Call for Papers Paris, France International Islamophobia Conference
December 13-14, 2013
Theme: The Epistemic, Racial, Cultural and Stuctural Exclusionary Measures in France and Europe
The University of California, Berkeley IRDP (Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project) and CADIS (Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques), Paris Invite Scholars and Researchers to Submit Paper Proposals December 13-14, 2013.
A lawsuit challenging the questioning of Muslims about their religious beliefs at the U.S. border can continue, a U.S. district court judge in Detroit ruled Tuesday.
The lawsuit names FBI Director Robert Mueller III, former acting Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner David Aguilar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, along with individual agents.
Judge Avern Cohn ruled that the plaintiffs in the case, four Muslim Americans who were all detained and questioned each time they crossed the U.S.-Canada border, had demonstrated that the agencies had a policy of questioning Muslim Americans entering the country, appeared to violate equal protection under the Fifth Amendment.
The lawsuit alleges Muslim Americans were singled out and asked questions like which mosque they go to, how often they pray and who their religious leader is.
Crazed film student Michael Enright pleaded guilty Tuesday to slicing the throat of a Muslim cab driver in a hate-fueled 2010 attack, with the promise of a 9½-year sentence.
A stone-faced Enright, 24, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and assault as hate crimes for the shocking attack on Ahmed Sharif, a Bangladeshi father of four, who picked up his would-be killer at E. 24th and Second Ave. on the evening of Aug. 24, 2010.
The boozed-up former School of Visual Arts student insulted Sharif’s religion, then lunged into the front seat with a knife and started hacking away at the driver’s neck. He also cut the cabbie’s face, arms and hands, prosecutors said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xxgd-DQjZSo
A Republican congressman claimed on the House floor on Tuesday that members of Muslim communities in the United States have not condemned acts of Islamic extremist terrorism against the U.S. and therefore are complicit in those and any future attacks.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade told the leader of a violent nationalist hate group that targets British Muslims, “We got your back” and “it’s great what you’re doing.”
Kilmeade offered his endorsement to the English Defence League (EDL) and co-founder Tommy Robinson, who appeared as a guest on the June 10 edition of Kilmeade’s Fox News Radio program. Kilmeade’s support followed an interview in which Robinson railed against the immigration of Muslims into the United Kingdom, and warned of Muslims “forcefully putting us under Sharia” Law and planning a “silent takeover” to “implement Sharia” in his country and across the world.
LOS ANGELES — Europeans “need to follow the example of the Jewish people and re-establish their nation-state” to counter the growing Islamization of their countries, Dutch politician Geert Wilders said Sunday in Los Angeles.
“My friends, what we need today is Zionism for the nations of Europe,” Wilders, founder and leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, said at the “Europe’s Last Stand?” conference, organized by the American Freedom Alliance.
Wilders described that Europe’s inner cities “have come to resemble Northern Africa and the Middle East” because they are ruled by Islamic Sharia law, noting that Islamic areas border the European Union headquarters in Brussels and that “largely Islamic suburbs” surround Paris. “Europe is in a terrible state,” Wilders said. “Bit by bit, European countries are losing their national sovereignty.”
Last week, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin hailed the arrival of “a strong new player in the pro-Israel community,” Concerned Women for America. It’s “music to the ears of Israel and her friends,” Rubin wrote, “that a 500,000-strong conservative group that has mostly focused on social and economic issues has adopted defense of Israel as part of its core mission.”
What Rubin doesn’t mention is that, in addition to a number of other very right-wing causes, CWFA has a history of anti-Muslim activism. In particular, the group pushes the “creeping sharia” conspiracy theory, which holds that Islamic religious law represents an imminent threat to the United States, and which my colleague Wajahat Ali and I debunked in a 2011 brief.
An American Islamic group has been advising British mosques on security measures, including the installation of safe rooms and panic alarms, warning that they are at greater risk than in any other western country.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has discussed its revamped security regulations with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) in light of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, in Woolwich, south-east London, which it said had even provoked attacks in the United States.
Pinellas County’s Republican Party is facing criticism from some of its own members for inviting a University of Central Florida academic to give an anti-Islam speech at its next meeting.
In its June newsletter, the group publicized that Dr. Jonathan Matusitz, an assistant professor, would be giving a 45 minute speech called “The Islamic Threat to America.” The speech is scheduled to take place roughly an hour before the organization’s executive committee meets and hears from Blaise Ingoglia, the vice chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.
On Thursday, Chris Latvala – son of State Sen. Jack Latvala, and a likely candidate for the State House in 2014 – took to Facebook to say he was disappointed in the party. “I am a born again Christian saved by grace alone, through christ alone, but a local county republican meeting should not be an avenue to bash a religion that is practiced by many in Pinellas County including fellow Republicans,” he wrote. “As a party our focus should be trying to win the vote of every voter regardless of their religious beliefs.”
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly provided a platform for Tommy Robinson, head of the English Defence League, a violent, extremist anti-Muslim hate group in Great Britain.
O’Reilly hosted Robinson on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss the EDL’s efforts to, as Robinson described, “fight for Christianity, fight for our children’s future, fight for our culture, and fight for our country’s identity, which is completely under attack.” Robinson went on to claim that British politicians aren’t doing enough to suppress the growth of Muslim communities in the United Kingdom, adding “actions speak a lot louder than words.”
Although O’Reilly mentioned press reports describing the EDL as “fascist” and “racist” and described the group’s views as “militant” at the beginning of the segment, he failed to note the EDL’s history of incendiary and often violent actions. A 2010 “undercover investigation” by The Guardian found that the organization planned protests against Muslim communities in “a blatant attempt to provoke mayhem and disorder”: