Islamophobia Watch

Muslims in Bristol have been racially abused and assaulted following the attempted terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow. The Bristol Muslim Cultural Society (BMCS) has reported several incidents – the latest of which occurred on Wednesday night when two people were arrested outside a mosque in St Jude's on suspicion of racially-aggravated offences. BMCS director Farooq Siddique said: "People were arrested outside for shouting verbal abuse. People have had their hijabs ripped and there have been verbal and physical acts against women. There have been three or four incidents reported through the Hate Crime Unit but our concern is that not enough people are reporting it. They just say it's the times we live in."

Bristol Evening Post, 7 July 2007

Charles Moore examines the issue of "Britishness". He writes: "... millions whose first language is not English now live in this country. A significant minority of them cannot even speak English. Many of these people are Muslims, and some seem to hate the country they inhabit. Their most prominent leaders, including the Muslim Council of Britain, which claims to be their main umbrella organisation, equivocate about the requirements of being British."

Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2007

See also the Torygraph's lead article, headed "We must make Muslims loyal subjects again"!

British Muslim communities have taken out newspaper advertisements condemning the recent attempted bomb attacks in London and at Glasgow airport in Scotland. The "Muslims United" advertisement is being placed in the UK's Guardian and Metro newspapers. It rejects any attempts to link criminal attacks to the teachings of Islam, and calls for society to remain united. The advertisement is supported by all mainstream Muslim organisations in the UK and individuals from a wide range of professions, organisers said.

Ihtisham Hibatullah, spokesman for the British Muslim Initiative, which is helping organise the campaign, said doctors made up the bulk of those who had joined the campaign. "The overwhelming response has come from the medical profession," he said, highlighting the fact that seven of the people detained over the recent failed attacks were from the medical profession. "People in the profession want to be heard saying 'not in their name'."

Al Jazeera, 6 July 2007

"While I know some Muslims will disagree with me about this, I don't mind whether the mayor of London is pro-Israel or supported the Iraq war. The mayoralty isn't about that, it's about things like transport (with Ken Livingstone having been mayor for as long as the position has existed, it's hard to think of what else it's about).

"It's important, however, that the mayor is not a bigot, which on the strength of his coverage of Muslim affairs while editor of the Spectator, Boris Johnson is. In that position, Johnson reacted to the July 2005 London bombings and the Paris slum riots of that year with horrendously unbalanced coverage, commissioning articles from the likes of Patrick Sookhdeo, full of sweeping generalisations, plain falsehoods and outright absurdities. The tone was that Islam itself, not an extremist movement, or the western policies off which it thrives, was to blame."

Yusuf Smith responds to reports that Boris Johnson MP is considering standing for selection as the Tory candidate in the 2008 London mayoral election.

Indigo Jo Blogs, 5 July 2007

See also Yusuf's comments on articles in the current issue of the (post-Johnson) Spectator. 

"We began with the usual and – this time – quite surreal assurances from politicians, Muslim leaders and, in particular the BBC, that the latest attacks were ‘nothing to do with Islam’. This is what we always hear when a bomb has gone off, or failed to go off – and it is always a silly statement, based upon nothing more real than wishful thinking....

"Then, as always happens, we had the next stage of wishful thinking ... we were assured by assorted correspondents and politicians that Britain's Muslim community were, in their entirety, appalled and outraged by the attacks. Well, maybe they were – but how do you know? ... Don’t forget that more than half of our Muslims feel sympathy for suicide bombers in Israel and a fairly hefty minority (one in eight, at the last count) for similar action against the cockroach imperialist infidel scum (i.e. you and me) over here. Not to mention almost half of Britain's Muslims who want Sharia law in this country and do not remotely, therefore, share our norms and values.

"We are told these sorts of things in order to stop us coming to unpalatable conclusions, because the government still clings, ever more precariously, to the vestigial tail of that discredited ideology, multiculturalism. Take, for example, the issue of immigration. The aspirant, useless bombers who missed their targets at Glasgow and London came here from Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. A recent Mori opinion poll commissioned by the government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion showed that almost 70 per cent of British people thought that we had let far too many immigrants into the country....

"Every month or so we read that the immigration appeals court has allowed some murderous lunatic from the Maghreb or beyond to stay in the country, despite his clearly stated homicidal impulses, because it would be an infringement of his human rights were he to be returned to the Islamic hellhole from which he arrived.... It is surely only a matter of time before someone who comes before the immigration appeals court is allowed to stay and later blows himself up in a public place. Perhaps it has happened already."

Spectator, 7 July 2007

Although, to be fair, unlike Nick Cohen et al, at the end of the piece Liddle does at least get around to mentioning the attack on Iraq as a contributory (albeit secondary) factor in encouraging terrorism: "Whatever your feelings about the war, it must, surely, provide a moral justification for those Islamists intent upon unleashing murder upon our soil...."

Civil rights campaigners urged Law Lords to "prosecute, not persecute" terror suspects on Thursday at the start of a six-day hearing into the legality of the repressive control orders regime.

