‘Multiculturalism costs lives’

“Multiculturalism is a divisive political doctrine that creates enormous costs, foments racial hatred, and may even have been complicit in cultivating the homegrown suicide bombers of July 7, according to a new report from the independent think-tank Civitas.”

National Secular Society news report, 3 October 2005

And what is this mild-sounding organisation Civitas that the NSS cites so approvingly? Well, actually, it’s a hard right anti-migrant outfit that numbers Anthony (“Islam really does want to conquer the world”) Browne among its leading contributors.

Civitas explains that the message of the report, The Poverty of Multiculturalism by Patrick West, is that “hard” multiculturalism has led “some Western intellectuals, who regard themselves as progressive, into the perverse position of defending cultures that condone the killing of homosexuals and the virtual enslavement of women, whilst denigrating the culture of the free societies of the West, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment”.

Civitas provides the following quote from Mr West: “State-sponsored multiculturalism has led to cities such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham fissuring along sectarian lines, and to heightening racial tensions between whites and Asians – with white people feeling ‘the other lot’ are getting favourable treatment from the local council…. The rise of the BNP in the north …  is the result of white people seeing themselves discriminated against by local authorities.”

Civitas press release, 30 September 2005

Defeat of political Islam is cause for celebration

Arjomand and media“The Ontario government’s decision to reject the introduction of Islamic arbitration courts in its jurisdiction is an important victory against the spread of political Islam in Canada and a severe blow to those who preach it.

“This victory could not have been celebrated without the tireless activism of Canadian Muslims such as Homa Arjomand, a woman who fled her native sharia-ruled Iran and knows first-hand the inequities of Islamic law.”

A right-wing Zionist applauds the efforts of the Worker Communist Party of Iran and condemns mainstream Jewish organisations in Ontario for their capitulation to political Islam.

Judeoscope, 12 September 2005

But where did everyone get the idea that comrade Arjomand, a leading figure in a far left sect characterised by its extreme, dogmatic secularism and fanatical Islamophobia, is a Muslim? Well, it could just be that they were encouraged in that illusion by exchanges like the following, from a TV interview:

Interviewer:  Ms Arjomand, if we could get your bona fides, are you a Muslim? And have you had personal experience of sharia law?

Homa Arjomand:  Yes, I have. I was born and raised in a Muslim family, and I lived in an Islamic state, Iran, and I experienced lots of horrible, horrible things … I fled Iran….

See the video clip here.

Of course, it was to the advantage of the WPI to pass themselves off as Muslims because it gave their opposition to the proposed arbitration courts much greater credibility than it would have had if they’d come clean about their actual politics. And in their role as “Muslims” they provided a useful cover for the right-wingers and racists with whom they promoted the same hysterical caricature of Islam.

Jihad Watch applauds Peter Tatchell

A UK supporter of Jihad Watch reports on a protest in London against the proposed introduction of Islamic arbitration bodies in Ontario: “there were only about 15-16 people, mostly men, including a reporter from Canadian television”.

Dhimmi Watch, 10 September 2005

Not to worry, though – they took turns to address each other on the iniquities of the Ontario proposal: “representatives from Sharia.com, the International Committee against Stoning, the British Humanist Association, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and Peter Tatchell made speeches. There was also a guy from a gay and lesbian association there. They basically made the same objections to Sharia law that we’ve all seen here at Jihad Watch/Dhimmi Watch”.

Perhaps Outrage, GALHA and their co-thinkers might consider organising a UK visit for Robert Spencer? After all, they have so much in common.

No ‘faith solution’ to extremism claims Rushdie

Tony Blair’s reliance on faith-based groups in fighting extremism is a “very bad mistake”, Salman Rushdie has said.
The prime minister’s belief that “more religion is going to solve the problem” was “seriously out of step with the country”, the novelist told BBC News. He criticised support for faith-based schools and said UK Islamic groups were failing to represent most Muslims.

The Muslim Council of Britain said Mr Rushdie had “lost his faith” and was “enraged” that most UK Muslims had not. MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala told BBC News: “Salman Rushdie’s call amounts to an appeal to Muslims to apostasise from their faith. He has been doing so at regular intervals since The Satanic Verses was published and has miserably failed every time.”

