Islamophobia Watch

Sheila Musaji replies to an article in the St Louis Dispatch by one Z. Dwight Billingsly: "Mr. Billingsly is upset that a Chicago school district has allowed Muslim students to have crescent moons and stars to mark Ramadan included in school decorations along with decorations for other holidays like Christmas that already are included in the schools."

She quotes Billingsly as writing: "In other words, mainstream Americans had agreed to subordinate their cultural traditions and accept another culture's traditions as equivalent to their own. This is a prescription for our society's destruction, a dangerous appeasement in the cultural wars. The school board should have told the Muslim parent that America's cultural norm is to celebrate and value Christmas, not Ramadan. The board should have told her that if she wanted to celebrate Ramadan in her home or at her mosque, she was welcome to do so, but that at public schools, only Christmas and other traditional American cultural celebrations would take place."

As Sheila Musaji points out, what Billingsly is asserting is that "American Muslims must accept that they are not equivalent to real Americans".

That's how Indymedia reported the Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) "Stop Kuffarphobia" demonstration in London yesterday. So few people turned up for the protest march from Whitehall Place to Temple tube station that the police refused to allow them to march along the road and insisted that they walk on the pavement.

Strictly speaking, SIOE England is more accurately described as a hard-right anti-Muslim racist – rather than fascist – organisation. And our information is that fully 30 SIOE supporters attended the closing rally at Temple Place to hear SIOE head Stephen Gash (of the tiny English Democrats party) warn against the Islamist plot to impose sharia law on Europe.

Admittedly, the attendance was slightly down on the thousand demonstrators Gash had told the police he was expecting.

It would be easy to mock Gash as a sad little man afflicted by organisational incompetence and delusions of grandeur (and we have no hesitation in doing so). But the humiliating failure of the "Stop Kuffarphobia" demo should not blind us to the fact that, as Soumaya Ghannoushi recently pointed out at Comment is Free, SIOE's message of anti-Muslim hatred and paranoia has a much wider resonance.

An ethnic advisory commission set up by the Governor of Oklahoma printed copies of the Quran, the Islamic "bible", had them embossed with the State Seal and offered to distribute them to the 149 members of that state's legislature. What was to be a gesture of understanding has turned into a battle of hateful words.

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A bill requiring visual identification when voting in federal elections has come to Parliament, largely due to controversy in Quebec over veiled women voting. The controversy over veiled voters arose when a ruling from Elections Canada allowed veiled women to cast ballots in three recent Quebec by-elections.

The Conservatives decided legislation was necessary after Marc Mayrand, Canada's chief electoral officer, rebuffed efforts by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get him to adjust voting rules to force women to bare their faces at polls. "I think it is necessary to maintaining public confidence in ... the electoral process," Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan told the Toronto Star yesterday.

Mayrand noted the revised federal electoral law that Parliament passed in June did not compel women with veils to remove them as part of voter identification, explaining that if MPs want that to be a rule, they should pass a new law.

The Conservative government's obsession with women having to lift their veils is seen by some as much ado about nothing. "This so-called veil problem is not even a problem that's been raised with the Muslim community," NDP Leader Jack Layton said.

Toronto Star, 27 October 2007

"We are the king of the world. We are the best and the brightest. We are America goddammit. WTF are we bowing to Islam for? This ain't PR no matter what Karen Hughes and Condirasha say. This is not not going to make the Islamic world hold hands and sing campfire tunes. Uh uh. This is submission and the worst message to send to Muslims."

Pamela Geller (of Muslims Against Sharia) offers a reasoned response to a photo of Laura Bush wearing a headscarf during her visit to Saudi Arabia.

Atlas Shrugs, 25 October 2007

See also the Weekly Standard, 25 October 2007

A far-right Danish political party controversially depicted the prophet Muhammad on election material yesterday. Now a high-profile Danish-Muslim politician has hit back with a poster lampooning the move.

