Category Archives: Secular

Anne Marie Waters and Dispatch International – one more time

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anne Marie Waters open letter to Miliband

The appalling Anne Marie Waters, who is a member of the National Secular Society council and spokesperson for the anti-sharia campaign One Law For All, has featured on Islamophobia Watch a number of times. (So many times, in fact, that even I’m getting bored with the subject – which is why it’s taken me a while to get round to writing this piece.)

In addition to whipping up fear and hatred of Islam through the NSS and OLFA, Waters also hoped to acquire a parliamentary platform for her views, via the Labour Party. Unfortunately for Waters, the latter ambition proved irreconcilable with her other activities. Her attempt earlier this year to win selection as the Labour candidate for the Brighton Pavilion constituency was defeated, thanks not least to Andy Newman’s admirable work (see here and here) in exposing her Islamophobic views.

Last month Waters resigned from the Labour Party, announcing her decision in an open letter to Ed Miliband that was published in the “counterjihad” newspaper Dispatch International, to which she is now a regular contributor. The reasons Waters gave for leaving the party were that she was opposed to Labour’s support for multiculturalism, to Ken Livingstone’s selection as Labour candidate in the 2012 London mayoral election, and to Labour’s “introduction of insidious hate speech laws”.

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PQ government prepared to fall over beefed-up secularism charter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MONTREAL — The minority Parti Quebecois tabled a toughened secularism charter Thursday and warned that it’s prepared to go to the polls if the bill is rejected. The PQ considers the bill a confidence motion and didn’t make any compromises to appease opposition parties whose support would be needed to pass it.

“If the Liberal Party objects, this is the kind of vote that involves the confidence of the government,” house leader Stephane Bedard told the legislature. He said the secularism charter is at the heart of the government’s program.

The PQ bill would bar all public service workers from wearing conspicuous religious symbols on the job. The ban would also apply to municipalities and universities, which had a “right of withdrawal” under earlier drafts of the charter.

Bernard Drainville, the minister in charge of the secularism charter, told a news conference the bill “marks a significant milestone in our history.” He has said the charter is a logical outworking of increased separation of church and state that began in the 1960s after 200 years of church control over Quebec society.

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Islamophobia has surged in Quebec since Charter proposed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim Council of Montreal press conference

Islamophobia has surged in Quebec since the introduction of the proposed Charter of Quebec Values, the Muslim Council of Montreal warned Tuesday, with an alarming rise in attacks, specifically against Muslim women.

Muslims made 117 complaints of verbal or physical abuse to a local anti-Islamophobia group between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, compared to a total of 25 complaints (or 3.5 complaints per month on average) in the nine-month period of January to September 2013.

This spike coincides with the kick-off of the debate on the Parti Québécois government’s proposed charter of values, which proposes to prevent public servants from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols, including the hijab and niqab.

“Premier Marois’s introduction of the charter of values has unleashed an alarming number of xenophobic and Islamaphobic attacks,” the council’s president, Salam Elmenyawi, told a press conference.

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Nazir-Ali scaremongers over sukuk

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Michael Nazir-Ali Triple JeopardyFormer bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, warns that plans for the UK to become the first non-Muslim country to sell a sharia-complaint bond could have “unforeseen consequences”.

Nazir-Ali told the Daily Telegraph: “This means that the Government itself will be subject to sharia in its dealings on these bonds. At the moment the issue is pretty modest, but how much will it grow? There’s a lot of liquidity out there and it could grow pretty rapidly, and then you may face a situation where a major part of your financial system is governed by sharia-compliant considerations.”

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Muslims real target of charter, law prof. says

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MONTREAL — Muslims are the real target of the proposed charter of Quebec values, while kippot and turbans are “collateral damage” in the provincial government’s plan to eliminate religious symbols from the public service, a McGill University law professor says.

Speaking Oct. 20 at a panel discussion on the issue at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, Daniel Weinstock said Islamophobia is “the elephant in the room” in the push to secularize Quebec.

“We are not at the centre [of this debate], but as Jews, according to our ethical tradition, we have to stand up resolutely for our Muslim brothers and sisters,” Weinstock said, receiving widespread applause.

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Canadian actor apologises for derogatory comments about Muslim women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Quebec veteran actress and film personality Denise Filiatrault apologized Thursday night on Facebook and Twitter for derogatory comments she made about Muslim women who wear hijabs in an interview Tuesday on radio station 98.5 with Paul Arcand.

“Some of the words I used to describe veiled women … were clearly inappropriate and went beyond my thinking,” wrote Filiatrault, 82. “I apologize to anyone who was offended. I’ve always been very colourful in my way of expressing myself but I admit that this debate requires a more measured choice of words.”

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French veil sacking case goes back to court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A long-standing legal row over France’s laws banning the wearing of religious symbols in public places takes another turn Thursday as the Paris appeals court considers the case of a childcare worker sacked for wearing a headscarf.

In 2008, Fatima Afif was fired from her job at the private Baby-Loup nursery school in Paris suburb Chanteloup-les-Vignes after she refused to remove her veil while at work.

In April 2013, after years of legal wrangles and appeals, the Court of Cassation (France’s highest court) ruled that Afif was unfairly fired and was a victim of “religious discrimination”, arguing that because Baby-Loup was a private institution, France’s strict secularism rules did not apply. It also ordered the nursery school to pay Afif a fine of 2,500 euros.

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