Category Archives: Secular

French satirical magazine to publish ‘Sharia Hebdo’ issue in protest at Ennahda’s election victory

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Charlie Hebdo Charia en LibyeFrench satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo has named the Prophet Muhammad as “editor-in-chief” for its next issue to mark the electoral victory of Islamist party Ennahda in Tunisia.

It will be renamed Sharia Hebdo, the weekly said in a statement on Monday. The publication’s editor-in-chief and cartoonist Charb said they were not trying to be especially provocative.

Ennahda won the most seats in Tunisia’s October elections and is now trying to form a coalition caretaker government. “To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia… Charlie Hebdo has asked Muhammad to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue”, the magazine said in a statement. “The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it,” the statement said.

The cover of the next issue, which comes out on Wednesday, shows Muhammad saying “100 lashes if you are not dying of laughter”. It will also include an editorial piece by the Prophet entitled Halal Aperitif and a women’s supplement called Madam Sharia.

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French court backs private nursery over Islamic headscarf sacking

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Baby LoupA French court has ruled that a private nursery had the right to fire an employee for wearing Islamic head-cover, leading its lawyer to hail an advance for secular forces in the country.

An appeal court in Versailles backed up an earlier ruling by a labour court that the Baby Loup nursery in Mantes-la-Jolie was within its rights to sack Fatima Afif in 2008 for refusing to take off her headscarf.

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More on Saturday’s EDL demo (3)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL OLFA placards

This photograph from the EDL protest last Saturday has been widely circulated around the internet, with comments mainly focusing on the disparity between the EDL’s claim that the event was organised by “Angels” and the physical appearance of the individuals in the picture. However a more sigificant aspect of the photo is the placards they are holding, two of which jointly promote the EDL and the One Law For All campaign.

The EDL/OLFA placards were displayed prominently on the demonstration itself (see here, here and here). This not the first time that publicity for the One Law For All campaign has featured on a far-right protest – one of their placards was seen last year on an English Nationalist Alliance march – but it is certainly unprecedented for OLFA’s logo and slogans to appear on propaganda material produced by the far right.

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Richard Dawkins claims Muslim schools are teaching ‘alien rubbish’ … but says CofE schools are OK

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard Dawkins and mosqueRichard Dawkins claims Muslim schools are having a “pernicious” influence on children who are having their minds “stuffed with alien rubbish” such as claims the world is only 6,000 years old.

The author of The God Delusion, who has previously described religious education provided by faith schools as a form of child abuse, said that the effect was “utterly deplorable” especially as it lasted until their university years. The prominent atheist said he could live with some faith schools that are vaguely religious and saved his fire for the schools that were teaching “total nonsense”.

Mr Dawkins, former Oxford University professor and evolutionary biologist, made his comments as he spoke to the Times Educational Supplement about the launch of a new science book.

He said that while he opposed faith schools as a whole, it was the Muslim ones that worried him the most. “Occasionally, my colleagues lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution – this is almost entirely Muslims,” he said. “So I think there’s a very, very pernicious influence that is lasting up to the university years. That must be coming from certain schools.”

He said that he noticed the “utterly deplorable” effect they were having first hand after visiting a Muslim school in Leicester as part of a documentary he made last year called Faith Schools Menace? “Every single person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins,” he said. “I spoke to a group of girls, and to a senior science teacher who believes the world is 6,000 years old. It’s just utterly deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish.”

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National Secular Society honorary associate accuses Muslims of sponging off welfare state

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shreela FlatherBaroness Flather of Windsor and Maidenhead became a heroine of the right-wing press earlier this week as a result of her speech to the House of Lords in support of the Welfare Reform Bill, where she accused some communities of migrant origin of exploiting the welfare state. She even argued that larger familes should be penalised by reducing child benefit payments for third and fourth children.

Shreela Flather told the assembled peers: “The minority communities in this country, particularly the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis have a very large number of children and the attraction is the large number of benefits that follow the child. Nobody likes to accept that, nobody likes to talk about it because it is supposed to be very politically incorrect.” She went on to say that “Indians … do not have large families because they are like the Jews of old. They want their children to be educated. This is the other problem – there is no emphasis on education in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi families.”

That there was an Islamophobic undercurrent to Flather’s baseless claims about migrant welfare spongers, which are of course common currency on the racist right, was strongly suggested by the fact that she specifically exempted migrants from Hindu-majority India and attacked communities originating in two Muslim-majority countries.

In a comment piece published in the Daily Mail (where else?) Flather makes this accusation quite explicit, asserting that it is “some Muslims from these two regions” who “produce ever larger families in order to claim extra payments and publicly-subsidised housing”. She goes on to criticise the fact that a couple who have contracted an Islamic marriage abroad can claim benefits for their children, and adds: “But the state handouts do not end there, for under Islamic Sharia law, polygamy is permissible. So a man can return to Pakistan, take another bride and then, in a repetition of the process, bring her to England where they also have children together – obtaining yet more money from the state.”

