As someone who devotes much energy to battling Islamophobia, it is important equally to oppose false cries of Islamophobia whenever any Muslim group is thwarted. Otherwise “Islamophobic” will become a meaningless pejorative just as “Anti-semitic” is thrown at any rational critic of Israel.
Having looked at the dispute over Camberley Mosque, I feel that it is the Bengali community which is acting with gross insensitivity. They wish to pull down a listed Victorian building to build a mosque. I would oppose that were the proposed replacement a mosque, synagogue, church or Tesco.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/surrey/8561342.stm
The old scholl has in fact been in use for many years as an Islamic centre. There is no threat to that. It is demolition of the building which is objected to.
It strikes me that the very large and sturdy building looks ideal for sympathetic internal conversion to make it a better mosque. Failing that, the community can do what anybody else has to do whose needs have outgrown a listed building, and move the mosque elsewhere.
I encountered a similar arrogance and insensitivity from some members of the Muslim community while campaigning on Whalley Range in Blackburn, when I was faced with a demand that a pub close to a mosque be closed down. I replied that the pub had been there for over a hundred years before the mosque.
The deliberate spread of fear and hatred of Muslims by politicians, media and security services is a real problem. But what we must insist is that Muslims are treated both no worse and no better than anybody else.
You don’t need to search to find such things,
That is how they always behave,
EDL yobs urinate on Westminster Abbey
Posted by Antifascist
If desecrating Nottingham Castle was not enough, on Friday the 5th of March, whilst in London to pay homage to their far right extremist prophet Geert Wilders, the “patriotic crusaders of England’s cultural heritage” paid their respect to one of England’s most historic sacred Christian sites, deluging Westminster Abbey with gallons of filthy urine
Engaged in a tsunami of continuous racist chanting, the EDL’s (in denial) neo-Nazi “defenders of England’s Christian heritage” made a beeline for one of London’s most famous place of worship, unzipping their floppy pink mitres in majestic unison, baptising walls, doorways and memorials with an almighty torrent of pungent hops-tinged English excreta.
Given a free reign to do what they pleased, while sober anti-fascist demonstrators were kettled, jostled, arrested, and released later without charge, the drunken racist thugs of the so-called English Defence League were allowed to do just whatever they wanted in Britain’s capital, free to roam the streets of London without censure, inflicting conflict and hatred upon anyone and anything as they pleased.
Scuffling in city pubs, drinking in the streets, racially abusing passers-by, intimidating shoppers, threatening anti-racist campaigners with violence, the very worst of England’s binge-drinking yob culture was on display in the nation’s capital last Friday. Rampaging through the streets, disturbing the peace in the Tate Gallery, was not enough to keep the violent fascist yobbos occupied. Once they had paid lipservice to wildeyed Wilders, they set off on their most hypocritical mission yet.
Their Hitler salutes and incessant racist chanting hardly demonstrating to the world the EDL are not bigots, by displaying the same contempt towards Christianity as they openly display towards Islam. Stopping off at a sufficient number of drinking holes along the way, paying homage to cheap fizzy Australian, Danish and Belgian lagers, the self-styled “defenders of England’s native culture”, slurped, stumbled and vomited until their bladders were ready for the big one, the defining moment for the english nationalist hooligans to leave their mark upon one of Britain’s most historic churches.
Making a pissing pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey, the usual suspects including the same lout dressed like St George captured urinating on Nottingham Castle (they never learn), ran in desperation towards the historic church, disproving the sceptics who thought they only defiled mosques with racist valdalism after dark, by doing their utmost to show the world what the EDL truly thinks of Christianity. The Metropolitan Police, church officials and embarrassed tourists looked away while the filthy louts of the riot-igniting EDL (including some of their ringleaders) sprayed walls, doors, commemorative plaques, and anything they could land on including a medieval doorway.
Westminster Abbey was used as a toilet by the thugs of the EDL.
Urinating in public always has been a criminal offence. In this CCTV era, so much as dropping a bus ticket onto the pavement can warrant a hefty fine and even a court appearance, but even though the recognisable culprits had been captured many times on camera, none of the despicable fascist scrotes who thought it funny to behave like tomcats on one of London’s most visited sacred places of Christian worship have so much as been interviewed by the boys in blue.
Try pissing not in broad daylight but late night, down some hidden rubbish-strewn alley of no importance, and expect to be arrested, handcuffed and rushed to the nearest nick to spend the night. The EDL regard themselves as untouchables since the bail terms for their leaders were overturned in court, but this fails to explain why the capital’s bastians of law and order see fit not to apply the letter of the law to these lawless racist football hooligans, when law-abiding social workers, students and humanitarian anti-racist campaigners are jostled, harassed, and even arrested without charge for peacefully opposing fascism, is beyond explanation.
