LSE students’ union adopts resolution condemning ‘Student Rights’ group

LSE Students' UnionLast week the London School of Economics students’ union debated a motion opposing Islamophobia, which was passed by 347 votes to 118 with 32 undecided. The motion condemned the misnamed Student Rights campaign, stating:

“Student Rights activities fuel Islamophobia, by disproportionately and unfairly targeting Muslim students, contributing to their marginalisation and ostracisation, damaging campus cohesion and feeding into a growing trend of Islamophobic discourse in wider society which should always be challenged, particularly in Islamophobia Awareness Month.”

The motion mandated union officers to issue a statement criticising Student Rights and write to university management expressing concerns about the activities of the group. Officers were also mandated to circulate the Real Student Rights petition.

Vandals scrawl more offensive graffiti on planned Worcester Park mosque

Vandals have scrawled offensive graffiti on the door of a building a Muslim community wants to use as a mosque.

The graffiti was spotted on the front door of the Bank Chambers building in Green Lane, which is owned by a Muslim group that has had two applications to turn the building into a mosque for the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jama’at branch of Islam turned down, over the weekend.

The graffiti, which says “f*** off c****”, has been reported to police.

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Patriots plan Lincoln return: ‘We don’t want you here’

An anti-mosque protest which is due to be held in Lincoln in the New Year has been labelled as “destructive” by a local politician.

The East Anglian Patriots group, which demonstrated in the city in June, has announced it will return on Saturday, January 18. The previous rally attracted several hundreds of protestors in City Square.

The group says it is protesting about the building of a mosque on the site of the Old Dairy in Boultham Park Road.

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UKIP boss heaps praise on Islam-baiter

Misty ThackerayThe interim chair of Ukip Scotland has been criticised over his support for a notorious far-right politician in the Netherlands who backs a ban on what he terms the “fascist” Koran. Misty Thackeray has described Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders, who said Islam was the biggest threat to civilisation, as “great”.

As revealed by the Sunday Herald, Ukip in Scotland is imploding due to tensions between senior members. Of nine shortlisted candidates for the European election, at least six quit over the alleged tactics used by one candidate, Otto Inglis. Ukip chief Nigel Farage then sacked ­Monckton by email. That led to Scottish chair Mike Scott-Hayward and fundraiser Malcolm Macaskill quitting in protest. Local branch officials also resigned in a show of solidarity with Monckton, who said Ukip north of the Border had been “wiped out”.

Thackeray said he had been asked to act as Scottish chairman until the next annual general meeting, but his hardline right-wing views are causing alarm. The Glasgow-based 52-year-old, described as a security consultant on a business database, praised Wilders on Facebook last year. Wilders has argued the Koran, which he calls a “fascist book”, should be outlawed. He has called for a block on new mosques and claimed Islam was the “biggest threat to our freedom and our civilization”.

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Student Rights director promotes ‘counterjihad’-style propaganda against Islam

Islamisation of the West is real

Last month Observer columnist Nick Cohen posted a piece on his Spectator blog in which he attempted to distance himself from some of the more extreme elements in the Islamophobia industry.

Admitting that he had felt “irritable” when former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) was presented as a guest of honour at an event where Cohen himself was speaking – it was to mark an award presented to the film Silent Conquest – Cohen even went so far as to state that he was “uneasy” about the message contained in the paranoid Islamophobic documentary he had been helping to publicise. He wrote: “Robinson’s appearance after a film that had made Muslims seem both an homogenous bloc and a conquering army summed up everything that was going wrong with the Right’s reaction to militant Islam.”

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EDL spokesman compares Mandela to Bin Laden

Kieran Hallett with pig's headThe sad death of Nelson Mandela was one of those events that brought a semblance of unity across the political spectrum.

Left-wingers who had been critical of Mandela’s endorsement of an economic system that kept millions of black South Africans in poverty didn’t hesitate to pay tribute to his heroic struggle against the apartheid regime. Even those Tories who had enthusiastically backed that regime and its suppression of the ANC thought it better to keep quiet about their views on this occasion.

Not sections of the far right, though. Their response to the news of Mandela’s passing was to denounce this freedom fighter as a terrorist and a communist. One such sick individual was Kieran Hallett, Exeter division leader and regional organiser for the English Defence League.

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Violent assault on imam of Hull Mosque

Hull Mosque and Islamic CentreThe leader of the Hull city mosque has appealed for his congregation not to take the law into their own hands after he was attacked by a man who stopped his car on the way home from the mosque.

Details of the assault on Imam Hafiz Salih, 60, have only just emerged. His son Ateeq Salih said his father was driving home last Saturday evening from his daughter’s house next to the Hull Mosque and Islamic Centre when two men and a woman tried to stop his car.

“They ran into the middle of the road and he had to do an emergency stop. He beeped the horn at them,” said the imam’s son. “One of the men lay down in the road right in front of the car. My father was confused and thought he was injured. Then the man slowly got up and went to the car and opened the door. My mum was sitting in the front and my youngest sister was in the back. He looked at all of them and he punched my father very hard in the face. It was a very forceful punch and my father’s face was covered in blood. Then the man walked away.”

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‘I am a Muslim, not a terrorist’

The long-awaited report from the UK Government’s Extremism Taskforce was published yesterday. It contains key recommendations regarding online extremism and countering institutions whereby people can become vulnerable to radicalisation. The recommendations include new ASBO-like Terror and Extremist Behaviour Orders: methods that aim to cause shock, rather than help eradicate the real causes of extremism. And with the report referencing previous discredited strategies, it risks further stigmatising Muslim communities.”

Imran Awan, deputy director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University, and co-author of the study Extremism, Counter-terrorism and Policing, writes at Open Democracy, 5 December 2014

EDL protest outside Portsmouth mosque

EDL protest outside Jami mosque

Around 20 members of the English Defence League (EDL) protested outside the Jami mosque in Southsea last night.

Chanting and waving placards, one of which read “terrorists are being radicalised here”, the protestors said they feared terrorist attacks could be carried out in the city by men from Portsmouth who have gone to Syria to fight with al-Qaeda linked groups.

As reported in The News, young men from Southsea who worshipped at the mosque have gone to fight in the country. Their actions have been condemned by key members of the local Muslim community, including worshippers at the Jami mosque.

EDL members traded insults with a counter demonstration of around 20 people, who were stood next to the mosque, in Victoria Road North, with police present to prevent trouble. The counter demonstration was largely made up of Unite Against Fascism members who said they had come to defend the mosque and worshippers.

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Was loss of state funding the motive for Quilliam’s lash-up with Lennon?

Lennon and Nawaz at press conferencePolitical Scrapbook has an interesting article on the financial problems faced by the Quilliam “counter-extremism” organisation before they jumped into bed with former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”).

Quilliam rejected the suggestion that they were threatened with closure before forming their risky but high-profile alliance with Lennon. But Scrapbook reproduces figures released by the Home Office this week in response to an FOI request, which they say “expose the precipitous collapse in public funding for the group”.

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