Thread: Tut! Tut! BNP vibes.......

A North East Liberal Democrat council candidate has been accused of Islamophobia over comments posted on his Facebook site.

Dave Stones, who is standing for election to Redcar and Cleveland Council, reportedly suggested on the website that a pork restaurant and a topless bar should be built next to a mosque.

He has apologised for any offence caused, but Labour MP Tom Blenkinsop accused him of holding "clearly expressed Islamophobic views".

The Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland MP raised the issue with Commons leader Sir George Young.

He said: "Next Thursday there will be a by-election in Newcomen ward of Redcar and Cleveland Council. The Liberal Democrat candidate there has made openly Islamophobic statements on his Facebook site yet he remains the candidate, despite the Liberal Democrats' zero tolerance for such instances of prejudice and discrimination.

"The Muslim Council of Britain are concerned, the Coexistence Trust are concerned and Hope Not Hate are concerned. Do you believe there is any place in mainstream democratic political parties, especially one which is in Government, for someone who holds such clearly expressed Islamophobic views such as Newcomen's Lib Dem candidate?"

Sir George told him he was "reluctant to get drawn into a by-election spat" but added: "If any criminal offence has been committed then it would be appropriate to refer it to the police."

Lancashire Telegraph, 13 January 2012

Meanwhile Ian Swales, the Lib Dem MP for Redcar, has dismissed Stones' Facebook comments as "a bad taste joke".

See "No place for racism in local government or North East says Northern TUC", TUC press release, 12 January 2012

Joan Smith had an article in yesterday's Independent on Sunday ("Strong religious belief is no excuse for intimidation") on the theme of Muslim attempts to suppress freedom of expression. Her arguments have been enthusiastically endorsed by fellow liberal Islamophobe Nick Cohen on his Spectator blog.

Smith claims that there has been an upsurge in attempts to intimidate critics of Islam, and gives three recent examples:

It's been a dreadful week for free speech. A meeting at a prestigious London college had to be abandoned on Monday evening when members of the audience were filmed and threatened by an Islamic extremist. Then the president of a student society at another London college was forced to resign after a Muslim organisation called for a ban on a joky image of the Prophet Mohammed. Finally, on Friday, the author Sir Salman Rushdie cancelled an appearance at India's largest literary festival, saying he feared an assassination attempt after protests by Muslim clerics.

Let us examine these three cases in turn.

1. It is true that a Muslim extremist barged into a meeting at Queen Mary, University of London where Anne Marie Waters of One Law For All*was due to speak on the threat to human rights posed by sharia law. He reportedly took photographs of the audience and threatened them with retribution if they said anything that defamed the Prophet.

If this account of events is accurate, then the individual's behaviour was indefensible and no doubt very upsetting for those attending the event. However, once the police had been called and the man had left the building, it is difficult to see how the meeting was, as Smith writes, "unable to go ahead".

(The National Secular Society seems to be aware that this is a bit of a hole in their argument and has claimed that outside the building the man "joined a large group of men, apparently there to support him". It is notable neither Anne Marie Waters nor Maryam Namazie saw fit to mention the presence of this gang, still less to suggest that it was why the meeting was cancelled.)

2. Then we have the much-hyped "Jesus and Mo" controversy at University College London. The organisation that "called for a ban on a joky image of the Prophet Mohammed" is the Ahmadiyya Muslim Students Association and they have repeatedly emphasised that they are not calling for a ban, but merely asking the student union's Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society (ASH) to withdraw to cartoon because it caused offence.

Furthermore, Smith's assertion that ASH president Robbie Yellon was "forced to resign" appears to have been taken directly from the headline to a Daily Mail report. As is usual with the Mail, the headline was intentionally misleading. A spokesperson for ASH in fact stated: "Robbie stepped aside because he signed up as president to organise events and run a student society. He did not appreciate the stress he would be under when dealing with a controversy like this, so he wanted to make way for someone else."

3. As for the threat to Salman Rushdie in India, Rushdie has claimed that the warning of an assassination attempt was a lie, and while the (non-Muslim) chief minister of Rajasthan insisted that the threat was real the police denied that they had any information about a plan to kill Rushdie.

So, to summarise, we have one individual who disrupted a meeting, a polite request by an Ahmadiyyah student group that an illustration which offended Muslims should be withdrawn,*and a dubious report of a threat against Salman Rushdie which Rushdie himself says in baseless. And this supposedly amounts to a pattern of Muslim intimidation of critics of Islam.

You might think that Joan Smith's ill-researched, inaccurate, dogmatically secularist scaremongering plays directly into the hands of the far right and will be used to bolster a racist narrative about the Islamic threat to the West (which results in real acts of violent intimidation, against the Muslim community and its supporters). You'd be correct.

Bwana, you really should put the source of where you have copied and pasted from. Having said that, as it is more than one line, we all know that these aren't your own thoughts.

What do you think about all this?

Originally Posted by angelman

Bwana, you really should put the source of where you have copied and pasted from. Having said that, as it is more than one line, we all know that these aren't your own thoughts.

What do you think about all this?

......and answer came there none.

I wonder if Bwana is prepared to say how he feels about taking part in online discussions. I ask this because there seems to be a peculiar method-by-no-method in his sporadic posts.