http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hERkZGLl_L4
Via Loonwatch, here is French interior minister Manuel Valls demonstrating the double standard he applies to religious headwear, in a video put together by the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France.
Talha Ahsan was extradited to the US in 2012 after spending six years in high security prisons in the UK. Like Gary McKinnon, he has Asperger Syndrome, and is now in a supermax prison in Connecticut. Ian Patel explains how this was able to happen.
The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned.
In 2006 a University at Buffalo student named Adeela Khan ended up in a report by the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence Unit because she had forwarded an email announcing an Islamic conference in Toronto at which the notorious extremist Tariq Ramadan was a featured speaker.
Update: See “CAIR to ask Yale, Rutgers to protect rights of Muslim students”, CAIR press release, 19 February 2012
And “Muslim groups press Rutgers to act on NYPD spy reports”,The Record, 19 February 2012
After six years of litigation, Orange County settled a religious discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of a Muslim woman who was forced to remove her traditional head scarf while she was in a courthouse holding cell, the ACLU announced today.
Orange County officials will no longer require Muslim women in custody to remove their head scarf, known as a hijab, said attorney Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
Said plaintiff Souhair Khatib of Anaheim: “I praise Allah and thank Him that I live in a country where I can practice my religion freely. While not everyone understands Islam or what it requires of me, I’m grateful that the U.S. government protects my right to fulfill my duty to Allah, whether at work, on a public street or, yes, even in a sheriff’s holding facility.”
Law enforcement officers will be trained about ordering Muslim women to remove hijabs, and the county will pay $85,000 in damages, fees and court costs.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate an apparent act of retaliation against a local community leader by FBI agents at the Minnesota field office.
CAIR says the alleged retaliation, in the form of an FBI visit to the home of the director of the civil rights group’s Minnesota chapter Lori Saroya , followed just two business days after public disclosure by that chapter of an FBI investigation into alleged intimidation tactics used on a local Somali Muslim by two agents.
A mentally ill man who thought he was meeting someone linked to the Taliban was arrested Friday morning after federal agents say he tried to detonate some sort of car-bomb at a Bank of America branch near Oakland’s airport.
But the explosive was a fake, prosecutors said, adding that the FBI had been eyeing Matthew Aaron Llaneza, 28, of San Jose for a while during an undercover investigation monitored by the FBI’s South Bay Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Secret, unaccountable no-fly lists are one of many weapons the US government uses to extra-judicially punish American Muslims, argues Glenn Greenwald.
Faiza Patel and Amos Toh ask: How many more lawsuits will it take for the NYPD to cease monitoring American citizens without a good explanation?
Lawyers have accused the New York police department of creating climate of fear and call for an independent monitor to oversee counter-terrorism efforts, the Guardian reports.
Charlotte Silver reports on the case of Tareq Abufayyad.