles of education. But I do know, when talking about Britain, that teenage Muslim girls are also ‘we’. While they are likely to grow up underrepresented in government, perhaps the last thing we need is for our existing politicians to forget that.”

Observer, 27 December 2009

Submitting anti-Muslim actions to a ‘Jewish test’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jonathan_Freedland“It’s a crude reaction but it’s the first one I had on hearing that the Swiss had voted to ban the building of minarets on mosques – the same reaction I have to the increasingly-frequent stories like it: how would I feel if this were not about them, but us? How, in other words, would I react if this latest attack were not on Muslims but on Jews?

“It’s crude because no two situations are ever exactly the same, and Muslims and Jews have different histories – in Switzerland and everywhere else. But it’s useful, allowing the testing of any proposition against an almost instinctive yardstick of decency.

“So how would I react if the Swiss voted to restrict the way synagogues are built? With horror, of course. Indeed, the mere hint of such a proposal in the heart of Europe – given the blood-soaked history of the 20th century – would send a shudder down the collective spine. That reaction alone would tell me that, on this proposal, there was only one decent place to be – against it.

“Or take Jack Straw’s campaign against the niqab in 2006. He and his supporters made what they hoped was a subtle, nuanced case against women wearing the full veil, but my first thought was much simpler. What if a government minister told ultra-orthodox Jewish men that, in their full beards, it was hard to tell them apart, or that he disliked the custom that commands ultra-orthodox Jewish women to cut off their hair, covering their heads with either a wig or a hat? No matter how subtle or nuanced his reasons, I would feel that this was, at best, an act of bullying directed at a vulnerable minority or, at worst, the first step towards something much more menacing.”

Jonathan Freedland at Comment is Free, 1 December 2009

Vote to ban minarets wasn’t necessarily Islamophobic (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SVP anti-minaret posterJoan Smith offers her profound thoughts on the result of the Swiss referendum:

“I don’t doubt that some people voted for the ban for racist reasons, but damning them all as ‘Islamophobes’ is an attempt to suppress entirely reasonable arguments about the role of religion in secular modern societies. Tariq Ramadan doesn’t use the word in his polemic but he does claim without qualification that ‘voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions’.

“Corralling a wide range of people, many of whom disagree profoundly with each other, under one great Islamophobic umbrella is a familiar tactic but it’s not conducive to civilised discussion. If the debate about the powers demanded and enjoyed by religion – all of them, not just Islam – pops up in distorted forms in European countries, it is as much the responsibility of religious apologists such as Ramadan as it is the racist right….

“Any notion of universal human rights recognises the right of individuals to practise their religion, but that isn’t incompatible with believing that religion is divisive and seeks to exercise unelected power…. If you take that position, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that public displays of religious symbols should be kept to a minimum, whether they take the form of crucifixes or hijabs. As Ian Traynor reports in today’s Guardian, the proposed ban on minarets in Switzerland received ‘substantial support on the left and among secularists worried about the status of women in Islamic cultures’.”

Comment is Free, 30 November 2009

Cf. Sholto Byrne’s comments on his New Statesman God Blog. He too notes left-wing and secularist support for the minaret ban, and observes that “it is part of the paradox of Western liberalism that its pluralism only extends so far, and that it is essentially intolerant of anything that does not stem from its own ‘definitive’ culture”.

Feminist support for Swiss minaret ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SVP campaigns for ban on minaretsA right-wing campaign to outlaw minarets on mosques in a referendum being held in Switzerland today has received an unlikely boost from radical feminists arguing that the tower-like structures are “male power symbols” and reminders of Islam’s oppression of women.

A “stop the minarets” campaign has provoked ferment in the land of Heidi, where women are more likely than men to vote for the ban after warnings from prominent feminists that Islam threatens their rights.

Forget about tranquil Alpine scenery and cowbells: one of the most startling features of the referendum campaign has been a poster showing a menacing woman in a burqa beside minarets rising from the Swiss flag. It seems to have struck a nerve in Langenthal, a small town near Bern where Muslims plan to put up a minaret next to their prayer room in a bleak former paint factory.

