Steve Rose responds to a Daily Mail report that Subway is stopping customers from enjoying pork and ham to appease Muslims.
Steve Rose’s Blog, 30 April 2014
Update: See “Halal search option removed from Subway website over staff safety fears”, Islamophobia Watch, 3 May 2014
Update 2: See also Steven Rose, “The sorry ‘Subway’ saga”, Tell MAMA, 7 May 2014
A UK Independence Party (Ukip) candidate who made national headlines for describing Islam as “organised crime” says he does not regret making the comment and insists it is backed up by “quotations from the Quran”.
Camden Ukip chairman Magnus Nielsen, 64, who is bidding to become a councillor in West Hampstead, has made numerous posts on his Facebook page about the religion, including one in which he says “Islam is organised crime under religious camouflage”.
Ukip faced fresh embarrassment over the views of its local election candidates last night after one proposed that Britain should “ban Islam and knock down all the mosques” and another said that Mo Farah is not British because he is “an African”.
In a series of postings on her Facebook page, Jackie Garnett, who is standing to become a Ukip councillor in Oldham, proposed that all mosques should be destroyed and accused Muslims of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against the English.
Describing her home town of Oldham as disintegrating because of “the immigrants”, she accused “the Muslims” of turning “many of the small areas of the town into ghettos”. She added: “Ethnic cleansing is going on in this country and its the english (sic) that are being diluted.”
Just weeks before the museum’s opening, tensions are rising over a video to be included in the exhibit, denials of media requests, and a board member’s allegedly anti-Muslim sentiments, Dean Obeidallah reports.
The National September 11 Memorial Museum board member in question is Debra Burlingame (pictured), who is the sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury warned about the growing threat of political Islam in Britain and Africa at an event hosted by the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security at Tel Aviv University and The Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies on Monday.
“Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to destroy it,” as some of its adherents try to “inhibit criticism,” said Cox, speaking at the Green House next to the university. In England, if you criticize Islam, you are called a racist, she said.
Robert Bilcliff is standing as a candidate for the UK Independence Party in the local elections in Tamworth. The Mail on Sunday reported that Bilcliff’s response to the legalisation of same-sex marriage last month was to post a comment on Twitter reading: “Sad day for all us straight people.”
The Mail also reported that in a Facebook post in July 2012 Bilcliff “made a joke against Muslims”. Bilcliff told the paper: “I am not racist and never have been. I have many friends of different nationalities but I enjoy a joke every now and again.”
The Mail didn’t quote the “joke”, so here it is:
Foreign laws would be banned in Florida courts for certain family-related cases, under a bill the Senate sent to the House on Monday.
The Senate voted 24-14 to approve the proposal (SB 386) by Umatilla Republican Alan Hays, who has pushed various versions of the measure the past few years. The bill would restrict courts and arbitration tribunals from applying foreign law and legal codes to matters of divorce, alimony, division of marital assets, child support and child custody.
The proposal is more defined than last year’s effort, which got House support but failed to advance in the Senate. The House companion (HB 903) has reached the floor but has yet to be scheduled for debate.
Hays said the bill will do nothing to impede international trade, a prior concern of business groups, and won’t cast a negative message upon anyone from another country. “For those people who want to come to America we welcome them, but when you come to America you’re going to be governed on American laws and when you come to Florida you’re going to be governed on Florida laws,” Hays said. “We dare not apologize for that, folks. This is a very good bill. It’s an all American bill.”
But the bill has been criticized as anti-Muslim and targeted at Sharia religious law followed in some Islamic countries.
For the last few weeks the Sunday Telegraph has been running a series of witch-hunting articles on the so-called “Trojan Horse plot” in Birmingham. The author of the reports, not entirely unexpectedly, is the discredited stitch-up artist Andrew Gilligan.
In the absence of any real evidence of the existence of such a “plot”, Gilligan has followed his usual method of hyping up the material he has managed to gather and loudly proclaiming that his charges have been proved. His repeated uncritical references to the transparently forged letter that provoked the furore in the first place – the most he is prepared to concede is that it contains “a number of inaccuracies” – give us an indication of Gilligan’s commitment to journalistic honesty.
The latest report by Gilligan is headlined “Guide to school Islamisation, by ‘ringleader’ of Trojan Horse plot”. He assures Telegraph readers that a “document” produced by the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007, and co-authored by Tahir Alam, offered “a detailed blueprint for the radical ‘Islamisation’ of secular state schools which closely resembles what appears to be happening in Birmingham”.
Ukip could be haemorrhaging candidates before the May elections with yet more derogatory and offensive comments revealed from its prospective councillors.
One Enfield council candidate, William Henwood, suggested the comedian Lenny Henry leave Britain to live in a “black country”. He was responding Twitter to comments from Henry that there were not enough ethnic minority faces on the BBC. The Ukip candidate tweeted in response: “He should emigrate to a black country. He does not have to live with whites.”
He is not the only candidate to have extreme views revealed in the past week since the party’s manifesto was launched. A Ukip Camden candidate Magnus Nielsen [pictured] wrote on Facebook that most mosques in the UK have been “taken over” by “fundamentalists”. “Islam is organised crime under religious camouflage. Any Muslim who is not involved in organised crime is not a ‘true believer’, practising Islam as Mohammed commanded,” he wrote on his page.
A UKIP candidate has defended tweets in which he said comedian Lenny Henry should emigrate to a “black country” and compared Islam to the Third Reich.
William Henwood, who is standing in a council election, said he did not think the messages were offensive. He tweeted after Henry said there should be more black and ethnic minority people in creative industries.
UKIP said it was a “non-racist, non-sectarian party whose members are expected to uphold these values”.
Mr Henwood told BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins: “I think if black people come to this country and don’t like mixing with white people why are they here? If he (Henry) wants a lot of blacks around go and live in a black country.”
On another occasion Mr Henwood tweeted: “Islam reminds me of the 3rd Reich Strength through violence against the citizens.”