Category Archives: Left Wing

Cant on cohesion

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s comment in 1978, that the British people were worried that ‘this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’, those on the Right of British politics have seen cultural diversity as a threat to national cohesion and security. But since 9/11, it has been parts of the ‘liberal’ Left that have attacked multiculturalism most forcefully, seeing in it the cause of segregation in Britain.

“…  a cacophony of voices has singled out Muslims in the ‘integration’ debate: it is their cultural difference which needs limits placed on it; it is they who must subsume their cultural heritage within ‘Britishness’; it is they who must declare their allegiance to (ill-defined) British values. In so doing, an idea that Muslims are inherently at odds with modern values, into which they need to be forcibly integrated, has been reinforced …. But it is entirely dishonest to pretend this is a demand for ‘integration’, when what is really being called for is assimilation.”

Arun Kundnani on the IRR website, 24 August 2004

‘British Muslim leaders’ and ‘sharia law’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shahid_MalikAfter some thirty Muslim representatives met with Ruth Kelly on 14 August, the media spin on the discussion was that “Muslim leaders” had proposed that holidays should be introduced to mark Muslim festivals and that Muslim communities should be allowed to operate Islamic legal codes for marriage and family life.

This was reported in the Daily Mail  under the headline “Muslims call for special bank holidays“, while the Daily Mirror headlined their report “We must not give in to Muslim blackmail“. The Daily Star informed its readers that “British Muslims have demanded special bank holidays for religious festivals…. They also called for the UK to have Sharia law, which in the Middle East includes penalties such as stonings and amputations”, and the fascists of the British National Party echoed the Mirror with “Labour ministers threatened with Islamic blackmail“.

Ever eager to grasp the opportunity for a spot of self-promotion, Labour MP Shahid Malik contributed an article to yesterday’s Sunday Times, headlined “If you want sharia law, you should go and live in Saudi“, in which he wrote that he had been “asked by the media whether I agreed that what British Muslims needed were Islamic holidays and sharia (Islamic law). I thought I had walked into some parallel universe. Sadly this was not a joke. These issues had apparently formed part of the discussion the day before between Prescott, Ruth Kelly, the communities minister, and a selection of ‘Muslim leaders’. I realised then that it wasn’t me and the media who were living in a parallel universe – although certain ‘Muslim leaders’ might well be…. When Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, heard my comments – I said essentially that if Muslims wanted sharia they should go and live somewhere where they have it – he accused me of doing the BNP’s work.”

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Minister criticises Muslim letter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

kim howellsForeign Office minister Kim Howells has criticised Muslim leaders for condemning British foreign policy.

An open letter, signed by three Muslim MPs, three peers and 38 community groups, said the stance on the Middle East has put civilians at risk. They went on to say that UK policy has given “ammunition to extremists”.

But Mr Howells denied there was a “rational connection”. He told BBC News 24 the letter’s comments were “facile”.

BBC News, 12 August 2006

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer applauds this “refreshing anti-dhimmitude from the UK”.

Dhimmi Watch, 12 August 2006

Denis MacShane backs Mad Mel on ‘Londonistan’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

denis_macshaneLabour MP Denis MacShane has a rambling piece in the current issue of Tribune, which purports to examine “how Labour should respond to Islamist politics”. The primary purpose of the piece is to offer critical support to the thesis in Melanie Phillips’ paranoid rant Londonistan that Islamism is a threat to Western civilisation. MacShane distances himself from some of the language used, but concludes that “Phillips’ book should be read…. Britain does need to wake up to the problems she discusses”.

The level of ignorance and contempt for facts in MacShane’s article is quite breathtaking. He tells us that the Muslim Council of Britain is “linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”. Presumably he means the Muslim Association of Britain – which is just one of hundreds of MCB affiliates. MacShane refers to a speech he made in 2003 “after a young man had gone to Israel, strapped explosives to his body and sought to kill innocent Jews”. This would appear to be a reference to Wail al-Dhaleai, who was reported to have died in a suicide attack on US troops in Iraq.

In his 2003 speech – which he now claims was uncontentious, even banal – MacShane said: “It is time for the elected and community leaders of the British Muslims to make a choice – the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists, against which the whole democratic world is uniting.” MacShane claims that the head of the CRE, Trevor Phillips, “wrote a whole page in The Observer denouncing me”. Phillips wrote no such article in the Observer. There was a report in that paper which noted that MacShane’s supposedly uncontroversial speech had “provoked a furious reaction from Muslim leaders, who said that they had condemned terrorism time and again”. Trevor Phillips was quoted in the report as saying:

“It would have been smarter if Denis MacShane had found out what British Muslims have been saying since, before and after September 11 on the issue of terrorism. Had he taken the trouble to do so, he would have known that his criticisms could not possibly apply to the leadership of mainstream Muslim opinion in Britain. This type of language will simply drive Muslims, who believe that once again they are being stereotyped, into the arms of extremists. He could have spoken to David Blunkett and Jack Straw, both of whom know the British Muslim community quite well, neither of whom would have made these remarks.”

