Category Archives: State Oppression

French court bans Muslim with ‘jihadist links’ from nuclear sites

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A French court this week upheld a ban on a Muslim engineer from entering nuclear sites citing his links with Islamist networks, in a move blasted by his lawyer as “Islamophobic”.

The 29-year-old, who works for a subcontractor to French energy giant EDF, had worked freely at nuclear power facilities throughout 2012 and 2013. But in March this year the man, who cannot be named under French law, had his pass to enter the Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear power station revoked.

Officials said he had links with a jihadist terrorist group and that he was in touch with an imam involved in recruiting youngsters to fight in Iraq.

A court in the northeastern town of Châlons-en-Champagne upheld the ban saying the management could prevent those “undergoing a process of political and religious radicalisation” from accessing sensitive sites.

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Crackdown on British jihadis ‘will push youth further towards extremism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Cameron’s renewed crackdown on British-born extremists will push marginalised young people further towards radicalisation, the UK’s biggest Muslim organisation has said.

Harun Khan, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), raised concerns about the prime minister’s anti-terrorism strategy amid signs of a wider impasse in relations between the government and Muslim groups.

“They need to be talking to us and others to understand what it is that’s leading these boys down this route,” Khan told the Guardian. “Part of the problem is the constant talk of legislation, harassment and monitoring, stripping people of their passports. This is what’s leading young people towards radicalism.”

The warning came as Cameron and Nick Clegg held further talks to try to agree on the final details of plans to stem the flow of British-born jihadis travelling to and from Syria and Iraq. Cameron is due to make a statement to MPs at 3.30pm on the proposals, which are expected to include measures to improve the flow of information about airline passengers to intelligence agencies and to intensify cooperation with Germany and Turkey, the main routes to Syria.

Khan said many young British-born Muslims felt pushed to the fringes of society and that the latest government crackdown could nudge them further into the grasp of radical clerics, instead of drawing them back into mainstream society.

“This is really unprecedented in what we’re seeing right now with young people,” he said. “People are watching the news and thinking: ‘These people are getting slaughtered, I need to do something’. Now we’ve put all these people out of the country and we’re saying you can’t come back in.”

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MCB says Prevent anti-terror scheme has ‘failed’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Harun KhanA senior figure in the Muslim Council of Britain says a key government anti-terrorism strategy has “failed”.

Deputy secretary general Harun Khan told BBC Radio 5 live the Prevent scheme was having a “negative impact”. The scheme seeks to lessen the influence of extremism – but Mr Khan said it alienated young Muslims and pushed them towards radical groups.

The government said it was supporting the vast majority of UK Muslims in combating extremism.

Prevent, which is part of the government’s broader counter-terrorism strategy, aims to “stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”. Work carried out as part of Prevent includes stopping “apologists for terrorism” coming to the UK, supporting community campaigns which oppose extremism and mentoring for individuals who are “at risk of being drawn into terrorist activity”. The strategy covers “all forms” of terrorism, including far-right extremism.

Mr Khan said Prevent had “really failed” when it came to Muslim communities, and said many young Muslims were “not interested in engaging for anything to do with Prevent”.

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Lock up Muslims who travel to Syria, says Boris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Conservative Party Conference ContinuesLondon mayor Boris Johnson devotes his column in today’s Daily Telegraph (“Do nothing, and we invite the tide of terror to our front door”) to the murder of James Foley and ISIS’s success in extending its control over areas of Syria and Iraq.

Johnson asserts that we “need to be far more effective in preventing British and other foreigners from getting out there”.

In order to suggest that this is a specifically British issue, he adds sarcastically: “I am interested to see how many Belgians are there.” Obviously not interested enough to check the figures, though. A report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation estimated that, as of December 2013, up to 296 Belgians had travelled to Syria to participate in the resistance to Assad. The figure for the UK was 366.

Johnson, however, apparently knows better than the ICSR’s researchers how many fighters from the UK are in Syria. He tells his readers that there are “perhaps five or six hundred Britons currently out there”. Where he gets that statistic from is unclear. Five hundred – the figure suggested by Sir Peter Fahey of ACPO – is at the top of the range of official estimates of the number of people who have gone to Syria to join the opposition forces since the outbreak of civil war there in 2011.

It is thought that half of these individuals have since returned to the UK, while as many as 40 fighters have lost their lives. So the number of people still out there is probably little more than a couple of hundred. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that the majority of them joined ISIS rather than the other anti-Assad opposition forces – who have been engaged in armed conflict not just with Assad’s regime but with ISIS too.

The majority of young Muslims who travelled to Syria would have been motivated, not by the desire to join a murderous gang of fanatics, but by the entirely admirable wish to defend the Syrian people against the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. It seems likely, therefore, that the number of UK citizens who have joined ISIS is in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Not that any of this enters into Johnson’s assessment of the situation. He writes: “The police can and do interview the returnees, but it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.”

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Multiculturalism has brought us honour killings and Sharia law, says (former) Archbishop

Posted on by Bob Pitt

George CareyMulticulturalism has resulted in honour killings, female genital mutilation and rule by Sharia law, a former Archbishop of Canterbury has claimed, as he called for Britons fighting with Isil to be “banished” from the country.

Lord Carey of Clifton said Muslim communities must “discipline” their young people or see them “banished” from Britain after leaving to fight in Syria and Iraq. Islamic leaders in Britain have failed to clearly denounce religious fanatics in the wake of the murder of James Foley by a suspected British jihadist, he suggested.