An honorary associate of the National Secular Society, Flather regards herself as a cultural Hindu in much the same way that Richard Dawkins says he is a cultural Christian, though the term Flather prefers is “Hindu atheist”. Interestingly, this is the very same term that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, founder of the (Hindu-supremacist, anti-Muslim) Hindutva movement, used to describe himself.

Only a few weeks ago we saw another NSS honorary associate, David Starkey, declaring that Enoch Powell was right. And now we have Shreela Flather ranting about about immigrants milking the benefits system. Will the NSS take any action against Flather over this? Don’t bet on it. The NSS president, Terry Sanderson, is on record as stating that “immigrants are importing their own brands of religion into Britain” which are “primitive, hysterical, fanatical and alien”. And he dismissed criticisms of Starkey on the grounds that there was nothing wrong with “voicing a well-intentioned but off-beat opinion in an important debate”.

Why don’t you join us? EDL responds to Tatchell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UNISON LGBT banner on Tower Hamlets demo
UNISON LGBT Group banner on Saturday’s United East End/UAF demo

I had originally decided to ignore Peter Tatchell’s predictably divisive and disruptive intervention in Tower Hamlets on Saturday (see here and here), on the grounds that giving prominent coverage to an individual publicity stunt by an attention-seeking narcissist would be a distraction from the impressive show of mass unity against the EDL. However, this made me change my mind:

EDL Tatchell Tower Hamlets

Promoting sharia hysteria down under – Maryam Namazie arrives in Australia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Maryam Namazie with Douglas Murray
Maryam Namazie with Douglas Murray at an OLFA meeting in London in January

In Britain, Maryam Namazie’s campaign against sharia law has earned her plenty of hate mail. But what really bothers her is the silence of parts of the media and the inaction by the British government over what she says are sharia’s attacks on the fundamental rights of Britain’s Muslim citizens.

Her group, One Law for All, has been fighting since 2008 to stop what she describes as the rise of political Islamism in Britain.

She is in Australia for a week-long speaking tour in the hope of helping ensure this country learns from the mistakes of Britain, where sharia tribunals enjoy a form of legal recognition in family law. “You are facing quite a lot of similar issues in Australia. It might not be as entrenched as it is in Britain, but you can see a lot of similarities,” Ms Namazie said.

Ms Namazie, who is an Iranian exile, said any form of legal accommodation with sharia “is like trying to incorporate apartheid into a non-racist system of law – they are simply incompatible”.

Yet she says her message is frequently ignored by some British newspapers and broadcasters. “A lot of the media that is considered liberal does not want to touch it because it is seen to be racist.”

The Australian, 23 August 2011

Maryam Namazie and her allies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Enemies Not AlliesThis week Maryam Namazie of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran announced the publication of a new book, Enemies Not Allies: The Far-Right. Co-authored by Namazie and Adam Barnett, it is issued under the imprint of One Law For All, an organisation launched by the WPI and its friends to campaign against the supposed threat posed by Sharia law in the UK.

The authors claim that the far right have “attempted to hijack legitimate criticism of Islamism” and the stated aim of their book is to establish the differences between the position of OLFA and that of “racist campaigns and organisations”. So we are given a summary of the ideology and political practice of the British National Party and the English Defence League, and of Stop Islamisation of Europe and its US franchise headed by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, all of whom the authors roundly denounce.

Now it is certainly true that the WPI have major differences with the BNP, the EDL, SIOE and SIOA. Obviously Maryam Namazie and her comrades do not have a long history of activity on the neo-Nazi right like Nick Griffin, they do not head a violent anti-Muslim street movement like the leaders of the EDL, nor are they rabid ultra-Zionists like Pamela Geller. However, when it comes to Islam, the common ground that exists between the WPI and sections of the Islamophobic right, including some of its most extreme elements, is quite clear. And that is something Enemies Not Allies completely ignores.

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Will the NSS end its association with David Starkey?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NSSWriting at The Third Estate, Reuben R draws our attention to the fact that David Starkey, under fire over his disgraceful racist contribution to a Newsnight debate on the riots last week, is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Reuben asks whether the NSS will now sever its links with Starkey. Unlikely, I would say, given the past record of the organisation.

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Lies, damned lies and statistics – misinterpreting the homophobic hate crime figures for Tower Hamlets

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In an article published in yesterday’s Guardian, Jack Gilbert of Rainbow Hamlets, the Tower Hamlets LGBT community forum, writes: “In June, we obtained a month-by-month analysis of homophobic crime figures in the borough. It reveals that incidents in Tower Hamlets have risen by a third (33%) between April 2009-March 2010 and April 2010-March 2011, much more than the 21% widely reported in the media.”

