I am writing because in February a National Front member Neil MacGregor pleaded guilty to threatening to blow up Glasgow Central Mosque, Scotland's biggest mosque and to behead one muslim a week until there are no more mosques in the country.I haven't followed this case, and don't know the detail, but Yousuf does indeed have a point. If it had been an Islamic fundamentalist who was trying to blow up a Church of Scotland church I am pretty sure it would have featured on national news bulletins. Is it really right for the media to discriminate like this, or is there more to this than either Yousuf or I can see?
Despite this there has not been any media reports of this at all. We are trying to get this changed, not because this is any more important than other terrorist attempts but rather because it is equal and so should receive similar press treatment. After all, do you think the coverage would have been the same if it was a muslim trying to blog up Scotland's biggest church and threatening to blow up one church a week?
Irfan Ahmed has also taken up the cudgels.
46 comments:
Iain i also received an email from Yousuf on this issue and im 100% in agreement with him. I think its safe to say some in the media are a bit biased towards minority groups, or is it something deeper ?
Thanks for listening to our campaign Iain and linking to us! I hope this will help in winning the battle like the blogosphere won the battle to get Dan Hannan's video onto the MSM!
I am on record - but am happy to be so again - as cheerfully advocating the pulling down of every church, cathedral and mosque etc on the planet (obviously not with people in them).
They are monuments to mankind’s stupidity.
Simon Gardner, presumably you would ask permission from the owners first? Otherwise you reveal yourself to be an arrogant totalitarian.
If Simon Gardner needs a hand, I'll be happy to lend him one.
Whilst I agree entirely with Yousouf and Irfan, the thought idly occurred to me that it would be near impossible for the position to be reversed in a Muslim country - how many churches are allowed to even exist in those places?
Well, why don't we also look at some of the other things that don't get reported.
How about attacks on English people by people from ethnic minorities for a start?
If you want to report crimes by someone who is a member of the BNP, how about reporting the crimes and persecution against members of the BNP? Fair is as fair does.
Also, how about exploring the reasons for the crimes in the first place - why do Muslims want to blow up British people? why do Scottish people want to blow up a Mosque? Do you think the reasons are the same? Might there by cause and effect?
I think that it is rather expected that muslims behave in this fashion - they do have a history of using bombs and beheading people. It is rather extraordinary for anyone of another religion to threaten tho copy muslim tactics and, perhaps, the reason that this warrants column inches..
no longer anonymous said... “...presumably you would ask permission from the owners first?”
Don’t be silly.
Islam is againat blowing up people or terrorism, so all people who say they are "Muslim terrorists" are actually not because as Islam teaches terrorists have NO place in Islam.
I agree the media should report everything and not what makes HOT news!
I picked up the email from Yousuf a while after the story had first run on his blog....sadly I didn't mention it myself as I struggle to find the time to post even my own stuff. I agree with the concerns expressed. It's worth digging further on and Yousuf has done a good job.
However it did occur to me that there may be a reason to downplay this. It seems to me that the National Front gentleman in question is an absolute barking raving mad nutcase, and that he is unlikely to be in a position to bomb or behead anyone or anything. Any coverage that took the threat seriously could encourage further racists or lunatics, and allow NF a platform of some kind.
Just a thought, my general view is that this is a definite issue of public and media interest, and there may well be a whiff of hypocrisy by the Mail (for example) not running with it, when we can all guess what the headlines would have been if it had been a Muslim in the dock for targeting churches.
@ Simon Gardner : You are as arrogant as you are stupid!
Jess the Dog is right. There's more to this story.
Irfan Ahmed has previously ignored this:
When I first read this story I was outraged, as I'm sure that all decent folk would be, and that you would hope we would be. I do recall an incident when the police rushed to the Mosque and heard it was a bomb scare, so that did seem strange that nothing more was heard of the matter - I assumed it was a hoax.
Now, I find through a bit of googling that you are portraying the story of Neil MacGregor as an 'attempted' bombing. It was nothing of the sort.
You can find more details of the story here http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/news-watch/society/guilty-plea-on-bomb-threat-to-glasgow-central-mosque.html
The man is clearly in need of help. He sent an email to the police! He then phoned the police claiming to be a member of the National Front and making these threats verbally - to the police.
Clearly it was a crank call. I've got little doubt in my mind that the reasons for delays in sentencing are in order for an appropriate psychiatric assessment to be made.
