Category Archives: Right wing

Allen West attacks ICNA billboards, claims US is threatened by ‘dangerous triumvirate of progressive socialism, secular humanism, and Islamic totalitarianism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Allen West website banner

Former Republican Congressman and outspoken conservative commentator Allen B. West has expressed his disapproval at an Islamic billboard sign campaign.

West posted his thoughts on the group’s “Why Islam?” billboard evangelism campaign Saturday on the former Florida congressman’s website. According to West, he saw the Why Islam? billboard while driving from an event at the Five Star Veterans Center in Jacksonville, Fla.

“As I drove home after the event heading to South Florida, ’round about Cocoa Beach I gazed over in amazement at a disturbing electronic billboard sign. I thought perhaps my eyes were just tired. However, as we got further down the road near Vero Beach, I saw the sign again,” wrote West. “So how was it that I gazed upon two electronic billboards promoting an ideology that translates into the word, ‘surrender?'”

West proceeded to write that the billboards were an example of the “dangerous triumvirate of progressive socialism, secular humanism, and Islamic totalitarianism.”

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Plan for new mosque in Pretoria suburb provokes right-wing Christian backlash

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Theunis Botha at press conferenceReligious intolerance is dividing the mostly Christian community of Pretoria’s Valhalla suburb.

The Thaba Tshwane Islamic Centre Trust’s plan to build a mosque in the quiet neighbourhood is at the centre of the tension. Residents are concerned about being disturbed by the mosque’s azaan, the Muslim call to prayer chanted five times a day.

“This is a long-established community; it is a Christian community,” said Christian Democratic Party leader and resident Theunis Botha, a church minister [pictured]. He said there was no need for a mosque in the suburb because there was only a handful of Muslims in the area.

Botha said there were mosques in nearby Erasmia. “We can hear them shouting from their towers in Erasmia when we are here in Valhalla,” he said. He said Muslims “do not want to integrate, they want to take over” as they did in Erasmia.

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Three in court over ‘Muslim patrol’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jamaal UddinA Muslim convert who was part of an east London gang of self-styled vigilantes calling themselves the “Muslim Patrol” pleaded guilty in court on Friday to assaulting two people in the street.

Jordan Horner, 19, [pictured] admitted two charges of assault and using threatening words and behaviour in January this year. Police had investigated a number of instances in which groups of men tried to intimidate members of the public.

Horner, from Walthamstow, London, who has previously been jailed for assaulting a photographer outside the home of a radical Islamist preacher, is said to have carried out the attacks with two other Muslim men, Ricardo MacFarlane, 26, and a 23-year-old who cannot be named for legal reasons. The latter two men deny all charges.

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Joel Hayward on libel victory against Mail on Sunday

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A professor at an Abu Dhabi university has won a libel claim against a British newspaper that called him the “Ayatollah of the RAF”.

Dr Joel Hayward, a defence and securities expert who teaches at Khalifa University, successfully sued the Mail on Sunday over the article from 2011. At the time, Prof Hayward – a Muslim convert – was the head of studies at the Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot training college in the UK.

The article, which has since been removed from the Mail Online website, claimed Prof Hayward encouraged students to take a “softly-softly line” when writing about Islamist terrorism, according to the New Zealand-born academic. He took legal action to set the record straight.

“I just felt like there was enough of this Islam-bashing,” he said. “Islam is a beautiful religion, it’s a wonderful thing. The characterisation by the Mail of my faith was just so inaccurate. It presented Islam as something so extreme and dark. I thought that if I let this pass, they’ll continue to attack everyone who embraces Islam.”

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Likud municipal campaigns ordered to drop racist ads

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Likud anti-mosque posterThe Central Election Committee on Thursday banned campaign ads used by Likud candidates in the Carmiel and Tel Aviv municipal elections, saying they were racist and offensive.

Central Election Committee Chairman Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran ordered the candidates to stop the campaigns immediately, deeming them “racist and almost certain to hurt the feelings of Arab Israelis and disrupt public order.”

Likud campaign ads in Jaffa [see illustration] said “Silence the Muezzin in Jaffa? Only the Likud can.” Another ad showed a picture of Jaffa with the slogan “Returning Jaffa to Israel.”

In Carmiel Likud ran a campaign against building a fictitious mosque. As part of the campaign, numerous residents received a phone call from a man with an Arab accent who introduced himself as “Nabil” and invited them to a cornerstone laying ceremony for a mosque in the town. The Likud’s campaign jingle played in the background.