Given a licence to chant offensive slogans, pick fights with opponents, and indecently urinate in broad daylight on Britain’s historical tourist sites willy-nilly, beyond their curtain of spin and internet trolling, the so-called English Defence League” are nothing more than the shamelessly moronic dregs of society, a gang of uncontrollable racist louts unable to control their bladders who bring nothing but hatred, fear and shame to the country they claim to love.
Armitage Skanks at Indymedia
Look here they are pissing on a Church, not just any Church, Westminister Abbey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94IDoy9Wlg&feature=youtube_gdata
And it is the same people.
These guys do not care about old buildings, they do not care about Christianity.
The mosque permission being taken away was nothing to do with old buildings being replaced by new. It is about Racism against brown people and legal ways to express it.
These guys don’t care about Christianity, if they did they wouldn’t piss on churches.
I suspect the EDL is a security state front organisation.
EDL are a BNP front, (They haven’t tried very hard to hide it)
I have heard from a Non-BNP fascist that the BNP and NF are security fronts, if that is the case then EDL would be a front of a front.
The BNP is a shit used by the security services to attract flies.
That’s a very good way of putting it!
Hey Suhayl Saadi
just a follow up to an earlier post in this thread about congenital disorders caused by marriage and breeding within families. You dismissed my comments earlier as you have every right to do, however if you have a moment check out this link, it may surprise you.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259401/Baroness-Deech-Rise-marriages-cousins-putting-children-risk-birth-defect.html
btw have to admire you folks for your many comments here, personally i’m a busy chap and don’t have the time you guys have to sit and type. However it’s not a criticism as i do find many of the contributors both enlightening and entertaining, sometimes they can be both simutaneously!
dailymail?
That is all the information I require to make a judgement.
I don’t think anyone needs to follow the link.
The word dailymail is more then enough information to discredit whatever content that link might have.
My son is ill, and in the beginning they kept asking us that question when we took him to hospital.
I really found it offensive.
Right, back to the Tai Chi bit, the “Chinese invented gunpowder”, can you cherry-pick or do you have to eat it all ? thing.
Tangled. In the case of gunpowder, I’m not sure there’s any great heresy involved, the ideology of “hey, we can kill people from a distance, great !” is fairly universal ? The article in Wikipedia remarks that one of the bunches of people that found it were looking for an elixir of longevity (oh boy …) in which case, people found use in it regardless of the original thinking behind it. Also, I think of Sir Isaac Newton, who was a swivel-eyed loon that spent more time working on alchemical stuff than anything else, and a hardcore biblical fundamentalist (genesis-based chronologies, the world was created at 9.15 in the morning of Thurday the somethingth of June, 4004BC stuff), but we’ve subsequently managed to cherrypick the bits of his work that fit with our current belief systems (gravity, mechanics, calculus) and drop the bits that didn’t, without detriment – according to our current belief. Who knows if he’d have agreed ?
And, for a contrary case, see the Wikipedia article on snake-oil, which I found a real eye-opener when I discovered it. In China, where it came from, the idea worked. When they imported it to the USA, it didn’t, and thus got a bad name. Because Chinese snakes are different from USA ones, the cherrypicking went wrong, they couldn’t just have the bits they liked. Not that that’s ‘belief’ stuff.
So, in practical terms, maybe you can and maybe you can’t, it depends whether
the bathwater you’d like to throw out really isn’t the baby. According to who ? The belief system of the cherrypicker, or of the originator ? Maybe it becomes something entirely different, in translation ?
In terms of beliefs without any practical aspects, people always have nicked stuff from each other; and, how do you tell if it “works” or not if there’s no practicality to it ?
(this is getting a bit too practical-examples and less religious than I like, I’ve been out in the pub and am at a bit of a loss for spirituality. Let’s just be glad I’m Not Having An Attack Of Capital Letters With Line Breaks. *ahem*. But – )
It all seems a bit like criticising the invasion of Iraq for being disgustingly badly planned. Yes, but it’s not really the main point, it wouldn’t have been any better if it had been really well planned. (In my opinion, which of course is all this is). My criticism of that vicar is where I think I also disagree with you, arsalan, what you were saying about bits of belief you wouldn’t accept.
Which is, that he wouldn’t take the risk.
