Islamophobia Watch

"Osama Saeed, who has openly called for 'a caliphate', a pan-Islamic global state, has a serious chance of being elected for Glasgow Central when the failing Brown government finally calls a general election. Salmond doesn't seem to care about the harm being done to the Muslim community by elevating someone such as Saeed, who last week was appointed to be a member of the Scottish government's working group to look at the issue of Trident replacement."

Tom Gallagher renews his campaign against the Scottish National Party and one of its leading Muslim activists.

Sunday Times, 13 April 2008

Update:  See also Postman Patel, 15 April 2008

He draws attention to the fact that Gallagher is a research fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington.

A 32-year-old woman who stabbed an Asian teenager she called a terrorist has been jailed for six years.

BBC News report 

Aamer Anwar, the lawyer represesenting Mohammed Atif Siddique, is to face contempt of court charges following remarks he made after the case. It is the first time in UK legal history that a solicitor has faced a contempt of court allegation in respect of remarks made outside of court.

For our previous coverage of this case see here, here and here

BBC News report

Scotland Against Criminalising Communities 

Osama Saeed responds to the anti-sharia hysteria provoked by Rowan Williams' speech.

Rolled Up Trousers, 11 February 2008

See also Yusuf Smith's comments at Indigo Jo blogs, 9 February 2008

Muslim fanatics in Scotland could be radicalised within weeks, the country's terror czar has warned. And John Corrigan stressed that the exact potential of the threat is constantly changing and can never be quantified. He spoke to Scotland on Sunday just six weeks before retiring as Scotland's counter-terrorism chief, having spent four years in the post overseeing such operations as the arrest of Mohammed Atif Siddique and the inquiry into the would-be car bombing of Glasgow Airport.

Recent research has shown the time it takes for an individual to show an initial interest in fundamentalism to actively taking part in an attack is reducing all the time. Several years ago, experts figured that period may be up to 18 months but now with perceived threats to Muslims being featured virtually daily on our television screens, that timescale is down to just a few weeks.

Scotland on Sunday, 3 February 2008

Corrigan would appear to be inspired by Daniel Pipes' invention, the "Sudden Jihad Syndrome".

William Dalrymple reviews The Second Plane, Martin Amis's new collection of essays and short stories about the post-9/11 world:

"Only in one place in the book does Amis actually come across a living Muslim. Arriving at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem after it has closed for the night, he tries to talk his way into the enclosure, and is rebuffed by the guard. 'I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face', he writes, 'when I suggested ... that he ... let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant.' This hysterical reaction, and the strong whiff of racial prejudice it gives off, is smelled again and again throughout this book.

"Islamists, in Amis's view, are not people with a political complaint against the West and its foreign policy. Instead, they are all 'irrationally abstract' in their hatred of America, 'haters of reason' whose 'armed doctrine is little better than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide', 'fanatics and nihilists' who have created 'a cult of death' and wish to 'eliminate all non-Muslims'.

"It is the lack of nuance that is most alarming. For Amis, all Islamists are the same, whether mass-murdering jihadis, or completely non-violent but religiously conservative democrats. Nor is it just the militant Islamists he dislikes: ordinary Muslims are regarded with equal contempt. He writes, with deep distaste, of 'the writhing moustaches of Pakistan' and 'the shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood' that Christopher Hitchens encounters in Peshawar. It seems, to Amis, that people's religion and ethnicity can remove them from rational discourse, and relegate them to the position of untermenschen."

Sunday Times, 27 January 2008

"Hundreds of British non-Muslims have been recruited by al-Qaeda to wage war against the West, senior security sources warned last night. As many as 1,500 white Britons are believed to have converted to Islam for the purpose of funding, planning and carrying out surprise terror attacks inside the UK, according to one MI5 source.... Security experts say the growing secret army of white terrorists poses a particularly serious threat as they are far less likely to be detected than members of the Asian community."

Scotland on Sunday, 13 January 2008

Paranoid nonsense, you might think, but let's be fair –  it does provide a strong argument against racial profiling.

"The sharp increase in Scots who feel distanced from Muslims, as revealed in a survey conducted before the foiled attack on Glasgow Airport in June, has produced remarkably similar responses from members of the Scottish establishment. Communities Minister Stewart Maxwell has promised 'leadership' to fight prejudice and Osama Saeed of the Muslim Council of Britain has called for 'educating the wider public'.

"Can the fact that 50% of Scots are uncomfortable with more Muslims coming to the country be ascribed wholly or mainly to racism or Islamophobia? Might it have something to do with certain Muslim leaders demanding more special rights or demands for ethical autonomy that are incompatible with the western design for living? ...

"I was shaken by the insistence of Morag Alexander of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that it is necessary to 'create a Scotland that is at ease with all aspects of diversity'. This is a recipe for anarchy...."

Letter from Tom Gallagher in the Herald, 15 December 2007

"The reality is that parents are getting very jumpy about their kids getting involved in any kind of Muslim activity no matter how mundane for fear of them ending up on some watch, and that is dangerous, because when there is anger about foreign policy there needs to be an outlet, and that has effectively been shut down by the atmosphere and the approach to the Muslim community.

"Young Muslims are feeling angry at what is going on in the world with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is vital is that these people are channelled into the democratic process, where they can air their views and make change."

Osama Saeed interviewed in The Scotsman 

Osama's blog is here 

A rightwing thinktank which claimed to have uncovered extremist literature on sale at dozens of British mosques was last night accused of basing a report on fabricated evidence.

The report by Policy Exchange alleged that books condoning violent jihad and encouraging hatred of Christians, Jews and gays were being sold in a quarter of the 100 mosques visited. But BBC2's Newsnight said examination of receipts provided by the researchers to verify their purchases showed some had been written by the same person – even though they purported to come from different mosques. Several receipts also misspelled the names or addresses of the mosques where the books were supposedly sold.

The report, the Hijacking of British Islam, was based on the work of four teams of two researchers each who visited 100 mosques. They claimed to have found the controversial material in bookshops attached to 25 mosques, including one at Regent's Park, London, and others in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Oxford and High Wycombe.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "Policy Exchange produced a report that was given a lot of publicity, and Newsnight deserve credit for exposing the incredibly shoddy and dubious methodology that Policy Exchange have resorted to. It would seem that Policy Exchange had already decided what they wanted to say about mosques and just went out to find or should I say invent the evidence to justify their prejudices."

Guardian, 13 December 2007

Watch video of yesterday's Newsnight programme here

See the British Muslim Initiative's press release, 13 December 2007

For Osama Saeed's comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 December 2007

The Newsnight investigation concentrated on mosques in and around London but, as Osama points out, questions about the credibility of the Hijacking of British Islam report were raised at the time by the Edinburgh Central Mosque – where nobody had come across the literature that Policy Exchange claimed to have discovered on their premises.

For some useful background on Dean Godson and Policy Exchange, see Tom Griffin's article at SpinWatch.