Showing solidarity to the Muslim minority, two renowned Montreal professors have donned hijab in a protest against the proposed ban on religious symbols in the Parti Québécois’ secular charter.
“I wear it as a kind of sign of solidarity,” Concordia University history professor Nora Jaffary told CBC on Monday, November 25.
The Parti Québécois government says it wants a calm, respectful debate on its proposed “values” charter.
So, how’s that going?
Well, on Sunday, a columnist in Le Journal de Montréal likened the niqab worn by two Montreal daycare educators, a photo of whom sparked a controversy last week, to the hood worn by members of the violently racist Ku Klux Klan.
And on Saturday, La Presse reported, two participants walked out of a debate on secularism after they were repeatedly interrupted and heckled because they were not in favour of banning Muslim veils.
Don Macpherson reports on the hysteria generated by supporters of the proposed Charter of Values which would prohibit public employees in Quebec from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols at work.
European judges will on Wednesday hear the case of a 23-year-old French woman who claims the country’s highly contentious ban on full-face veils violates her rights.
The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) will hear arguments in the case brought by a plaintiff known only by her initials SAS, with a ruling expected in early 2014.
Justice Minister Alan Shatter has condemned the sending of hate mail to the Muslim community, and said he is bringing the matter to the attention of Garda Commissioner.
An unsigned letter, which features an image of Michael Collins, was posted to a number of schools and mosques recently, threatening extreme violence if building plans for a new mosque in north Dublin get underway.
The Minister said in a statement that he utterly condemned “racism and religious bigotry in all of their forms” and that he was “appalled by the nature of the letters. He added: “Religious intolerance has no place in our society. Incitement to hatred and incitement to violence are offences under our laws.”
The letter states that: “Your very presence in our country is destroying our heritage and culture and we are calling on our countries’ people to attack any Muslim they come across in shops, taxis or mosques or any other place they come across them.”
An international conference on what it means to be an Australian Muslim has heard that most Muslims experience much higher rates of racism than the average Australian.
The two day conference has been organised by Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation, along with the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy Australia.
The Centre’s director, Mehmet Ozalp says the inaugural conference is needed to examine what it means to be an Australian Muslim in the 21st century. He says there is a focus on young people, including the impact of the internet and radical forces.
“There is an identity crisis that always comes with being young but also being a young Muslim makes it even deeper and more profound”, he said. “There are people pulling in different directions but what we found in our research is that by and large Muslims want to integrate into Australia.”
The police are failing to investigate hundreds of cases of anti-Muslim hate messages on the internet, according to a government-funded monitoring group.
Tell Mama, which records anti-Muslim attacks, says it recorded 1,432 cases of abuse in the last 22 months. But Tell Mama has told the BBC it has only had a response from the police regarding 70 cases. The Association of Chief Police Officers said it was working to address the concerns expressed by Tell Mama.
Hundreds of people gathered in Wakefield today to oppose a protest by the far-right English Defence League.
Community group We are Wakefield staged a multi-cultural celebration as a counter-protest to an EDL demonstration in the city centre this afternoon.
Around 100 EDL members gathered on Brook Street amid a heavy police presence for around an hour from 2pm.
UK Muslim communities are home to “thousands of potential home-grown terrorists”, former UK Independence Party leader Lord Pearson has warned.
Such people “hate us with frightening religious fervour”, he said during a parliamentary debate on Islam. Sharia law was “running de facto in our land” and calls for violence were not simply coming from a “few extremists”.
But faith minister Baroness Warsi said Lord Pearson was either “ignorant” or attempting to “distort” views of Islam.
Muslim women are more likely to be subjected to Islamophobic attacks than men, especially if they are wearing the niqab or other clothing associated with their religion, a study has found.
Maybe We Are Hated, a report on the impact of Islamophobic attacks, written by Dr Chris Allen, a social policy lecturer at the University of Birmingham, will be launched in the House of Commons on Wednesday. It is intended to look beyond the statistics and, for the first time, give a voice to the female victims of Islamophobia.
One of the women featuring in the report, Rachel, 28, was run over by a man after she asked him to move his car, which was blocking the drive of her house. Before attacking her, he said: “I’m gonna pop you, Muslim.”
In another case, four decomposing pigs’ heads were placed outside a woman’s house. Shareefa, 33, told how she was repeatedly abused by a group of young people calling her names such as “ninja” and had fireworks posted through the letterbox of her home.
“I was scared to go out on the street or into the area on my own,” she told Allen. “It made me think continuously that I need some sort of self-defence class so I know now to defend myself and protect my children. You start linking everything as being anti-Muslim, and that may well not be the case. For example, some people give you a look, which may be nothing.”
Allen interviewed 20 women aged between 15 and 52 about their experiences. One was called “Mrs Osama bin Laden” and told to “go back to Afghanistan” while at the gym. Another, on her way home after dropping her children at school, was followed by a woman with a pushchair, who spat in her face and asked her: “Why do you look so ugly? Why are you covering your face?”