A Muslim “multicultural relations officer” for Ohio’s Office of Homeland Security claims in court that Internet bloggers defamed him and cost him his job by posting that he was an “Islamist mole” who sympathized with terrorists.
Omar Alomari sued the City of Columbus, Todd Alan Sheets, Stephen Coughlin, John Guandolo, Patrick Poole and a John Doe known on the Internet as “Rusty Shackleford,” in Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.
A former Conservative borough council election candidate has lost his membership of the party after a campaign poster from the British National Party appeared on his Facebook page.
But Roger Hogg said: “I’m entirely innocent! I did not post this. My Facebook has been hacked!”
The poster which featured a picture of a mosque with a line through it and the caption “No More Mosques” was displayed on Mr Hogg’s page this week, but the self-employed security officer said: “I was unaware it was even on my wall till (Tory chief) John Wilson called me about it.”
Mr Hogg stood as the Tory candidate for Fant Ward in the May Maidstone Borough Council elections. He is the son of Mike Hogg, who is a Conservative member for South Ward.
His Facebook page read: “How can it be legal to not allow women to enter the front door of the Mosque? Is there any other building in the country that could even think of getting away with such anti-women bigotry and discrimination? These are very real, logical questions, please do contribute.”
A ban on people wearing clothing that covers their face in public, like a burqa or niqab, may find its way to Denmark following a landmark decision at the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday.
Judges upheld France’s burqa law, accepting the argument that veils threatened the right of citizens to live together in society. And now, several legal experts have told Berlingske newspaper that they believe a similar ban could be enacted in Denmark.
Sten Schaumburg-Müller, a law professor at Aarhus University, agreed that the French model could be adopted by Denmark. “It’s obvious that a ban specifically targeting burqas would be hopeless,” he said. “But I believe a ban similar to France’s prohibiting the covering of the face in public could be established here.”
Jacob Mchangama, the head of think-tank Justitia, also believes the law could be recycled on Danish ground. “The defining element in the French legislation is that it isn’t targeted at specific religions, but instead the motivation is to ensure social cohesion and interaction between citizens,” he said.
Pia Kjærsgaard, the DF values spokesperson, thinks a ban on face-covering dress, whether it is specifically targeting Islamic burqas or not, should be introduced in Denmark. “We can’t have women being completely covered so you can’t see their facial expressions or who you have right in front of you,” she told Berlingske.
Norway’s Labour and Progress parties have stated that they would consider revisiting the issue of a Muslim veil ban in the wake of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that a public ban does not violate the human rights of Muslim women.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday gave support to France’s claim that the statutory public prohibition of clothing which covers the face is within the framework of European human rights.
“We must consider whether we should promote the proposal again, after the court in Strasbourg has now confirmed what we have constantly said: that a ban is compatible with human rights,” said Mazyar Keshvari at the Progress Party (FRP) to the VG daily.
Jan Bøhler of the Labour Party (Ap) also claimed that the ruling of the court puts the Norwegian discussion about the controversial ban in a new light. “When parliament rejected such a ban in 2013, the main argument was that Norway risked being censured in the ECHR. Now that argument falls away. I think we need to take a new discussion about a possible ban,” he told VG.
She’s known for courting controversy but Katie Hopkins appears to have out-done herself with her latest Twitter rant. The 39-year-old former reality TV star opened up on her feelings about Islamic festival Ramadan.
Muslims worldwide will be observing a month of fasting as it is now the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. Katie tweeted on Sunday evening: “Ramadan typically brings a spike in violence in Middle East. I get grumpy when I don’t eat – but I don’t blow things up. Religion of peace?”
But she didn’t stop there; the mother-of-three then compared Ramadan, which is widely regarded as one of the Five Pillars of Islam, to the trendy 5:2 diet. She added: “If we take 5:2 as a basic idea, what is the ratio for Ramadan? 18:6?”
This is the headline to a report in the Daily Mail. The report begins: “A Muslim who stabbed a pregnant Romanian prostitute to death after warning her not to work near a mosque was jailed for at least 29 years today.”
As you might expect from the Mail, the claim that Farooq Shah, the individual convicted of the murder, targeted sex worker Mariana Popa because she was working near a mosque is a straightforward lie.