It is most disingenious of you to try to use this story to create some sort of impression that in Glasgow, of all cities, muslim's are somehow unfairly treated by the press.
A much better, though less controversial and perhaps less useful in portraying the muslim community as 'victims' would be to highlight the excellent work of Strathclyde police in this matter.
We are told what the 'powers that be' (whoever they are) want us to be told. The MSM in this country is controlled rigidly. We are being conditioned and 'trained' for the future.
Yousuf Hamid is, of course, wrong.
The case was reported in Scottish papers as a fairly local issue.
MacGregor was obviously a fantasist and advertised his "intentions" explicitly to the police. No evidence was led that he actually possessed any weapons or explosives.
I am not even clear that he was a member of the National Front if such an organisation still exists in any real sense outside of pubs.
His case was quite different to radical Islamic preachers who incite hatred and violence, facilitate training and weapons procurement. Those are distinctly under-prosecuted.
I think it worth reading what Neil MacGregor himself has to say. Not sure where jess the Dog got the NF connerction from, it just seems he is a crank turned God squad and most certainly does need help.
http://scottishislamic.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/macgregor-sentencing-deferred/
Some nutter made a threat (to the police) to blow up mosques and behead Muslims. From the stories it would appear he was acting alone and had been making no preparations to put the threat into practice.
Is that such a big deal?
Cranmer was not unsympathetic to the prima facie evidence presented here, so he emailed Mr Ahmed with these specific questions, with every intention of bringing the matter to the attention of his flock:
Given the silence on the matter, what has been the source of your information?
Can you provide any direct links to any of these sources?
Are these reliable?
You say sentencing is due to take place on the 17th April. Presumably, the source of this information includes the names of his defence team?
Did MacGregor actually atempt to blow up the mosque, or did he simply threaten to do so?
Is it true that he phoned the police to warn them of his intentions?
If the latter (and His Grace does not know), is this not (in your judgement) somewhat different from the Islamists who bomb., murder and maim with no warning whatsoever?
What is the evidence that MacGregor is actually a member of the National Front?
How do you respond to the suggestions that he is in need of medical treatment for his mental state rather than incarceration for being a terrorist?
If MacGregor is not a pyschiatric case, the media blackout is not justified. If, however, he is, is it not wise to await news of his sentencing before which psychiatric reports will have been adduced?
His Grace received a perfunctory reply simply referring him to a Facebook page, which does not address any of these rather important questions.
As you suspected, Mr Dale, there may be more to this story than meets the eye.
Threatening to blow up a mosque and behead muslims, not blowing up or even planning to blow up a mosque. There are hundreds of muslim threats of violence, including bombs and beheadings, that don't get widely reported, including those by people the government is talking to as "moderates".
This is no worse. In fact it is less serious, as it has actually been acted upon, despite being an isolated case. There is very little action taken against muslim protesters and their supporters who threaten violence of a very similar nature, in fact I am sure tehir threats are the inspiration for Mr MacGregor's, as explosions and beheadings are typical threats from violent muslim extremists.
Does Mr Hamid think that islamists who threaten violence should be prosecuted more often, and their threats receive more publicity? If so, then I can support him in both cases. If not, then he is hypocritical.
I agree that such censorship is wrong. I have been trying to get our media to at least mention that our police in Kosovo (the KLA sworn in en masse) have been allowed not merely to engage in genocide & ethnic cleansing but to kidnap thousands of Serb teenagers & cut them open while alive to remove their organs to swll to our hospitals.
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm
Obviously if the BBC, ITN & our entire press corps were not wholly & completely corrupt racist scum willing to tell absolutely any lie & censor any dact in the Nazi cause this one NATO atrocity, out of many, would have had far more coverage that the entire Gaza war.
I think by any objective measure the gact that our police were allowed to murder thousands of innocent civilians in such an obscene way is thousands of times more newsworthy than one alleged BNP nut threatening to kill. Indeed I think it is more newsworthy than all the coverage given to the Gaza war, where fewer died & in a less disgusting way.
If so our media have deliberately lied & censored for a decade in a way which would make Goebbels proud.
I have used this article as a reference elsewhere.
http://www.thedvdforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=558495
I am happy to remove the link if required.
Span Ows said... “...it just seems he is a crank turned God squad...”
Err. Spot the difference. (Coz I can’t.)
"Don’t be silly."
