Islamophobia Watch

Well, that's the line the Daily Telegraph is taking anyway, and Conservative Home is joining in. What's got them so worked up is the document submitted by the Conservative Muslim Forum in response to An Unquiet World, the report of the Tories' National and International Security Policy Group chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.

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Tony Blair has accused Iran of backing and financing terrorist attacks, and warned that the threat of militant Islam is similar to that posed by fascism in the early 20th century.

In his first major speech since leaving office, Mr Blair said that Iran was prepared to destabilise peaceful countries in support of the "deadly ideology" driving Muslim extremism.

Speaking at a charity event in New York, Mr Blair said that the US, Britain and their allies risked being "forced into retreat" if they do not show "even greater determination and belief" in their common values. Mr Blair, who is now an envoy for the Middle East Quartet, said: "Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading, but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we're not in the 1920s or 1930s again."

He said: "This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace."

Guardian, 19 October 2007

See comments by David Cox and Inayat Bunglawala at Comment is Free, 19 October 2007

No to intolerance and Islamophobia!

On October 22-26 the so-called Terrorism Awareness Project will send extremist speakers to campuses across the country to spread a message of intolerance and Islamophobia, in a campaign billed as "the biggest conservative campus protest ever."

The list of speakers includes:

• Ann Coulter, who recently made quite a splash with her unabashed Jew-hatred;
• Robert Spencer, who calls Islam "the world's most intolerant religion";
• Rick Santorum, who compared homosexuality to incest and bestiality;
• And of course, David Horowitz whose long history of racism has included attacks on affirmative action and the statement that "guns don't kill black people, other blacks do".

These and other hate-mongers will be demonizing Islam and portraying a one-sided and bigoted view of a faith held by billions of people around the world.

Join Jewish Voice for Peace in our condemnation of this campaign of racism and bigotry!

Sign the petition here

"We are used to attacks on freedom of speech these days. At present Martin Amis is coming under heavy attack from radical Muslims for his trenchant criticisms of the violence that is inseparable from extreme Islamism....

"In so doing, he has attracted the ire of Professor Terry Eagleton – a mediocre but always modish literary critic. Having, in my view, distorted Amis's words, Eagleton claimed that the author was 'hounding and humiliating' Muslims – and the usual suspects have followed in his wake with shrieks of 'Islamophobe' and 'racist'.

"Amis is neither. For while Islam is one of the world's great religions, he is surely correct when he says that Islamic extremists are 'anti-Semites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes'. He has every right to say our society is more evolved than repressive and brutal Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, which is being permitted through political inertia to fund Europe-wide centres peddling the pernicious doctrine of Wahhabism (which promotes global Jihad) to impressionable young men."

Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail, 19 October 2007

For an alternative view, read Soumaya Ghannoushi at Comment is Free, 18 October 2007

The author Martin Amis has claimed he feels "morally superior" to Muslim states which are not as "evolved" as the Western world. Responding to long-running accusations that he is Islamophobic, Amis launched a fresh invective against the Muslim faith and many of its followers. The 58-year-old defended a proposal he made last year that Muslims be deported and strip-searched in a crackdown on terrorism. His latest comments came in a TV news interview last night and during the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week.

In an interview with Jon Snow on Channel Four News, Amis declared: "I feel morally superior to Islamists, by some distance. There are great problems with Islam. The Koran recommends the beating of women. The anti-Semites, the psychotic misogynists and the homophobes are the Islamists."

Days earlier, Amis shocked festivalgoers in Cheltenham with claims that Muslim states are less "civilised" than Western society. "Some societies are just more evolved than others," he said. "These societies are arming themselves with weapons like the AK47 and blowing people up on buses and Tubes."

When one member of his audience suggested not all Muslims were terrorists he retorted: "No one else is doing it. Here in the West we have the most evolved society in the world and we are not blowing people up."

Condemning his comments, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: "Amis clearly seems to believe many Muslim communities are primitive. But just because some extremists have committed terrorist acts does not give him licence to denigrate an entire faith community. He should be ashamed of himself."

Daily Mail, 18 October 2007

Watch the Channel 4 interview with Amis here

There's an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (hat tip: The Angry Arab) in the November issue of Reason magazine. The following exchange takes place in response to Hirsi Ali's insistence on the need for Islam to be "defeated":

Reason: Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world's 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, "defeat Islam"?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there's no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they're the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, "This is a warning. We won't accept this anymore." There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Debbie Almontaser, who resigned under fire from her position as principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), New York's Arabic-themed school, has spoken out publicly for the first time. In a statement read from the steps of City Hall she said:

"On Feb. 12, 2007, the Department of Education announced the establishment of KGIA. In the days following, right-wing blogs began spinning KGIA as an Islamist school with a radical extremist jihad principal. And local New York City papers fanned the flames with headlines like: 'Holy war! Slope Parents Protest Arabic School Plan', 'A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn', and 'Arabic School Idea Is a Monstrosity'. From the day the school was approved to the day I was forced to resign, The New York Sun plastered my picture on its website with a link to negative articles about KGIA."

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Another thorough demolition of David Horowitz's "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week", coming to US campuses next week:

"Mr. Horowitz and his hounds claim that the event's purpose is to advocate for moderate Muslims struggling against fundamentalism and highlight the oppression of Islamic women, while refraining from attacking Islam directly. This is hard to believe when looking at the week's speaking lineup."

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"When I hear mention of the 'Clash of Civilizations' I don't know whether to laugh or to cry", writes Uri Avnery of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom. "To laugh, because it is such a silly notion. To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters. To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts."

Gush Shalom website, 13 October 2007

For six years, Iman Khalil has worn a headscarf with her soccer uniform. It wasn't a problem until this past weekend, when a referee decided before a tournament match on Saturday that the headscarf violated league rules.

"The referee looked at me and said, 'You can't play in that,'" the 15-year-old told The Tampa Tribune. "This isn't headgear or anything. It's part of the faith. I don't think it should be a problem that I wear it."

A league official overruled referee Steve Richardson during half-time, but he still refused to let the Muslim girl play in the second half of the game.

"At first I was extremely upset," she said. "I got very emotional. I kept my cool. I wiped my face because I was crying. But then everyone rallied around us. All the team. All the parents. Even the other team. It was just phenomenal."

The league later apologized to Iman and reminded referees that players are allowed to wear religious articles as long they don't pose a threat of injury.