Recently in Good News Category

British Muslim Initiative: The Sun and Daily Mail withdraw unfounded allegations by Policy Exchange

Hot on the heels of the Daily Spew grovelling to the McCanns yesterday, the Sun and the Daily Mail (or Scum and Snail Trail as they're known around these parts) have withdrawn articles from their websites based on the Policy Exchange report of last year, which alleged that extremist literature was being sold in mosques in the UK. This happened after a Newsnight investigation demonstrated that much of the evidence on which that report was based was in fact forged, but not before several major newspapers had "given prominent and extremely biased coverage to the report"; the BMI had complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the coverage. The Sun also printed a letter from Muhammad Sawalha of the BMI and Mohammed Kozbar of the North London Central Mosque (i.e. Finsbury Park mosque). (HT: Islamophobia Watch.)

STOP PRESS: the Forest Gate brothers have been released

Plus: in this week's New Statesman, former editor Peter Wilby on the contradictory stories of the events last Friday:

The brothers who lived there were planning a terrorist attack using cyanide, sarin, anthrax, or bubonic plague germs. The noxious substance would be released from a vest or a canister. It would be a suicide attack or a remote-controlled explosion. The "bomb" was inside the house or "out there". Its use was imminent or it was nowhere near completion. The information came from an MI5 informant or a police informant. The police operation was code-named Volga or Volgo.

Officers entered the house by smashing a window or battering down the front door. One brother was shot by the police (either after a warning or not after a warning, and either after a scuffle or not after a scuffle), or he was shot by the other brother. The shot came from a Glock pistol or a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun. Both brothers had criminal records or they didn't.

An amusing article from Julie Bindel (very rare indeed for me to agree with anything she writes) on why she's glad the Gunners lost in the match with Barça last night. Particularly interesting is this reason:

I have heard them shouting that their rivals, Tottenham [Hotspur, or Spurs], are "the Yids". Charming.

Strange, that, for a team that's just signed a promotional deal with the Israeli tourism authority, putting them in the same class as Man U and Chelski as teams whose opponents I'd support, no matter who they were.

Guardian Unlimited - Gold teeth: a sure sign of a media sting

I've not normally got much time for George Galloway and his party nowadays, but my attention was drawn to this story about how Mazhar Mahmood, a journo with the salacious Sunday Murdoch rag the News of the World (AKA News of the Screws) tried to stitch up Galloway with a date at the Dorchester and some suggestive remarks:

The MP and Big Brother evictee had been invited out to a late night meal by two men apparently keen to help Mr Galloway's party, Respect. The pair, introduced as Pervaiz Khan and Sam Fernando, described themselves as "Islamists" which, given that neither had a beard, also seemed peculiar.

An "Islamist" introducing himself as Sam Fernando?

Soon the conversation turned, according to Mr Galloway, to the issue of just how they could help - along the lines of "can we sponsor members of parliament? ... fund political parties?" What could they mean? "I told them absolutely not, it's completely illegal," said Mr Galloway yesterday.

Then the men starting making remarks about Jewish people, said the MP, "and invited me to agree with them. For example, when I said the Daily Express was the worst pro-war, anti-Muslim paper in the land, they asked 'because it's owned by a Jew?'. 'No,' I said, 'because it's owned by a pro-war pornographer'."

"Parveiz" turned out to be Mazhar Mahmood, who normally specialises in dressing up as an Arab sheikh (despite being of Pakistani origin and not speaking Arabic) and enticing celebrities to backbite people and spill secrets, which he reproduces in the News of the Screws. (Also see Umm Zaid's Make a Fast Buck the Mozrab Way list of other ways to drag the Muslims' name through the mud.) (More: here, here.)

Technorati Tags: george+galloway, mazher+mahmood, news+of+the+world

And some good news to finish the week off: the ironically named Slobodan (meaning freedom) Milosevic is dead.

From Gene at Harry's Place: "Let the conspiracy-mongering begin"

To paraphrase a headline from the Sun, was Slobba clobbered?

Who gives a damn? He's dead. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

CAIR reported this week that a con man who has been swindling money out of Islamic centres in the USA for several years has been indicted by an Alabama grand jury and extradited from Canada. The announcement reads, "Mohammed Agbareia made an initial appearance Monday in U.S. District Court in Alabama on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. FBI officials say a co-defendant, Zouhair Hissy, was arrested in Canada on January 4. The two men were indicted by a federal grand jury in Mobile, Ala., for trying to bilk a local Islamic center out of $1500 using a scam that relied on the Islamic tradition of helping travelers in distress." CAIR executive director Nihad Awad is calling on anyone targeted in the "stranded traveller" scam to assist prosecutors.