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Jacob Bender is first Jew to lead chapter of Muslim advocacy group CAIR

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jacob BenderJacob Bender is set to be the voice of Philadelphia-area Muslims, to take on discrimination they encounter in workplace and in the public sphere, and to fight expressions of hate. And his Jewish faith, Bender believes, can only help him do the job effectively.

“The Muslim community is under attack from Islamophobic forces, and it is the obligation and responsibility of people of good will to stand up and say this is a bigoted attack,” Bender said. “This is fully in keeping with my life goals.”

The Council on American Islamic Relations’ Philadelphia branch announced the appointment of Bender as its executive director October 15. Bender is the first Jew, and the first non-Muslim, to serve as director of a CAIR branch.

“The needs of the Muslim community are really the needs of any minority community in the United States,” said Iftekhar Hussein, chairman of CAIR-Philadelphia’s board of directors. “Jacob, being Jewish, understands that from his own background.”

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Virginia Beach councilman who opposed mosque has close links to anti-Muslim hate group

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Act! for America logoA few weeks before last month’s vote on the city’s first mosque, Councilman Bill DeSteph received a 25-page PowerPoint presentation. It came from the leader of the local chapter of ACT for America, a group concerned about radical Islamists in the United States, and alleged the proposed mosque had ties to Muslim extremists.

DeSteph, the only council member to vote against the mosque on Sept. 24, later said he had information that the facility was a threat to national security, but he declined to give details. He said he passed the information to the federal government.

That PowerPoint, other correspondence obtained by The Virginian-Pilot through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews show that DeSteph used information from the local ACT leader to help make his decision on the mosque, and that ACT hoped he would be a political voice in Richmond for its agenda. DeSteph, a former naval intelligence officer, is running as a Republican for the 82nd District seat in the House of Delegates.

Since then, DeSteph has mostly refused to comment on the mosque, citing what he calls an “ongoing investigation.” Last month, the FBI wouldn’t comment on DeSteph’s allegations. The FBI has not responded to a request for additional comment because of the partial federal government shutdown.

This is not first time DeSteph has raised questions about mosques or Islam. In 2010, he wrote to New York City officials objecting to plans for a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site. The letter was nearly identical to an online petition from ACT.

At the time, DeSteph was dating the daughter of the founder of the national ACT group, Brigitte Gabriel, an author and activist. Gabriel and ACT Executive Director Guy Rodgers, a former field director for the Christian Coalition and a political consultant, live in Virginia Beach.

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Tory press plays Islamophobic ‘dog whistle’ … with assistance from Labour

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, has condemned the newspapers that provide their readers with a completely distorted view of the East London borough. The Evening Standard and Telegraph in particular have set out to “inculcate an idea that somehow this part of London is run by a bunch of incompetent, corrupt Muslims who plan to introduce Sharia Law”.

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A week is a long time in counterjihadism: A balance sheet of Stephen Lennon’s break with the EDL

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lennon Nawaz and CarrollA week ago when Stephen Lennon announced, at a press conference organised by the Quilliam think tank, that he and Kevin Carroll had resigned from the leadership of the English Defence League, his game plan seemed obvious.

It looked as though Lennon intended to use Quilliam to provide a cover of legitimacy for his entirely spurious break from far-right extremism, and then set up a more mainstream Islamophobic organisation which, by distancing itself from the racist thugs and neo-Nazis who infest the EDL, would enjoy greater credibility within the international “counterjihad” movement. Presumably, having served their purpose, Quilliam would then be ditched by Lennon in favour of building links with the Islamophobia industry in the US, which is after all where the big money is to be found.

At first, all seemed to be going to plan. The Quilliam press conference last Tuesday worked even better than Lennon could possibly have hoped, resulting in saturation coverage from TV channels and national newspapers and launching Lennon into a series of softball media interviews in which he faced no serious challenge over his four-year record at the head of a mob of violent anti-Muslim psychopaths.

Lennon’s main links to the US Islamophobia industry, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, had been primed in advance about his decision to leave the EDL. They immediately issued statements (here and here) enthusiastically endorsing Lennon’s move and declaring that they looked forward to working with him in the future. The former EDL leaders’ refusal to condemn their US associates was taken by Spencer as confirmation that there was “no indication that Robinson or Carroll have given up on their resolve to resist jihad terror and Islamic supremacism”. As I wrote at the time, it appeared that Quilliam had succeeded only in smoothing the way for Lennon’s transition into the leadership of a new and more profitable “counterjihadist” enterprise.

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