Category Archives: Multiculturalism

Muslim leaders back Livingstone as mayor

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MayorProminent Muslim organisations and individuals have pledged to back Ken Livingstone as mayor of London, saying it is in the “best interest” of Muslims to vote for him in this year’s elections on May 1.

A statement, published today in full on the Guardian’s website, praises Livingstone for his continued support of a multicultural society and for protecting Muslim communities against racism and Islamophobia. The 63 signatories include Mohammed Ali, the chief executive of the Islam Channel, which claims to have an audience of millions, Professor Tariq Ramadan and Dilwar Hussain from the London Muslim Centre, part of the East London Mosque.

His rival, Conservative candidate Boris Johnson, said he was “not remotely worried” by the statement of support and warned against “divide and rule” politics. “When anything is signed by so-called community leaders I take it with a big pinch of salt,” he said. “My grandfather was a Muslim and so was my great-grandfather. I am proud of my Muslim ancestry.”

Guardian, 3 January 2008

This would be the same Boris Johnson who described Islam as “the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers” and asserted that “to any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam – seems a natural reaction”. Opposing the illegalisation of incitement to religious hatred Johnson stated that such a law “makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself”.

When he was editor of the Spectator Johnson regularly published appalling examples of anti-Muslim bigotry by the likes of Rod Liddle and Anthony Browne, while the magazine’s front cover featured headlines such as “Eurabian Nightmare” and “The Muslims are Coming“.

Update:  See also the discussion on the Stormfront fascist forum. Sample comments: “Another reason why Ken must go at all costs. Vote BNP if you don’t want the whole of London and Britain, turning into the ape and reptile enclosures of London Zoo!” “People have got to wake up when muslims, the most unwestern group of people imaginable are fully supporting Livingstone.” “Boris will get my 2nd preference vote. I think Boris will get a hugh [sic] anti-Ken Livingstone vote.”

Read the official BNP response here.

Further update:  Scroll down to the bottom of the comments on the Guardian website and you’ll find the following statement by Comment is Free editor Georgina Henry:

“Sorry, but we’re closing this thread due to the continual breaches of the talk policy. Our moderators have had to take down almost 40 offensive comments, and banned 16 people. It’s incredibly depressing that so many pieces on this site written by or about Muslims degenerate into racist/sectarian abuse.”

German Muslims angry at ‘anti-foreigner’ campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BERLIN – German Muslim groups on Wednesday accused a senior politician in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party of stirring up hostility against foreigners in a bid to win a regional election.

Roland Koch of the Christian Democrats (CDU) has focused his campaign for re-election as premier of the prosperous western state of Hesse on crime, in particular offences by foreigners. He reacted to an assault on a German pensioner by two youths – one Greek, one Turkish – in a Munich railway station by saying Germany had too many young foreign criminals and urging an end to “multicultural” coddling of immigrants.

The brutal attack, caught on a surveillance camera and played repeatedly on German television in recent days, prompted calls for tougher sentencing, boot camps and even the deportation of criminals of foreign origins.

“The debate is shameful and scandalous,” head of the TGD Turkish Communities in Germany Kenan Kolat told Reuters on Wednesday, saying the deportation issue was “political arson”. “This is pure populism,” he said, urging Merkel to speak out against it.

Germany is home to about 15 million people with an immigrant background – about 18 percent of the population – and Merkel has talked often about the need to integrate the country’s 3.2 million Muslims, most of whom are of Turkish origin. But she says immigrants must accept German culture and won rapturous applause at a conference of her mostly Roman Catholic party last month for saying mosques should not dwarf churches.

Reuters, 2 January 2008

Update:  See also criticisms by Stephen Kramer of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who has said that Koch’s campaign “can hardly be distinguished from the NPD,” a neo-Nazi party.

In defence of Herouxville

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Herouxville (1)In January this year the small Quebec town of Herouxville hit the headlines when it published a code of conduct for migrants which among other things advised them that it was unacceptable to “kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc.”

In the National Post Jonathan Kay defended the citizens of Herouxville against the charge that their bigoted and stereotyped views about migrants (and Muslims in particular) represented an attack on multiculturalism from the right. He claims that such views have been “liberated from the odour of racism” and are now commonplace in what passes for the left:

“… in the culture wars, feminists, gay activists and other progressives are no longer willing to risk their winnings by pledging multicultural solidarity with traditional Muslims, Hasidic Jews and other socially conservative immigrant groups … muscular monoculturalism is no longer the purview of the right … it’s becoming a mainstream ideology, even a fashionable one, on the left.”

Update:  See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs

Aqsa – a dirge

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Here’s what we know of Aqsa Parvez’ death: Aqsa Parvez had problems at home stemming from intergenerational and, probably to some degree, cross-cultural conflicts, which made her distinct from other Canadian kids in exactly zero ways. She was killed in her home, something so mind-shatteringly evil there is nothing normal at all about it. Analyzing it as if it falls into some pattern or other is fruitless. Scrambling over Aqsa Parvez’ prone dead body, wrenching off this bit or that, to position it so that its ultimate sacrifice is a sacrifice for our just cause, the obliteration of the hijab or the destruction of the myth of traditional multiculturalism or the age-old war against tradition, is disgusting.”

Abdiel Abd Al Hayy takes on Irshad Manji et al.

Abdiel, 18 December 2007

Diversity – ‘a recipe for anarchy’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The sharp increase in Scots who feel distanced from Muslims, as revealed in a survey conducted before the foiled attack on Glasgow Airport in June, has produced remarkably similar responses from members of the Scottish establishment. Communities Minister Stewart Maxwell has promised ‘leadership’ to fight prejudice and Osama Saeed of the Muslim Council of Britain has called for ‘educating the wider public’.