• Warning to Muslims about pseudo-Islamic 419 scam attempts
• Scams targeting Muslim women by Sara Umm Zaid - includes a piece on "distressed Muslimahs" who want your money.

Ginny gave me a link to a local TV station in Nashville which had a news report on her work at the Nashville benefits office and how she uses the computer and telephone system despite not being able to see the screen. WKRN currently has the story at the top of its "local headlines"; you might be able to find it on the "More" page once it drops off the top few stories. It's in Windows Media Player format, which also didn't work properly on the Mac version of the software which I use. It's marked "Blind woman helps others with new technology". (Note that of all the blind people in Nashville who use computers to help them with their work, WKRN chose to feature a Muslim lady in hijab, so this counts as a "Muslima positive" story as well, which is why I've linked it here.)

Good news today, which certainly justifies an update: Tory Bliar's proposal to lock suspected terrorists up for up to 90 days got defeated in the Commons, with 322 against and 291 in favour. 49 Labour MPs voted against the government in a vote which required cabinet ministers to be recalled from trips to Israel and Russia. Old alliances very publicly broke down, with the Sun encouraging its readers to send their appeals to the PM to support the 90-day rule, while attacking both Tory leadership candidates for opposing it.

A new edition of the Islamic classic Dalaa'il al-Khairaat has been published, with a beautiful MP3 of the text's recitation (via Seeker's Digest). The page (the default page just contains a picture of the book and the MP3) also has an introduction by Shaikh Nuh, who explains its importance and the process of the current edition's publication; there is also a piece by the shaikh on the text itself. The standard version costs £25 (UK); there are also limited-edition deluxe and super-deluxe versions, which cost £150 and £360 respectively.

Via Islamophobia Watch, Keith Shilson, who was expelled from Middlesex University (in London) for insisting on holding a "question time" with Hizbut-Tahrir on campus, has been reinstated, although HT remains banned on the campus. The decision initially attracted condemnation from around the world and from the college's own staff. Shilson now says he accepts that the college were within their rights to ban the group and the meeting, but supports "free speech on campus".

Founder of the National Front and later head of the British National Party, Nazi scumbag and inciter of racial hatred, John Tyndall, has snuffed it at the age of 71 at his home in Hove. The BBC reported that he was due to appear in court on Thursday in Leeds, along with current BNP leader Nick Griffin, charged with race-hate offences. Last year he was one of a number of racist and fascist activists who gathered in New Orleans (see earlier post) to celebrate the return of racist con-man David Duke and to hammer out a "protocol" by which far-right groups "aim their hate at their real targets, not at each other, and to advance in unity their vision: a nation for white people". He will not be missed.

Following on from CAIR's occasional "Good News" features in their mailings, I've decided to do one of my own whenever a good news feature (or apparent good news feature) appears in the media. Today it's about the Tartars of Crimea (a peninsula in the Black Sea which belongs to Ukraine but where the main language is Russian), whose rights have been restored for the first time since their deportation to Central Asia by Stalin according to this BBC report. The new law, awaiting signature by President Leonid Kuchma, will have the same rights over land, housing and work as other Ukrainians, and bans discrimination.

An entry in al-Muhajabah's blog gives some news from Rwanda, where the number of Muslims has doubled since the genocide, in large part because Muslims stayed out of that atrocity and gave shelter to Tutsis while the churches turned them over to the murderers. (Then again, were Muslims murdered during the Rwanda genocide? If not, that could partly account for this increase, but the fact remains that thousands have converted in the ten years since.) BBC News report (1st April)

This report notes that "the Church hierarchy in Rwanda supported the previous regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana. And they failed to denounce ethnic hatred then being disseminated. Some survivors like Zafran have since left the Catholic Church, unable to reconcile the Church's teaching with the actions of its most senior members during the genocide". One notes yet again the lack of fellow feeling among Christians - they were willing to abandon their co-religionists in East Timor to the Indonesians (yes they were Muslims, but there was no pretence of jihad and they wiped out a third of the population), and terrorise Afro-Americans for a century because of a post-Civil War vendetta in which the churches were complicit.

There are two important lessons in this for Muslims. The first is the obvious value of being a good neighbour and helping them out in times of distress; the other is staying above nationalism and tribalism. The Muslims in Rwanda risked their lives to save people from being murdered by militias and mobs. Muslims today are divided along various lines of race, tribe and biraderi, sects with minute differences as well as other matters which should not divide us. This causes problems in the mosques, which in many places are the preserve of one ethnic or tribal group (you might like to read this blog entry by Izzy Mo in New Orleans), and ultimately gives our community a bad name when such matters as biraderi politics gets tangled up with local politics in the UK and becomes news. There is no room for this in Islam! Let us rise above it!