A man has been charged after allegedly shouting offensive comments and throwing cement bags at a mosque in Sydney’s southwest.
Police say a 39-year-old man entered the mosque in Auburn at 1.30pm on Saturday and started to cause a disturbance. A statement from NSW Police said: “the man began shouting offensive comments and throwing around cement bags that were inside the building.” He then picked up a chair and threatened to hit a woman with it after she had approached him.
There have been at least 30 attacks on Muslims – mainly against women wearing the hijab – in the three weeks since the police anti-terror raids and threats by Islamic State put relations between the Islamic community and mainstream Australia on edge.
Muslim community leaders are compiling a register of religiously motivated incidents, which includes reports of physical and verbal assaults, threats of violence against senior clerics and damage to mosques.
They claim “mistrust” with police had led to the real rate of anti-Islamic episodes going unreported and the threat of segregation for women wearing the niqab into Parliament had licensed a new wave of people willing to vent against Muslim women in public in recent days. Muslim groups have begun arranging escorts for women to go shopping.
While national security agencies have been boosted with almost $650 million in new funding, Muslim leaders are critical of the level of police resources put into stopping hate crimes at street level.
Among recorded incidents, a woman was threatened with having her hijab torn from her head and set alight, a cup of coffee was thrown through the car window of a woman driving in a hijab, and a pig’s head and cross were thrown into the grounds of a Brisbane mosque.
A mother in western Sydney was spat on and had the pram carrying her baby kicked, according to the list of incidents compiled by the western Sydney-based Muslim Legal Network and the recently launched Islamophobia Register.
A list of verbal attacks includes a Muslim mother in Melbourne who was warned to remove her child from playing with group of non-Muslim children at a play park.
At least four mosques have been targeted with written threats, graffiti and thrown objects. Queensland has the highest rate of personal assaults and threats to mosques, according to the list.
Solicitor Lydia Shelly, of the Muslim Legal Network, said: “We have noticed an increase in attacks against Muslim women in public places, of those who wear a scarf or a hijab. As a Muslim woman, I am very concerned that this is impacting on the rights or perhaps the freedom of movement for Muslim women, because they simply do not feel safe any more.
“We have had property defaced. We have had death threats issued to our spiritual leaders and threats to bomb the mosques and things like that.”
A Muslim cleric who preaches from certain passages of the Koran could be caught in the “broad” net of the government’s new anti-terror law, Islamic leaders have warned.
Grand Mufti of Australia Ibrahim Abu Mohammad and the Australian National Imams Council have called for the offence of “advocating terrorism” to be removed from the so-called Foreign Fighters Bill, currently before Parliament.
They went public with their opposition on the same day Prime Minister Tony Abbott backed the draft legislation as essential to reining in “preachers of hate”, including the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The organisation is hosting a lecture in Lakemba on Friday to denounce “the politics and plots of the American-led intervention in Iraq and Syria” and Mr Abbott has conceded that the current legal framework is not sufficient to shut the event down.
The imams council said a cleric could fall foul of the new law even if he simply “advocated the duty of a Muslim to defend his land”.
“We are therefore concerned that the proposal has serious implications on free speech and will have a chilling effect on legitimate religious and political debate,” the council – representing 250 imams – said in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.
Appearing in front of the committee on Wednesday, members of the Muslim Legal Network said the laws, introduced by Attorney-General George Brandis, should target the extreme fringe, not mainstream Muslims. They said any religious community could face being charged with a terror-related offence “if they refer back to stories in the Quran, Bible and Torah in their sermons”.
Meet the anti-racism heroes who came to the aid of two Muslim women as they were being attacked in a bigoted tirade in Newcastle.
The friends, who were skating at Newcastle West when they intervened to help the mother and daughter on Monday night, say more people need to take a stand against “weak” and “cowardly” vilification.
Scott William Papworth, 27, has denied verbally attacking the women and threatening to kill those who came to their aid, claiming he was only one of numerous people in the vicinity and that he had been acting in self-defence against the skating group. It’s alleged he swore at the women and told them: “We are Westerners and you’re not meant to be here.”
Mr Papworth, of Bingleburra outside Dungog, pleaded not guilty to five charges in Newcastle Local Court on Tuesday, including that he intimidated and stalked the women, assaulted one of the men who came to their aid and stole two mobile phones. Mr Papworth was refused bail after magistrate Ian Cheetham described the verbal assault as “made on a racial basis upon persons who were innocently going about their business”.
Prosecutor Sergeant Karl Moir urged the magistrate to consider the charges “in the present climate”. “We are not just looking at a vacuum here,” he told the court.
In a statement tendered to court, police alleged the two women were wearing traditional Muslim hijabs as they drove along Smith Street about 7pm on Monday. A man allegedly approached their vehicle and said, “We are Westerners and you’re not meant to be here” and then he punched the driver’s side wing mirror.
The daughter drove five metres and got out to fix the mirror. But as she tried to get back in the car, police allege the man forced the left side of his body into the car, took hold of the steering wheel and put his foot on the accelerator for about 10 seconds. The car was in park and didn’t move.
The statement said Patrick Burgess, James Turvey and four other men saw what had happened and became concerned for the women’s safety.
As they approached the car they heard the man yell out “you Musi c—s”. Police allege the man turned on the six friends and threatened to kill them. The man allegedly stole two of their mobile phones and ran off but was struck by a skateboard thrown by one of the friends. He later allegedly punched Mr Burgess.
“He was saying the worst things [to the women], racist profanities [then] he started swinging at each of us while we were trying to defuse situation as best we could,” Mr Burgess told the Newcastle Herald.
