BBC News reports on World Hijab Day.
Update: Mad Maryam Namazie offers her thoughts on the subject: “Today is World Hijab Day! What next? Maybe we can all try to mutilate our daughters on World Mutilation Day or marry off our girls on World Child Marriages Day? How about a day when our male guardians can track our whereabouts to make sure we aren’t leaving the country.”
Labour’s NEC has rejected Ken Livingstone’s request for Lutfur Rahman to get back into the Labour party.
The NEC’s organisation sub-committee was setting the process for selecting a Labour mayoral candidate in Tower Hamlets. He or she is now expected to be chosen in April, to give them time to build up a head of steam against Lutfur, who was sacked as Labour candidate in the 2010 mayoral election for his close links to an Islamic fundamentalist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, which believes in turning Europe into a sharia state. Lutfur is also backed by a group of powerful local businessmen.
Labour MP, Tom Harris, congratulated Labour’s NEC in a tweet: “Well done Labour’s NEC for rejecting Ken Livingstone’s request for Islamist Lutfur Rahman to get back into our party.”
My article from the current issue of Labour Briefing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJTqNeMNWU
Tariq Ramadan talks to Myriam François-Cerrah.
Hundreds of French nationalists have demonstrated in Paris against Islamist extremism, chanting the French anthem and saying the religion has no place in the country.
Protester Romain Cyiril says, “France was always a welcoming country, but for the first time we have to deal with a religion which can’t and doesn’t want to integrate itself.”
When last week’s cover of normally stern French magazine Le Point appeared online, the consensus on social networks said it was a hoax. Le Point is no tabloid. It is a serious and well respected conservative magazine.
Running the headline: “Brazen Islam…in school cafeterias, hospitals, and swimming pools” the cover featured a niqab-clad woman arguing with a French policewoman. It had to be a joke, but sadly it wasn’t.
Labour councillors are blocking plans to honour campaigning journalist Christopher Hitchens with a statue, with one of them branding the late writer as a “pro-war Islamophobe”.
A trail of emails leaked to the New Journal show a sharp exchange between the British Humanist Association (BHA), which wants the statue to be erected in Red Lion Square, Holborn, and politicians representing the ward.
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls warned Islamists on Thursday that preaching hatred in France would not be tolerated, telling hardliners as he inaugurated a mosque that they would be expelled if they challenged the Republic’s principles.
Valls’ message underscored the tough line that President Francois Hollande’s government has taken towards Islamists who were furious over the publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammad in a French magazine last week.
While Socialist officials criticised Charlie Hebdo magazine over the cartoons, calling them a provocation, they banned protests against the images, denying requests by Muslim groups to hold marches in the name of free speech.
Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier
A French satirical magazine published nude cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed Wednesday, a move that could further inflame tensions after violent protests in the Muslim world over an anti-Islam film.
The cover of Charlie Hebdo shows a Muslim in a wheelchair being pushed by an Orthodox Jew under the title “Intouchables 2”, referring to an award-winning French film about a poor black man who helps an aristocratic quadriplegic.
Another cartoon on the back page of the weekly magazine show a naked turbaned Mohammed exposing his posterior to a film director, a scene inspired by a 1963 film starring French film star Brigitte Bardot.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that on Thursday 6 September a young Muslim couple, Saad and Myriam, arrived at the town hall at La Seyne-sur-Mer in southeastern France to get married.
However when Florence Cyrulnik (pictured left), the Socialist Party deputy mayor who was to preside over their wedding, arrived she told Myriam abruptly that she would not proceed with the marriage unless the bride immediately removed her headscarf. Although Myriam was not wearing a face veil, which is of course illegal in France, she was informed that religious symbols were banned in public spaces according to a local secularist statute.