France seeks to woo Islamic finance

PARIS — As France debates whether to ban the burqa, the government is leading a drive to attract billions in investment from Muslim countries by turning Paris into the European capital of Islamic finance.

The French parliament this month has approved changes to legislation to allow Islamic "sukuk" bonds to be issued and the Qatar Islamic Bank has applied to be the first such bank to open in France.

Home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority, France is hoping to unseat London as the European hub for Islamic banking, offering products that comply with Sharia law and meet the needs of big investors mostly from Gulf countries.

But the drive is raising hackles, with some opposition politicians accusing the government of undermining France's much prized secularism to accommodate wealthy interests.

"When rich Muslims are concerned, we welcome them. But when they are poor, we put them on planes and deport them. This is all very upsetting," said Socialist deputy Henri Emmanuelli.

After failing to garner enough votes to derail the bill, the Socialist opposition is challenging the legality of the new legislation on Islamic finance before the Constitutional Council.

"We must not allow principles of Sharia law, or the ethics of the Koran to be introduced into French law," said Emmanuelli.

Under Sharia law, making money from money such as charging interest is not permitted and investment in companies involved in alcohol, gambling and tobacco is strictly off limits.

Much of the debate has focussed on opening up the French market to "sukuk" bonds, which are asset-based and do not pay interest. Investors receive coupons corresponding to part of the profits earned by the asset underpinning the bond.

Economists argue that money raised through Islamic finance could help spur France's nascent recovery with tools that are seen as financially sounder than the high-risk derivatives that led to the 2008 global meltdown.

Elyes Jouini, an author of a report presented to the government last year, estimates that France could tap into 120 billion euros in capital from Islamic finance by making adjustments to its tax and banking laws.

Only seven billion euros of those would be raised domestically among France's five million Muslims.

"There are extremely important financial reserves in Gulf countries and southeast Asia and these countries are ready to invest anywhere but they have specific rules in terms of ethics and in terms of the choice of investment," said Jouini.

"If France wants to attract this capital to its economy, it must offer the possibility for these investors to do so according to the rules of Islamic finance," he said.

Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and Central Bank governor Christian Noyer are to address a major conference in Paris this week that could yield some announcements on promoting Islamic finance in the French economy.

France's far-right National Front has denounced Islamic finance as a "community-based peril" resulting from immigration.

Jouini said opposition to the changes stems from "fear of the unknown."

"The term Islamic is confused with Islamist, the term Sharia raises fears because some think of women forced to cover themselves, the word fatwa raises fears because some think of Salman Rushdie, but a fatwa is nothing more than a decree," said Jouini. continues here

EDITOR'S Comment: It’s a tricky one this, as real nationalism opposes international finance, the practice of speculation, that is to say, the making of profit on the back of another’s labour, Islam recognises the crime of usury and for this we must salute them, however, nationalists realise that Islam does not belong within Europe. So whilst applauding their stance regarding interest we recognise that they do not and never shall belong here, France should be for the French, not swamped by hordes of others, be they from Islamic countries or indeed from the UK, “Nations for Native peoples”, being the nationalist take on things.

Mohammed is now the third most popular boy's name in England. So why this shabby effort to conceal it?

This week, the Office of National Statistics published a list of the most popular boys' names in Britain: Jack, Oliver, Thomas, Harry, Joshua, Alfie, Charlie, Daniel.

They reflect a cultural tradition as old as the nation's history, and would provoke approving nods from Jack the Ripper, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Becket and Harry Hotspur.

There is just one small problem: the list is deceitful. In reality, the third most popular choice for boy children born last year in England and Wales was not Thomas, but Mohammed.

The ONS explains blithely that it had no intent to deceive. Its normal practice is to catalogue different spellings separately, as in Mohammed, Muhammed and so on.

But if you add these variants together, as surely seems logical, then Mohammed is right up there, near the top of the list.

Unfortunately, in recent times we have been given plentiful cause for paranoia about attempts by official bodies to conceal from us information about the changing face of Britain which our rulers know that many people will not like.

Immigration figures are routinely distorted. In a rare moment of honesty, a Labour Home Secretary conceded that he had no idea just how many migrants dwell in this country, because of the huge and unquantified pool of illegals.

