Consider two stories carried by Bob Pitt on Islamophobia-Watch.
Exhibit A, published by I-W on June 25th, is the story of Sureyya Ozkaya:
These are the shocking injuries inflicted upon schoolgirl Sureyya Ozkaya during a brutal daylight assault near her Thornton Heath home.
The 14-year-old’s hair was set on fire and her hands and feet were cut with glass during the attack in Grangewood Park, before her attackers smashed her head against a tree and left her bleeding in a bush.
She was stumbled upon by a woman walking her dog and carried home to nearby Kitchener Road following the attack, at about 7.30pm on June 9.
Sureyya’s mother Pemdegul Kale, 39, said three girls taunted her daughter about her Muslim faith as they carried out the assault, before burning her hair with a lighter and stealing her trainers.
Exhibit B, published by I-W on June 28th, is about Tariq Ramadan:
Academic Tariq Ramadan, sacked by Rotterdam city council last year, is asking for €75,000 compensation for wrongful dismissal.
Ramadan lost his job as city integration adviser after officials discovered he presented a tv show for a broadcast company financed by Iran. The city said this could not be combined with his other roles. Erasmus University also ended his contract as a visiting professor.
Court hearings over the compensation claim began on Monday. Ramadan claims the sacking damaged his reputation as an Islamic scholar.
The first discusses the shocking and gutless physical assault on a young muslim girl. She was targeted specifically because she is muslim and there is a clear-cut indication of anti-muslim bigotry in the motivation to the violence.
The second is about Tariq Ramadan who has decided to take his erstwhile employers to court on grounds of wrongful dismissal. Rotterdam City Council decided that Ramadan’s links to an Iranian TV channel would conflict with his role as an academic at Erasmus University.
Question: Why is the story of Tariq Ramadan, suing Rotterdam City Council in this case, Islamophobic?
There is no commentary by Bob Pitt to tell us why. There is simply the vague suggestion from the title of the piece that implies Ramadan was dismissed on grounds that were Islamophobic. But this is not articulated in the article, which is cut and pasted verbatim from Dutch News.
When two completely divergent stories are juxtaposed in this manner, it has two effects:
1) By offering no distinction between the two cases, it seeks to conflate the fate of ordinary muslims with the travails of seasoned political Islamists. It does this by claiming that violent anti-muslim bigotry suffered by ordinary people who are targetted because they are muslim is of the same qualitative order as political action taken against right-wing Islamists.
2) There is the attempt to bolster Tariq Ramadan’s story by listing it alongside the story of real violence against a real victim. Tariq Ramadan is not a victim of any kind, but what this juxtaposition does is to objectify the pain of Sureyya in particular, and devalue and disrespect the real victims of anti-muslim bigotry in general.
Islamophobia-Watch is replete with this kind of sophistry and moral relativism. Political Islamists will be the first to claim to be victims of “Islamophobia” but will be the last to be on the receiving end of real anti-muslim bigotry.
But the take-away point to remind oneself when one reads the blog is this:
Islamophobia-Watch uses ordinary muslims to protect the interests of right-wing Islamists.
13 Comments
It is people like Tariq Ramadan and their friends in the Islamist media, including Islamophobia-Watch, who are morally responsible for the attack on the girl.
You might have noticed that the pitiful Bunglwala’s ‘Inayat’s Corner’ and fuckwit Sunny Hundal’s ‘Pickled Politics’ blogs are being referenced increasingly approvingly by Bob Pitt.
Bob, who no longer works for City Hall, now posts under his real name and not as ‘Martin Sullivan’. But comments are still diabled on his nasty pro-Islamist website, naturally. But even if they weren’t, he’d be far too busy deleting comments and banning people, like his friend Andy Newman of Socialist Unity, to be posting anything of any worth.
Inayat has Pitt’s website on his links list.
Bob has been linked to quite a few nasties in his time. He started off his political career in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, most widely infamous for the nasty sexual misconduct of its founder, Gerry Healey.
Less well known about (outside of those of us involved on the Left in the ’80s) were the cash-for-information deals that the WRP struck with both Gaddafi’s regime in Libya and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
In return for cash injections and other support from these dictatorships, the WRP collected information on Iraqi and Libyan dissidents in the UK and passed this information onto the authorities in Libya and Iraq. This directly contributed to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of dissidents (especially from the Communist Party of Iraq and the various Kurdish factions) and their families and friends over a period of time in the 1980s.
Lest we forget.
There seems to be more to this attack on the Turkish girl.
In particular, the gang shooed her sister away before beating her up. Now, the sister was just as Muslim as this girl. So, if this was specifically an anti-Muslim crime, why wasn’t the sister beaten up too?
This was probably a schoolgirls’ vendetta more than anything else.
qidniz
“In particular, the gang shooed her sister away before beating her up. Now, the sister was just as Muslim as this girl. So, if this was specifically an anti-Muslim crime, why wasn’t the sister beaten up too?”
For the bloodthirsty qidniz it wasnt enough that one innocent Muslim girl was assaulted
That’s a bit much even from a genocide-loving nutjob troll like you, Murky One.
Brain-fried mullahs like Marwan have trouble with the word “if” and, of course, even a form of argument as simple as modus tollens is quite beyond them.
interestingly, i think that IW is right to cry foul on the “muslims want to ban their kids from music lessons” story:
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/9130
apparently it’s a christmas show, so it’s more about the religious side of things than the music.
although, come to think of it, i thought jesus was an islamic prophet, so what’s the problem with a christmas show? i’m not too clear on that one.
b’shalom
bananabrain
“although, come to think of it, i thought jesus was an islamic prophet, so what’s the problem with a christmas show? i’m not too clear on that one.”
er.. because Christians deify the Prophet Jesus which is shirk (idolatry) the worst sin in Islam.
Yeah, best crucify them then, Mar…me…tariq…. whatever your name is.
Yeah, best crucify them then, Mar…me…tariq…. whatever your name is.
Meanwhile, his buddies and soul-mates are showing everyone the proper way to educate Muslim children.
Joe Boxer – isn’t that a bit like blaming anti-semitic attacks on Israel? Good post though.
Sarah AB
Yes, it is. The correlation between actions taken in Israel and anti-semitic attacks here is not tenuous.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/gaza-war-saw-antisemitic-attacks-rise–to-record-high-1889936.html