The Parti Quebecois government, already involved in a political battle to toughen the province’s language law, has placed another emotionally charged identity issue on the back burner.
The government has delayed its plan to set limits on religious accommodations until the fall and even begun referring to it in less contentious terms.
Two Muslim women were attacked by strangers in parks, with both incidents being reported within days of each other.
A woman wearing a hijab veil in Greatfields Park in Barking was repeatedly punched in the head by two white women who branded her a “Muslim terrorist”.
It was one of two racially-motivated incidents reported last week to anti-Muslim attack support service Tell Mama, which is run by the charity Faith Matters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfRXDDltCDQ
According to the Observatory of Islamophobia in France, the total number of registered cases has gone up by 28 percent in just one year.
The figures also show that the Internet has become the new battlefield. According to the Observatory, a rising number of hate mails are being circulated through internet, which describe Muslims as terrorists, extremists and a danger to other cultures.
A city supermarket at the centre of a racially motivated verbal attack on an ethnic woman by another shopper has released CCTV footage of the confrontation.
The NewsMail ran a story in Saturday’s paper after speaking to Wendy Fay, who witnessed the woman being abused by a drunken man for wearing a scarf inside the Bundaberg Plaza Supa IGA last Wednesday.
Miss Fay said the man had repeatedly yelled, “you’re in Australia now, you can’t wear that sh*t on your head”, while other shoppers watched on silently.
Hijab headscarves were torn off two Muslim women during one of a spate of racist attacks in Edinburgh by children as young as eight, police said yesterday.
The women, in their early 20s, are said to have been “traumatised” by the incident which happened last week, in which two children hurled racial abuse at them before ripping off the hijabs. The culprits are believed to be aged eight and 14.
Writing in the Chicago Monitor, Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations draws attentions to this “joke” greeting card spotted by CAIR-Chicago in a local store.
The card, produced by a company called NobleWorks Cards, features a photo of a Muslim doll wearing a hijab accompanied by the words “The talking doll. Pull string for message, if you dare!” and “She’ll love you to death! She’ll blow your brains out!” The inside of the card features the message “Hope your birthday is a BLOW OUT!”
The different reactions to the ban on burqas and to the legalisation of same-sex marriage lay bare the hypocrisy of the French right, argues Aurelien Mondon.
Security camera images of the man wanted in hate/bias assault investigation
Toronto police have launched a hate-crime investigation after a Muslim woman was spat upon last week outside a plaza in the city’s northeast, just hours after counterterrorism investigators dismantled a local al-Qaeda-linked plot to derail a Via passenger train.
The suspect also said something to the 18-year-old victim, who was wearing a hijab, but she could not understand him due to a language barrier, police said.
“Obviously there’s no motivation that we can determine other than the fact that the woman was wearing a hijab,” said Det.-Sgt. Jim Gotell of 33 Division, noting the victim had done “absolutely nothing” to provoke the assault, and there were no overt signs that the suspect suffered from a mental illness. “The only logical assumption we can make at this point in time is [it was] because she was wearing a hijab, and it was a hate crime.”
One Society Many Cultures has issued a statement opposing further restrictions on the right of Muslim women in France to wear the hijab.
A US panel criticized Western European countries Tuesday for “aggressive secularism” as it released a report on religious freedom that took aim at laws banning full-face veils in public.
For the first time, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom — whose members are appointed by the government — included a chapter on the region in its annual review of tolerance of other faiths around the world.
Because Western Europe generally has a very good record, “it’s easy to overlook the fact that there are some questions and problematic issues emerging there” related to religious dress and customs, commission chair Katrina Lantos Swett told reporters. “In some countries a very aggressive secularism is putting people of religious faith in uncomfortable and difficult positions.”