Category Archives: Secular

At last a secularist / humanist voice of reason

Posted on by Eddie Truman

Sir_Bernard_CrickJust when it appeared that the secularist & humanist movement had fallen to the tidal wave of intolerance, racism and Islamophobia (see here and here), Bernard Crick writes in the Guardian:

“To work with those of other beliefs implies, of course, tact and courtesy to mute immediate criticism of what for the time and purpose at hand are irrelevancies. It is historically and psychologically foolish for secularists to believe that criticism of all religious belief is an effective way of combating violent fanaticism.”

Sir Bernard clearly understands that the racist attacks on Muslims by those claiming adherence to humanism and secularism are not acceptable.

This age of fanaticism is no time for non-believers to make enemies

Dutch ban on veil – ‘a victory for secularism and women’s rights’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In a move applauded by all those seeking an end to religious influence in society the Dutch government has started the process of banning the burkha from all public places in the Netherlands. This follows on from similar rulings in Belgium. France enacted laws late last year to prevent religious symbology in schools and despite early objection from fundamentalist groups this has now become universal. Margret De Cuyper of the Den Haag women’s forum hailed it as a victory for a secular Dutch society and for women’s liberation from male formulated clothes of control. She said, ‘Women have lived for too long with clothes and standards decided for them by men, this is a victory’.”

Indymedia, 18 October 2005

GALHA issues statement

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The GALHA committee has issued a statement regarding comments in the Autumn 2005 issue of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine.

GALHA press release, 16 October 2005

This statement can only be welcomed. On the other hand, the contact given is GALHA secretary George Broadhead, who is himself the author of an article in the same issue of G&LH magazine which includes the following passage:

“There are two terms that, increasingly, annoy us: Islamophobia and moderate Muslims. What we’d like to know is, first, what’s wrong with being fearful of Islam (there’s a lot to fear); and, second, what does a moderate Muslim do, other than excuse the real nutters by adhering to this barmy doctrine?”

Broadhead’s assertion – in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 – that there are no such people as “moderate Muslims”, and that all adherents of Islam are implicated in the actions of a minority of extremists, strikes me as only marginally less poisonous than the material in G&LH magazine from which the GALHA committee now seeks to dissociate itself.

Incidentally, the GALHA website contains the following information about the author of the most blatantly Islamophobic article in G&LH magazine: “Diesel Balaam works in the television industry. He was co-author with Sukie de la Croix of the satirical column Emerald City News which appeared weekly in London’s Capital Gay from 1987 to 1992. Their book of short stories Black Confetti: New Fairy Tales for an Old Country was reviewed in the Spring 1996 issue of Gay and Lesbian Humanist.”

So GALHA members who deny any knowledge of who Balaam is are perhaps being a trifle disingenuous.

Nick Cohen boosts Maryam Namazie

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Namazie“A week ago, at a reception in one of London’s dowdier hotels, Maryam Namazie received a cheque and a certificate stating that she was Secularist of the Year 2005. The audience from the National Secular Society cheered, but no one else noticed.”

Nick Cohen in the Observer, 16 October 2005

Oh, I don’t know. Islamophobia Watch picked up on it. Cohen observes that “Maryam Namazie’s obscurity remains baffling. She ought to be a liberal poster girl” (sic). Perhaps Namazie’s obscurity is not unconnected with the fact that she’s a member of the central and political committees of a barking far-left sect, the Worker Communist Party of Iran (WPI), whose hysterical Islamophobia, while it obviously appeals to a fellow bigot like Cohen, would repel any principled liberal.

As for the so-called “Sharia courts” in Canada to which Cohen’s article refers, details can be found in the Canada section of this site. What was in fact proposed was to allow Muslims the same right to faith-based civil arbitration that had been available to Catholics and Jews in Ontario since 1991. The WPI’s response to the proposal was:

“The struggle to establish Islamic tribunals in Canada, like similar efforts to enforce the hijab in public institutions and schools in France, is not merely a cultural effort to pursue cultural rights. Both the aims of and the forces behind these efforts are political. These attempts are part and parcel of one of the most reactionary global phenomena in recent history, i.e. the movement of political Islam.”