Many EU nations decline to collate statistics about the religious affiliations of their populations, to avoid rousing sentiment against Muslims.

The ONS's hit parade of children's names, as released for publication, seemed designed to mask a simple truth which dismays millions of people, and which politicians and bureaucracies go to great lengths to bury: the Muslim population of Britain is growing extraordinarily fast.

In 2007, 28 per cent of children born in England and Wales, rising to 54 per cent in London, had at least one foreign-born parent. In 2008, 14.4 per cent of primary school children claimed some other tongue than English as their first language.

The Muslim population is now close to two million, over 3 per cent, and rising fast because Muslim families have more children than most of the rest of us, many of them named Mohammed or Muhammed.

Muslim population has doubled in 30 years, and will double again on present projections by 2015. By 2060, Britain is expected to be the most populous nation in the EU, with 77 million people - this, though today Germany's population is 20 million larger than ours.

A bleak body of pundits, many of them American neoconservatives rather than spokesmen of the British National Party, believe that Europe, and Britain in particular, is threatened by a Muslim tide which will not merely transform its traditional culture but, frankly, bury it.

In a series of recent books, they argue that Islam is colonising this continent in a fashion that will render it unrecognisable a generation or two hence.

Even if this is overstated, the statistics paint a grim picture for those of us who do not wish to live in a small island crowded with 77 million people, even if most of the newcomers were white Australian Christians.

No government massage of the numbers can blunt the fact that a host of migrants is here, most of whom espouse an entirely different cultural tradition from our own.

If a fraction of what we are told about the threat posed by climate change to the world's poorer societies is true, then vastly more of their inhabitants will seek to move West in the decades ahead.

It seems fantastically na've to suppose that many of these newcomers - or even their children born here - will start reading Jane Austen or tuning in to The Archers. They are likely to change Britain, and indeed Europe, more than we shall change them.

The big thing that makes this wave of immigrants so different from those of the past, who became integrated into our society and our ways, is that it is so vast. After World War II, some thousands of Poles settled here, who could not face returning to a communist tyranny.

Many of them had names like Wladyslaw or Miroslaw. Yet when they married and had children, few gave these Polish names. Most became Jacks and Olivers and Harrys. Today, their grandchildren are indistinguishable from ours.

It is hard to believe the same will be true in Birmingham or Leicester, where Muslims are soon expected to outnumber whites. Today, the adolescent children of immigrants tell pollsters that they feel much less integrated into British society than many of their parents profess.

The problem is intensified by cultural problems which are entirely of our own creation: we, the old British, have grown deeply unsure about what we believe in. This helps to explain our fervent attachment to the memory of World War II.

It is a much more powerful force than Christianity. It was the last event in our collective experience about which we are sure we were on the right side, and did well.

Ed Husain, the former Muslim radical whose 2007 book The Islamist painted vivid images both of the shortcomings of British society and Muslim attitudes towards this, wrote: 'In mosques, after prayers, many of my Muslim friends rightly ask what we are supposed to integrate into. 'Big Brother' lifestyle? Ladette culture? Binge drinking? Gambling?'

A society capable of elevating Jade Goody from victim into iconic martyr; whose juries repeatedly refuse to convict footballers even on overwhelming evidence because they are granted the privileges of secular saints; where four-letter language is happily indulged by the BBC and schools seem unable to produce literate children, is scarcely in a strong position to pontificate about British values.

In any discussion about Muslims, we should acknowledge that the morality prevailing in many of their households is at least the equal of ours, and sometimes superior to it.

Because we know this, because we have lost confidence in our own cultural identity, we flail and blather about how to respond to the unprecedented ethnic and demographic turmoil which our politicians have unleashed upon us.

Muslims in Britain will become eager to integrate only when they perceive our society as possessing equal or superior virtues to their own, as today many do not. Only in the treatment of women can we claim to occupy conspicuously higher ground.

Even those of us who deplore the almost uncontrolled tide of immigration should acknowledge huge problems in our own society - the loss of shared disciplines, values and respect - for which newcomers bear no responsibility.

Britain, two generations hence, threatens to become a mere camp site for 77 million people of many races, for whom this represents a mere place to sleep, eat and make money. To avert this, we must address a series of related challenges.