If other peoples’ way of looking at things has come up with something that people _want_ to cherrypick, then there was something there. Or they think there is, anyway, even if you disagree. So let it come. Argue against it, if you think there’s something to disagree with. And, if you’re sure that your ideas are the right ones, you have nothing to be afraid of, right ?
Censorship is cheating.
Richard, you’re mixing metaphors: babies and bathwater and cherries and cherry-pickers! Not that there’s anything wrong with that – mix away!. Everything is syncretic at some level; indeed, we ourselves are syntheses of several billions of years of DNA exchange, mutation, etc.
Have you ever walked a labyrinth in a cathedral? I haven’t, but I quite like the idea. I read a wonderful book written by a nun once about this; I lent the book to a (broad-minded, old-style C of E) vicar and he never returned it! He’s most welcome to it, of course. There something about certain types of physical movement in space; even if you don’t ‘buy’ the whole religious package associated with it, it can still be energising if approached in the appropriately contemplative manner. The dance of the planets, the galaxies…
Thanks, Parky. Look, ‘cousin marriage’ is a cultural issue, not a religious one and it’s an issue which South Asian Muslim communities (we’re talking this cohort, largely) also talk about. But it’s a societal matter, not a polemical one.
Also, FYI, levels of cystic fibrosis are high is Scotland, pemphigus has a relatively high incidence among Jewish people, MS is high in Scotland (we really have a problem with high levels of morbidity for lots of diseases up here, some of which is enviromental, to do with diet, alcohol, etc. and some, genetic), thalassaemia is prevalent from the Med to South Asia and Sickle Cell in African-origin communities (both are for adaptive reasons re. malaria protection). Melanoma is massive among white people nowadays, it’s an epidemic, a real killer, esp.in Australia but also elsewhere. Yet tanning salons replicate. The potential effects of alcohol and smoking on the foetus is well-documented. The list goes on – it’s very long!
All other aetiological factors in these lists are presented as, ‘here’s a health issue, let’s try and manage it as best we can’, but the ‘cousin marriage’ issue tends to be presented as ‘here’s another rod with which to beat those primitive Muslims about the head’.
Some of the most devout Muslims don’t marry their cousins, or even people from their own ethnic communities, but they still get beaten about the head, metaphorically and sometimes literally, about this and for other things too.
No-one ever says that ‘Christians account for 99.9% of alcohol-related problems on the NHS’ (even corrected for population proportion and expressed as a ratio), because such a statement would seem ludicrous. But looked-at in a one-dimensional ‘Daily Mail’ manner, it is of course true. Some Muslims do drink, but it tends to be less common and so Muslims account for far less in the way of alcohol-related issues vis a vis the NHS. 80% of all attendances at A and E Depts in the UK are due to alcohol-related illness. That’s just A and E. We’re not talking cirrhosis, etc. It’s an enormous financial burden which you and I pay. But The Daily Mail et al would be likely to write-up a story about that, if they did write one, framed in that manner: ‘Christians told by Muslim doctor to stop drinking!’. Or it would be a ‘let’s bash the working classes’ story.
I’m not endorsing such an approach, of course, I’m illustrating the fallacy of it.
When Muslims (or other ‘Others’) marry or take-up with indigenous people, they’re told that ‘They take our women’. When they work, ‘They take out jobs’. When they’re out of work, ‘They claim benefits’. When they’re very fit and win sports races, black people are told ‘it’s not fair, they’re naturally athletic’. When they don’t, they’re told they’re lazy. When they’re swots and successful, they’re resented and made fun of. When they’re not, they’re ‘thick’. John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ has great lyrics and they apply also in these circumstances.
Give it a spin!
“As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small…”
“When Muslims (or other ‘Others’) marry or take-up with indigenous people, they’re told that ‘They take our women’. When they work, ‘They take out jobs’. When they’re out of work, ‘They claim benefits’. When they’re very fit and win sports races, black people are told ‘it’s not fair, they’re naturally athletic’. When they don’t, they’re told they’re lazy. When they’re swots and successful, they’re resented and made fun of. When they’re not, they’re ‘thick’. John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ has great lyrics and they apply also in these circumstances.”
I never thought of it like that. There is no winning with the daily mail.
Marry out, we take other peoples women, marry in we are inbred.
If we work, we take their Jobs, if we don’t we take their benefits.
If we can afford a house we drive up the prices making them affordable, if we can’t we take away council housing needed by the indigenous.
The real issue for them is that fact that we breath. Anything less then mass suicide will be regarded as an act of provocation.
Thats why I didn’t read the article, the fact that it is in the daily mail is enough to discredit it in my eyes.
