Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain replies to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
Category Archives: Secular
Stop pandering to Muslims says ‘silent majority’
The government’s attempts to placate Muslims will cause long-term damage to communities, a charity said yesterday.
The warning came from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, chair and co-founder of the British Muslims for Secular Democracy, a new organisation claiming to represent the “silent majority who feel no conflict between their faith and democracy”.
Speaking before the launch, attended by Baroness Kishwer Faulkner and former Islamist Ed Husain, the journalist said the government was pandering to Muslims by granting too many concessions, fuelling their separation from the rest of society.
“The government has found a way of placating Muslims in a way that will only damage us in the long term, Muslims wanting separate schools or different measures. There must be one law for all. This differential accommodation leads to us being pushed to the edges. How is it that the Sikhs and Hindus can live in democracy but not Muslims?”
She added: “The perception is that Muslims receive a disproportionate amount of attention and funding and that perception is justified. This ridiculous, distorted, exaggerated single identity has made us no friends.”
But what else can you expect from an organisation whose leading figures include Taj Hargey and Shaaz Mahboob? And since when did these characters represent the majority of British Muslims, silent or otherwise?
Update: See Yusuf Smith’s comments on Indigo Jo Blogs, 4 May 2008
BNP seeks to gain Jewish votes in Islamophobic campaign
The far right British National party is trying to shed its antisemitic past as part of a drive to pick up votes among London’s Jewish community. The party, which could get its first seat on the London assembly if voter turnout is low next month, is campaigning in Jewish areas across the capital and attempting to play on what it sees as historical enmity between the Jewish and Muslim communities.
In one leaflet, handed out in north London last weekend, the party’s only Jewish councillor, Pat Richardson, is quoted along with a picture of young Muslims holding a placard reading: “Butcher those who mock Islam.”
“I’m in the BNP because no one else speaks out against the Islamification of our country,” said Richardson. “Being Jewish only adds to my concern about this aggressive creed that also threatens our secular values and Christian tradition.”
The move has sparked a furious reaction among Jewish organisations who say the BNP is still antisemitic and racist.
‘Get off my bus, I need to pray’
That was the headline to an article in the Sun, which informed its readers that “a Muslim bus driver told stunned passengers to get off so he could PRAY. The white Islamic convert rolled out his prayer mat in the aisle and knelt on the floor facing Mecca. Passengers watched in amazement as he held out his palms towards the sky, bowed his head and began to chant.”
This story, along with the accompanying video clip, was widely circulated around the right-wing blogosphere, where it was presented as yet another example of the “Islamification” of the West. The Freethinker took it as conclusive proof that “the lunacy that is Islam has now insinuated itself into Britain’s public transport system”. Dhimmi Watch introduced the Sun report as a case “from our ever-expanding You Can’t Make This Stuff Up file”.
Secularist bigot on Fitna
Pat Condell – the favourite comedian of the National Secular Society (and the BNP) – offers his thoughts on Geert Wilders’ film.
Religion is now a potential ally of radical social change
“Panicked by the rise of radical Islamism and the newly assertive religious identity of migrant communities in a secular Europe, the anti-religious evangelists are increasingly using atheism as a banner for the defence of the global liberal capitalist order and the wars fought since 2001 to assert its dominance.
“At the same time, they are unable to recognise the ethnic dimension of their Islamophobia, let alone the deeper reasons why people continue to search for spiritual meaning in a grossly destructive economic environment where social alternatives have been pronounced dead and narcissistic consumption is king….
“Just as the French republican tradition of liberation came to be used as a stick to beat Muslims in a completely different social context from which it emerged, so the militant secularists who fetishise metaphysics and cosmology as a reason to declare the religious beyond the liberal pale are now ending up as apologists for western supremacism and violence.
“Like nationalism, religion can play a reactionary or a progressive role, and the struggle is now within it, not against it. For the future, it can be an ally of radical change.”
Seumas Milne in the Guardian, 27 March 2008
Fury over plan to teach Koran in schools
Fury over plan to teach Koran in schools
By Gabriel Milland Political Correspondent
Daily Express, 25 March 2008
STATE schools should be forced to open their doors to Islamic preachers teaching the Koran, the largest classroom union demanded yesterday.
The National Union of Teachers’ conference also said existing religious schools – almost all of them Christian – should have to admit pupils from other faiths.
The union’s general secretary Steve Sinnott said that allowing Muslim imams to preach in schools would be a way to reunite divided communities.
But the proposals prompted immediate outrage. Conservative Party backbencher Mark Pritchard said: “This is just further appeasement for Muslim militants. We should just follow the existing laws on religious education, which state that it should be of a predominantly Christian character. All this will do is further divide many communities that are already split on religious lines.”
‘Red Ken – the UAF – and Islamic extremism’
The British National Party denounces London mayor Ken Livingstone and his relations with the MCB and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The fascists conclude that Livingstone is … a fascist! (Note, by the way, the endorsement of Martin Bright and the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.)
More merde from MacShane
On the principle of “we read this reactionary crap so you don’t have to”, Islamophobia Watch has invested in a copy of Brother Tariq, the English language edition of Caroline Fourest’s attack on Tariq Ramadan, recently published by the right-wing Tory think-tank the Social Affairs Unit.
The book’s jacket features accolades from Peter Tatchell and Joan Smith. Tatchell poses the rhetorical question: “Is Tariq Ramadan an Islamic liberal or a clever Islamist strategist who uses the language of liberalism to disguise a fundamentalist agenda?” Fourest’s book, of course, comes down firmly in favour of the latter, and in recommending it Tatchell clearly does too. Smith, for her part, tells us that “political Islam, catalogued in this book in forensic detail, loathes the modern world” and recommends Fourest’s anti-Ramadan polemic as “an essential guide to decoding Islamist rhetoric, exposing the political project which lies behind contrived controversies such as the veil”.
As we have pointed out before, attacks on Professor Ramadan as a dangerous extremist are a sure sign that Islamophobia has reached the point where it has waved goodbye to any semblance of rational thought. So it is hardly surprising that Tatchell and Smith have joined the anti-Ramadan campaign.
Tariq Ramadan – ‘dangerous radical’
“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“.