Islamophobia Watch

Over at Western Resistance (and the right-wing US website Family Security Matters) Adrian Morgan exposes two of the evil geniuses behind Islamophobia Watch.

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"New Labour ministers are scrambling over one another to become number one hate figure amongst the Muslim community, leaving BNP spokesmen trailing, by a series of statements which show that some of our rulers are capable of speaking the truth and acknowledging commonsense after all.

"For years the BNP has been warning of the threat of militant Islam to the British way of life and the rapid pace of Islamification following concession after concession from public bodies, government agencies and private businesses, these concessions being made all in the name of 'tolerance' and 'understanding' in a multicultural society. For those warnings BNP spokesmen and women were condemned as 'racist', 'Islamophobic', 'bigoted', 'intolerant' and any epithet media pundits chose to use in order to end the debate about the presence of Islam in this country.

"The Crown Prosecution Service went one further and in a stitch up involving the BBC and West Yorkshire Police BNP leader Nick Griffin was arrested in December 2004 and charged with several counts of using language which might be likely to incite racial hatred. His 'crime'; at two private BNP meetings in West Yorkshire he called Islam 'a vicious wicked faith'....

"Mr. Griffin's warning now seems a distant echo compared to the repeated calls in recent days from government ministers for Muslims to start adapting to our British way of life."

BNP news article, 15 October 2006

Muslim organisations accused the government on Wednesday of using its financial muscle to "socially engineer" Islamic groups with no objections to Britain's bloody foreign policy. Their warning followed a speech by Community Secretary Ruth Kelly, who warned that there would be a "significant shift" in state funding and engagement in favour of organisations which spoke out clearly against extremism.

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Britain's race watchdog has said Jack Straw was "completely right" to express his concerns about Muslim women wearing veils. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, also gave his full support to schools that ban girls from wearing veils in lessons.

With the row intensifying over Muslim dress, Mr Phillips told MPs he believed that Mr Straw, the Leader of the Commons, had taken a "perfectly reasonable" stance last week. "I think it's right for him to say 'would you mind not making me feel uncomfortable' in this case, as long as it is clearly understood the answer to that can be 'no'." He added: "Jack Straw was completely right to raise this. It is not a question of public policy, but a question of social etiquette and manners."

Mr Phillips also said he believed the wearing of veils for religious reasons should not override school-uniform policies, providing they have been "arrived at properly". "If I were the headteacher in a school, I would probably say veils should not be worn in the classroom," he told the Commons Education and Skills Committee.

Independent, 12 October 2006

Phillips, of course, was recently appointed by Ruth Kelly as chair of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, despite widespread opposition. As the Mayor of London commented at the time: "... what Trevor is doing is trying to move the race agenda away from a celebration of multi-culturalism and pandering to the Right, and I have to say it's absolutely disgraceful."

"The most tiresome argument in this whole debate is that the niqab makes white, middle-class English people feel 'uncomfortable' or 'threatened'. Well, I want to say, what a load of whingeing wusses. Threatened by drunken football hooligans or muggers – that I can understand. But threatened by a woman quietly going about her business in a veil? As for uncomfortable: myself, I feel uncomfortable with a certain kind of pink-faced Englishman wearing crimson braces, a white-cuffed pinstriped shirt and a bow tie. Their clothing is a fair predictor of the views that will come out of their mouths. But I don't ask them to take off their braces."

Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian, 12 October 2006

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, today weighed into the debate over Muslim women wearing the veil by offering his support to universities that banned the full-face veil.

Guardian, 11 October 2006

Questions are being asked about how the police and intelligence services handled an anti-terror raid in east London after the release of two men. Brothers Abul Koyair, 20, and Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, who was shot in the raid, were freed without charge. Muslim Council of Britain chief Mohammed Abdul Bari said: "The question the community raises is the genuineness of the intelligence." Mr Bari, who is secretary general of the Muslim council, told the BBC: "It all goes back to intelligence, and the police gave the reason for this massive raid. It all depends on how the police act now. There is an issue of trust."

Met Police Authority member Murad Qureshi, speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, said: "I think that there were a series of mistakes, which I think that the Met should learn from, and they cover everything from the collecting of intelligence and how you corroborate that to the nature of the surveillance of suspects, through to how the suspects are actually dealt with." Of particular concern, he said was "how we find ourselves with one of the brothers shot and quite a lot of the slander, quite honestly, which has been out in the press".

BBC News, 10 June 2006

Melanie Phillips' article in last week's Observer stating that Islam in Britain has become "fused with an agenda of murder" has prompted the following letter in response:

Melanie Phillips (Comment, last week) may be right about the radicalising impact of The Satanic Verses and the Bosnian war on many Muslims, but her continued penchant for blaming the religion of Islam and depicting all Muslims as extremist murderers is a disgrace. Imagine her horror if someone wrote that Judaism had become fused with murder. It is naked incitement to argue that Islam and all Muslims in Britain are intent on killing when this only applies to a very small, albeit very extreme, minority.

If Phillips's nonsense was even partially accurate, we would have mass murders and bombings every day as one million British Muslims fulfilled their divinely ordained mandate. This anti-Islamic invective is no less despicable than the anti-semitism that Phillips regularly castigates others for.
Chris Doyle
London EC4

Observer, 4 June 2006

Ten percent of Dutch people admit to having racist opinions – that is, they consider themselves to be more intelligent than foreigners – according to a poll published on Saturday. The survey by the Motivaction polling agency was published in the protestant daily Nederlands Dagblad. The poll found that half of the people in Holland have an aversion to Muslims, 43% think Islam is a threat to peace and two-thirds feel the faith is at odds with modern life in Europe.

News24.com, 3 June 2006

"The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or 'Islamophobia'. They simply ignore the statements and signs which show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicize the west."

Melanie Phillips rants on, this time in the New York Post, 4 June 2006