Britain must “recover a confidence in our nation’s values”, Lord Carey wrote in the Mail on Sunday.

“For too long we have been self-conscious and even ashamed about British identity. By embracing multiculturalism and the idea that every culture and belief is of equal value we have betrayed our own traditions of welcoming strangers to our shore. In Britain’s hospitable establishment different beliefs were welcomed but only one was preeminent – Christianity.

“The fact is that for too long the doctrine of multiculturalism has led to immigrants establishing completely separate communities in our cities. This has led to honour killings, female genital circumcision and the establishment of sharia law in inner-city pockets throughout the UK.”

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Muslim engineer banned from French nuclear sites

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim engineer working for a firm subcontracted by French energy giant EDF has been banned from accessing French nuclear sites where he normally works, a move his lawyer says is “pure Islamophobia”.

The 29-year-old project manager had been granted access to nuclear installations as part of his job throughout 2012 and 2013. But in March 2014 the engineer, who cannot be named according to French law, had his pass to enter the Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear power station revoked without explanation.

The decision, made by the local administration, was covered by “Secret Defence” – which means the authorities are not required to publicly justify the decision.

“My client worked freely in French nuclear power stations for three years,” said his lawyer Sefen Guez Guez, who works with France’s Anti-Islamophobia Collective (CCIF), to FRANCE 24. “The question now is what changed? Overnight, he became a suspect person and no one has any idea why. That’s what we’re trying to get to the bottom of.”

As far as the lawyer is concerned, “considering the current atmosphere in France, his religious leanings cannot be ruled out” as a reason behind the ban.

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Whitehall report into Muslim Brotherhood delayed by wrangling

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The publication of a UK government report into the Muslim Brotherhood has been delayed as ministers and officials wrangle over its findings, the Financial Times has learnt.

David Cameron asked Sir John Jenkins, Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to conduct an investigation into whether the Egyptian political group should be classified as a terrorist organisation. The prime minister did so after coming under heavy pressure from allies in the Gulf such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which has banned the organisation.

Whitehall officials have told the FT the report has found the group should not be labelled a terrorist organisation, and in fact has found little evidence that its members are involved in terrorist activities. But ministers are so concerned about the reaction from Britain’s Middle East allies that they have stalled publication for several weeks, according to two people with knowledge of the report.

One person said: “Sir John will say that the Brotherhood is not a terrorist organisation. The Saudis and Emiratis will then be very upset with us.”

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The French ‘burqa’ ban: ECHR judgment poses general threat to minority rights

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hilal Elver, author of The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion, examines last month’s ruling by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights affirming France’s ban on the wearing of the full-face veil in public. She writes:

By now, it is clear that Article 9 of the European Convention does not protect freedom of religion when the subject is a woman and the religion is Islam…. The ECHR acted politically and opportunistically not to challenge France’s strong Republicanism and principles of laicité, sacrificing the rights of the small minority of Muslims who wear the full-face veil. Rather than protecting the individual freedom of the 2000 women, the ECHR protected the majority view of France.

The ECHR is the most powerful supra national human rights court and its decisions have widespread impact. Several countries in Europe, such as Denmark, Norway, Spain, Austria, and even the UK, have already started to discuss whether to create similar laws banning the burqa in public places. This raises concerns that cases related to the cultural behavior and religious practices of minorities could shift public opinion dangerously away from the principles of multiculturalism, democracy, human rights and religious tolerance.

The most recent law bans the full-face veil, but tomorrow, the prohibitions may be against halal food, circumcision, the location of a mosque or the visibility of a minaret; even religious education might be banned for reasons of public health, security or cultural integration.

OUP Blog, 17 August 2014

#WelcomeHomeTalha Summer Rally – Tomorrow

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Talha Ahsan rally

A rally to celebrate the homecoming of Talha Ahsan and the resilience of his family-led campaign, the justice movement making Free Talha Ahsan campaign , a diverse, multi-faith community of solidarity and resistance uniting so many people from across Britian and Internationally.

“Wasn’t great to say goodbye?” boasted Theresa May in the cruel extradition of Talha Ahsan. Talha is a British-born citizen, who suffers from Aspergers syndrome like Gary Mckinnon, was extradited to indefinite solitary confinement in US Supermax prison housing death row inmate after over 6 years of detention without trial, charge or prima facie evidence in the UK.

Now it is time to say #WelcomeHomeTalha

Let all gather together to say “SHAME ON YOU, Theresa May”.

Talha was declared a free man by a US judge on 16th July and was transferred to US immigration custody where he awaits – celebrating a month of freedom.

US-UK EXTRADITION is ruining the lives of too many British citizens and guests – and must be reformed urgently.

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FBI targeted mentally disabled Muslim American citizens

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FBI-NYPD JTTFA Human Rights Watch report, documenting abuses in US terrorism investigations, has illuminated some incredibly dubious practices carried out by law enforcement.

The report looks at investigations that began shortly after 9/11 and have carried on until the present day.

One disturbing practice, which seems to pop up over and over in the report, is the targeting of those with mental disabilities to ‘create’ crimes. This occurs during ‘sting’ operations, when agents pose as members of the Muslim American community, infiltrating mosques.

In an average sting operation, an undercover agent finds a suspect who they think is, say, selling illegal arms. They approach them and gather information, waiting for a crime to unfold.

However, when it comes to counter-terrorism operations, law enforcement officers have been accused of breaching this time-honored system, using a subject’s mental disability to actually foster terrorism. You read that right, by the way – counter-terrorism efforts are being used to foster terrorism.

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