Phillips also said that the use of the phrase “the British way” was offensive: “On the face of it, it is a little undiplomatic for a Foreign Office Minister to suggest that the British have a monopoly on rational and civilised behaviour. Anybody who hails from a colony could adduce several centuries of evidence to the contrary.”

According to a Guardian report, MacShane’s constituency party passed a resolution, proposed and seconded by two local Muslim councillors, which expressed no confidence in their MP and called on the party’s national executive committee to discipline him. The motion stated:

“Denis MacShane is inciting racial and religious hatred, by publicly implying in the press that the Muslim community elected members and leaders are in favour of terrorism and being anti-British. We feel these comments are ill-informed, designed to portray us in the media as conspiring against the state. The Nazis in world war two similarly accused the Jews, disputing their patriotism, which was so well executed that it led to what we now know as the Holocaust.”

In short, if the Labour Party is to discuss the issue of Islamism, the last person they should be listening to is Denis MacShane.

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BNP backs Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Predictably, the fascists are full of admiration for Bright’s Channel 4 documentary, Who Speaks for Muslims?, which of course fitted in neatly with their own 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.”

BNP news article, 18 July 2006

Bodi bashes Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Faisal Bodi trashes Martin Bright’s recent Channel 4 documentary. He points out that Bright falsely attributes to democratic reformist Islamist organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood “a position at the beginning of a continuum of Islamist terror”.

Guardian, 18 July 2006

Over at the National Secular Society’s website, a link to Bodi’s article has been posted under the heading “We must listen to the murderous Islamic militants”. And there are still people who deny that the NSS is Islamophobic!

For further informed criticism of Bright, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 16 July 2006

‘Fury over Halal Christmas dinner’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fury Over Christmas DinnerParents expressed outrage last night over a school’s plans to serve pupils a Muslim Christmas dinner.

The headteacher announced that she intended to replace the children’s traditional turkey meal with halal chicken. She explained that eating poultry which had been slaughtered in the Muslim way would create an “integrated Christmas”.

But furious parents accused the school of undermining the Christian faith. They were backed by Labour MP Denis MacShane who demanded to know why the children were not being offered a choice.

After Mr MacShane’s intervention, Jan Charters, head of Oakwood School in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, backed down and youngsters will now be offered a choice of halal chicken or a traditional turkey dinner, costing £1.75.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “Headteachers and school governors should not make this sort of mistake in the first place. There are a lot of these silly people around who undermine British culture.”

Daily Express, 18 November 2006

Speccy backs Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Governments come and go, but there still is such a thing as the British official mind. From our colonial days comes a Foreign Office belief that in any tricky situation, especially one involving religion and politics, one must make friends with the extremists and find, like needles in a haystack, the ‘moderates’ in their midst. This was the strategy that led us to encourage the Arab Higher Committee in pre-war Palestine, under the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Nazi-supporting Haj Amin al-Husseini, to ‘deliver’ Muslim opinion. The concept achieved apotheosis in the approach towards terrorism in Northern Ireland, which systematically broke all the genuine moderates Terence O’Neill, Brian Faulkner, David Trimble and the SDLP and advanced Sinn Fein on the grounds that it held ‘the key to peace’. Now the two biggest parties in Northern Ireland are Sinn Fein and the Paisleyites, so extremism is seen to pay off and the Province’s sectarian divisions are as a great as they have ever been.

“Sorry to praise the New Statesman in these pages, but its political editor, Martin Bright, has just produced an excellent pamphlet for Policy Exchange, the think-tank of which I am chairman, called ‘When progressives treat with reactionaries’. It is about how the British government has sought to deal with Muslims in this country (and abroad) by flirting with Islamists rather than helping empower the unfanatical. The pamphlet reprints a dozen leaked official documents which promote the oxymoron, expressed in one of them, of ‘moderate Islamist tendencies’. The Foreign Office has as its adviser a young man called Mockbul Ali, who wrote, after September 11, about how the ‘non-white world has been terrorised in the name of freedom’. He is revealed advising the Foreign Office to support the admission into this country of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious leader who supports Taleban ‘jihad’ against British troops, the execution of homosexuals and female genital mutilation. He also wanted Hossain Sayeedi, a Bangladeshi MP, let in. Sayeedi thinks our troops deserve to die for opposing the Taleban and has compared Hindus in his own country to excrement.”

Charles Moore in the Spectator, 15 July 2006