Category Archives: Left Wing

Anti-Semitism is ’embedded in many of the political manifestations of Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Alasdair Palmer reviews Denis MacShane’s new book Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism:

“Anti-Semitism – virulent, violent anti-Semitism – is flourishing, principally because it is embedded in many of the political manifestations of Islam….

“If we are going to defend liberal values in Britain – if we are not to allow the ‘Endarkenment’, as MacShane calls the encroachment of fundamentalism – to erode the existence of a tolerant, secular society, then we have to fight bigotry, dogma and lies wherever they manifest themselves.

“Bigotry, dogma and lies are three of the essential planks of anti-Semitism in all its forms, and so long as radical Islam has anti-Semitism at its heart, it will be incompatible with any decent social order. That’s the message of MacShane’s book. I hope it is one that we all take to heart.”

Daily Telegraph, 13 November 2008

No hijab at schools: UK minister

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasOnly two weeks in his post, Britain’s new immigration minister believes that hijab should not be allowed at British schools. “People wear veils for different reasons: some out of religious conviction. some because they’re forced to. It should be up to them,” Phil Woolas told The Times on Saturday, October 18. “But at school you shouldn’t wear one. It’s harder to get a good education if you wear a veil as you’re more cut off.”

Islam Online, 18 October 2008

Islamophobia Watch hesitates to defend Phil Woolas, but to be fair we think he was talking about a ban on the niqab rather than the headscarf (not that we’d support that either, of course). But he should be asked to clarify his remarks.

Incidentally, we can’t help noting that Woolas’s Times interview, with its call for “a tougher immigration policy” and unpleasant talk about “putting British people first” and “not pandering to Hampstead liberals” over immigration, is reproduced with evident approval by Searchlight on their Stop the BNP site. Presumably they, like Woolas himself, think that the way to stop fascism is to adopt the fascists’ own rhetoric.

Shari’a law called ‘racist, backward’ at meeting of ex-Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Council of ex-MuslimsLondon — Sweeping legal challenges must be made against the creeping introduction of Islamic law (shari’a) in the United Kingdom, the head of a new body of former Muslims said here Friday. The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, a group bringing together former adherents of the Islamic faith as well as humanists, held its first international conference in London. Several speakers decried the rise of what they called “political Islam” across Europe.

CNSNews.com, 13 October 2008

That would be this so-called Council of Ex-Muslims. Its conference brought together members of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (who were responsible for launching the organisation) along with militant atheists and secularists. With the exception of Ibn Warraq, there was scarcely an ex-Muslim in sight.

Update:  See also the Guardian, which for some reason has given space to A.C Grayling to promote this fraud.

MPACUK criticises Woolas appointment

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasMuslim groups expressed anger last night after a Labour politician who has been at the centre of a series of race controversies was made Immigration Minister.

Phil Woolas, previously an Environment Minister, was handed the brief despite infuriating the Pakistani community earlier this year by warning they were fuelling birth defects by inter-marrying. He also caused anger following the Oldham race riots by calling for “the reality of anti-white racism” to be acknowledged.

Last night, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee condemned his appointment. A spokesman said: “Phil Woolas has a track record of insensitive, inappropriate outbursts that have verged on Islamophobia. He is a Minister clearly out of his depth. We will monitor his work for any more signs of his all too obvious antipathy towards British Muslims.”

Mail on Sunday, 5 September 2008

Not so Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a recent post on his New Statesman blog Martin Bright takes issue with an article written by the notorious Holocaust denier Lady Michele Renouf who, he reports, “develops the most detailed description yet of the Zionist conspiracy of which I am supposed to be a part”. Bright’s piece is headed “Where the hard left and extreme right meet”, and he claims that Renouf’s article is “almost indistinguishable from the attacks on me from supporters of Ken Livingstone and the likes of Islamophobia Watch”.

Really? We’ve written quite a lot about Martin Bright over the years and you can check it all out here. We challenge Bright to produce a single post in which we’ve depicted him, à la Renouf, as part of some “Zionist conspiracy”. If Bright wants to polemicise against Islamophobia Watch, surely he could come up with something slightly less stupid than this.

Renouf’s position – she has a soft spot for the Islamic Republic of Iran because it organised a conference on the Holocaust which provided a platform for nutters like herself to promote their “revisionist” gobbledegook – is in any case hardly typical of the extreme right.

Nick Griffin of the British National Party – the only far-right organisation of any size and influence in the UK – no doubt had people like Renouf in mind when he condemned “those ‘hardliners’ who would rather attack the Jews than the Muslims”. He continued: “To even hint of making common cause with Islam – or put ourselves in a position when opponents can suggest to the masses that this is the case – is political insanity.” Instead, Griffin told BNP members: “We should be positioning ourselves to take advantage for our own political ends of the growing wave of public hostility to Islam currently being whipped up by the mass media.”

A wave of public hostility, we might add, to which the self-confessed Islamophobe, Martin Bright (“there is a lot in Islam to be afraid of”, as he explained to a FOSIS conference at City Hall a few years ago), has made a far from negligible contribution. And the BNP is happy to acknowledge his efforts. In 2006 the fascists applauded a Channel 4 documentary by Bright which chimed in with their own poisonous propaganda about the threat posed by mainstream Muslim organisations in Britain:

“Martin Bright of the New Statesman illustrated how the MCB which purports to be a ‘moderate’ organisation actually represents the most extreme and militant Islamic fundamentalists with links to the Jamaat al Islami [sic] and the Muslim Brotherhood which is itself linked to terror groups and has defended them.”

