Category Archives: Left Wing

Tariq Ramadan – ‘dangerous radical’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_Ramadan“Fourest has rendered an invaluable service. She demonstrates with great skill that Ramadan is a dangerous radical who, far from modernizing Islam, is in fact attempting to Islamize modernity.”

Ibn Warraq reviews Caroline Fourest’s book Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.

City Journal, 29 February 2008

Note that this English language edition of Fourest’s Frère Tariq is published in the UK by the right-wing think-tank the Social Affairs Unit and features an introduction by Labour MP Denis MacShane.

See also The Australian for the controversy over Tariq Ramadan’s current visit to Australia.

Update: The Australian has commissioned Mad Melanie Phillips to deliver a characteristic rant under the headline “Master of Islamist doublespeak“, which warns the people of Australia that Professor Ramadan is “probably the most dangerous Islamist in the Western world”!

See also “MP warns scholar on racist messages“.

Headscarf row flares again in Danish parliament

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Asmaa Abdol-HamidCOPENHAGEN — Tension about the possibility of a Muslim politician addressing the Danish parliament in a headscarf has flared again, but Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen tried to calm the debate on Tuesday.

“It’s up to parliament to decide dress codes, and if some people were to get up on the podium wearing a [Muslim] headscarf, I would not leave the room,” Rasmussen told reporters. “In my opinion, people’s ideas and points of view are more important than what they wear,” he said, adding however that “it would be beneficial for Danish society if the public sphere were exempt of some religious displays.”

Rasmussen’s comments came after his liberal-conservative government’s ally, the extreme-right Danish People’s Party (DPP), rekindled a row over whether women wearing the Muslim headscarf, or hijab, should be allowed to address parliament. DPP spokesman Soeren Espersen said last week that Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a Dane of Palestinian origin, should not be permitted to address parliament while wearing a hijab.

She failed in her bid to become the first headscarf-wearing Muslim in Europe to be voted into parliament in last year’s general election, but there is a possibility that she could stand in temporarily for a parliamentarian from the small far-left Unity List Party.

Daily Times, 26 February 2008

See also Islam in Europe, 24 February 2008

Update:  The Copenhagen Post reports that Asmaa Abdol-Hamid has decided to take a one-year break from party politics. She is quoted as expressing her “disappointment in the left wing” over its response to Islamophobia, stating: “while there’s all this hubbub out there over Muslims, with one over-the-top suggestion after the other, the Red-Green Alliance has been disturbingly silent.”

Minister warns of ‘inbred’ Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasA government minister has warned that inbreeding among immigrants is causing a surge in birth defects – comments likely to spark a new row over the place of Muslims in British society. Phil Woolas, an environment minister, said the culture of arranged marriages between first cousins was the “elephant in the room”. Woolas, a former race relations minister, said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.”

Woolas was supported by Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley, who called for the NHS to do more to warn parents of the dangers of inbreeding. “This is to do with a medieval culture where you keep wealth within the family,” she said. “I have encountered cases of blindness and deafness. There was one poor girl who had to have an oxygen tank on her back and breathe from a hole in the front of her neck. The parents were warned they should not have any more children. But when the husband returned again from Pakistan, within months they had another child with exactly the same condition.”

Sunday Times, 10 February 2008

In the Observer Jo Revill points out that “his claims don’t appear to be supported by medical evidence. The risk of a child having birth defects if the parents are cousins is double that of other children, which means the risk rises from about 3 per cent in the general population to about 6 per cent when there is consanguinity (when the parents are closely related).”

Government bans Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

YusufalQaradawiThe government has been criticised by moderate Muslim groups for banning a controversial Muslim scholar from entering Britain and branding him an extremist.

The government confirmed to the Guardian that Yusuf al-Qaradawi had applied to come to the UK but had been refused.

The decision could hand the Tories a small political victory as the Conservative leader, David Cameron, last week called for his exclusion from the UK, saying Qaradawi was a “dangerous and divisive” preacher of hate.

