How Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion encourage The Cold War on British Muslims

In a report published today, Spinwatch examines the Centre for Social Cohesion and Policy Exchange; two key right-wing think-tanks involved in the debate on Islam and multiculturalism which are thought to have influenced the Coalition Government’s new Prevent strategy.

The report, which was completed before the recent terrorist attacks in Norway, argues that right-wing think-tanks have understated the rise of Islamophobia on the far-right and in some cases condoned the rise of groups such as the English Defence League because of their own links to the 'counterjihad movement'. [Spinwatch] Read more [via Islamophobia Watch]

Norway Terror Stigmatizes Islam Haters as Labor’s Appeal at Decade High

Anders Behring Breivik’s efforts to galvanize anti-Islam sentiment in Norway after last month’s hate killings have given the ruling party he sought to destroy its biggest tailwind in more than a decade.

Support for Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s Labor Party, targeted by Breivik in the July 22 bombing and shootings that left 77 dead, soared to more than 40 percent, two polls showed this week. If a vote were held today, that would be the best result since the 1985 election. Approval of Stoltenberg’s handling of the crisis is at more than 90 percent, polls show. [Bloomberg] Read more

Why Islamist terror dwarfs Breivik's brand: Almost nobody supports 'Christianist' violence

.... Breivik's ideology does not represent the same sort of threat that Islamism does because it is not shared by nearly as many people, governments or institutions. Aside from a handful of anonymous Internet postings, there have been no avowals of support for Breivik's mass murder.

No influential Christian preachers have praised what he did. There were no celebrations in the streets, nor has any government applauded his attempt to "save" Europe from "Islamization."

The only organizational backing for Breivik's massacre appears to have come from a 12th century crusader outfit called the "Knights Templar," which, as far as we know, exists nowhere but in his own deranged head. [NYDailyNews.com] Read more

"Sharia Controlled Zones" for UK cities

.... In order to achieve this, Muslims Against Crusades have announced the establishment of 25 "Sharia Controlled Zones" around the UK, in areas targeted by the government in their anti-extremism Prevent strategy (posters announcing their establishment have already appeared in some east London boroughs).

In those areas, said Choudary, his supporters will set about "encouraging awareness of Islam among the Muslims and non-Muslims" and "educating the Muslims to make sure they struggle to implement the Sharia wherever they are".

Muslim residents will the encouraged to live in "enclaves, where they will trade with each other, resolve their disputes according to the Sharia, and protect and defend each other". [New Humanist] Read more

Re-emergence of the Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood has never had it so good; thanks to the Arab Spring which has toppled their nemeses in Egypt and Tunisia.

Last Friday's mass demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria, which were exclusively attended by the movement's supporters, were a bold show of strength and influence. They also marked an important turning point in the course of the January 25 uprising, which was triggered by largely secularist youth. [Gulf News] Read more [via National Secular Society]

Kelly Brook and the jihad seekers' allowance

.... Hasnath and Tahir, both 18, told police that the way the women had been photographed was against their religion. Hasnath said: ‘If someone was to look at our wife or mother or daughter with a bad intention, we would not like it, so we were just trying to do good.’

There will be some sympathy for them — and not just from other Muslims. Plenty of people, especially those with young children, are uncomfortable with the proliferation of sexually-explicit advertising in public spaces.

You don’t have to be a purse-lipped prude to believe there’s far too much gratuitous nudity and hard-sell soft porn on daily display.

On one level, Hasnath and Tahir are no different from those Victorians who insisted on covering table legs lest they unleash pent-up male passion. It would be easy to dismiss them as harmless eccentrics.

But their actions come against a backdrop of growing militancy among young Muslim men and attempts to impose Islamic Sharia law on whole areas of Britain. [MailOnline] Read more

Spray-painted burkas and religious freedom

Liberal intellectuals are unwise to scoff at Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn. His journalism on Jihadist activity in East London is of the highest quality.

His commentary today on the case of two young Muslims convicted for painting a burka on a bus shelter poster of Kelly Brook shows why anybody committed to liberty as it has developed in Britain should be concerned about the threat to it from radical Islam.