So if you could you would rip down St Paul's Cathedral, the Sistene Chapel and other great works of architecture for petty ideological reasons even if public opinion was against you, people still made use of those buildings and the owners didn't want them knocked down.
What exactly differentiates your philosophy from political authoritarianism? Or are you just trying to wind people up?
The trouble is they don't need any help from infidels to blow up mosques:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/bomb-in-shiite-mosque-kills-17-people-in-pakistan-1663127.html
Simon Gardner:
Err. Spot the difference. (Coz I can’t.)
LOL! Indeed!
One isolated angry nutcase a jihad does not make!
Did this one person have access to bombs, did he have an organised gang ready to make off with muslims to hack their heads off like the taliban/islamists do?
Islamist jihadist terrorists are a real threat, they number in the thousands in the UK alone, enjoying popular active support by tens of thousands and passive support by the hundreds of thousands, the islamist hostile colonists in the UK provide lots of manpower and financial support to the Taliban helping them kill and maim british troops, so lets get things in perspective here shall we?
There may well be some Muslims who wish to integrate into our nation but the actual observed reality is that many wish us ill and despise everything British.
Talking up one lone fantasist nutter is a joke and detracts from the overwhelming threat the UK faces from a large number of utterly hostile and vindictive Islamists, the fact is that another tragedy like 7/7 is being planned right now, thousands of islamist 'millitants' are under surveilance.
I fully understand my post will not be popular and I fully understand should you delete it, I hope you understand why I posted it.
"There may be more to this story than meets the eye." Or in another sense, less. If some one called (shall we say) Yousuf had threatened to bomb and kill, there would be a serious chance that he meant it.
Cassandra there have also been a couple of Moslems brought to trial with attendent publicity who looked very like silly teens writing poetry or boasting on the net.
The real problem is, or should be, that our media are willing to lie & censor to protect those who do actual genocide, 100s of thousands of times more newsworthy than this - simply because they are working for our government.
Nobody denies that our government is responsible for racial genocide but everybody, including Iain who is normally a pretty good liberal, considers it something not be mentioned in polite company.
no longer anonymous said... “So if you could you would rip down St Paul's Cathedral, the Sistene Chapel and other great works of architecture for petty ideological reasons ”
Nothing “petty” about it at all. And they aren’t “great”; they are monuments to Man’s stupidity and that’s all they are. Ditto my noisy village church and that monstrosity in Regent’s Park. All ghastly edifices to asininity.
And I’m so glad not to be being accused of being a wishy-washy liberal for a change.
Iain your involvement in this would be taken more seriously if the racist kidnapping and murder of Glasgow 15 year-old Kriss Donald had been reported on your blog or any other national media source AT ALL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriss_Donald
The wikipedia article says that the BBC mentioned the story 3 times at a national level - that's 3 more times than I ever saw it mentioned.
more on the attack from the Guardian, the only MSN source considered "safe" enough to report it without provoking a backlash
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/nov/19/race.world
Be careful when reporting Glasgow "race" stories going unreported, because I strongly believe that this murder was covered up, whilst your story is about a lone nutter who needs psychiatric help.
This is another case of bloggers getting visions of grandeur, I'm afraid. Yet again we see claims that because it wasn't covered more extensively by the mainstream press, that it means there's some kind of conspiracy against Christians or something going on. What a joke.
Back to Geoffrey Hoon being a hoon, please.
Iain,
You may be in danger of allowing Muslim activists to get away with an exercise in moral equivalence. They say the ravings of one lonely lunatic who made threats in an e-mail to the police should be more widely reported. One might suspect that their aim is to excuse and minimise a whole culture and infrastructure of death that is intent on delivering murder at a vast rate. Only today we hear of a teenager who killed 20 or more people and injured 60 at a Shia mosque in Pakistan. The teenager did not act alone. He was recruited by a network of evil men and sent to his death. This pattern has repeated itself all over the world. These are real news stories. One lonely lunatic does not make a news story. Real death and destruction do.
Note that it is Hizb ut-Tahrir , among others, that is trying to get this story out. Don’t help them. Yapping Yousef misrepresents the story on his own blog calling the incident an “attempted terrorist attack on Glasgow Central Mosque”.
The kernel of the story seems to be a story in a weekly publication called The Digger which reported:
“The court heard how 35-year-old MacGregor admitted sending a race hate email to Strathclyde Police threatening to blow up [Glasgow Central] Mosque if certain demands weren’t met. Included in the chilling message was a threat to behead one Muslim a week in the same manner construction worker Ken Bigley was killed after he was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004.”