The Ontario proposal provoked a racist backlash throughout Canada against Muslims and their supposed barbaric religious practices, which it was claimed had no place in a civilised Western society. And it was another WPI central committee member, Homa Arjomand, who played a leading role in encouraging this upsurge of Islamophobia. For her trouble, she became the “poster girl” of the most hardline right-wingers, receiving plaudits from the likes of Front Page Magazine.

It can’t be long before Cohen and the WPI go the whole hog and join their friends in GALHA – with whom they have co-operated closely in the anti-Qaradawi campaign – in promoting an anti-Muslim agenda that is indistinguishable from the vile propaganda of the racist Right.

Joan Smith defends modernity against Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joan Smith“I haven’t opposed religious reactionaries all my life to suddenly go soft on people who argue that calling for a ban on ‘adulteresses’ being stoned to death is a bit too radical for Islam at the moment (yes, I do mean Tariq Ramadan).” Joan Smith takes up the refrain we hear endlessly from Nick Cohen, Harry’s Place et al that the Left have abandoned their principles by allying with Muslims in opposition to US imperialism. “It’s time they took an honest look at where they may be heading and I don’t just mean the restoration of the Caliphate.”

Tribune, 14 October 2005

Personally, I think the Islamophobic self-styled defenders of secularism and rationalism should take an honest look at where they are heading – and I do mean (cf. Gay and Lesbian Humanist) into a de facto racist bloc with the likes of the BNP.

Christian group may seek ban on Qur’an

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Protestant evangelical pressure group has warned that it will try to use the government’s racial and religious hatred law to prosecute bookshops selling the Qur’an for inciting religious hatred.

Christian Voice, a fringe fundamentalist group which first came to public prominence this year when it campaigned against the BBC’s broadcasting of Jerry Springer The Opera, was among the evangelical organisations taking part in a 1,000-strong demonstration against the bill outside parliament yesterday as the House of Lords held a second reading debate on the measure.

Its director, Stephen Green, said the organisation would consider taking out prosecutions against shops selling the Islamic holy book. He told the Guardian: “If the Qur’an is not hate speech, I don’t know what is. We will report staff who sell it. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that unbelievers must be killed.”

Guardian, 12 October 2005

It seems to have escaped Green’s attention that under the provisions of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill it would be necessary for the Attorney General to initiate a prosecution. And what are the prospects of the Attorney General acceding to demands from a nutty Christian sect that Muslim bookshops should be prosecuted for selling the Qur’an? Precisely nil.

What is more worthy of comment is the fact that yesterday’s protest against the bill involved a block between right-wing evangelical Christians and militant secularists. According to reports in the Morning Star and the Metro, the former group brandished placards reading “Freedom to Preach” and “Don’t Let Terrorism Win”, and joined together in singing “In the Name of Jesus We Have the Victory”, while Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society hailed the demonstration (which had the official backing of the NSS) as “a measure of the breadth of the opposition to this bill”.

You might wonder what such disparate groups have in common. An interest in fomenting hatred against Muslims free from state interference, perhaps?

‘The sick face of Islam’ – GALHA

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sick Face of IslamThe latest issue of GALHA’s Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine contains a feature on what they call “The sick face of Islam”.

Editor Andy Armitage explains: “Our front-page headline this quarter is deliberately ambiguous: it could be saying this is only the sickening face of this religion called Islam (implying that there is possibly another face); or it could be saying this is the face of Islam, and its face is sickening. Interpret it as you will. But I suspect that many who thought the former some years ago may well now be thinking the latter…”

