February 29, 2008 – 11:26 pm
So, there’s not really that much of a problem here. Since we have no direct quotes from any of the Universities that says that female Muslim students had refused to scrub properly and been allowed to get away with it, it’s likely that what’s happened is something a whole lot less worrying than either paper [...]
February 27, 2008 – 10:20 pm
President George W. Bush may have cooled down his wild rhetoric about “Islamofascists,” but the Republican presidential contender John McCain and others have filled the vacuum with their constant references to Islamic extremism as being the threat of the century and the defining issue of our times. Mainstream cable television, local newspapers and public affairs [...]
February 22, 2008 – 11:03 am
In recent years, the Daily Express newspaper has frequently published inflammatory articles on asylum seekers, migrants and Muslims. The newspaper regularly carries front page headlines such as ‘Christmas is banned; it offends Muslims’, ‘Now Muslims get their own laws in Britain’ and ‘Muslims tell us how to run our schools’.
IRR News
February 17, 2008 – 11:04 pm
As one who has encountered many Muslims both on the Internet and face to face over the past decade or so, I do not get the impression of a “firm self-image” among the hot-headed youths who have extremist sympathies, but rather from ordinary, decent religious Muslims with their heads screwed on. The aim of the [...]
February 12, 2008 – 11:59 pm
Phillips shows extraordinary presumption in demanding the sacking or resignation of Dr Williams because of this. Phillips is not a Christian, Anglican or otherwise, and her opinions on what is appropriate for Dr Williams are irrelevant unless it directly affects her community, which this does not. The speech was about the status of another community; [...]
February 12, 2008 – 11:56 pm
Criticism of Islam segues effortlessly with prejudice against black immigrants. “Niggers out” no longer wins many votes, but Muslim-bashing presses the same political buttons. For our rulers, Islam is a doubly-convenient scapegoat for resistance to the West’s “war on terror”. Any discussion of Islam today is therefore a discussion about war and about racism. By [...]
February 11, 2008 – 10:58 pm
Surf the discussion threads this weekend and you’ll read bumper levels of invective aimed at Muslims and Islam, fuelled by this kind of reporting. It’s not difficult to find examples of real hatred, of furiously resentful people. The level of antagonism seems so out of proportion – after all, Islam isn’t taking over the UK, [...]
February 11, 2008 – 10:55 pm
Yet he uses the issue of cousin marriages to justify bashing specifically Muslims (even more specifically Pakistanis), without acknowledging the greater public health concern is arranged marriages among Uncle-Niece couples that is still occasionally practiced among Hindus (even though illegal in India since 1955, it is not universally enforced). Indeed, Islam does not allow Uncle-Niece [...]
February 11, 2008 – 7:11 pm
When a group of Osgoode Hall researchers and students reviewed 20 Maclean’s articles, they found what they felt was a disturbing and sustained pattern of Islamaphobia. With titles such as “Wake up ostriches: Islam’s in an expansionary phase” and “Wake up Europe: It may already be too late,” the articles “promoted hatred and fear of [...]
February 10, 2008 – 11:03 pm
The reaction to Williams’ statement adequately expresses the three basic coordinates of contemporary Islamophobia, veering between burning resentment about Them getting ’special treatment’, fear and loathing of the ‘Muslim threat’, and finally a vague ‘humanitarianism’ in which whitey rescues Asian Babes from their non-white male captors. The first two being the usual racist discourse, and [...]
February 10, 2008 – 8:23 pm
An initial observation of the website highlighted an overwhelming focus on news reports linked to Islam and Muslims in the UK i.e. there were reports on honour based violence, “The West Islam and Islamism” and “Hate on the State: How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism”. There were news reports with headlines such as “The Grand [...]
February 9, 2008 – 11:09 pm
The main reason for the adverse and fearful reaction is that Shariah is popularly used as a synonym for penal law with its fixed penalties that can involve capital punishment. However, there is no Muslim representative body advocating Islamic penal law in Britain. Furthermore, the term “Shariah” itself is an umbrella concept that includes criminal [...]
February 9, 2008 – 11:03 pm
There has been a lot of ignorance expressed in response to Dr Williams’s speech. For example, one Baroness Cox claimed on BBC Newsnight last night that Canada once had Shari’ah law, but abolished it under pressure from women’s rights groups. In fact, Ontario (not Canada as a whole) had an Arbitration Act, allowing religious tribunals [...]
February 8, 2008 – 12:29 pm
The problem is that the right, and their fellow-travellers on the Muslim-bashing left, will seize on this. For them, it’s a case of mediaeval misogyny versus western enlightenment. Suddenly, papers that oppose abortion and believe career women will always be unhappy start cross-dressing as feminists. Don’t believe this ruse – they’re just using feminism as [...]
February 7, 2008 – 7:24 pm
As a journalistic shorthand, it’s almost perfect for the theme of the moment, being the suggestion that supremacism among angry young brown people poses an existential threat to the British way of life. Think of the words themselves, as if you were a journalist: “Shari’ah” is an assertively “foreign” word, whose pronunciation includes letters and [...]