The reported 21% rise over that 2009-11 period was based on earlier figures provided by the Metropolitan Police which showed that recorded homophobic crimes in Tower Hamlets had increased from 67 to 81. The Met’s statistics are being continuously revised, and if we look at the latest figures to which Jack Gilbert refers we find that the numbers now show a rise to 81 from 61, which does indeed give an increase of 33%.

However, as you can see, the reason for this higher percentage change is not that the Met’s figure for homophobic crimes in Tower Hamlets during 2010-11 has increased, but rather that the figure for 2009-10 has been revised downwards. Which means that the total figure for homophobic crimes over the period 2009-11 has also been reduced – from 148 to 142. Using these figures to suggest that homophobic crimes in Tower Hamlets are at a higher level than has been reported is disingenuous to say the least.

It would also be interesting to see the 2008-9 figure for comparison, because it seems possible in view of the latest statistics for 2009-10 that the level of recorded homophobic crime in Tower Hamlets might even have fallen over the 2008-10 period, or at least that any increase was lower than previously thought.

The reason why a longer time-frame would be useful in assessing the actual development of homophobic crime levels in Tower Hamlets is that over shorter periods the statistics often show sharp percentage changes for no obvious reason. This becomes clear if you break down the figures for the period from April 2009 to March 2011 into six-month rather than one-year segments.

Between April and September 2009 there were 38 recorded homophobic hate crimes in Tower Hamlets. Over the next six months, October 2009 to March 2010, the figure came down to 23 – a fall of almost 40%. In the following six months, April to September 2010, the figure rose to 46 – an increase of 100%. It then fell to 35 during the six months between October 2010 and March 2011 – a decline of 24%.

It seems highly unlikely that such wild fluctuations reflect the actual rise and fall of homophobia in Tower Hamlets. It’s just that when you are dealing with relatively low figures like these even small numerical changes produce dramatic-looking percentage shifts. Nor do the statistics show that the level of homophobic crime in Tower Hamlets at the end of the two-year period from April 2009 to March 2011 was any higher than at the beginning, as the figure for the final six months is slightly down on that for the first six months (35 as against 38).

The problem is that when people are intent on “proving” that there has been a dangerous increase in homophobia in Tower Hamlets they just interpret the statistics to justify their own prejudices.

The recent notorious Homintern statement denouncing rising homophobia in the borough gave headline prominence to the 21% figure. However, an earlier version of the same statement, published under Andy Tippetts’ name on the National Secular Society website, took the view that there might have been a fall in homophobic crime in Tower Hamlets – but argued that this was because “there are many gay people who have been forced out of the borough, unable to cope with the harassment”. So, according to this reasoning, if there has been an increase in anti-gay crime in Tower Hamlets, that shows a rise in homophobia, and if there has been a fall in anti-gay crime in the borough that shows a rise in homophobia too!

The purpose of exaggerating the level of homophobia in Tower Hamlets is of course to imply that Muslims are primarily responsible for anti-gay hatred in the borough. But the statistics that are available do not bear that out. The only figures I have seen are for violent homophobic crime in Tower Hamlets over the three-year period 2006/7 to 2008/9. These show that 36% of such crimes were committed by people of Bangladeshi heritage, who form 33% of the total population of Tower Hamlets according to the last available census figures. So there is no evidence that Muslims are mainly or disproportionately responsible for homophobic violence in the borough.

Now, it may be that over the past two years there has been a big surge in the proportion of homophobic crimes in Tower Hamlets committed by Muslims. But unless they can produce any evidence that this is the case, LGBT organisations would be advised to avoid giving credence to accusations that have a basis in Islamophobic mythology rather than facts.

And while we’re on the subject of statistics, it would be helpful if those who blame the East London Mosque for the supposed rise in homophobia among local Muslims could provide a figure for the number of speakers who have used the mosque as a platform to preach hostility towards the LGBT community.

In his Guardian article Jack Gilbert argues that the ELM “has accepted it has hosted at least one homophobic speaker, Abdul Karim Hattin, in 2007, whose Spot the Fag lecture was featured on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme”. This lecture was delivered at an event organised by an outside body who had hired a conference room at the London Muslim Centre. And, as Gilbert notes, the ELM’s website now states firmly that “those hate preachers who circumvented our bookings policy in the past are now barred; our vetting procedures for speakers and guests appearing at our mosque and centre have been significantly tightened over the past year”.

The basis on which Islamophobes like the signatories to the Homintern statement justify their charge that the East London Mosque is guilty of “allowing its premises to be used to promote gayhate campaigns” is to compile a list of preachers who have spoken at the mosque over the years, together with homophobic statements these preachers are alleged to have made. But nobody, so far as I’m aware, has claimed that any of these alleged statements, with the sole exception of Abdul Karim Hattin’s 2007 lecture, were actually made at the ELM itself.

In short, the answer to the question of how many speakers have used the East London Mosque as a platform to preach hostility towards the LGBT community would appear to be – one, four years ago, at an event booked by an outside body, and he’s now been banned.