Category Archives: Canada

Anti-Muslim vandals strike Fort Saskatchewan prayer room

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fort Saskatchewan anti-Muslim vandalism (1)

Members of Fort Saskatchewan’s Muslim community are once again cleaning up after a home that they use for prayer was vandalized with anti-Islam insults twice in the past week.

Waseem Akhtar, who lives in the home, awoke to the sounds of something striking the side of the building early Monday morning. “They hit some stuff outside of my bedroom. And then, I opened my window curtain…and they just ran away,” Akhtar said.

When he went outside to look, he found his home had been pelted with eggs; many of the bits of eggshells spread across his lawn had anti-Muslim insults written on them in marker.

Less than a week earlier, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York, vandals spray-painted a red cross on the side of Akhtar’s home.

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Thornhill, Ontario: Islamic centre vandalised

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thornhill Islamic centre graffiti (2)York regional police are investigating a hate crime at an Islamic centre in Thornhill, as worshippers mark the holy month of Ramadan.

The sidewalk in front of the Ja’ffari Community Centre at 9000 Bathurst St., near Rutherford Road, was vandalized on Sunday night with anti-Muslim messages. The sidewalk has since been powerwashed, but the area that was vandalized is cordoned off with police tape.

One of the messages read “Arab go home” while the other one read “F**k Gaza.” A spray-painted star of David remains on the sign of the centre, and a spray paint cap was found at the scene.

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Montreal police arrest man during arson attack on Muslim community centre

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Assahaba Islamic Community Centre vandalisedMONTREAL — Police apprehended a 47-year-old man at a Muslim community centre in the Rosemont neighbourhood early Tuesday morning.

Authorities confirmed that they were forced to use a stun gun after the man resisted arrest. He was caught trying to throw a Molotov Cocktail through a window of the Assahaba Islamic Community Centre on the corner of Belanger and 23rd Avenue.

Police said that the attempted attack was the fifth in just over a month. The man was caught because officers had been staking out the community centre after previous incidents. The man was described as a white Quebecer, with possible links to an extremist organization.

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Quebec’s ruling party suffers crushing defeat – despite the anti-Muslim campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The lunacy which has dominated the discourse coming out of Quebec over the last year has finally been countered with a dose of sanity. In a historic vote this Monday, the ruling Parti Québécois (PQ) suffered a major defeat after just 19 months of taking office. Premier Pauline Marois organized an ugly campaign which centered on identity politics and secession from Canada. Her gross miscalculations resulted in a humiliating loss and allowed the federalist Liberal party to form a majority government in the Francophone province.

“The madness which characterized PQ’s odious agenda is best exemplified with their proposed secular ‘Charter of Values’. The notorious document, an affront to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, proposed banning all public employees from wearing religious symbols: hijabs, turban, skullcaps – anything ‘conspicuous’. This Charter paved way to a discourse which was perhaps the most jaw dropping display of xenophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric in recent history.”

Waleed Ahmed reports.

Muslim Matters, 11 April 2014

Ontario man charged with racial assault on teenage girl

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Hamilton man is charged with assault after he allegedly yelled racial slurs at a teenage Muslim girl and chased her out of her apartment building.

A 17-year-old girl was heading to her apartment building on Oxford Street around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday when a man began yelling what police say were racial slurs at her in the lobby. The man yelled at her to leave the building, said Det. Carmine Pietroniro from Hamilton Police Services’s hate crime/extremism unit.

The longer the culprit yelled, the more aggressive he became, Pietroniro said. “At that point, he tried kicking her.”

Another tenant helped restrain the man, while the victim ran to her apartment and told her mother about the incident, police say.

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Sentencing delayed in case of Toronto man convicted of promoting hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Eric BrazauSentencing has been delayed in the case of a hate-mongering Toronto man convicted of a charge rarely laid in Ontario courtrooms.

Eric Brazau was found guilty in February of willfully promoting hatred against Muslims, a charge that was laid only after police and the Crown attorney received consent from the deputy attorney general. He was scheduled to be sentenced Monday, but due to court scheduling conflicts, it was put over until Wednesday.

The hate charge stemmed from incidents in September 2012, in which Brazau handed out home-made flyers, on which he wrote the words, “They are here and breeding,” with an excerpt from the Qur’an beneath it, which read, “Kill them wherever you find them.”

The flyers included photos of men, women and children dressed in tradition Muslim garb, including one photo of a Toronto man and his wife as she pushed a stroller. “As well, this side of the flyer contained a graphic representation of a skeletal pregnant woman wearing a hijab – her belly is a bomb with a lit fuse,” Justice Ford Clements wrote in his February judgment.

On the other side of the pamphlet were “a number of graphic images… (that) associated the Islamic religion and the prophet Muhammad with pedophilia, bestiality and Satanism,” Clements wrote.

Brazau was also convicted of criminal harassment and mischief, after blocking the path of the Toronto man shown in his flyer and photographing him as he attempted to walk down a pathway. Court heard Brazau had on an earlier occasion confronted the same man and called him “a terrorist.”

Given that Brazau was on probation for a previous conviction at the time, he was also charged with – and ultimately convicted of – breaching his probation by not keeping the peace.

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Montreal protest against ‘racist’ charter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Montreal anti-charter protest March 2014Hundreds of people marched in the streets of Montreal Friday evening to mark the International day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and denounce the Parti Québécois’s proposed secular charter.

While the protest stopped outside PQ Premier Pauline Marois’s offices downtown​, many were critical of Quebec’s other political parties for not taking a stronger stand against the charter. They say no government should decide what women get to wear. “We cannot let the other parties off the hook, when they say hijab is okay, but niqab is not,” said Delores Chew of the South Asian Women’s Association.

Though the march was taking place in the context of an election campaign, protesters say the issue is bigger than party politics.

“People assume that there is a legitimate debate to be had about how we – presumably white people – are going to decide how immigrant people are going to integrate or participate in society. That’s profoundly racist. It’s as simple as that,” said protest organizer Joël Pedneault.

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Parti Quebecois candidate resigns after posting ‘F— Islam’ photo on Facebook

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jean Carriere Facebook postA Parti Quebecois candidate has resigned after it was learned he posted a “F— Islam” photo on Facebook.

Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois said candidate Jean Carrière, 25, offered his resignation this morning and she accepted it after Quebec media reports. The photo shows a topless woman, extending a middle finger with the inscription “F— Islam” and was posted in late January.

Carrière initially told Radio-Canada he shared the photo because its message was “feminist.”

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Montreal rally unites faiths against ‘secularism’ charter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Canadians for Coexistence

With his fuchsia skullcap and sash, Catholic Bishop Thomas Dowd stood out in the crowd at Shaare Zedek Congregation on Sunday. Speaking to nearly 500 people at the synagogue in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Dowd said he purposely wore his most ostentatious outfit to the multi-faith rally against the Parti Québécois government’s proposed secular charter.

Bill 60, which would bar all public sector workers from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols like the Muslim head scarf, Jewish skullcap or Sikh turban, died on the order paper last week when Premier Pauline Marois dissolved the National Assembly to call an election. But speakers, who included local politicians and representatives of six faiths, said that was no reason to stop protesting, since the PQ has vowed to adopt the charter if it wins a majority on April 7.

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