Mr Burgess said he felt “so disgusted” the women had been subjected to the abuse. “People need to know that this is not OK,” he said. “The way this situation has gotten is so not acceptable, and people need to start taking action and actively condemning this sort of activity. It’s the indifference of good people that is bringing us down.”
A Brisbane man has been charged after allegedly threatening to set a Muslim woman’s head scarf on fire.
The 26-year-old woman left an Islamic centre in West End on September 9 and was walking down Boundary St when three men outside a pub approached her, police say. One then allegedly threatened to set her head scarf on fire.
A man has been refused bail after pleading not guilty to verbally attacking two Muslim women as they drove through Newcastle, north of Sydney.
Scott Papworth, 27, is accused of yelling abuse about Islam and punching a side-view mirror as a woman, 26, and her mother sat in a car in the city about 7:00pm (AEDT) last night. Police say Papworth followed the pair as they drove away and continued the abuse after they pulled over to fix the car’s mirror.
Papworth is also accused of punching a man who tried to help the women, and stealing mobile phones from two people who intervened, before being apprehended by members of the public.
In Newcastle Local Court this afternoon, Papworth pleaded not guilty to two counts of intimidation, two counts of larceny, one count of assault and one count of malicious damage. Police prosecutor Karl Moir told the court it was “a racially provoked attack on innocent people” and the allegations were very serious given the “present climate” relating to Islam in Australia.
Death threats against the nation’s leading Islamic cleric and threats to bomb Sydney’s two biggest mosques are included in a letter signed by ultra-right-wing racist group the Australian Defence League.
The letter, signed “A. D. L, Australian Defence League”, threatens “Australia” will fight “Islam”, “Terror for terror … bomb for bomb”. It includes the words “Lakemba Mosque”, “Auburn Mosque” and chief Muslim leader “Grand Mufti”, with the capitalised word “BOOM” written below each.
The owner of prominent Muslim clothing store Boutique Nour al Houda in Greenacre, in Sydney’s southwest, said he received the letter about a month ago and reported it to police.
After becoming the target for racially motivated abuse in recent weeks, the store owner – who wanted to be known only as Sal – has removed a collection of large flags, including some displaying the Islamic creed praising Mohammed, the national flags of several Middle Eastern countries and the Australian flag.
“We have a business to run, we don’t need these wankers coming around and telling us they’re going to blow us up, so we took them all down,” Sal said. “Now we are suffering … we live in Australia, one of the best countries in the world, and now we are the targets.”
A number of Muslim students have experienced serious incidents of racial vilification on University of Sydney campuses in recent weeks.
In one incident, a female Muslim student was told to take her hijab off her head and hang herself with it while walking to Redfern Station.
Members of the Sydney University Muslim Students Association were also abused while promoting their annual Islamic Awareness Week.
A SUMSA member, who had asked another student not to rip down posters for the festival, was asked “What are you going to do, behead me?” – a reference to the recent, highly-publicised executions of Western citizens by extremist group ISIS.
In a similar incident, students handing out fliers for the festival were told that they were “trying to make 9/11 happen all over again,” and the University would be better if it had no Muslim students.
Several Muslim students at the University’s Cumberland campus have also reported being spat on in recent weeks.
SUMSA spokesperson Mohamad Raad says that Muslim students have been deeply troubled by this spate of Islamophobic attacks.
“As Muslims, we’re obviously aware that there are a lot of tensions out there at the moment, but you don’t expect these sorts of things to happen on an Australian university campus,” he said.
The owner of a pizza shop in Sydney’s southwest has had his car and restaurant set alight, while anti-Muslim graffiti was sprayed across the eatery’s walls.
Police are investigating a possible link between the incidents at the owner’s home and Mimi’s Pizza in Hammondville. Only a malfunctioning wick stopped the shop from being destroyed.
Neighbours report that the graffiti included slogans such as “F***en Muslims” and “You dogs go home”.
Police say arsonists set fire to the car, parked outside the pizza shop owner’s home, at about 2.30am this morning and they believe the same people may have attempted to set fire to the shop sometime before 6am.
Canberra Muslim woman Nurcan Baran says she has stopped wearing her hijab for fear of being attacked.
On Thursday Speaker Bronwyn Bishop and Senate President Stephen Parry approved new interim rules to force Muslim women who cover their faces to sit in a separate glass-enclosed public gallery in Federal Parliament. But Prime Minister Tony Abbott stepped in and asked Ms Bishop to reconsider the ruling.
Mrs Baran said the increasingly strident debate has stirred unease with Canberra’s Muslim community.
The 22-year-old mother and part-time law student at the University of Canberra began thinking about wearing a hijab at 13, but did not start wearing one until she was overseas in 2012 aged 19. The self-proclaimed “proud Muslim feminist” emphasised she chose to wear the hijab and was not forced.
“They say it is meant to stop men looking for you. It is not,” she said. “It is for that woman’s own modesty and I think instead of being viewed as a tool of oppression it needs to be viewed as a woman’s choice.”
But Mrs Baran said she chose to stop wearing the hijab in December 2013 because of negative treatment she was receiving in Canberra. She told 7.30 ACT she was worried she would be attacked while out with her daughter and felt forced to take off the hijab in order to feel safe.
She said there was no difference between those forcing women to cover up and those forcing women to uncover. “I don’t think men have the right to tell women how to dress whether you are Western or from the Middle East,” she said. “I think we really need to make it clear that they really don’t have that right.”
But despite her stance Mrs Baran made her own decision to not wear her hijab in Canberra. “I didn’t feel self confident. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to take my daughter for walks,” she said. “I didn’t want to go back to uni, and I just kept on thinking to myself, ‘how can I become a lawyer and help people if I can’t even face the world?’ And that’s what I felt as a hijabi woman in Canberra.”