It would be easy to dismiss the individuals responsible for the bus shelter incident, Mohammed Hasnath and Muhammed Tahir, as ‘harmless eccentrics’, he writes, but ‘their actions come against a backdrop of growing militancy among young Muslim men and attempts to impose Sharia law on whole areas of Britain.

The most serious incident of religious intolerance in Tower Hamlets came back in April. I brought you the story of a 31-year-old Asian shop assistant in fear of her life because she refused to hear a headscarf’. [Heresy Corner] Read more

Can Islam Be Reformed?

After having studied Arabic at college and lectured on comparative religion for decades, and having devoted years to writing my upcoming book comparing American values with leftist and Islamist values, I have become convinced of two things regarding Islam: It must be reformed, and it can be reformed.

Both suppositions are highly controversial. Few believing Muslims think that Islam needs to be reformed; the suggestion would strike most religious Muslims as absurd, if not insulting and ultimately blasphemous.

And it would strike many non-Muslim critics of Islam as naive. As Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, put it in a quote known to all Western students of Islam, "Islam reformed is Islam no longer." [Townhall.com] Read more

One man's crime is not enough to sanitise radical Islam

.... Clearly, blaming ‘Islam’ as a whole is wrong because the faith is rich in ambiguity with scope for multiple interpretations. In any case, it would be absurd to believe that a community of over 1.5 billion people all share an identical belief system and moral outlook.

But the opposing view involves implausible denial and is equally unmerited. Bin Laden’s followers are not just reckless adolescents driven by narcissistic rage. They are religious fanatics quoting chapter and verse to justify slaughter.

Thus, while it would be reckless to tar all members of a community with the same brush, this is not a licence for political correctness either.

Just because a ‘Christian fundamentalist’ became a loathsome mass killer is no reason to sanitise radical Islam. We owe as much to the victims of that ideology, including Muslim ones. [The Commentator] Read more

Is secularism to blame for Norway attacks?

.... When critics of Islam point out that the Koran contains verses that justify the subjugation of women and incite hatred toward non-Muslims, they are not doing so to be recreationally mean to people.

Rather, they do this because the importance of Koranic inerrancy and infallibility to orthodox Islamic beliefs has real consequences, especially when these beliefs are exploited by Islamists to further their own objectives.

The fact that one reasonably-literate Norwegian psychopath may agree with this concern does not make it any less true or important, nor does it remove any of the responsibility for this attack from the man himself. [National Post] Read more [via National Secular Society]

Washington plans to host a meeting on resolution opposing defamation of religions

During the next few months, Washington plans to host a coordination meeting to discuss with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) how to implement resolution no. 16/18 on combating defamation of religions, and how to prevent stereotypes depicting religions and their followers; as well as disseminating religious tolerance, which has been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council last March, in agreement with Western countries.

The resolution was adopted after lengthy discussions held between the OIC and countries in which the phenomenon of Islamophobia is in the rise. [International Islamic News Agency] Read more [via National Secular Society]

The French Secular Government Model Is Dying In The Middle East

.... In Egypt, too, we see a revolution resulting from failure rather than a revolution grounded in a viable vision for the future.

Fortunately Egypt’s centuries of relative stability and strong sense of identity protect it from the worst kinds of chaos and civil war that assail weaker and less firmly-founded countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon. Egypt is neither a developing country in the sense that it is gaining on the advanced world or a failed state; it is stuck in the gray zone in between.

In Turkey, a sometimes feisty and over-the-top Kemalist regime has given way to a sometimes feisty and over-the-top group of Islamists; in the Arab world, a gaggle of failed secularist modernizers is being driven from power by waves of public resentment and frustration.

Either way, the century in which French secularism was the dominant ideological force in the Middle East has now clearly come to an end. From Pakistan to Morocco, the Muslim world has turned its back on the modernity of the 20th century. God only knows what comes next. [Business Insider] Read more [via National Secular Society]

Hatred, smears and the liberals hell-bent on bullying millions of us into silence

.... As soon as the atrocity happened, people on the Left saw a heaven-sent opportunity to smear mainstream conservative thinkers and writers by making a grossly distorted association between Breivik’s attack and their ideas.

They claimed that anyone on ‘the Right’ who had spoken out against multiculturalism or Islamic extremism was complicit in the atrocity and therefore had a moral duty to stop writing about such things.