But moderate British Muslim groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), are upset with the ban. Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary-general of the MCB, condemned the ban. He said the UK government had bowed to Zionist and neo-con pressure and pointed out that a Tory government had allowed Qaradawi to enter Britain several times.

Bari said Qaradawi was respected as a scholar throughout the Muslim world: “It is regrettable that the government has finally given way to these unreasonable demands spearheaded by the Tory leader whose government had, in fact, allowed Dr Qaradawi to visit the UK five times between 1995-97.

“I am afraid this decision will send the wrong message to Muslims everywhere about the state of British society and culture. Britain has had a long and established tradition of free speech, debate and intellectual pursuit. These principles are worth defending, especially if we would like to see them spread throughout the world.”

The Home Office said: “We can confirm that Al-Qaradawi has been refused a visa to visit the UK. The UK will not tolerate the presence of those who seek to justify any acts of terrorist violence or express views that could foster inter-community violence.”

Guardian, 7 February 2008

The Sun, on the other hand goes with “PM bans hate cleric’s UK visit“.

See also MCB press release, 6 February 2008 and Inayat Bunglawala’s piece at Comment is Free

And for Tim Montgomerie’s response see Tory Diary, 7 February 2008

‘When religion means death’ (according to Maryam Namazie)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

namazie and racist placards 2Maryam Namazie of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran offers her thoughts (we use the word in its loosest possible sense) on the death sentence imposed on Parwiz Kambakhsh in Afghanistan. She writes:

“Many have rightly come to his defence and must keep the pressure on. But to defend Parwiz by saying he did not ‘intend’ to blaspheme misses the entire point. This is exactly what the likes of the Muslim Council of Britain say in order to conceal the responsibility of their political Islamic movement. For example, the MCB ‘greeted’ the release of Gillian Gibbons (the British schoolteacher who was imprisoned in Sudan for allowing her 7 year old students to name their class teddy bear Mohammad) by saying she had not ‘intended to deliberately insult the Islamic faith’.

“What they are basically saying is that victims and their ‘intentions’ are to blame for the injustices and barbarity of Islamic law. Moreover, they are implying that if someone knew they were blaspheming, or if their actions or statements were so clearly blasphemous that they should have known better, then the death penalty or calls for their death are permissible – or at the very least understandable. The smokescreen of ‘intent’ aims to conceal the real issue at hand, which is Islam in power….”

New Statesman blog, 5 February 2008

In fact, the MCB did not merely “greet” the release of Gillian Gibbons but declared that her prosecution was “a disgraceful decision and defies common sense” and called for the charges to be dropped. Like many self-styled defenders of the Enlightenment, Namazie doesn’t allow objective evidence to interfere with her own prejudices.

The ‘left’ that hates Livingstone

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It’s as if the last 25 years had never happened. For the past week we’ve been back in the days of Margaret Thatcher’s war on Red Ken and the Greater London Council. Every morning, the media have brought new revelations of the horrors at City Hall and Ken Livingstone’s manifest unfitness to be re-elected mayor of London. Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists. Only the details have changed: for lesbian workers’ cooperatives, read the Arab women’s network, and for Sinn Féin and the Irish community, substitute Islamist groups and London’s Muslims….

“The trigger for this retro onslaught was Tuesday’s almost comically slanted Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Livingstone, presented by the New Statesman‘s Martin Bright, who wrote that he felt it his ‘duty to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours’….

“What has given this latest assault on Livingstone a special edge is that the people driving it trade as being on the left: Bright as a representative of Britain’s main centre-left political weekly and Nick Cohen, who has more openly lined up behind Johnson, as an Observer columnist. In reality, both writers share a broadly neoconservative agenda on Islamism and the ‘war on terror’ … and that is the central issue that has turned them and their allies against Livingstone. Bright wrote a pamphlet for the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange attacking government dialogue with Islamists, warmly praised by the leading US neocon Richard Perle. Cohen famously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s: ‘I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom’.”

Seumas Milne in the Guardian, 24 January 2008

For another comment on the Bright-Cohen campaign against Ken, see here.

