The British Muslim Forum released a statement supporting the ban on Zakir Naik. However, there seems to be no statement on the BMF’s own website.
Meanwhile, major Shia organisations have criticised the Muslim Council of Britain for support provided the Indian Muslim televangelist:
The three organisations showed a united front in expressing their collective displeasure and sent a strongly worded letter to the Muslim Council of Britain.
A French lawyer attacked one of her fellow shoppers for covering her face. The burqa may be “an affront to French values”, but it is increasingly difficult to say the same thing about bigotry.
Egyptian human rights groups disagree over ‘Islamic hate channels.’
Egyptian human rights activists submitted a report to the Egyptian government this week demanding it ban aggressive religious Islamic channels from broadcasting.
The activists, who include lawyer and human-rights activist Nagib Gabriel, described these channels as extremist and said they were disseminating “subversive ideas that call for discrimination against women and Copts and lean towards radical behavior that is far from the spirit of Islam,” according to a report in the Kuwaiti Al-Jarida.
….Human rights activists are not all in agreement over how to deal with these stations.
“The stations are very problematic,” Ahmad Samih, director of the Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies told The Media Line. “It’s not an easy decision for a human-rights activist fighting for freedom of speech to ask them to take it off air, but I think they need to be punished and they need to understand what responsibilities they have.”
Bahey Eddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies told The Media Line that “with all due respect to the good intentions of those NGOs, I’m afraid this will indirectly help the government limit the freedom of satellite channels in Egypt and other parts of the region.”
Journalism malpractice: New Yorker magazine’s sun-shiny feature article on hate radio shock jock Michael Savage.
Savage, according to Kelefa Sanneh, is “a marvelous storyteller, a quirky talker, and an incorrigible free-associater.” He’s a “a first-rate host, chatty and solicitous,” and a “political idealist, a sucker for a sob story, and firm believer in the power of friendship.”
All of this prompts Eric Boehlert to ask: “Does he like puppies, too?”
Remember, Savage is the guy who said Arabs were non-humans, called for the deaths of 100 million Muslims, a ban on mosque building in the US, and who said the South Asian tsunami “wasn’t a tragedy” and the affected countries were “hotbeds of radical Islam” anyway, so who cares?
Here’s a pic of the author and subject side-by-side.
ABC affiliate right-wing hate radio station host Lee Rodgers wants to “massacre all Iraqis” if they give the US any trouble.
Lee Rodgers on the Iraq people. “You people do what ever you want to each other and this country just don’t give us a reason to come back or we’ll massacre every last damn one of you.”
Spocko’s suggested letters to the show’s advertisers:
Dear Bay Area BMW. Are you aware you are sponsoring someone who is calling for America to massacre the Iraqi people? If you don’t want to support this serious suggestion of genocide, please stop advertising on KSFO.
Dear Bay Area Mercedes dealers. Will you sell a car to an Iraqi? Or do you, like Lee Rodgers, want to kill all of them? It seems bad for business to call for all of your future Iraqi customers to be massacred. Please advise me of your views on massacring Iraqis. Are you for or against it?
If you don’t want to support serious suggestions of genocide, please stop advertising on KSFO.
Dear Toyota Repair Centers. Would you print an ad in a paper saying, “Toyota supports the future massacre of every last damn Iraqi. We sponsor Lee Rodgers, the KSFO host who said that. Come and get your car tuned up! Iraqis need not schedule an appointment.”
If you won’t do that with a print ad, then why do you do it with your radio ads?
More racist Facebook page comments discovered by Audra Shay, the top candidate in the race to head national Young Republicans political group (post on the first set of comments here).
* In October 2008, in the wake of news that an effigy of Sarah Palin was being hung outside an affluent Hollywood home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shay replied, returning to the “LOL” style that she employed after the “coons” comment: “What no ‘Obama in a noose? Come on now, its just freedome [sic] of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol.”
She picked up the thread again the next morning with a clarification and a new insight. “Apparently I could not spell last night. I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.”
That is the “traditional wisdom” of republican control mechanisms in action. Dogwhistle race-baiting and IQ-baiting has won for them in the past.
Clerics in Iran are inciting the public to attack Baha’is and burn their properties.
Out of step with its allies, the US defends the freedom to offend, says the New York Times.
i think ali already observed this, but this type of behavior is REALLY good at elicting anti-islamic feelings in non-muslims. and i’m not talking about steyn’s arguments….
it is moments like this where i realize that for all my criticisms of liberalism, i am SOOOOO very american in my attitudes about what political liberalism ought to be. the attempts by supposedly liberal-gov’ts to control speech make no rational sense to me and seem to be begging for a backlash against the very groups that they are trying to protect.
in the end, the attempt to control speech seems to reveal a complete lack of faith in liberal society and its citizenry. that lack of faith is the real threat to the european polis. explicitly authoritarian controls will form the society until its people increasingly learn to be more and more illiberal.
While agree with you, razib about states regulating speech* and (Western) Muslims (as a general rule) to better appreciate the ‘free speech’ argument, I can’t let this go without comment:
this type of behavior is REALLY good at elicting anti-islamic feelings in non-muslims.
This is completely wrong. The vitriol or anger of these people must be directed at the states which make provisions to clamp down on ‘hate’ speech, not Muslims. Muslims, in France or Canada or elsewhere, are only making use of legal avenues which already in place and were put in place before Muslims became a ‘problem’. This is not really a ‘Muslim problem’.
*ALL states make provisions to curtail our speech (and behaviour). What is up for debate the extent to which states will restrict this ‘speech’. ‘Religious beliefs’ are not, ordinarily, protected by liberal states from ridicule, mockery or abuse (which is linked to the need for the secular state to decide and define, “over and over again”, what exactly we mean by ‘religion’).
fair enough.
Shams al-Nahar is discussing. 
razib, 
thabet, and 
johnpi
Thanks for noticing this. BTW I have the email addresses of the correct people at all of these companies. I would LOVE to provide them to you and your readers.
I have a very good track record of convincing advertisers to not associate with KSFO. I convinced two to leave just last week. In 2007 a group of bloggers and I convinced 28 advertisers to stop supporting this kind of violent rhetoric.
Rhetoric like this
http://www.spockosbrain.com/LeeRogersIndonesiananotherEnemyMuslimNationKillMillions10252006H06M06.wma
Where Rodgers says that we should kill millions of Muslims.
I also sent a letter to the Iraq Ambassador about this, but he ignored it. Maybe because I’m not Iraqi. Below is the link to the letter. Could you please get it to someone who cares so an official statement can come from the Iraqi government?
That would go a long way to helping the advertisers to know that the call for genocide from KSFO host Rodgers was seriously offensive. And official statement will not do anything to limit his speech, but it will give me something to use to show the advertisers.
Here is a link to the letter.
http://www.spockosbrain.com/Massacre_all_Iraqis_says_Lee_Rodgers_KSFO.html
You can write me at spockosemail AT gmail .com
Thanks!
LLAP,
Spocko