First the next British government must effectively limit immigration. Thereafter, we should follow the French in outlawing the most conspicuous manifestations of cultural separateness, notably the face veil in schools, in law courts and other publicly administered institutions, and at airport security.

Most important, we must rediscover a belief in ourselves, a sense not so much of British nationality as of British community, which others can see the merits of sharing. Parts of this country - its middle-class islands - are still wonderful places to inhabit. They are still definably old Britain.

Others, above all the inner cities, seem lost to civilisation. Everyone outside them, and especially our politicians, have abandoned them to unemployed families, feral children, unchecked crime and huge immigrant communities which may live in this country, but are tragically not of it. continues here

'Birmingham wants football not fascism' says NASUWT

The NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union in the UK, utterly deplores the English Defence League’s (EDL’s) attempt to exploit the England V Slovenia football match in Birmingham by using it as an opportunity to promote their vile racist agenda.

The group is planning a rally in the city on Saturday 5 September in order to spread their evil Islamophobic views among football supporters. The NASUWT is lending its full support to Unite Against Fascism’s (UAF’s) opposing action on the same day.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said:

“Birmingham is renowned for being a harmonious, multicultural city and has greatly benefited from its diverse mix of inhabitants. The people of Birmingham simply don’t want these violent political thugs disrupting their community cohesion.

“By timing their rally for the day of the England football match, the EDL is clearly attempting to convert ordinary football fans, many of them families, who simply want to see the national team play in their home city.

“We applaud the initiative of UAF in organising a peaceful promotion of racial harmony under the heading of ‘Birmingham United’. We will be urging our members to support this nonviolent event.continues here

EDITOR'S Comment: It is not just the reprehensible left that oppose this Zionist front group but all true nationalists, as in the article highlighted below, even the BNP, themselves infiltrated by Zion, oppose this protest (sic) so to claim that this is a “far-right” or BNP initiative is rather old-hat, considering that nationalism is united to in its condemnation. We oppose also groups such as the NASUWT and UAF ,who are in themselves nothing more then front groups for Communism, the concept of a union is a good thing, the working man is open to exploitation by avaricious capitalists, however, all unions today are fronts for communism and as such are enemies of the body-politic, the common people.

As nationalists we oppose hatred for hatreds sake, we believe that all races, creeds and colours should exist in peace, however, such a peace can only occur with a return to normality, a return to natures way, rather than the enforced appalling system we see now today. Forcing this agenda through, detrimentally affects all races and creeds, although due to our minority position it affects whites perhaps more severely, yet true nationalists are not blinded by colour, not beset by Zion’s agenda, we recognise for instance that the east is beset by a terrible foe, that the sub-Saharan basin and its people is and has been, completely exploited by greedy capitalism, as such we oppose such actions, contrary to neo-Tory-nationalism.

So at a stroke we recognise the various interests at play here and regrettably none work in the peoples interests, unfortunately the EDL protest will have many genuine supporters, many aggrieved individuals, bravely protesting against evil, yet I have to tell you today that you are led, led by a terrible force, a force hell-bent upon global government and ultimate power, it is in your interest and the interest of your children to join with true nationalists in opposing such a terrible foe. Quite perversely all groups contain individuals led by evil, even the left contain individuals that desire only to combat evil, they have been trained to view nationalism as such, yet true nationalism desires no concentration camps or any of the other rubbish stated by the malevolent left, it desires peace amongst peoples ,yet the return of our mother Europe.

This is a battle for all peoples, for all creeds and for all nations, yet to oppose nationalism, in this or indeed any other country, is to oppose the peoples fight-back, the peoples only hope. Strange then it is that Islam marshals its forces against our people ,even as their own face a similar fate at the hands of globalism, strange that those that consider themselves fighting for Islam, fight against peoples who oppose the very same forces. True Muslims would live and reside within Islamic nations, not reject their culture and system to live in the land of the unbeliever, true muslims would stand with their brothers against globalisation, rather than opposing individuals that fight to regain their land.