The sole basis for this claim is that during the trial, in an attempt to identify a motive for the murder, the prosecuting barrister asked Shah: “What was that conversation with Miss Popa about? Did you ask her to go with you? Did you offer her money? Did she say no because you had a bike and didn’t even have a car? Or were you on this night patrolling the area for prostitutes? Did you want to challenge Miss Popa and ask her to get out of that area, to get away from the mosques?”
But the Mail‘s own report states: “In his account to the jury, Shah said having women sell their bodies near his mosque or home ‘means nothing'”. According to the Ilford Recorder, the investigating officer Detective Inspector Darren Richards said that Shah “has never given any reason” for the murder, adding: “He’s given no reason because there was no reason, other than he’d armed himself with a knife and was prepared to use it that night.”
DI Richards had previously stated: “This was a cold-blooded, senseless murder by a man who went out that night, armed with a knife, intent on using it to commit serious injury to someone. He had already threatened and robbed a vulnerable man with a knife earlier that night, and he was hanging around the Ilford Lane area, looking for another victim. He killed Mariana because she was there, because he thought he could get away with it.”
Shah’s religious beliefs, if indeed he has any, appear to have had no bearing whatsoever on the case.
A Sydney radio presenter has been told he will not be filling in a guest slot on 2GB after he called the Prophet Muhammad a paedophile.
The former 2UE presenter Michael Smith made the comments on Thursday during his regular guest spot with 2GB host Ben Fordham.
Smith was discussing the recent controversy about a talk the Festival of Dangerous Ideas had booked, and later cancelled, with a Muslim activist, titled “Honour killings are morally justified”.
He compared the festival’s invitation to Uthman Badar to asking the leader of the Ku Klux Klan to speak and said the founder of Islam was “… a man who promoted the idea that it was OK to marry a six-year-old and consummate the marriage when the little girl was nine”.
The sinister black balloons started appearing in Bendigo in May. Then 10 days ago, a cluster of them were tied to the home and business of a local councillor who supports the building of a controversial mosque.
The councillor, Mark Weragoda, was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Bendigo in the 1980s. He says the unrelenting and increasingly vengeful campaign against the Bendigo mosque – which has been approved by the council but faces a tribunal appeal – is the first time he has faced racial hatred in the regional Victorian city.
When he spoke to the council in favour of the mosque at a heated meeting the night before he found the balloons, protesters played Middle-Eastern music to try to drown him out. He said the balloons didn’t worry him and he felt sorry for the “minority” groups who opposed the mosque on racial and religious grounds rather than for planning reasons.
A week before, The Bendigo Advertiser received an anonymous email headed “Mysterious black balloons revealed”, which said that by accepting Islam into Bendigo, the community would be “endorsing domestic and child abuse” because under sharia law it was acceptable to “marry off child brides, perform genital mutilation, forbidding [sic] women to express themselves, and not being treated as equal to men”.
The email said: “The misconception that it is ‘racist’ to be against the lifestyle of Islam or Muslims is incorrect as it is not a race, whilst Islam is not a religion and cannot be compared to any other religion as it is an ideology.”
Bendigo’s pro-mosque residents tried to nullify the spectacle of the black balloons – a chilling image, like bunches of dead flowers – by tying coloured balloons around the city. But a metal flagpole flying coloured balloons was torn down at a furniture store in the central business district, while the black balloons’ symbolism of hate and vilification remained.
Until now, it has been unclear who was responsible. The likely answer turns out to be instructive because it helps show exactly how extremist far-right groups from outside have managed to infiltrate and hijack a campaign in country Victoria that, until they got involved, was about planning issues.
Michael Safi asks: How did a local planning decision catapult the Victorian town into the heart of the debate over Islamaphobia in Australia?
“Brigitte Gabriel’s” [a.k.a – Hanah Kahwagi Tudor] anti-Islam hate group ACT! for America has announced that it will honor September 11 Museum Board Member Debra Burlingame at its upcoming conference in Washington, D.C., to be held on September 11. In recent weeks, mainstream media have focused on Gabriel’s hateful tactics after her berating of a female Muslim attendee at a recent Heritage Foundation event.
Tudor, who goes by the pseudonym “Brigitte Gabriel,” has said Arabs have “no soul” and that Islam is the “real enemy.” The Southern Poverty Law Center lists her as one of the “Anti-Islam Inner Circle.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) says Gabriel’s beliefs are extreme, while the New York Times described her as an “Islamophobe.”