“Can the fact that 50% of Scots are uncomfortable with more Muslims coming to the country be ascribed wholly or mainly to racism or Islamophobia? Might it have something to do with certain Muslim leaders demanding more special rights or demands for ethical autonomy that are incompatible with the western design for living? …

“I was shaken by the insistence of Morag Alexander of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that it is necessary to ‘create a Scotland that is at ease with all aspects of diversity’. This is a recipe for anarchy….”

Letter from Tom Gallagher in the Herald, 15 December 2007

Canadian Muslim women’s soccer team fights ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sixteen-year-old Sheena Alami calls the flap over Islamic hijab headscarves that has sidelined her Edmonton soccer team shocking. “I was really disappointed that this whole issue was taking place in Canada because we’re supposed to be a multicultural society accepting of different cultures and religions,” she said yesterday.

The Alberta Soccer Association has temporarily banned Alami and her teammates on the Al-Ikhwat (Sisterhood) soccer team from playing until it makes a ruling on the safety of hijabs on the field. Alami, a Grade 10 student at Harry Ainlay Composite High School and the daughter of Afghani immigrants, says she’s worn a headscarf while playing soccer and basketball for years.

Thirteen of the 18 women on the team wear hijabs, and they secured a letter of support from the Edmonton and District Soccer Association. “They said, ‘No problem’,” she recalled. “And we were so relieved and so happy.”

The summer went smoothly but shortly after the indoor season kicked off last month, a Calgary referee barred Safaa Menhem, 14, from playing while wearing a hijab – and an ASA ban on the entire Edmonton Al-Ikhwat team followed.

The ASA allowed Menhem to join her teammates on the pitch last week, while wearing a modified hijab tied at the back of the neck rather than under her chin, but has yet to rule on the Edmonton team.

Edmonton Sun, 9 December 2007

Muslim alienation caused by multiculturalism, claims Boris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… here is how John Reid could prove that he was really tough. Here is the bravest thing he could possibly say. He should say that the real problem in our society, and the reason we have so many disaffected and alienated Muslim youths, is that for a generation he and people like him supported the disastrous multicultural agenda. The reason that 40 per cent of British Muslims would like some form of Sharia law in this country is that the Left has traditionally deprecated British institutions and even the teaching of English. A truly brave John Reid would now publicly grovel to Ray Honeyford, the Bradford head who called for teaching in English and who was vilified and persecuted by the Left.”

Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, 16 November 2006

In a notorious article published in the Salisbury Review in 1984 Honeyford claimed to expose “the real educational consequences of the general acceptance of the notion that multi-racial inner cities are not only inevitable but, in some sense, desirable”. Reporting on a meeting with Bradford Asian parents at his school, he wrote: “The hysterical political temperament of the Indian sub-continent became evident – an extraordinary sight in an English School Hall.” He denounced as “totalitarian” the proposals that “Schoolbooks with a racist content should be scrapped. Racist teachers should be dismissed.” And this is the man Boris Johnson acclaims as a hero!

Quebec mother considers teachers in hijabs a threat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reminding them of the Christian name of where they were – on Île Jésus – a young mother yesterday urged the chairmen of Quebec’s “reasonable accommodations” commission not to forget their Roman Catholic heritage. Geneviève April also had a warning for Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor: Don’t promote the rise of Islam in Quebec, because it will erode the identity of young French Canadians like her two children, who are exposed to it at school and daycare.

“As a mother, I’m very worried,” said April, 30, whose young son attends a multi-ethnic school that is 70-per-cent allophone and where the pupils are of 45 nationalities. “Children are sponges, and if my children are taught by someone (who is Muslim), they’ll start asking themselves who they are,” said April, the first of two dozen people who addressed the commission yesterday in Laval.

Teachers and daycare workers in hijabs, for example, are a threat, because “children trust the people looking after them, and (wearing the hijab) is practically a kind of subversion, and I think that’s deplorable and shouldn’t be accepted.”

Bouchard, a veteran historian and sociologist who grew up Catholic in Chicoutimi, asked April whether it’s OK for parents to transmit their religion to their children. Absolutely, she replied, but “I don’t want Muslim parents transmitting their religion to my children.”

“Culture and religion are interrelated,” and whereas Islam has no roots here, “Quebec culture is completely filled with allusions to the Catholic religion,” she said, noting that the Highway 15 hotel where the Laval hearings are being held sits on Île Jésus.

At his multi-ethnic school, her son is “in a bath of cultures, and his identity will be put to the test,” April said. If his teacher wears a hijab and many of his classmates are Muslims, her son may one day decide to become Muslim himself, “just to be like his friends, and I wouldn’t like that,” April said.

“That’s why you’d like hijabs to be banned in schools?” Bouchard asked.

“Yes,” April replied.

Montreal Gazette, 15 November 2007

Are US Muslims not real Americans?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sheila Musaji replies to an article in the St Louis Dispatch by one Z. Dwight Billingsly: “Mr. Billingsly is upset that a Chicago school district has allowed Muslim students to have crescent moons and stars to mark Ramadan included in school decorations along with decorations for other holidays like Christmas that already are included in the schools.”

She quotes Billingsly as writing: “In other words, mainstream Americans had agreed to subordinate their cultural traditions and accept another culture’s traditions as equivalent to their own. This is a prescription for our society’s destruction, a dangerous appeasement in the cultural wars. The school board should have told the Muslim parent that America’s cultural norm is to celebrate and value Christmas, not Ramadan. The board should have told her that if she wanted to celebrate Ramadan in her home or at her mosque, she was welcome to do so, but that at public schools, only Christmas and other traditional American cultural celebrations would take place.”

As Sheila Musaji points out, what Billingsly is asserting is that “American Muslims must accept that they are not equivalent to real Americans“.