To my stupefaction, I have become a principal target of this incendiary witch-hunt, being smeared for having helped provoke the Norway massacre. [MailOnline] Read more

The pro-immigration Left should stop using Anders Breivik to further its political agenda

.... David Cameron and Angela Merkel should be applauded for having the courage to confront the centre left consensus about multiculturalism. Whatever your feelings about the manner in which immigration has transformed the countries of Western Europe, you should welcome the opportunity to engage in a public debate on the subject.

For Thorbjørn Jagland to invoke the crimes of Anders Breivik in order to avoid doing so is a disgrace and suggests that he’s not confident this is an argument he and his fellow multiculturalists can win.

[A COMMENT] Persuading Europeans that their countries are better off for having imported the Third World and its weird religion is an argument that can never be won, which is why the Left is reduced to the pathetic tactic of dreaming up ever more fanciful ways of demonizing the Right. [telegraph.co.uk] Read more

Iranian sentenced to blinding for acid attack pardoned

An Iranian man who was ordered to be blinded for carrying out an acid attack on a woman has been pardoned by his victim, state television has said.

Ameneh Bahrami had demanded qisas, a rarely used retributive justice under Sharia law, but the report said she had forgone that right at the last minute.

A court had backed Ms Bahrami's demand in 2008 that Majid Movahedi be blinded. He attacked Ms Bahrami in 2004 after she had refused his offer of marriage, leaving her severely disfigured.

Rights group Amnesty International had lobbied against the sentence, calling it "cruel and inhuman punishment amounting to torture". [BBC] Read more

Be warned: Real courage is being ready to step on a few 'cultural' toes

.... The local Imam, when I challenged him about such a barbaric practice, which he justified as a religious and cultural necessity to ensure their purity at marriage, had steely eyes which bored through me. ‘In the not too distant future,’ he intoned, ‘all British girls will be circumcised when Islam rules this country.’

That kind of thinking has not gone away. Last week we saw posters declaring that areas of East London are now subject to Sharia Law – a clearly unacceptable concept in a society with its own, highly developed legal system.

My second moment of terror came last Monday when Stephen Lennon, who leads the English Defence League (EDL), warned in conversation with Jeremy Paxman that the kind of extreme Right-wing violence witnessed in Norway was likely to be happening here in five to ten years. [MailOnline] Read more

Who inspires the Anders Breiviks and their hatred of Muslims?

.... This is where Cohen's distinction between Islamism and Islam breaks down. For, if a major figure like Qaradawi is, as Cohen claims, a barbarian intent on killing homosexuals and genitally mutilating young girls, if a liberal Muslim intellectual like Ramadan embodies the threat from "radical Islam", if the MCB and the East London Mosque are led by dangerous extremists whose objective is to establish an Islamic empire – then you can only conclude that the Muslim communities in which these individuals and organisations are rooted must surely be suspect too. [Islamophobia Watch] Read more

Iran man pardoned from acid in eye punishment at last second

Majid Mohavedi waited on his knees weeping, a doctor standing over him with a phial of corrosive chemicals in his hand, when his victim, watching from above, had a last-minute change of heart.

Ameneh Bahrami, once a woman of striking beauty, was blinded and hideously disfigured after Mohavedi threw a bucket of acid over her in 2004 in a fit of anger after she had rejected his proposal of marriage.

Under Iranian law, Miss Bahrami was entitled to seek retribution in kind – a practice, endorsed by the Koran known as qesas that prescribes "eye-for-an-eye" justice. The court that convicted Mohavedi ruled, however, that he could only be blinded in one eye. [telegraph.co.uk] Read more

Cairo protest highlights clash of visions

A huge rally Friday meant to symbolize unity highlighted instead the deepening splits between secular and religious parties over Egypt's future, signaling battles certain to unfold in coming months over the influence of Islamic law on the nation's new constitution.

The demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square, one of the largest since President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February, reaffirmed the power of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations that amassed tens of thousands of supporters. It comes as weeks of protests have convulsed the country and polarized political parties whose true agendas are emerging. [Los Angeles Times] Read more

War for the furtherance of Islam and against non-believers is considered ethically acceptable

Islamic experts assure me there is no prohibition of warfare during Ramadan. On the contrary, many of Islam's great conquests occurred during this holy month, including the first clash between Muslims and infidels, which occurred in 624 when Muhammad led his troops to victory in the battle of Badr. War for the furtherance of Islam and against non-believers is considered ethically acceptable by scholars, even during the month of fasting and prayer. [Guardian Cif] Read more

Norwegian Terrorist Special Edition

In addition to the regular update this week LibertyPhile includes a Special Edition, 13 extracts and links to articles analysing Anders Breivik’s motives and the background to them.

On Christian fundamentalism Archbishop Cranmer, July 24
Anders Breivik is not Christian but anti-Islam Guardian Cif, 24 July
Christian Terrorism and Islamophobia Sam Harris, 24 July
Norway, we salute you - Radicals across the globe will use Anders Breivik against the West The Commentator, 27 July
SIAN Blames “Politically Correct Norway” for Breivik’s Murders The Spittoon, 27 July
Mass-murder in Norway highlights the need to oppose the ideas driving the European far right New Humanist, 27 July
Breivik and Fascism – A Lesson from George Orwell Harry’s Place, 27 July
Romancing Eurabia The Huffington Post, 27 July
Is Wilders partly to blame for Norway attacks? Radio Nederlands Worldwide, 27 July
Has the UK ignored the threat from the far-right? Wallscometumblingdown, 28 July
In his rage against Muslims, Norway's killer was no loner Guardian Cif, 28 July
The Norway Massacre and Europe's War on Free Speech Hudson New York, 28 July
Was Anders Breivik a ‘fascist’ or something else? Liberal Conspiracy, 28 July

On Christian fundamentalism

.... But never over recent centuries has ‘Christian fundamentalism’ been used to justify mass murder. We are not talking about bombing Dresden or sinking the Belgrano or any appalling loss of life within a context of war: we are talking about a professing Christian who decides to take the law into his own hands and act unilaterally.

Anders Behring Breivik shows a remarkable ignorance of the teachings of Jesus, who exhorted Peter to put away his sword. To be a fundamentalist follower of Jesus would be to dedicate one’s life to celibate pacifism.

And not only that, it would be to give away all that one has to the poor and live in a commune where everyone shares everything and all possessions. [Archbishop Cranmer] Read more

Anders Breivik is not Christian but anti-Islam

[A COMMENT] As a Muslim, & as a human being, I offer my condolences to the victims. This Norwegian terrorist is not much different than Osama Bin Laden. Hatred & intolerance will lead to these types of atrocities no matter on which side of spectrum. The Fascism in Islam = Fascism in Christianity = Fascism in any other religion or philosophy.

For the intolerant Europeans, if you want to limit the Immigration of Muslims into your countries, just modify your rules & laws. You are in charge of your own countries and governments.

Try to only allow educated & progressive Muslims into your lands who will assimilate more easily into your communities. If you create ghettos for the Arabs like in France, then you can not expect assimilation!!! [Guardian Cif] Read more

Christian Terrorism and Islamophobia

.... One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik’s behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of “Islamophobia” and about the need to address the threat of “terrorism” in purely generic terms.

The emergence of “Christian” terrorism in Europe does absolutely nothing to diminish or simplify the problem of Islam—its repression of women, its hostility toward free speech, and its all-too-facile and frequent resort to threats and violence.

Islam remains the most retrograde and ill-behaved religion on earth. And the final irony of Breivik’s despicable life is that he has made that truth even more difficult to speak about. [Sam Harris] Read more [via National Secular Society]

Norway, we salute you - Radicals across the globe will use Anders Breivik against the West

.... Radicalization is a threat to our freedoms and equality; we too have wishy-washy politicians eager for votes and terrified of offending, thereby pandering to the Islamists; we have our share of Sharia-pushers; we have huge loopholes in our immigration system, an open welcome-to-one-and-all policy regardless of background and intention and most of all, like Storhaug’s prediction, time is running out for us.

The radicals have become bold across the globe and are using scare tactics. They will milk the Oslo massacre against the West forever. For them this is a triumph.

We need to act now for tougher immigration policies, harsh legal consequences for those wishing to harm the West , transparency and accountability for all religious organizations along with clearance from organizations such as RCMP and Revenue Canada and a strict policy of separation of church and state. [The Commentator] Read more