The operative word is threatened and this is in any case a very, very rare threat. If t had been a serious threat then yes it may have been picked up by the mass media, but as it was it wasn't a serious threat.
Now, if there had been instances of this happening here and abroad and it was serious I would agree, but no.
Perhaps you would prefer to have been duped into making this an issue by someone else? They are using you Iain to try and hide the fact that terrorist threats are serious from muslims. If we were to give mass media coverage to every idiot who threatened muslims then the papers would be full. I agree with Simon Gardner to an extent here.
Did Irfan campaign against the muslims threatening in London and being an utter disgrace to our troops returning from Iraq? We all of us here condemn any nutter threatening people, but only muslims fail to condemn their own.
Double standards as usual.
The Grim Reaper said... “...that it means there's some kind of conspiracy against Christians or something going on.”
If there is, can you tell me where I sign up?
Perhaps this imbalance has something to do with the fact that the National Front consists of three loonies on day release, whereas our Mohammedan brethren have developed quite the reputation for decapitating people they don't completely agree with, and blowing up their property to boot.
The biggest problem Islamicists have is not the National Front, but is in distancing themselves from their terrorist wing, and I don't think they try nearly hard enough. Part of the problem here is that Islam is inherently political as well as proselytizing. In other words, moderate, mainstream Muslims would quite like Britain to be converted to Islam and for us all to live in an Islamic state under Sharia.
Iain you should know by now that the dead tree press (especially the Sctsman and the Herald) and the BBC (especially) and STV news in Scotland is firmly and totally in the corrupt hands of New Labour and only ever reports word for word press releases from New Labour, murders and mayhem from West Central Scotland, and the daily boredom of what is going on with Rangers and Celtic - in fact the latter usually takes up half of each new bulletin. The SNP and the rest of Scotland rarely ever get mentioned except when the SNP are being attacked by the anti-SNP party (i.e. New Labour) and when there is some monumental disaster happening elsewhere in Scotland that the UK media has noticed. So far as Muslims are concerned the Scots media thinks they don't exists except if they happen to be a New Labour MP attacking the SNP. Sorry for being so cynical but these are the facts of life in Scotland.
Chas said... “Part of the problem here is that Islam is inherently political as well as proselytizing.”
Very many “religions” are or have been political - like catholicism or the mormons or evangelical christianity. In fact offhand, the only “religion” I can think of that absolutely doesn’t do this is judaism - which is bloody difficult to join.
I think the reason goes something like this:
Muslims have a track record of outrageous acts like that.
Whereas no one is interested in a lone scottish nutter.
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Dear Yapping Yousuf
My name is Neil MacGregor and I am the person who carried out the atrocities you speak of and what the Digger have reported on.
It is true what I did except for the nail bomb (I never mentioned a nail bomb) I simply said bomb.
What I did was a total disgrace and sickening and I have had to live with my disrespectful act every day since February 2007. I have no pride in what I did and fell sick when ever I read or hear what I did, sometimes I cant even believe I did this disgraceful act. I returned from 12 years in California and watched a video clip sent to me by a friend in England and was shocked and upset at what I saw when watching Eugene Armstrong being beheaded. I lost my temper and verbally hit back with phone calls, emails and letters. Before this incident I had no hate of any religions or of any race and have not since.
I have since written apology letters to bashir Maan of Glasgow Central Mosque and Osama saeed of the Scottish Islamic Foundation to plead for there forgiveness, which was given by both. I also wrote to Osama Saeed and asked him if I could help in the fight against Islamaphobia and he accepted and said he would like to meet me after the sentencing to discuss how I can help.
Yes what I did was so shocking I couldn’t look my Mum in the face when I told her, my fiance left me and I fell in to depression.
I have never been a member of any racist or fascist society and am only a member of the SNP.
I am and always will be deeply sorry for the upset I caused and it will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Neil MacGregor
It us worth mentioning that the former Councillor Bashir Maan refered to above had 2 letters published in the Herald newspaper during the Gaza war in which he justified violence afainst Jews saying Israel's actions "bodes ill for Jews all over the world" & was "reviviong" anti-Semitism.
I do not believe the police charged him with this incitment & know for a fact that the Herald declined to publish my or any other letter criticising these inflamatory words.
I think this puts his email in context.
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