Fresh proposals for a permanent mosque risk turning part of West Ham into an “Islamic ghetto”, say opponents.
A public exhibition was held by Tablighi Jamaat in Stratford in a bid to gather support for the Riverine Centre in Canning Road – dubbed a “mega-mosque”. The plan includes a 9,500 capacity mosque with 40m high minarets, library, visitors centre, and a 300-space car park for worshippers.
An internal FBI investigation into its counterterrorism training has purged hundreds of bureau documents of instructional material about Muslims, some of which characterized them as prone to violence or terrorism.
The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller. So far, the inquiry has uncovered and purged over 700 pages of documentation from approximately 300 presentations given to agents since 9/11 – some of which were similar to briefings published by Danger Room last year describing “mainstream” Muslims as “violent.” And more disclosures may be forthcoming, as the FBI continues its inquiry and responds to Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents themselves.
Mohamed Soltan will always remember Martin Luther King Day. On the morning of Jan. 16, 2012, someone set fire to his parents’ home on Britton Farms Drive while he slept.
“I was sleeping and my roommate (Ahmed Mahmoud), thankfully, he’s a really light sleeper, he comes into my room and is waking me up,” said Soltan, a 24-year-old student at Ohio State University. He grabbed his cell phone and a sweatshirt and ran down the stairs of his parents’ home.
“We had already inhaled a wave of smoke,” Soltan said. “I was coughing, choking, calling the dispatcher. I was really worried that the fire was going to get out of hand, because we saw it coming from the side. I was really scared for my neighbors.”
No one was hurt, but there was a lot of damage to the structure, and most of the contents are not salvageable, Soltan said. However, the memories made over eight years – the longest Soltan has lived in any one place – remain.
A dad-of-two was jailed for posting racist remarks on the internet. Anthony Buck wrote anti-Muslim comments on social networking site Facebook. He was sentenced to a total of four months after breaching a suspended sentence for a previous crime.
Sefton Magistrates Court heard Buck, 40, of Sussex Road, Southport, wrote the comments between May 1 and July 19 last year. They were discovered during a police investigation into racist graffiti on a public footbridge.
Assed Baig defends the record of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies.
Huffington Post, 16 February 2012
See also Reyhana Patel, “University Islamic Societies are not ‘hotbeds’ for radicalisation”, Huffington Post, 14 February 2012
Ireland’s failure to gather statistics on hate crime and discrimination against Muslims amounts to institutional racism, according to a pioneering research project which will be unveiled at University College Cork on Saturday.
The failure, in particular, by the gardaí to use its Pulse electronic system to monitor crimes against ethic and religious minorities facilitates Islamophobia in Ireland, argues James Carr of University of Limerick.
He said: “The Garda Pulse system still does not capture if religion was an aggravating factor in a crime; thus, we cannot tell the extent of incidents Islamophobic behaviour from Garda recorded crime statistics.”
He said this flies in the face of the National Action Plan Against Racism, which had prioritised the gathering of comprehensive date on offences tainted by racism.
Mr Carr’s paper, ‘Measuring Islamophobia’, forms part of a research project contained in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs which will be presented to the public at UCC.
He describes the phenomenon as a form of racism specific to members of Muslim communities and reinforced by stereotypical negative images of Muslims.
“Hirsi Ali pleads with readers that we must ‘please get our priorities straight…. Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world’.
“It’s hard to know what she means; is there really some great danger that the West is doing too much to protect Muslims? The real implication here is that there is a genocide that must be stopped. That is an extremely serious charge. She fails to provide evidence to support that case, and manages to smear a major American Islamic advocacy group in the process.”
Peter Hart replies to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Newsweek article “The global war on Christians in the Muslim world”
TAMPA — If members of the Hillsborough County School Board thought they had put controversy over a Muslim speaker behind them, they were wrong.
More than a dozen who oppose school appearances from the Council on American-Islamic Relations attended Tuesday’s board meeting, some asking the board to call for a workshop and others displaying signs on the sidewalk outside that said, “Welcome to Tampastan.”
The group included Kristina Gionet of the Pinellas Patriots, who said, “I guarantee that if CAIR comes across the bay, we will stop them at the Howard Frankland Bridge.”
The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is urging houses of worship in metro Detroit to take extra precautions following several cases of vandalism.
Dearborn police are investigating several incidents of possible anti-Muslim vandalism in the city, according to a press release sent out Tuesday by the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
According to CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid, the American Moslem Bekaa Center, located on Chase Road north of Ford Road, was targeted in the spray-painting, as well as a building nearby on Chase that is soon to be opened as a restaurant.
Jamal Tarhuni arrives at Oregon International Airport
A Libyan-American who says he was forbidden from returning to the United States and questioned by FBI agents in Tunisia after visiting neighboring Libya insists he has done nothing wrong.
“I do intend to protect my rights. I do intend to clear my name,” 55-year-old Jamal Tarhuni said after arriving at Portland International Airport Tuesday morning from Amsterdam.