A case of “where liberal Islamophobes and the extreme right meet”, you might say.

SIF cleared over grants

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Islamic organisation with close connections to the SNP has been cleared by public spending watchdog Audit Scotland for the way it won Scottish Government grants. The Scottish Islamic Foundation is led by Osama Saeed, a Westminster candidate for the Scottish National Party, with an SNP researcher at Holyrood doubling as its spokesman.

Lord George Foulkes, a Labour MSP for Lothian, wrote to Audit Scotland asking it to investigate the grants. Auditors found that an application for running an event to celebrate Islamic culture and promote Scotland in Muslim countries was dealt with by officials in the Race, Religion and Refugee Integration Grant Scheme and met the criteria.

Herald, 4 September 2008

‘Decents’ on the Muslim threat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Why is this man regarded any more favourably than Pat Robertson or Stephen Green’s Christian Voice?”

The question is posed by one Max Dunbar in the current issue of Democratiya, house journal of the “decent left”, and the man in question is Tariq Ramadan.

This sort of thing does our job for us. As we’ve remarked in the past, those who promote the view that Professor Ramadan represents some sort of fundamentalist threat to Western society discredit themselves more effectively than we ever could.

Continue reading →

MPs too scared of Muslim voters to challenge forced marriage, claims Cryer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ann CryerPoliticians are too scared to speak out against forced marriage in case they lose valuable Muslim votes, according to a veteran Labour MP.

Ann Cryer said politicians in areas with high Muslim populations, many of which are Labour heartlands, should be at the forefront of the campaign to stop young couples being made to wed against their will by their families. Mrs Cryer said:

“There still is a nervousness to talk about this, especially those MPs in constituencies affected by these issues.They should be fighting on the front line, but they are the ones keeping quiet on the issue because they don’t want to lose votes.

“Some of the Muslim leaders in my area are doing their communities a disservice and trying to keep them in the backwoods. They don’t seem to have any understanding about the importance of having integration and cohesion, or to promote women to leadership roles in the community.”

However Mrs Cryer’s claims have been dismissed by Khalid Mahmood, the Muslim Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. He claimed that MPs would not be so easily swayed by the perceived opinions of their constituents, and pointed out that many politicians supported the war in Iraq despite opposition from Muslim voters.

Mr Mahmood said: “In terms of being scared, I think that’s complete nonsense. Most MPs will speak their minds because that’s what they’re there for and most of them are strong enough characters. People do things because they believe in them, not because of this cynical reason. If that was the case, MPs would have stood up against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.”

He added: “I’ve been adamantly against forced marriage and people have supported me in that. We’ve also got a rigid system with the embassy in Islamabad now and although it is an issue, it’s not an epidemic as Ann sometimes makes it out to be.”

Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2008

Jim Fitzpatrick calls for ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir

Posted on by Bob Pitt

KhilafahA government minister has condemned a decision by radical Muslims to stage their annual party conference in London’s East End on Saturday.

Labour’s Transport Minister Jim Fitzpatrick said the Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, which wants Britain to be an “Islamic” state, was being deliberately divisive choosing Stepney for its conference.

The Poplar & Canning Town MP’s comments were backed by Tower Hamlets Tory Opposition councillor Tim Archer, who described Hizb ut-Tahrir’s decision as “disgusting.”

Their conference, Khilafah, The Need for Political Unity, comes a week after Tower Hamlets’ new borough police commander Paul Rickett warned that extremists could be targeting “vulnerable” members of the East End’s large Bengali population.

MP Mr Fitzpatrick told the Advertiser that he had “no time” for Hizb ut-Tahrir, an outfit former Prime Minister Tony Blair considered banning. “There’s a strong feeling they should be banned,” said Mr Fitzpatrick. “It’s an organisation that preaches intolerance and division and there should be no place for it.”

East London Advertiser, 14 August 2008

The Blears fallacy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumaya Ghannoushi2“The communities’ secretary seems to be pursuing an increasingly hawkish policy towards the Muslim minority. A few days ago, she gave a provocative and rather bizarre speech fittingly delivered from the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, which was last year discredited by the BBC’s Newsnight for its fabricated mosque report. Blears announced a long list of conditions which Muslim organisations must meet if they are to enjoy government recognition, or ‘legitimisation’.

“Hearing Blears demand the recognition of Israel, it was difficult to tell whether one was listening to a foreign, or communities’ secretary, and whether those she had been targeting were diplomats and foreign ministers, or communities and British citizens. And when she echoed former Policy Exchange chairman Charles Moore’s criticisms of the IslamExpo, recently held in Olympia, for giving floor space to the ‘genocidal’ government of Iran – one of 15 Muslim countries represented at the event – one couldn’t help wondering if her government had just cut off diplomatic ties with Tehran, and closed its embassy in London.

“Brown’s government, like its predecessor, seems unable to relinquish the old approach to communities based on the systems and methods of the colonial era. Minorities are to be managed through many sticks, a few carrots, and a handful of engineered political and religious representatives. These are the modern-day versions of the local intermediaries on whom colonial administrations relied in the control of indigenous populations. The rule is simple. To win recognition, you must lose any independence. You must turn into the government’s eyes, ears and arms in your community, nothing more.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at Comment is Free, 25 July 2008