ISLAMOPHOBIA: Anti Muslim Racism
Entries from April 13, 2008 - April 19, 2008
Binmen in Muslim areas ordered by police to snoop in residents' rubbish bins
Police chiefs ordered binmen to act as spies by sifting through rubbish to look for pamphlets produced by Islamic terror groups. Town halls responsible for areas with large Muslim populations were summoned to London and told to get their refuse collectors to search bins for discarded documents or material that might identify and incriminate Islamic extremists. But the bin-searching instruction was deemed so potentially damaging to community relations that councils simply refused to carry out any sort of spying.
Bradford City Council leader Kris Hopkins said: "We were asked to snoop on our own residents by getting our binmen to rummage around people's rubbish. But the idea that our binmen should be rooting around a wheelie bin to see if they can spot dodgy bits of paper or funny wires is ridiculous. Our binmen aren't there to act like the secret police. They're there to empty our bins. It goes without saying that if any of our staff spotted something illegal they'd call the police. But our job is to bring communities together, to help our communities live side by side, not do the dirty work for MI5."
London mayoral election: It's really no contest
"The story actually amounted to little more than the fact that the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), an organisation that has co-hosted the major anti-war demonstrations, is working with others to ensure a large turnout of Muslim voters in the capital and is strongly advocating a vote for Livingstone for mayor. The BMI is also calling for a vote for myself for the assembly and for Respect's candidate in the City and East London constituency, Hanif Abdulmuhit.
"Now you might have thought that Muslim activists arguing for democratic political engagement and taking part in lobbying, meetings, leafleting and all other activities that attend elections in Britain would receive plaudits from the self-styled defenders of the mother of parliaments. But no – the worthy aim of getting hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters to turn out at the polls is apparently evidence of a sinister, anti-democratic plot.
"It is an indication of the nightmare that we could expect if Boris Johnson managed to get his hands on the mayoralty. It would mark nothing short of a counter-revolution against the progressive stances which Livingstone has adopted against racism and Islamophobia and over other issues."
George Galloway writes in the Morning Star.
Martin Sullivan
in Right Wing, UK, Resisting Islamophobia, Far Right Racists
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'Reject the support of Islamists' urges Toube
Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Harry's Place blogger David Toube argues that Labour and Lib-Dem politicians should reject endorsements from the Muslim Association of Britain.
The new generation of renegades
"Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s.... Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance – justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism – with the far right.
"The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq....
"Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation – on these understandable grounds – to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.
"For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object – the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities – is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he's declaring war on the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but his 'thought experiment' about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) 'until it hurts the whole community' makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque. Cohen is careful to point out that 'Islamism has Islamic roots', and, clearly, the group that he dubs the 'far right' goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami."
David Edgar in the Guardian, 19 April 2008
'Red Ken: there's method in his vileness'
"This column has long argued that mass, uncontrolled immigration was a deliberate policy to secure electoral advantage for Labour. Back in 1987, after Mrs Thatcher's third victory, Labour concluded it could no longer rely on the old white working class. So it decided that it would import a new working class, which would then return the favour by loyally voting Labour.
"This was part of a wider strategy that also included the creation of a vast client state and putting as many members of the middle classes as possible on the payroll. It's now coming to fruition in the London mayoral elections.
"There are 350,000 new voters on the electoral roll in the capital, most of them immigrants. There's also a huge Muslim vote. Ken Livingstone reckons that 200,000 of them will swing it for him. So he's sent his goons into mosques to rustle up support and lavished hundreds of thousands of pounds in grants on Muslim organisations. One of his most dedicated cheerleaders in the Islamic community is a big fan of suicide bombings and a supporter of Hamas, which wants to wipe Israel off the map.
"Now you know why Livingstone embraces Islamist headbangers, insults Jews and smears anyone who challenges him as a 'racist' or 'Islamophobe'. It's all done with a cynical eye on the ballot box. Vile he may be, daft he ain't."
Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail, 18 April 2008
You do rather feel that Littlejohn is preaching to the converted here. A Daily Mail online poll on the London mayoral election currently has Livingstone at 11% and Boris Johnson at 78%. Now there's a surprise.
Colleagues jailed for race abuse
Three men have been jailed for three years for a campaign of racial harassment against a Muslim colleague. Amjid Mehmood was tied to railings and force-fed bacon while a rucksack with protruding wires was put on his locker, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.
Fellow road maintenance workers Lee McDermott, of Rowley Regis, and Sean Melaney and Phillip Skett, both from Birmingham, admitted racial harassment.
The nine-month campaign of abuse came to light when Mr Mehmood told police.