It is for this reason that Islam within Europe is an enemy, not because of its belief system per-se but because it thwarts our peoples autonomy, inhibits our culture and seeks to impose its own values upon an unwilling people. Why your leaders do not speak out about the rapes upon white girls, about the unruly mobs that maraud at will in many of our towns and cities and why your leaders do not tell you truth, that to be here, to reside within Europe, is both contrary to Islam reaching and indeed an aid to the agenda. It is quite true that much of what now passes for nationalism is purely anti-Islamic, led by Zion as it is but I can tell you, that what you perceive to be nationalism is nothing of the sort, it is a Frankenstein, a monster, an agenda malign, directed against nationalism to destroy it.

Yet as long as true nationalism lives, as long as Zion is kept at bay, as long as we cling to our traditional values, our peoples still have chance, still have hope, we do not and will not support the sending of troops to your lands, what right have we to do so, we deplore the desecration of your holy places, the attacks upon your people and fight against the very forces that send our young men to die. However, we will oppose you bitterly should you attack our people, colonise our land and undermine our way of life, Islam cannot win in this, cannot proceed to create constantly enemies and hope to survive, do we as you not have the right to live in peace within our own countries, do not our women have the right to walk in safety, is not our culture and tradition as valued to us as yours is to you.

Yet today young Muslims will take to the streets in a land not their own, they will if chance permits attack whites, they will stand with and indeed be marshalled by the far-left, a force that regards religion as a nonsense, that seeks to destroy all religions in the cause of their quite terrible, murderous agenda. Given chance they would turn upon you, fight you mercilessly and you them, yet you will side with them today against peoples denied their rights, attacked and colonised. Nationalism and indeed western peoples pick no fight with Islam but be under no illusions should you pick a fight with us, you will get one, true nationalism has not shown its hand, has not as yet marshalled its forces, what you see is only Zionism, yet we, as indeed you, must protect our people.

Such a shame, three different forces upon the field, individuals used by the same force, each believe erroneously that they fight evil whilst evil rubs its hands in glee, it is as if none can see, as if all that take to the field cannot or indeed will not, look back and see the puppeteers. Still fate is fate and if it is the case that true nationalism has been forced to coalesce, forced to come together against evil then we shall see, yet do not expect the trifling rubbish of neo-Tory-nationalism, true nationalism recognises and fights all of our peoples enemies, no matter which banner they choose to fight under. We would hope that peace would reign, that sense would prevail, yet this is not forthcoming and is therefore only a dream, today all mans enemy will marshal its troops and they will fall into line, remember we are watching growing and waiting and true nationalism is far, far from dead, choose your side wisely…

Young British Muslims angry with police and media

LONDON (Reuters) - Many young British Muslims feel demonized by the police and the media and say they have come under pressure to prove their loyalty since the September 11 attacks and the 2005 London bombings, a study has found.

The report for the Policy Research Center, an Islamic think tank, was intended to give young Muslims their own voice to counter assumptions made by outsiders.

It said young Muslims had been portrayed in the media as a threat to society and often struggled to convince people that they can be both British and Muslim at the same time.

Public debate over immigration, nationalism and integration has left them feeling under attack, while Britain's role in Iraq and Afghanistan has only increased the pressure.

"As well as facing questions and challenges to their loyalty, young Muslims ... are being pressed to define their identity in light of national and international events," the report said.

Young Muslims are too often asked to prove that their religion is peaceful and they are law-abiding, the report said.

"This is especially damaging when myths and stereotypes surmount accurate information, resulting in young British Muslims being portrayed as a threat to the wellbeing of the wider British communities," it said.

There are 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, 2.8 percent of the population, according to the last census in 2001. Unofficial estimates suggest the number could now be well above 2 million.

Most have roots in south Asia, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh, a legacy of Britain's colonial rule.

POLITICAL DEBATE

With Britain in its worst recession since World War Two, immigration has risen up the political agenda. The far-right British National Party won its first two seats in the European Parliament in June, helped by fears over jobs and housing.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, trailing in the polls with an election less than a year away, has repeatedly defended his immigration policy and has called the BNP "Nazi sympathizers."

Despite attempts by police chiefs to engage with the Muslim community, the report found many young British Muslims did not trust the police and felt harassed.

The report blamed a dramatic rise in Muslims being stopped and searched in the street after the July 2005 suicide bombings, which killed 52 people in London. Four British Muslims, three of Pakistani origin, carried out those attacks.

The report said sensationalist media reporting after the bombings created negative stereotypes of Muslims in Britain.

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