Islamophobia Watch

Milgo Noor had an appointment at 3:30 p.m. this past Sunday to look at bridesmaid dresses in a Buffalo bridal shop. She never arrived. When the young bride-to-be tried crossing the border with her three bridesmaids – two sisters and a cousin – the women were detained for more than eight hours and two of them were escorted back into Canada in handcuffs.

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"So you're at prayers at your local mosque, and a pasty white guy in a pantomime Arab costume and fake beard comes up to you. He says, 'Asalaamun alaykum, dear brother! You can speak freely in front of me. Would you like to discuss violent jihad against the kaafirs?' You look around. Is your cousin Mustafa setting you up? Is there a hidden camera in the mihrab? Because when anything this patently ridiculous happens, there's got to be an angle. And there is. Congrats! You've just been selected by the Mapping Shari'a Project for inclusion in their latest study."

Abdiel Abdalhayy takes on Dave Glaubatz and SANE.

LONDON – Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on the media on Wednesday to be more careful in their choice of words when reporting on religious conflict.

"I would hope that you in the media would be passionate about letting people judge for themselves, that you would be careful about some of the language that you do actually use," he said. "'Muslim terrorism' – have you ever read anywhere 'Christian terrorism'? – as if Islam propagates violence, but you have never spoken about what happened in Northern Ireland as Christian terrorism," he said.

Tutu added that understanding different religions required peoples of all faiths to understand different perspectives. "We Christians ought to get off our high horse and learn to be a great deal more humble, when you look at our history, the bloody things that we did in the name of religion," he said.

Reuters, 27 June 2007

Johann Hari has always been one of our favourite Islamophobes. Unlike many self-styled defenders of Enlightenment values he is in fact capable of rational thought, plus he has an understanding that there is such a thing as imperialism, which always helps. And, to be fair, he does take a stand against the more egregious examples of anti-Muslim bigotry. His piece in the next issue of The New Republic about a cruise sponsored by the right-wing magazine National Review gives an entertaining – if rather scary – insight into the Islamophobic hysteria that has gripped US conservatives:

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The Muslim Council of Britain insisted yesterday that "honour" violence was a cultural practice and nothing to do with faith. The council spoke out after a BBC investigation claimed that there were links between some cases of honour violence in Britain and islamist extremist groups abroad. Victims of such attacks are alleged by their families to have disgraced them.

The Crown Prosecution Service pointed to the death five years ago of Heshu Yones, 16, who was stabbed to death by her father, and claimed that Islamist terror groups were behind it. Crown Prosecution Service national lead on honour crime Nazir Afzal told Radio 4 that the threats to kill another woman, who is known as Miss B, came from her family but originated from an Egyptian terrorist group. He said: "They told her husband that, if he didn't put his wife in her place, then they would do it themselves."

However, Muslim Council of Britain spokeswoman Reefat Drabu disagreed with Mr Afzal's comments. "First and foremost, there has to be clarity that this is nothing to do with any faith, in particular Islam," she said. "It is a cultural practice and there is nothing in any faith that would condone it or say that it is the right thing do it. This is to do with misguided notions of family honour. It has nothing to do with radicalism or terrorism."

Morning Star, 27 June 2007

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We strongly deplore the recent conferring of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie (Letters, June 21). We see this as a deliberate provocation and insult to the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. The "honouring" of Rushdie at a time when the British government claims to be trying to build bridges with the Muslim community can only be seen as duplicitous. We regard this as a conscious effort not only to offend Muslim sensibilities but also to sow seeds of division. In honouring Rushdie, the prime minister has demonstrated how little regard he has for Islam.

Ali al-Hadithi Federation Of Student Islamic Societies, Bashir Mann Muslim Council of Scotland, Dr Abdul Wahid Hizb ut-Tahrir, Dr Ahmad ar-Rawi Muslim Association of Britain, Dr Mamoun Mobayad Northern Ireland Muslim Family Association, Dr Muhammad Abdul-Bari Muslim Council of Britain, Massoud Shadjareh Islamic Human Rights Commission, Maulana Faiz Siddiqui Muslim Action Committee, Muhammad Sawalha British Muslim Initiative, Saleem Qidwai Muslim Council of Wales, Sheikh Abdulhossein Moezi Islamic Centre of England, Sheikh Shafiq-ur-Rahman United Kingdom Islamic Mission

Letter in Guardian, 26 June 2007

See also the Times, 26 June 2007

The construction of one of Europe's biggest mosques near to a globally famous Christian landmark has sparked a furious row in Germany. Immigration and integration are hugely sensitive questions in Germany, which is home to a Turkish community of several million. But almost within the shadow of Cologne Cathedral, political correctness has now been replaced by bitter confrontation as the city's Muslims begin to build a 2,000-capacity mosque with twin minarets that will reach 170ft.

"Muslims have been here for 40 years, yet people are praying in back rooms," said Seyda Can, an Islamic theologian at the Turkish Islamic Union in Cologne. "There are 120,000 Muslims in Cologne, that's 12 per cent of the population. We should not hide." Work will begin in the autumn on the £15 million mosque, which will include huge glass and stone cupolas and two six-storey minarets.

"It's not a popular plan," said Joerg Uckermann, the district's deputy mayor. "We don't want to build a Turkish ghetto in Ehrenfeld. I know about Londonistan and I don't want that here." Mr Uckermann is part of a curious coalition of protest that has united Jewish intellectuals and neo-Nazis. Leading the charge is Ralph Giordano, a prominent Jewish author, who wrote recently that Germany was witnessing a "clash of two completely different cultures" and questioned whether they could ever be reconciled.

For Mr Uckermann, who belongs to the Right-wing CDU party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr Giordano's comments smashed a long-held taboo in Germany. "Giordano broke down the wall," he said. "Before if you criticised this monstrous mosque you were a Nazi. But we have a problem with the integration of Muslims. It's a question of language and culture."

Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2007

Another paranoid "Eurabia" fantasy, this one courtesy of UPI.

A useful exposé of the notorious Middle East Media Research Institute from In Focus, June 2007

"Muslims called for the Queen to 'Go to Hell' as they burnt the flag of St George on the streets of London on Friday", the British National Party reports. They refer their supporters to this article from Friday's This Is London (the Evening Standard 's website) which, typically, gave completely disproportionate coverage to the provocative activities of a tiny and completely unrepresentative group of nutters around Omar Bakri's former lieutenant Anjem Choudary.

In a caption accompanying a picture of Choudary's supporters demonstrating against the decision to give a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, This Is London informed its readers that "the protest has drawn hundreds of angry British muslims to Regents Park Mosque in North London". The Guardian, by contrast, put the figure at "about 20" while the Telegraph estimated "two dozen".

Needless to say, This Is London didn't see fit to quote this letter from Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. They prefer to falsely associate British Muslims with a self-publicising idiot like Anjem Choudary and feed the racist propaganda of the BNP.