Swedish bus driver sacked after Muslim veil incident

A Malmö bus driver has been fired from his job following revelations that he stopped a woman from boarding his bus because she was wearing a niqab, a form of Islamic headdress that covers the face. The bus company, Arriva, has elected not to extend the driver’s contract, suggesting that this was not an isolated incident.

The incident occurred last Tuesday morning when “Leonora” boarded the number 35 bus on her usual route between the Rosengård housing estate and the city’s central station. According to Leonora, the driver stopped her from boarding, saying that her niqab made her hard to identify. “I have never before needed to identify myself on a public bus. This wasn’t a weapon I was carrying,” she told The Local.

Leonora stayed on the bus anyway, but claims that the driver mocked her and looked at her angrily. “I can understand that people don’t like it, but I think they should leave their prejudices at home,” she said.

The Local, 2 May 2007

Swedish security police ‘harasses Muslims’

A major crisis management training exercise taking place in Stockholm next week will contribute to further stigmatization of Muslims, according to two leading members of the Green Party. “The security police constantly engages in harassing Muslims and actively contributes to fuelling Islamophobia,” wrote Stockholm’s opposition vice mayor Yvonne Ruwaida and member of parliament Mehmet Kaplan on Dagens Nyheter‘s opinion page.

The politicians believe that the crisis exercise which the Swedish Emergency Management Agency (Krisberedskapsmyndigheten) is starting on Wednesday will follow this pattern. Around 4,000 people will participate in the exercise and the scenario which they will attempt to deal with is described as “a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction”.

The terrorists in the exercise have been given the fictional name of ‘Bogalanders’. They live in one of the predominantly immigrant “Million Homes” areas, their religion is split into two factions and they are protesting against the occupation of holy ground in “Bogaland”. “The parallels with Muslims and Islam are not exactly hard to find,” wrote Kaplan and Ruwaida.

The Local, 22 April 2007

Muslim women lose swimming pool discrimination case

Two Muslim mothers in Sweden on Wednesday lost a discrimination case against an indoor swimming pool where the lifeguards had asked them to remove their veils and body-covering clothing.

The Gothenburg court ruled the municipal pool had not discriminated against the women. It ordered the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination, which had brought the case on their behalf, to pay the City of Gothenburg’s costs of 30,850 kronor (4,375 dollars, 3,330 euros).

The women, Houda Morabet and Hayal Eroglu, were at the pool separately on two different occasions in April 2004, accompanying their young children but not to swim themselves. Both were wearing veils, long pants and long-sleeved tee-shirts because their religion does not allow them to reveal parts of their body in public.

The ombudsman argued in court that the lifeguards’ insistence that they change into tee-shirts was an act of discrimination.

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Swedish integration minister rejects allegations of Islamophobia

Sweden’s new integration minister dismissed allegations of “Islamophobia” by Muslim groups, and vowed Monday to defend the rights of women who are “oppressed in the name of religion.”

Nyamko Sabuni, 37, has irritated Muslim leaders by opposing religious schools and suggesting that all schools ban Islamic headscarves for girls younger than 15.

Nearly 50 Muslim organizations signed a petition opposing her appointment as integration minister, saying her views “breathe of populism and Islamophobia.”

“I will not let myself be scared into silence,” Sabuni told reporters when asked about the petition. “I will never accept that women and girls are oppressed in the name of religion.”

The 37-year-old Congolese immigrant became Sweden’s first black Cabinet member when she joined the center-right coalition government that took power in October.

Her views on religious schools, which make up a fraction of the country’s 5,000 schools, headscarves and other issues have not been endorsed by the coalition, but stirred debate about the place of Islam in Scandinavian society.

Many Muslims feel unfairly singled out by Sabuni’s campaign against arranged marriages, genital mutilation and honor killings, saying such practices are linked to tribal traditions rather than religious beliefs.

Associated Press, 19 February 2007

Bruce Bawer and Islamophobia

While Europe Slept“So what are Mr. Bawer’s views? He calls himself a ‘liberal’ cultural critic but his views are anything but liberal, and he is much in vogue with the ultraconservative National Review types as well as the ethno-nationalist ‘intellectuals’ in Europe where he lives….

“Bawer has his own solution to the ‘immigrant question’. He tells us his views are unfairly attacked by people who call him names ‘instead of trying to respond to irrefutable facts and arguments’. If Mr. Bawer’s arguments are indeed ‘irrefutable’ what would be the point of trying to respond to them? People who believe their opinions and arguments are ‘irrefutable’ are manifesting that very same fundamentalist mentality they claim to be opposing.

“Here is Bawer’s solution. ‘European officials’, he writes, ‘have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They’re in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow.’ Clearly, when you are calling out the army and advocating deportation of planeloads of people daily, there is more to it than a crackdown on violent militant Islamists. This looks like a call to a general assault on Muslim immigrants in general.