Bright’s fright night

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bright’s fright night

Martin Bright’s feeble TV hatchet job on London Mayor Ken Livingstone may have missed its target, but it speaks volumes for the pro-war ‘left’, writes ANDREW MURRAY.

Morning Star, 23 January 2008

THE most remarkable moment in this week’s partisan hatchet job on London Mayor Ken Livingstone on Channel 4 was not in fact about the mayor at all.

It was the moment when reporter Martin Bright, in the course of a segment about Venezuela, dismissed the Chavez regime in terms straight from the Bush State Department handbook – allied to Iran, associated with cocaine-smuggling guerillas and accused of human rights abuses.

With that passing phrase, Bright managed to align himself with the global neocon agenda on the Middle East and Latin America as well as the matter ostensibly in hand.

For make no mistake, the travesty of journalism that was the Dispatches programme reveals two things above all. First, getting Livingstone out of office is now priority number one for the warmongering, Muslim-bashing neocon “left.” Second, they are now prepared to openly embrace even the reactionary Toryism of Boris Johnson in order to further this end.

One of only two people can be elected mayor this year – Livingstone or Johnson. And Bright, seconded by his soulmate Nick Cohen in The Observer, has effectively come out for a Johnson victory, so great is his venom against anything even approximating to an authentic socialist left.

That was made abundantly clear in the Evening Standard, in which Bright hyperventilated on his personal mission to see the mayor driven out of office.

“I feel it is my duty,” he intoned with a pomposity worthy of a higher office than political reporter on a small-circulation weekly, “to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours.”

Bright himself has form working to the agenda of the global right. He teamed up with the Policy Exchange, which is run by charter neocon and former Daily Telegraph chief leader-writer Dean Godson, to produce a pamphlet telling Britain’s Muslims how they should behave.

This venture earned him a public commendation from Richard Perle, the leading imperial strategist for the Reagan and Bush administrations and one of the chief boosters of the Iraq war in Washington. The Policy Exchange has since been accused of fraudulent research in a subsequent Muslim-baiting television programme.

Research was not an issue for “BoJo” Bright. When the shadow secretary of state for business and enterprise Alan Duncan popped up in the programme in the guise of a “former oil trader” to bear expert witness on Venezuela, we knew that we were not really in the realm of Woodward and Bernstein but in the party political broadcast zone.

A similar incidence of “research-light” was the risible interview with Marc Wadsworth, a former anti-racist activist who sensationally announced that some of Livingstone’s advisers were affiliated to the “Communist Fourth International based in Moscow.” Did no-one bother poor “Bright” with the news that the Communist International and the Fourth International were two entirely different and bitterly opposed bodies and that the latter has never ever been based in Moscow, a famously inhospitable location for Trotskyists?

As for the attack on “Socialist Action,” surely John Ross, Redmond O’Neill and the rest can, after eight years, be judged on their contribution to the running of London rather than their membership of any particular political group. This is simply McCarthyism at a puerile Daily Express level, an attempt to scare the Tories of Orpington and High Barnet into getting to the polls in May before the Soviet comes to town.

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Britain is a Christian country says minister

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A new “tool kit” for universities issued today by Bill Rammell, the Universities Minister, advises universities to draw up a national watch list of guest speakers who should be banned from speaking on campus. It also suggests that universities consider setting up multi-faith chaplaincies instead of separate prayer rooms for different faiths, to promote integration and prevent pockets of extremists forming.

Mr Rammell was adamant that Muslim students – particularly those coming from overseas – did not have the right to demand special treatment from British universities. “Britain technically is a Christian country with many secular features. It’s those two things. It’s not anything else. If you expect that you would have the same response to your faith needs in Britain as would happen within a Muslim or Islamic country, [you] would be disappointed,” he said.

His comments follow fears that some Islamic societies and prayer rooms in universities had become no-go areas for the authorities, where extremists may be free to preach hatred and violence to vulnerable students.

Times, 22 January 2008

See also “Extremists turn attention to Muslim women” in the Daily Telegraph and “Extremists are ‘grooming’ female students, security officials warn” in the Daily Mail.