Exeter EDL News has an excellent piece demolishing the EDL’s justifications for their forthcoming protest in Exeter, as presented in their video promoting the event.
Exeter EDL News points out that most of the EDL’s accusations against the University of Exeter are lifted straight from a witch-hunting article posted on the website of Sam Westrop‘s misnamed organisation Stand for Peace.
A former pit village in east Durham will be the scene of opposing demonstrations over plans for a Muslim education centre at the weekend.
County Durham Unites Against Racism said it will hold a peaceful counter-demonstration in Shotton Colliery, near Peterlee, to protest against the English Defence League (EDL) and North East Infidels (NEI) demonstration on Saturday (November 9).
It is the second time the EDL and NEI have demonstrated in the village over plans to open a Muslim education centre. In December last year about 200 EDL supporters converged on Shotton Colliery to protest plans by local businessman, Kaiser Choudry’s to turn a former The Melrose Arms pub into a Muslim education centre.
A Volusia County School Board meeting where protesters planned to raise objections to the way a high school history textbook portrays Islam was canceled before it started Tuesday after the U.S. Department of Justice passed along information that raised “substantial safety concerns” among school officials.
The announcement came as about 75 demonstrators gathered outside the School Board office, engaging at times in heated debates about how public school textbooks should deal with religion.
That debate will now be left to another yet-to-be-determined day when the School Board will meet with additional security measures in place, according to a statement released late Tuesday by district spokeswoman Nancy Wait. Longtime board observers could not remember another time when a meeting was canceled over security issues.
Every Muslim on “Homeland” is a credible threat – and it’s beginning to look a lot like Bush-era paranoia, argues Daniel D’Addario.
The Russian March, a yearly demonstration of Russian nationalist groups, was held Monday in Moscow and in 100 other cities across the country. Never before has this march been held amid so much xenophobia and intolerance in Russian society. Never before have members of the ruling elite, including members of the State Duma and the Kremlin, so publicly and openly made anti-migrant and xenophobic statements. Not surprisingly, 40 percent of Russians now say they support holding the Russian March, according to a recent poll by the Levada Center.
Islamophobia has surged in Quebec since the introduction of the proposed Charter of Quebec Values, the Muslim Council of Montreal warned Tuesday, with an alarming rise in attacks, specifically against Muslim women.
Muslims made 117 complaints of verbal or physical abuse to a local anti-Islamophobia group between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, compared to a total of 25 complaints (or 3.5 complaints per month on average) in the nine-month period of January to September 2013.
This spike coincides with the kick-off of the debate on the Parti Québécois government’s proposed charter of values, which proposes to prevent public servants from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols, including the hijab and niqab.
“Premier Marois’s introduction of the charter of values has unleashed an alarming number of xenophobic and Islamaphobic attacks,” the council’s president, Salam Elmenyawi, told a press conference.
Supporters of a courtroom ban on the niqab from Judge Peter Murphy to Tory minister Kenneth Clarke, assert that it is vital for a defendant’s face to be visible in order for a jury to properly evaluate the evidence she gives. Archie Bland points out that it just ain’t so.
A mosque in Cairns in far north Queensland has been targeted by vandals. The front of the Cairns North mosque was sprayed with large red letters early yesterday, calling for the worshippers to “integrate” or return to their “homelands”.
Imam Abdul Aziz Mohammed, 81, says he has been involved with the Cairns community for decades and cannot do any more to integrate.
“I’ve lived here in Cairns all my life and this is the first time we’ve ever seen any physical opposition to our religion and basically our family,” he said. “My family’s been here since 1900 and I was shocked, to say the least.”
VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. — Hundreds of people in Volusia County are preparing a protest against a textbook that’s in public schools across Florida.
They believe a world history book dedicates too much material to Islam and doesn’t focus equally on Christianity and other religions. Some protest organizers want students to go home and tear the section on Islam out of their textbooks.
We’ve had some harsh words to say about Cristina Odone in the past, but this article on her Telegraph blog, responding to Kenneth Clarke’s offensive remarks about the veil, is pretty good.