“This may also explain his sympathetic defense of the Sweden Democrats in an opinion piece he wrote for the December 8, 2006 New York Sun. This article, ‘While Sweden Slept‘ is an incontinent attack on Swedish Social Democracy. The Sweden Democrats he champions in this article are a small radical right-wing party of ethno-nationalists. It grew out of the racist ‘Keep Sweden Swedish’ movement of the 1980s. Their basic ideology is the ein Volk, ein Reich variety. One of their own leaders resigned saying the party was infested with neo-Nazis, racists and holocaust deniers. The party is opposed to immigration and if it ever got into power would no doubt take Bawer’s views on how to ‘rescue Europe’ (or at least Sweden) seriously.”

Thomas Riggins in Political Affairs, 13 February 2007

Sweden’s Muslim minister turns on veil

Nyamko SabuniThe latest media darling of Scandinavian politics is not only black, beautiful and Muslim; she is also firmly against the wearing of the veil.

Nyamko Sabuni, 37, has caused a storm as Sweden’s new integration and equality minister by arguing that all girls should be checked for evidence of female circumcision; arranged marriages should be criminalised; religious schools should receive no state funding; and immigrants should learn Swedish and find a job.

Supporters of the centre-right government that came to power last month believe that her bold rejection of cultural diversity may make her a force for change across Europe. Her critics are calling her a hardliner and even an Islamophobe.

Sunday Times, 22 October 2006

Looks like Sweden has found its own Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Sabuni has already received the endorsement of Little Green Footballs and Dhimmi Watch.

Update:  And Western Resistance and Pickled Politics.

Nordic views on Islam sour after global attacks

In October, leading Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten stirred emotions when it defied Islam’s ban on images of Prophet Mohammad by printing cartoons depicting him in various guises, including one where his turban appears to be a bomb.

In Norway, the anti-immigration Progress Party won a record 22 percent of parliamentary seats in a September election.

A poll by Sweden’s Integration Board in September showed that while the country was more tolerant towards foreigners, it had grown less positive towards Muslims, with 40 percent saying they did not want a mosque in their neighbourhood.

“Islam has become the bottom of the pecking order, a type of new enemy,” Helena Benauda, head of the Swedish Muslim Council, said when the poll was published. “I fear it will get even worse after the terrorist attack in London this summer.”

Reuters, 23 November 2005

Swedish party urges monitoring Muslim students

The Swedish right-wing Liberal People’s Party has called on school teachers to spy on their Muslim students under the pretext of combating extremism, drawing immediate rebuke from the teachers union.

“We want Swedish teachers to spy on their Muslim students who have extremist tendencies,” the party’s education spokesman, Jan Björklund, said Wednesday, September 21.

Liberal People’s Party MP Lotta Edholm has also proposed cooperation between the teachers and Säpo (intelligence service) to hunt down “Muslim extremists”. “We see for us a form of information exchange: Säpo should inform teachers about these groups but the schools should also give important information to Säpo about how young people think,” she added.

Since 2002 the Liberal People’s Party has been seeking to attract voters by adopting right-wing populist policies. Party leader Lars Leijonborg has proposed tougher rules for immigrants applying for the Swedish citizenship. The party recently hosted controversial Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a vocal critic of Islam.

The proposal of the Liberal People’s Party drew immediate fire from the teachers’ union Lärarförbundet. “If one is going to observe students on a very vague basis and do what Säpo has asked it could have long-term and destructive consequences for the individual student,” Eva-Lis Preisz, the union’s chairwoman, told Aftonbladet newspaper.

In an opinion poll by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, some 64% of the respondents opposed spying on Muslim school children, while 34% supported the proposal.

Islam Online, 22 September 2005

Free speech for Islamophobes – National Secular Society

After Norwegian evangelical Christian preacher Runar Søgaard delivered a sermon in Stockholm in which he attacked Islam, describing the Prophet as “a confused paedophile”, the media was quick to find a Muslim extremist prepared to issue a death threat against him.

However, the head of Sweden’s council of imams, Hassan Moussa, said although the comments “injure millions of Muslims all over the world”, they must not lead to violence like the murder last year of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. “We assure all honest Swedes that the tragic developments we witnessed in Holland will not take place here,” Moussa wrote in Expressen newspaper. “Those who cast stones against us will not get stoned in return. We beg those who threatened Søgaard, in the name of Islam, to let Swedish law judge between him and us. Do not under any circumstances take the law into your own hands.” But the Muslim community is suing the preacher for hate crimes. “See you in court, Runar,” Moussa wrote.

And how does Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society report this? Under the headline “Swedish Muslims repudiate violence against anti-Muslim bigot”, perhaps? No, under the headline “No free speech for Islamophobes, say Islamists in Sweden”.

NSS Newsline, 8 May 2005