Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The Glasgow Protest

You will, no doubt, remember that we were having great difficulty finding out about the protest in Glasgow that was supposed to have taken place on Saturday. After the Independent reported that thousands were due to attend there was no more mention of it.

USS Neverdock did his investigation and found that the event had taken place but no one really knew much about it. Read here and here for background.

Today the truth has been revealed. The SocialistWorkerOnline has an exclusive report on the protest. Far from the thousands who were to pack the area there were instead just 300 people.

Omar Saeed from the Muslim Association of Britain told the gathering: "They are implying there are extremists in our mosques, in our universities, in our homes - that our parents are ignoring the extremists among their own children. We reject it."

No surprises there. Nor were there any from Yvonne Ridley who was also there telling the few who were bothered, "Tony Blair and his master George Bush in the White House have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon, with their own brand of extremism."

This rally against Islamophobia was exactly that. As Fellay pointed out in the comments the term "Islamophobia" implies an irrational hatred of Muslims. This rally served to give us all rational reasons for being concerned about some of them; as if there weren't enough already.