A panel of five Law Lords headed by Lord Bingham began hearing appeals from 10 people placed under control orders – including "house arrest," tagging, curfews and restricted access to phones and the internet – without charge or trial. They argue that the measures introduced under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 violate their right to liberty and a fair trial.

Morning Star, 6 July 2007

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COLOGNE, Germany – In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations.

Cologne's Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany's largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires.

Predictably, an extreme-right local political party has waged a noisy, xenophobic protest campaign, drumming up support from its far-right allies in Austria and Belgium. But the proposal has also drawn fierce criticism from a respected German-Jewish writer, Ralph Giordano, who said the mosque would be "an expression of the creeping Islamization of our land."

The far-right party Pro Cologne, which holds 5 of the 90 seats in the city council, collected 23,000 signatures on a petition demanding the halting of the project. The city says only 15,000 of them were genuine. On June 16, Pro Cologne mobilized 200 people at a rally to protest the mosque. Among those on hand were the leaders of Austria's Freedom Party, which was founded by Jörg Haider, and the extremist party Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, from Antwerp. Both advocate the deportation of immigrants.

Manfred Rouhs, a leader of Pro Cologne, said the mosque would reinforce the development of a parallel Muslim society, and encourage the subjugation of women, which he said was embedded in Islam. "This is not a social model that has any place in the middle of Europe," he said.

In this, he has found common ground with Mr Giordano, an 84-year-old Jew who eluded the Nazis in World War II by hiding in a cellar. Mr Giordano, who dismisses Pro Cologne as a "local chapter of contemporary National Socialists," nonetheless agrees that the mosque is a threat. "There are people who say this mosque could be a step toward integration," Mr Giordano said in an interview. "I say, 'No, no, and three times no.' Mosques are a symbol of a parallel world."

"I don't want to see women on the street wearing burqas," said Mr Giordano, a nattily dressed man with the flowing white hair of an 18th-century German romantic. "I'm insulted by that – not by the women themselves, but by the people who turned them into human penguins."

Henryk M. Broder, a Jewish journalist who is a friend of Mr Giordano's, said he should have avoided the phrase "human penguins." But Mr Broder said that his underlying message was valid, and that his stature as a writer gave him the standing to say it. "A mosque is more than a church or a synagogue," he said. "It is a political statement."

New York Times, 5 July 2007

Despite reporting that "public opinion about the project seems guardedly supportive, with a majority of residents saying they favor it", the NYT devotes most of its coverage to the views of the bigoted minority.

See also David Vickrey's comments at Dialog International, 5 July 2007

"The other day when he was asked to react to the attempted car-bomb attacks on London, the city's mayor, Ken Livingstone, called for tolerance. Fair enough, you might say. But at whom was his call for tolerance directed? You are probably thinking, if you are a logical sort, that the call must have been directed at the fanatics who had come within an ace of killing and maiming possibly hundreds of people. But you would be mistaken. Instead Ken directed his call at his fellow, non-Muslim, Englishmen. He said that in the past Jews, the Irish and gays had been persecuted in England and now it was the turn of Muslims....

"The War on Terror, if that term can still be used, is revealing strange ideological fissures in Western societies. I came across these fissures in person last September when I took part in about eight radio discussions in the days after Pope Benedict had quoted the Byzantine emperor who had less-than-flattering things to say about Islam. The line-up on those shows was me playing my usual role as the Catholic commentator, a Muslim representative, and frequently a representative of what I suppose we'll have to call the secular left.

"On almost every one of these shows the secular left representative did his or her best to impersonate Ken Livingstone. First there was the usual ritualistic condemnation of the extremists, but this was then followed by a much more detailed discussion of why we are to blame for whatever Muslims extremists do to us. To all intents and purposes this placed the secular leftist firmly on the side of the Muslim representative....

"Essentially you had the guardians of tolerance siding with people who would crush homosexuals under walls if they could, and who would turn women into property given half a chance. And why this horrid sympathy? It is because the secular left's hatred of Western civilisation, and certainly Christianity, America and Israel, is such that they will side with anyone, no matter how unsavoury, who shares that hatred."

David Quinn in the Irish Independent, 6 July 2007

Police chiefs were last night under intense pressure to use racial profiling in the battle to prevent ­further terror strikes.

All the suspects in the latest failed attacks are young adults of Asian or Middle Eastern descent. But officers carrying out spot checks at key sites have been told not to target people based on their ethnicity or age.

The policy has led to accusations that police bosses are more worried about upsetting minority groups than protecting the country. One frustrated officer last night said: "In these extreme circumstances the rules need to be changed because otherwise we are wasting our resources."

Tory MP Philip Davies said: "I agree with him completely. It makes my blood boil. In a nutshell, what police officers are being told is put political correctness above the security of people in this country."

Daily Express, 5 July 2007

The insistence that terror attacks have nothing to do with Britain's actions in the Muslim world only makes them harder to stop, argues Seumas Milne.

Guardian, 5 July 2007