BBC News, 29 August 2005 

Muslims who want Islamic law told to leave Australia

Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law should get out of Australia, a senior government minister has said, hinting that some radical clerics might be asked to leave.

Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament, Treasurer Peter Costello told national television late Tuesday.

“If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you,” said Costello, who is seen as heir-apparent to Prime Minister John Howard.

“I’d be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false.

“There’s only one law in Australia — it’s the law that’s made by the parliament of Australia and enforced by our courts. There is no second law.

“If you can’t agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practices it, perhaps, then, that’s a better option,” Costello said.

Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he replied: “Where a person has dual citizenship, it might be possible to ask them to exercise that other citizenship. That might be a live possibility.”

AFP, 24 August 2005

Clarke’s deportation list welcomed by GALHA

“The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association has warmly welcomed the ‘deportation list’ and hopes the ban will include the anti-gay cleric Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who visited Britain in October [sic] 2004. ‘We have written to the Home Secretary urging him to ban Sheik al-Qaradawi who has made his extremist views very clear in his speeches and books, and via his website, and who is currently banned from the USA,’ said GALHA secretary, George Broadhead. ‘Sheik al-Qaradawi supports the killing of homosexuals to keep society pure, the killing of Israelis (including civilians), the killing of apostates, and the mutilation of women’s genitals’.”

Rainbow Network, 25 August 2005

GALHA have been less forthcoming about why they have withdrawn their accusation that Qaradawi called for the Crown Prince of Qatar to be stoned to death. Their 2 August press release has now been removed from their site without any explanation. The misleading Aljazeera magazine report on which the press release was based has also been deleted.

‘I am very pleased to be here next to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji’

Campaign Against Sharia CourtSpeech by Homa Arjomand, central committee member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, at the Toronto conference against sharia law.

Comrade Arjomand declares: “I need to emphasize that I am talking about political Islam as a movement…. Their conduct is primarily in the form of opposition to the freedom of women, women’s civil liberties, and freedom of expression. It is misogynistic and goes against modernism…. Islamic terrorism is a military section of Political Islam…. Political Islam with its terrorist action clearly says that if you don’t recognize Islamic states, terrorism is what people in the West will face.”

Butterflies and Wheels, 23 August 2005

Yeah, the usual Islamism=terrorism nonsense that you get from the WPI (and from Nick Cohen, Searchlight magazine and the BNP, for that matter). The idea that Islamism contains reformist tendencies, who oppose terrorism and pursue democratic change, is of course completely absent from this hysterical Islamophobic discourse.

Why multiculturalism has failed Britain (according to Gilles Kepel)

Gilles Kepel“France, ridiculed when Bernard Stasi and his commission first recommended a ban on all religious symbols in schools, has since excited the interest of those who note that this is, nevertheless, the country with the largest number of Muslims, with a population far greater than either Germany or the UK. The social control, they also remark, exerted by the combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy has led – according to the inverse terms of multiculturalism – to France being spared from terror attacks for the past decade.”

Gilles Kepel in the Independent, 22 August 2005.

Note the use of “the past decade” as the period of comparison. This has presumably been chosen so as to exclude the Paris Metro and other bombings of 1995. The “combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy” didn’t seem to have much effect then, did they? At that time, as I recall, the London Underground was, by contrast, spared any terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists, despite Britain’s commitment to multiculturalism.

Is it stating the obvious to point out that in both cases the bombings were provoked by the foreign policy of the country under attack – in 1995 by French support for the Algerian government’s brutal suppression of the FIS (which had been about to win a democratic election) and in 2005 by Blair’s participation in the bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq?

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By their friends ye shall know them

The website of the Worker Communist Party of Iran seems to be down at the moment. However, a report by WPI central committee member Homa Arjomand of a meeting in Toronto on 12 August can be consulted at Butterflies and Wheels. Sharing the platform with Homa Arjomand were Irshad Manji and right-wing Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Comrade Arjomand reports that the meeting featured a showing of the film “Submission”. But for some reason she omits to mention the name of the film’s director – the late Dutch racist Theo van Gogh. Obviously just an oversight.