The issue includes quotes such as: “There are two terms that, increasingly, annoy us: Islamophobia and moderate Muslims. What we’d like to know is, first, what’s wrong with being fearful of Islam (there’s a lot to fear); and, second, what does a moderate Muslim do, other than excuse the real nutters by adhering to this barmy doctrine?” … “for homosexuals, it is doubtful that there is any such thing as a ‘moderate’ practising Muslim, or that the Koran can be regarded as anything more than just a squalid murder manual” … “it is not racist to be anti-immigration or anti-Islam” … “the reckless and mismanaged immigration polices of successive governments have led to the demographics of our major towns and cites being for ever changed by huge numbers of foreign settlers” … “Legal or illegal, many of these Third World and Eastern European newcomers are criminals of the worst kind, and many more are hopelessly ill equipped to live in a complex Western democracy, unable even to speak English in some cases. A parasitic few are bent on the destruction of Western civilisation” … “Redundant churches are sprouting onion domes and minarets. We are becoming strangers in our own land” … “the fastest-growing religion is Islam. Chillingly, it continues to grow like a canker, both through immigration and through … unrestrained and irresponsible breeding” … “In the Netherlands, the warnings of popular gay politician Pim Fortuyn were tragically snuffed out by a left-wing assassin before he could sufficiently alert people to the damage the influx of Muslims is doing to his own native land”. And these are just a sample.

I believe Brett Lock of Outrage is a member of GALHA. Perhaps he’d care to comment on these articles on his blog?

Maryam Namazie – ‘secularist of the year’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Maryam NamazieMaryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran has been awarded the National Secular Society’s Irwin Prize for “Secularist of the Year”. The £5,000 annual prize was presented by Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee at a lunch at the Montcalm Hotel in London. Introducing Namazie, Keith Porteous Wood of the NSS explained that “she has been roundly criticised by Islamists, the Islamic Republic of Iran and even Ken Livingstone after his invitation to this country of Yusuf Al Qaradawi. So she must be doing something right.”

In her speech, comrade Namazie stated: “And don’t get me started on Islamophobia. It is now even deemed racist to criticise beliefs and ideas and movements associated with them. And – silly me – all along I thought racism was aimed at individuals and groups of people not beliefs and political movements.”

Butterflies and Wheels, 9 October 2005

This would be the same Mayam Namazie who offered the following thoughtful comment on the issue of the hijab: “I suppose if it were to be compared with anyone’s clothing it would be comparable to the Star of David pinned on Jews by the Nazis to segregate, control, repress and to commit genocide.” So perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t get her started on Islamophobia.

For a succinct demolition of Namazie’s hysterical line on Islam (“The innocence with which Namazie claims not to know what Islamophobia is recalls the neo-Nazi party official who, challenged on TV, declares: ‘Racist? Me?'”) see Peyvand Khorsandi in The Iranian, 4 February 2003

Danish cartoon controversy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten is facing accusations that it deliberately provoked and insulted Muslims by publishing twelve cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed.

The newspaper urged cartoonists to send in drawings of the prophet, after an author complained that nobody dared to illustrate his book on Mohammed. The author claimed that illustrators feared that extremist Muslims would find it sacrilegious to break the Islamic ban on depicting Mohammed. Twelve illustrators heeded the newspaper’s call, and sent in cartoons of the prophet, which were published in the newspaper one week ago.

Daily newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad said one Muslim, at least, had taken offence. “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims,” Imam Raed Hlayhel wrote in a statement. “Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world. We demand an apology!”

Jyllands-Posten described the cartoons as a defence for “secular democracy and right to expression”. Hlayhel, however, said the newspaper had abused democracy with the single intention of humiliating Muslims.

Lars Refn, one of the cartoonists who participated in the newspaper’s call to arms, said he actually agreed with Hlayhel. Therefore, his cartoon did not feature the prophet Mohammed, but a normal Danish schoolboy Mohammed, who had written a Persian text on his schoolroom’s blackboard.

“On the blackboard it says in Persian with Arabic letters that ‘Jyllands-Posten‘s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’,” Refn said. “Of course we shouldn’t let ourselves be censored by a few extremist Muslims, but Jyllands-Posten‘s only goal is to vent the fires as soon as they get the opportunity. There’s nothing constructive in that.”

Copenhagen Post, 6 October 2005

Islamophobia Watch cruel to Panorama

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yes, it’s true – we were really, really horrible to poor John Ware, the reporter who headed the Panorama witch-hunt of the Muslim Council of Britain (see here). Still, Ware has his admirers. Anthony “The Muslims are coming” Browne is a supporter, and so is Brett Lock of Outrage.

Lock & Load, 3 October 2005

And Lock also finds himself in a bloc with Mad Mel. See Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 3 October 2005

Alliances with Islamophobic right-wingers are par for the course with Mr Lock. See, for example, here.