McDermott, 31, from Blue Stone Walk, Sean Melaney, 28, of Steatham Grove, Kingstanding, and Skett, 39, of College Road, Erdington, were each jailed for three years.
Public pool bars father and son from its 'Muslim-only' swimming session
A father and his five-year-old son were turned away from their local swimming pool because they were the wrong religion. David Toube, 39, and his son Harry were told that the Sunday morning session was reserved for Muslim men only.
Mr Toube, a corporate lawyer, described his experiences on a blog. "I arrived at the pool to discover that they were holding what staff described to me as 'Muslim men only swimming'," he wrote. "I asked whether my son and I could go as we were both male. I was told that the session was for Muslims only and that we could not be admitted."
Yes, it's our friend David T from the "left-wing" blog Harry's Place, finding his true political home in a right-wing Tory rag.
See also "Banned from swimming pool for not being Muslim" in the Daily Express, "Multiculturalism gone wild: UK father and son banned from public swimming pool for not being Muslims" at Dhimmi Watch and "No swimming for dhimmis: how will the Left excuse this latest Western Muslim 'tolerance'?" by Debbie Schlussel.
Update: Read the excellent post by D.B. at The People's Republic of Teeside, 19 April 2008
Boy called Islam 'banned from game show over name'
The parents of a nine-year old French boy called Islam are to sue a television company for discrimination after it allegedly refused to let him participate in a game show unless he changed his name. Angel Productions told the boy that his name "represented a religion that was not liked in France," according to the parents cited by Le Parisien newspaper.
Islam Alaouchiche had been shortlisted for a place in a youth game show called "In ze boite" (In the box) on Gulli, a children's channel. But when he turned up for the final audition with his parents, who have Algerian nationality, they were told by a casting agent: "There's a problem, your son cannot keep his first name. Being called Islam if you are a boy is like a girl wearing the (Islamic) veil." The woman suggested Islam use "another Arab name" such as Mohammed or Sofiane. But his mother Farah refused.
The family left the premises to return to their home near Paris and never heard from the company again.
'Suicide bomb backer runs Ken's campaign'
"An advocate of suicide bombing is among leaders of a group trying to mobilise Muslim voters to back Ken Livingstone, the Standard reveals today. For the past year, the group has been working on a strategy to win an estimated 200,000 Muslim votes in an effort to re-elect the Mayor. It includes a campaign of vilification aimed at his Conservative rival, Boris Johnson. It is being waged by Muslims 4 Ken, led by 39-year-old lecturer Anas Altikriti and Palestinian-born Azzam Tamimi, a supporter of Hamas, the militant group dedicated to the creation of an Islamic state of Palestine."
Evening Standard, 16 April 2008
See also "Embracing Islam gives Ken new election hope" and "Ken's friends".
Read the response by the British Muslim Initiative and Muslims 4 Ken here and here.
Why the BNP backs Boris
"When confronted about his infamous choice of language to describe black people – 'piccaninnies' with 'watermelon smiles' – Boris Johnson's responses ranged from claims of being misinterpreted to apologies for the offence caused. And when, a few days ago, Nick Ferrari questioned him on his no less distasteful statements on Islam, the Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty denied ever making them. He insisted that Ken Livingstone, the mayoral incumbent and his fellow guest on the breakfast show, was seeking to smear him. Islam, he emphatically declared, was 'a religion of peace'.
"What a difference a mayoral race can make. Only two years ago, Johnson's writings – readily available in the online archives of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph – were peppered with talk of the 'paranoia of the Muslim mind', of Islam's 'medievalism', 'heartlessness' and 'disgusting arrogance'. Islamophobia was, he maintained, 'a natural reaction' to 'any non-Muslim reader of the Qur'an'. We must, therefore, dispose of the 'first taboo', he counselled, and accept 'that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem'....
"Given Johnson's record on minorities, his endorsement by the far right as a second-preference candidate seems understandable, shocking though it may be. This signifies a worrying precedent in the history of the BNP – notwithstanding Johnson's claim that he has no wish 'to receive a single second-preference vote from a BNP supporter'. Never before has the BNP felt sufficiently fond of a mainstream mayoral candidate to lend him or her its support."
Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 16 April 2008
It might be added that during his tenure as editor of the Spectator Boris Johnson repeatedly published anti-Muslim articles by the likes of Rod Liddle, Anthony Browne, Patrick Sookhdeo and Mark Steyn.
Read Johnson's views on Islam here
Martin Sullivan
in Right Wing, UK, Resisting Islamophobia, Far Right Racists
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