The ad by the Danish People's Party, the country's third largest political force, showed a hand-drawn picture of the Islamic prophet under the slogan "Freedom of expression is Danish, censorship is not". The ad was condemned as a "provocation" by at least one Danish-Muslim group, as Islam forbids representation of its most important prophet.

Now Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a Danish-Muslim politician who could become the first MP to wear the hijab in the Danish parliament if elected in next month's poll, has hit back with a poster showing a hand-drawn picture of the DPP leader, Pia Kjaersgaard, under the slogan "Freedom of expression is Danish, stupidity is not".

Guardian, 26 October 2007

The provincial parliament in the southern Austrian province Carinthia called on its provincial government to prepare legislation banning the construction of mosques or minarets. The province's governor, the populist former leader of the rightist Freedom Party, Joerg Haider, had repeatedly called for anti-Muslim measures along those lines.

The proposal was adopted with the votes of the conservative People's Party, Freedom Party, and the support of the Alliance for Austria's Future, an equally rightist breakaway party from the Freedom Party, founded by Haider. Alliance floor leader Kurt Scheuch said his party wanted to prevent the creeping Islamization by radical forces. "We prefer churchbells to the muezzin's chants," he said.

Carinthia's Social Democrats and Greens, who had voted against the measure, slammed the proposal as a move to "prevent integration (and) hinder religious freedom" and called it an "open attack on democracy and the rule of law." The Social Democrats pointed out that currently there were no plans for for building mosques in the province, unmasking the proposal as an attempt to "attract the right-wing vote," Social Democrat floor leader Peter Kaiser said.

Earth Times, 25 October 2007

A mosque in a small town outside Milan has been the target of a violent attack – the eighth on mosques in the region of Lombardy surrounding the city.

Italian media reports said the Alif Baa Islamic Centre, in the northern Italian city of Abbiategrasso, 20 kilometres west of Milan, was subjected to fresh violence on Wednesday. Witnesses said a masked man was seen throwing a Molotov cocktail inside the courtyard of the mosque from his motorcycle in the late afternoon. No major damage or injuries were reported in the attack.

This is the eighth assault against Islamic centres in the region of Lombardy in recent months. The Alif Baa Islamic Centre reported other attacks on 25 July and 10 August this year. Another mosque in the nearby city of Segrate was attacked on 5 August and the car of the Imam, Hamid Zariate, was destroyed.

AKI, 25 October 2007

Johann Hari has found a new hero: "Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22-year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the 'right' to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and an end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: 'We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in'."

Independent, 25 October 2007

That would be this Ehsan Jami, would it – the ally of Dutch far-right racist Geert Wilders?

In the same article Hari happily refers to "my friend Maryam Namazie" – the Iranian sectarian nutter who discredited this year's International Day Against Homophobia in London by launching into a paranoid rant accusing the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to execute gay men in Trafalgar Square.

But the main subject of Hari's piece is Namazie's fellow member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran, Mina Ahadi, who has just been awarded the title of Secularist of the Year by the National Secular Society. Ahadi received widespread publicity when she launched her so-called Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, including an interview in Der Spiegel in which she stated "I know Islam and for me it means death and pain" and defended the display of racist anti-Muslim caricatures at a German carnival.

How long, you wonder, before Namazie and Ahadi join their chum Ehsan Jami in forming an open alliance with the extreme Right? If they do, they'll evidently be able to count on the support of Johann Hari.

Update:  For Johann's response, see here

There are significantly fewer Muslims in the Netherlands than previously believed, the country's Central Bureau for Statistics said Wednesday, after a review of its census techniques. The CBS said it was cutting estimates to 850,000, or 5.2 percent of the country's 16.3 million population, from 1 million, or 6.1 percent.

Associated Press, 24 October 2007

A bit of a problem, you'd have thought, for fantasists like Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray and David Icke who have been predicting an Islamic takeover of the Netherlands.