Islamophobia Watch

An Italian minister from an anti-immigrant party who wore a T-shirt that offended Muslims in 2006 said on Friday the gesture was misunderstood and his appointment should not damage relations with Libya.

Roberto Calderoli of the Northern League was appointed this week to the new government of Silvio Berlusconi, who was installed as prime minister for a third term. Berlusconi faced a diplomatic clash with Libya – and possible energy sanctions – after Tripoli made it clear it objected to Calderoli's appointment.

He quit Berlusconi's last government in 2006 after wearing a T-shirt showing a Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that angered Muslims worldwide. He was blamed for rioting that broke out at the Italian consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

Calderoli was asked by Italian television about Libya's angry response to his appointment, and whether he regretted the T-shirt incident. He said he was sorry for the consequences of his act which he said was misinterpreted as anti-Islamic provocation. "Mine was a message of peace and rapprochement between the monotheistic religions but was misunderstood," he said.

Reuters, 9 May 2008

See Pastor Rod Parsley's views on Islam on YouTube

"Ken Livingstone spent my money – my money – welcoming Yusuf al-Qaradawi to City Hall as an honoured guest. He knew what he was doing. He did it largely to annoy Jews."

Daniel Finkelstein in the Jewish Chronicle, 9 May 2008

A U.S. Islamic group said an emergency drill at a simulated mosque in Irving, Ill., inaccurately stereotyped Islamic mosques as safety risks.

Nearly 30 government agencies took part in last week's drill, during which the village's Continuing Recovery Center was referred to as "Irving Mosque," a "home-base for a radical, heavily armed group with suspected terrorist ties," the Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register reported Thursday.

"It really was in poor taste, probably as a result of a lack of cultural prowess on the part of the person who made that choice," said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations'.

The drill used simulated blasts, hostage situations and nerve gas to train law enforcement officers how to respond to such situations.

Diana Holmes, coordinator of the Montgomery County Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, said she was unaware of the council's criticism, the newspaper reported.

UPI, 8 May 2008

See also CAIR press release, 6 May 2008 and Pipe Line News, 6 May 2008 and Op Ed News, 9 May 2008

OTTAWA — Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy. Alan Baker said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.

"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," Mr. Baker said in an interview.

Globe and Mail, 8 May 2008

By 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians, according to calculations by Christian Research, a think-tank. The figures are published in the latest in a series of reports entitled Religious Trends.

The think-tank has warned that 4,000 churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to shrink at current rates. Christian Research describes its aim as encouraging "change in Christian culture so that by 2010 more churches are growing".

The Church of England moved to discredit the research last night, criticising its methodology and saying the results were "flawed and dangerously misleading". A C of E spokesman said: "These sorts of statistics, based on dubious presumptions, do no one of any faith any favours. Faith communities are not in competition and simplistic research like this is misleading and unhelpful."

The research does not compare like with like, according to the spokesman. The number of practising Muslims, for instance, is based on the number of people who said they were active in the 2001 census. If the same process were applied to Christians it would give a figure of 20 million active churchgoers, according to Church House, the headquarters of the C of E.

Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2008

See also the Times and the Daily Mail.

"We have a bad habit in Western secular society of thinking that we know best. And Western feminism often has an equally bad habit of thinking that its ideals are the right ideals for women of all cultures.

"In our society, the veils and scarves worn by Muslim women are commonly seen as symbols and tools of an oppressive Islamic patriarchy. This sort of establishment thinking makes feminism inaccessible for women of different beliefs, which robs the movement of its global power. Women who would like to be identified as feminists but choose to wear a headscarf don't always seem to have a place.

"Western stereotypes surrounding the hijab – the scarf that covers the neck and hair of Muslim women – include the assumption that women are wearing it because of subjugation and religious indoctrination. Some argue that such coverage is used to make women subservient and invisible. But what really makes them invisible is assuming that the women who choose to wear the hijab, the abaya or anything else did not make the choice themselves."

Amanda Teuscher in The Post, 6 May 2008

See also "Front Page news: Islamophobia makes you an expert on niqab" at Muslimah Media Watch

"Brigitte Bardot is facing prison if convicted for a fifth time of inciting racial hatred. Brigitte loves animals and hates Muslims, which is why she sent a petition to the president about halal butchers: 'I've had enough of being led by the nose by this whole population which is destroying us, destroying our country, imposing their ways.' Sarkozy takes a tough line on this sort of abuse. 'When you live in France', he is fond of reminding voters, 'you respect the rules. You don't have lots of wives, you don't circumcise your daughters, and you don't use the bath of your apartment to slaughter sheep in.' The peace prize is in the post, M President."

Fiachra Gibbons in the Guardian Paris Diary, 6 May 2008

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, rallies to the defence of a far-right racist:

"Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna ('strife' in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial.

"Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of 'religious sensitivity'....

"The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for 'racism' and 'Islamophobia'....

"The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam 'really' is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society....

"And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and 'multiculturalists' who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of 'affirmative action' at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of paying 'respect' to the glaring pathologies in their culture."

Huffington Post, 5 May 2008

"Well, even a stopped clock is right two times a day and so it is that I find myself rather agreeing with the BNP's recently elected to the London Assembly Richard Barnbrook who says that he will press for the Union Flag to be flown permanently over City Hall, for burkas to be banned from public buildings and for official celebrations to mark St George's Day. He will resist the planned construction of a huge new mosque, the biggest place of worship in Britain, in Newham, East London.

"This seems fair enough to me – after all London IS British and not merely an overseas branch of Islamabad. I think the Burqa SHOULD be banned, and feel that the huge new mega mosque planned for East London should also be banned until such times as existing mosques prove they are not little more than recruiting offices for Jihad, and surely the flying of the Union Flag over City Hall is non-controversial?"

A Tangled Web, 6 May 2008