“If we give them a minaret, they’ll have us all wearing burqas,” said Julia Werner, a local housewife. “Before you know it, we’ll have sharia law and women being stoned to death in our streets. We won’t be Swiss any more.”

A spoof video game on the internet called Minaret Attack shows minarets popping up all over the idyllic Swiss countryside, after which a message proclaims: “Game over! Switzerland is covered in minarets. Vote to ban them on November 29.”

Socialist politicians have been furious to see icons of the left joining what is regarded as an anti-immigrant campaign by the populist Swiss People’s party, the biggest group in parliament. One of them, Julia Onken, warned that failure to ban minarets would be “a signal of the state’s acceptance of the oppression of women”. She has sent out 4,000 emails attacking Muslims who condone forced marriage, honour killings and beating women.

Sunday Times, 29 November 2009

‘Just say no to Sharia law’ urges Tatchell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tatchell No Islamic StatePeter Tatchell is given space at Comment is Free to promote the “Universal Children’s Day and International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women” demonstration on Saturday – which, despite its grandiose title, is just another stupid stunt by One Law for All, a front organisation for Mariam Namazie and the Worker Communist Party of Iran.

Tatchell writes plaintively that “the turn out in Hyde Park will probably be quite small” – which, based on previous experience, is a realistic prediction. The explanation is that anyone with a shred of political judgement baulks at stirring up Islamophobia in co-operation with a bunch of sectarian cranks like the WPI. For Tatchell, however, the problem is that leftists and liberals “get squeamish when it comes to challenging human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam”.

The WPI appeals to its supporters to “Show your opposition to Sharia law and all religious-based tribunals in Britain, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere” (emphasis added), and Tatchell himself claims that he and other supporters of Saturday’s demonstration “reject all religious laws and courts, including those inspired by Judaist and Christian fundamentalism”. Why, then, do Tatchell and the WPI concentrate exclusively on attacking Islamic religious tribunals? We never hear a peep from them about the Beth Din courts that operate within the Orthodox Jewish community, even though their rules on divorce are considerably more discriminatory against women than those of Sharia tribunals.

The reason of course is that Tatchell is less interested in women’s rights than in generating some publicity for himself by stoking the fires of anti-Muslim bigotry.

Opposition to Muslim girls’ school plan in Pendle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pland to convert the former Smith and Nephew factory in Brierfield into a Muslim girls’ school have provoked widespread opposition. Brierfield’s Mayor, Michael Sutcliff, has spoken out against the plan.Town councillor Marie Starkie also voiced her disapproval. Pendle MP Gordon Prentice has lambasted the proposal. And a leading Pendle BNP councillor has condemned the idea in a letter to this newspaper.

Birmingham-based charity Islamic Help is planning to take over the mill and use it as the Pendle Boarding School for Girls. It is estimated as many as 5,000 students would attend the school if the plans came to fruition.

Mr Sutcliff says in a letter the school would lead to Pendle being faced with “a real problem”. He says: “The local education authority has spent millions of pounds on two new schools in Pendle, one of them in Brierfield, and millions on a new college in Burnley, and this pops up. It doesn’t make sense and it wants kicking into the long grass very quickly. It is funded, I rather think, for people with a lot of sand and oil whose way of thinking doesn’t fit in with very few people here.”

British National Party councillor Brian Parker said the school and an Islamic college proposed for Burnley were not needed. “Quite apart from anyone’s view on the desirability of having two communities living side by side with little in common and divided by religion, the sheer scale of these proposals make them unsuited to our two towns.

“Six and a half thousand young women will make up a very significant proportion of the entire population. Over the years, some will doubtless settle and like any other university those over the age of 18 will be entitled to vote, affecting the political make up of the councils and even who will be the MPs. One would like a little more information about the nature of the education intended to be provided by these colleges and why Muslims wish to be educated apart from the rest of us,” he said in a letter jointly signed by John Rowe, the BNP’s prospective Parliamentary candidate in Burnley.

Pendle Today, 6 November 2009