Anti-Muslim vandals strike Fort Saskatchewan prayer room

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fort Saskatchewan anti-Muslim vandalism (1)

Members of Fort Saskatchewan’s Muslim community are once again cleaning up after a home that they use for prayer was vandalized with anti-Islam insults twice in the past week.

Waseem Akhtar, who lives in the home, awoke to the sounds of something striking the side of the building early Monday morning. “They hit some stuff outside of my bedroom. And then, I opened my window curtain…and they just ran away,” Akhtar said.

When he went outside to look, he found his home had been pelted with eggs; many of the bits of eggshells spread across his lawn had anti-Muslim insults written on them in marker.

Less than a week earlier, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York, vandals spray-painted a red cross on the side of Akhtar’s home.

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UKIP’s former deputy leader calls for passages from Qur’an to be banned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Christopher MoncktonBritain’s Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a politician and globe-trotting climate-change denier, has called upon the United States to outlaw certain parts of the Islamic holy book the Koran and to make reading them aloud illegal.

Right Wing Watch reported on Monckton’s latest column for conspiracy website and “Birther” hub World Net Daily, in which the former advisor to England’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher urged the U.S. Congress to outlaw passages of the Koran as incitement to murder.

“Nearly all acts of terrorism perpetrated throughout the world in the past quarter of a century were carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah,” Monckton falsely claimed, omitting acts of terror by U.S. right-wing militia and the ongoing campaign of brutal violence being waged by Mexican drug cartels.

“Why?” Monckton asked. “One does not need to look any further than their “holy” book, the [Koran].”

“Craven public authorities have failed to act against the circulation of the [Koran] in its present form because they fear a violent backlash,” Monckton claimed. But, he said, anti-Islamists should not shrink from banning the portions of the Koran that call for violence against nonbelievers. The rights of free speech, he said, are outweighed by the need to stop incitement.

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Fox News military analyst compares Islam to Nazism, Fascism and Communism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tom McInerney Fox NewsA retired three-star general railed against the Obama administration, political correctness, the media and rules of engagement during a speech Monday night at Sandhills Community College.

Thomas G. McInerney, who retired from the Air Force in 1994 as a lieutenant general, currently serves as a Fox News military analyst and was invited to speak by the Moore County Republican Party. The general was originally slated to talk about how military downsizing may affect preparedness, but changed his topic to instead address current threats facing the nation.

McInerney presented views that he called “more harsh” than his Fox News commentary.

McInerney said the economy, shrinking military and more than a decade’s worth of U.S. policies in the Middle East have only increased the dangers facing the nation. “These are very dangerous times for America,” McInerney said. “We are leading from behind, and that’s why these things are happening. You cannot lead from behind. Someone has to lead.”

The biggest threat, McInerney said, is radical Islam, and the general said the onus for “cleaning house” has to be on the Muslim community. McInerney said American leaders are afraid of offending Muslims, and said radicals have hidden behind their religion.

Earning applause from the audience, he compared Islam to Nazis, Fascism and Communism. “Political correctness is killing us,” he said. “It is a global war against radical Islam. Let’s call it what it is … Islam is not a religion of peace.”

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Yet more anti-Muslim scaremongering from the Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily Mail Changing Face of Britain

This article from yesterday’s Daily Mail is the latest in the newspaper’s long-running series of “Islamification of Britain” scare stories. It begins:

“There are more Muslim children than Christian growing up in Birmingham, figures show. The latest statistics, extracted from the 2011 Census, give an insight into the fast pace of demographic change across Britain. They pinpoint several parts of the country where traditional religious beliefs are being eclipsed for the first time.”

(Quite why Christianity alone should fall into the category of “traditional religious beliefs” is unclear, given that Islam along with Judaism and other minority faiths have a long historical tradition in the UK.)

We are then offered the following table to show how Christianity is being “eclipsed”:

Daily Mail Changing Face of Britain (2)

The examples selectively chosen by the Mail to demonstrate the supposed eclipse of Christianity are of course all areas with untypically large Muslim communities.

The Daily Mirror has done some number crunching of its own and points out that there is in fact a grand total of 7 local authorities across England and Wales where there are more Muslim children than Christian, compared with 340 in which Christian children outnumber Muslims.

The Mirror also notes that there are 21 local authorities where children registered as having no religion outnumber those registered as Christian, although for some reason the Mail seems less concerned about the “eclipse” of Christianity by atheism.

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The untold cases of Islamophobia in schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fourteen year olds resolutely defending hostility towards their Muslim neighbours.

When it was said that nothing justified the abuse of a woman just because she decided to dress differently, the response was that it was because “she probably has a bomb underneath her clothes”.

Muslims were openly derided as terrorists by a significant number of over zealous white students.

Students whom I later realised were themselves victims of a raucous media campaign to give them an enemy and distract them from the disfranchisement and misery faced by many of their families.

Perhaps our words and slides were just too high brow and academic for young minds to relate to.

So when a victim stood to speak honestly and emotionally of her harrowing experiences which included having dogs set upon her and her young children and having an unopened beer can thrown at her whilst she was driving, the unrelenting coldness amongst the audience remained.

Maybe the sight of a young classmate breaking down in tears after relating the incident of seeing his mother racially abused at a local supermarket over the weekend just gone would bring a modicum of sympathy. Again none was forthcoming.