“Richard, you’re mixing metaphors”
Not widely enough, I think – they both state that we already know where the boundaries are, which closes down the thought I was wanting to open up, namely that we don’t.
I’m not very familiar with cathedrals, I didn’t even know there were any that contained mazes. (Did their builders lift that idea from a different mindset ?)
Ah, not mazes, Richard, labyrinths. That’s the thing, you see. A maze (eg. Hampton Court) is potentially ‘devilish’ because it aims to make you become lost – so the Minotaur’s one on Crete was a maze really – a labyrinth, on the other hand, is designed in loops around a centre so that if you just follow any path, you will always get out, it will always bring you to safety.
Chartres Cathedral’s the most famous. I think Salisbury may have one. Lots of cathedrals have them, usually on the floor, sometimes as hedges outside. Many have been covered with chairs, unfortunately. People ‘walk’ them, some in bare feet like the pilgrims at that place in Northern Spain, Santiago de Compostela; it’s a metaphor for attaining spiritual enlightenment and being filled with the Holy Spirit. I think that like a lot of things we consider ‘Western’, I think labyrinths and mazes may go back to Sumer or Babylon. In other words, to Iraq, the cradle of Western civilisation.
But specifically, I think it was Mediaeval – High Gothic – mysticism, same sorts of concepts as Rosslyn Chapel (forget Dan Brown!). It’s been years since I read that book, though, I’d have to look into it again. ‘The Saelg Tales’ (a novella of mine, on web) contains an account of an Armenian church and of a Sussex Saxon church, no labyrinths but a similar, ‘spirit-into-stone, frozen music’ ambience. Dig it!
http://textualities.net/suhayl-saadi/saelig-tales-part-1/
Hi Suhayl,
yes the list of self-inflicted illnesses is indeed a long one caused by alcohol, tabaco and unhealthy foods such as takeaways. The difference here though is that these are largely self inflicted through goods which are taxed quite heavily by government and thus the price of these goods has an element which can be used to offset the cost of necessary health care.
By parents chosing to marry within their own families and therefore selecting a restricted gene pool in order to produce children inflicts poor health and limited longevity on their off-spring. This outcome has been known about for many years and why such practices are not favoured. This practice has occured within white anglo-saxon groups in the past and no doubt still does as a visit to the West Country may show. It just seems sensible for immigrant groups wishing to integrate into British society that they follow this practice too. In the end it has the benefit of producing a stronger and long lasting breed which given the goal of Islam to convert everyone to its way of thinking surely must be sensible. To think otherwise is surely to be in denial.
And btw Arsalan the Daily Mail is really a damm good read especially the on-line version, as some of the reader comments are hilarious, produced by crazy people who should be locked up for their own well-being and our safety.
I’m not in denial, Parky, I’d indicated that in my post on the subject. As I said, it’s largely a cultural practice which developed in agrarian societies and is related to the distribution and inheritance of land. That’s one of the reasons why it died-out in industrial societies, including in the UK. It’s got nothing to do with Islam. There is nothing in Islam that says one ought to marry one’s cousin. Like a lot of rural, tribal customs, they take a while to change in an industrial (or post-industrial) setting. MacDonalds no longer marry only MacDonalds, even though they’re all ‘Sons of Donald’ (Donald must’ve been some man!). It’s a socio-economic/ tribal demographic matter, not a religious one. And I guess no-one wants a guy with one eye and a twitch playing a mandolin on a hill above the Everglades. What I am critiquing is the manner in which the ‘story’ tends to be presented in certain sections of the media compared with other, not-so-dissimilar potential ‘stories’ and the motivations behind this difference.
If we’re looking coldly at costs to the NHS, perhaps one might posit the fact that without Muslim people (and Hindu, Sikh and Christian South Asians and Africans and African Caribbeans) working for it, the NHS would’ve collapsed 50 years ago. Cystic fibrosis is not taxed at source. Nor are pemphigus and MS.
I agree that The Daily Mail on-line comments are often hilarious, sometimes disturbing. The iceberg effect.
We will decide how much of yourself you are permitted to cover.
We wil decide who you are allowed to marry.
We will decide the designs of your places of worship.
We will decide what you view as Halal.
We will decide every aspect of your life.
If you don’t like it leave the country.
We will decide this for you, and no one else.
Because when you are here, you belong to US!
You are here to serve the government, not to be served by the government.
media and security services is a real problem. But what we must insist is that Muslims are treated both no worse and no better than anybody else .http://www.cheap-lacostepoloshirts.co.uk