Amongst the young faces and clearly in the minority young Muslim girls wearing hijabs, others without and their male compatriots sat glum faced seemingly unable to speak up or defend their rights to be treated as human beings.

Faisal Hanif recounts his experience of promoting human rights in a Rotherham secondary school.

Asian Image, 15 September 2014

Currumbin mosque proposal voted down by Gold Coast councillors

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Currumbin anti-mosque placards

A controversial proposal for a mosque in Currumbin has been rejected by Gold Coast City Council.

The proposal for an Islamic place of worship, which received 3,500 objections, has sparked protests, threats and insults against some councillors. Ten councillors, including area representative Chris Robbins, voted against the proposal. Five voted for the development application to be approved. The council cited issues involving community concerns, car parking and opening hours.

Councillor Robbins said the planning committee had not properly considered the social impacts of the mosque. “Those residents who live near the site have had some very stringent concerns,” she said. “This was decided by the councillors on town planning grounds.”

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali draws criticism from fellow atheists at Yale

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Fox NewsA campus appearance by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the outspoken Muslim-turned-atheist activist, is being challenged again, this time at Yale University where she is scheduled to speak Monday night (Sept. 15).

While her previous campus critics have included members of religious groups, especially Muslims, this time the critics include Ali’s fellow ex-Muslims and atheists.

“We do not believe Ayaan Hirsi Ali represents the totality of the ex-Muslim experience,” members of Yale Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics posted on Facebook Friday (Sept. 12). “Although we acknowledge the value of her story, we do not endorse her blanket statements on all Muslims and Islam.”

Those statements include calling Islam “the new fascism” and “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death.” She has called for the closing of Muslim schools in the West, where she settled after immigrating from her native Somalia, and is a vocal advocate for the rights of women and girls in Islam.

The students’ statement continued: “We believe Ayaan Hirsi Ali represents a sadly common voice in the atheist community that attacks and provokes, rather than contributes to constructive criticism or dialogue.”

Ali will speak at the invitation of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a student organization that describes itself as committed to diversity. Thirty-five other Yale groups have expressed concern over the invitation.

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Rise Up Australia campaign launch told Islam is a ‘death cult’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Danny Nalliah at campaign launchMaverick MP Geoff Shaw and UK climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton are expected to join forces and attend a campaign meeting for a hard-right Christian party.

Rise Up Australia’s firebrand leader Danny Nalliah said he recently spoke to Mr Shaw and the balance-of-power MP would attend a party meeting in Frankston this weekend.

It comes as the anti-Islam party and the independent MP work to strike a preference deal ahead of November’s state election. “We will be preferencing each other,” Mr Nalliah told The Age. “I have known Geoff for 10 years. He says it as it is. I feel the treatment of him has been unfair.” A spokesman for Mr Shaw said he was unable to make any comment.

On Monday, Mr Nalliah launched the party’s Victorian election campaign, declaring that Islam was a “death cult”.

The flag-waving gathering at St Kilda town hall attracted an ethnically diverse crowd of about 100, with supporters from India, China, Hungary and Malaysia united by their fear of Islam. There was lots of rising up – for prayers, rounds of applause and the singing of the national anthem. Australian flags swayed as the crowd sang the party’s theme song.

Mr Nalliah, who is president of the Catch the Fire Ministries and previously blamed the Black Saturday bushfires on the state’s abortion laws, spoke out against sharia law and said he loved Muslims but not their religion. “Tony Abbott, our prime minister called the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria a death cult. I go one step further. I call Islam the death cult.”

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British Muslims fear backlash after David Haines murder

Posted on by Bob Pitt

British Muslims are bracing themselves for a backlash after the beheading of David Haines by Islamic State militants, leading community figures have said.

Harun Khan, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said a backlash was experienced virtually every time violence carried out by extremists who claimed to act in the name of religion received high-profile media coverage.

Anxiety among Muslim communities was already heightened this weekend before news of Haines’s murder, after a mosque in Rotherham was attacked in the wake of a protest by the extremist English Defence League.

Khan said: “Somebody somewhere is going to react, it’s been proven, it’s happened many times: after 9/11, after 7 July [2005 attacks on London] and after [the murder of] Lee Rigby.”

He said the greatest fear was of attacks on Islamic buildings such as mosques, and on vulnerable people, such as women wearing the hijab.

At the East London mosque in Tower Hamlets worshippers said the risk of reprisal attacks in the UK increased with each new report of violence. “Isis and the beheading is not something we recognise at all,” said Amir Younis, 42. “Everyone I’ve spoken to regards those people as complete lunatics. We don’t know who they are, they’ve come from nowhere, and all of a sudden they’re claiming to represent the whole of the Muslim community.

“But in terms of Islamophic reprisals, I don’t think things are going to get any worse than they already are. Islamophobia is something that the Islamic community needs to stop tolerating – we allow people to say the most ridiculous things.”

Two young women visiting the mosque, Aysha Islam and Shakila Hoque, said news of the beheading of Haines would spur on the EDL. “People talk about it a lot,” said Islam. “This area is more safe than places like Luton, but you never know what’s going to happen.”

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Reports and comment from Islamophobia Watch 8‑14 September

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reports and comment from Islamophobia Watch 8-14 September 2014