Tyrol mosque defaced with swastikas

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Telfs mosque graffiti (1)A mosque in the town of Telfs, in Tyrol, which is known for its distinctive white minaret has been defaced with swastikas.

The Nazi symbol was sprayed in black paint overnight on Tuesday, around the entrance to the mosque and on some mosaic tiles. It is not known who defaced the mosque but the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution has launched an investigation.

The mosque was opened in 2001 by the local Turkish cultural association. However, many locals protested in 2005 when the cultural association announced that it wanted to build a minaret to accompany the mosque.

Among the roughly 15,000 residents of Telfs, about 2,400 people signed a petition against the building of the mosque, and nearby homeowners threatened lawsuits. Locals objected that the minaret would attract crowds and cause traffic congestion. Others complained that the minaret would represent a victory of Islam over Christianity.

Continue reading →

Hundreds protest Israeli wedding of ‘Jew with Muslim’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lehava anti-wedding protest

A bride who converted from Judaism to the Muslim faith and a Muslim groom were married on Sunday to cries of “Death to Arabs” as Israeli police held back about 200 angry protesters.

The protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced the bride, who was raised Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a “traitor against the Jewish state”. They sang a song that urges, “May your village burn down.”

A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read, “Love conquers all.”

The groom told Israel’s Channel 2 TV the protesters failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit. “We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favour coexistence,” he bravely said.

Several dozen police, including members of the force’s most elite units, formed human chains to keep the protesters from the wedding hall’s gates and chased after many who defied them. Four protesters were arrested, and there were no injuries.

A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 metres from the wedding hall in Tel Aviv.

The far-right group Lehava has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past but has rarely protested at the site of a wedding. Sunday’s demonstration was a sign of how tensions have risen during the war in Gaza.

A protester against the wedding, Ofer Golan, told France 24, “It’s time that the Muslim will leave Israel. That’s it. This is a Jewish country, they don’t belong here, they don’t have to be here. They have 22 countries; they can go anywhere they like.”

Continue reading →

Muslim engineer banned from French nuclear sites

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim engineer working for a firm subcontracted by French energy giant EDF has been banned from accessing French nuclear sites where he normally works, a move his lawyer says is “pure Islamophobia”.

The 29-year-old project manager had been granted access to nuclear installations as part of his job throughout 2012 and 2013. But in March 2014 the engineer, who cannot be named according to French law, had his pass to enter the Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear power station revoked without explanation.

The decision, made by the local administration, was covered by “Secret Defence” – which means the authorities are not required to publicly justify the decision.

“My client worked freely in French nuclear power stations for three years,” said his lawyer Sefen Guez Guez, who works with France’s Anti-Islamophobia Collective (CCIF), to FRANCE 24. “The question now is what changed? Overnight, he became a suspect person and no one has any idea why. That’s what we’re trying to get to the bottom of.”

As far as the lawyer is concerned, “considering the current atmosphere in France, his religious leanings cannot be ruled out” as a reason behind the ban.

Continue reading →

Mordechai Kedar joins Geller at pro-Israel, anti-Islam rally

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mordechai Kedar at AFDI rally August 2014Yesterday Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative held a rally in Union Square, New York, under the slogan “We the living support Israel”.

In an apparent attempt to boost turnout – even Geller must be aware that the vast majority of New York’s Jewish community, including committed supporters of the state of Israel, will have nothing to do with her – the event was subtitled “And minorities persecuted under Islamic rule”.

According to Geller, an individual who enjoys at best a tenuous relationship with reality, the event attracted “thousands” of AFDI supporters, though it’s odd that her website contains no pictures of this vast throng. From photographic evidence, it looks as though the attendance was at most a couple of hundred. A report at the Huffington Post puts it at “around 150”.

Continue reading →

Racist vandals target Muslim graves in Chadderton Cemetery

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Chadderton cemetery vandalismRacist vandals have carried out a sickening attack on Muslim graves in a cemetery.

The yobs uprooted headstones, trampled on flowers and kicked over memorials in what police branded a ‘heinous and senseless’ crime in Chadderton Cemetery.

The raid took place at the site, on Middleton Road, between 8.30pm on Friday, August 15, and 7.30pm the following day.

Officers received a distressed call from someone visiting the grave of a loved one. When police arrived they found up to ten graves – all in the Muslim section of the cemetery – had been damaged, leading them to believe it was a racially-motivated attack.

Wooden grave markers and headstones were uprooted from four adjoining graves, one of which had a brass plaque ripped from the headstone itself.

A further two large floral tributes on other graves were smashed, trampled on and the flowers scattered across the other, while flowers on up to four other graves were also kicked over. There was also some evidence to suggest someone had walked directly over a recent grave. Police are now appealing for witnesses to come forward.

Continue reading →

Reports and comment from Islamophobia Watch 11‑17 August

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reports and comment from Islamophobia Watch 11-17 August 2014

Kevin Sorbo thinks bombing a mosque is a joke

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Kevin Sorbo as HerculesKevin Sorbo, former star of the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, is fond of denouncing the liberal consensus in Hollywood and has set himself up as a spokesperson for the Christian right.

He is particularly outraged by political correctness, which he claims is “melting our moral compass” and results in discrimination against Christianity in favour of Islam. “I don’t understand this ‘please embrace the Muslim religion, but not Christians'”, he complains.

In 2010 Sorbo fronted a documentary, produced by the Christian film company Cloud Ten Pictures, entitled The 12 Biggest Lies. Along with “men and women are equal” and “the earth is billions of years old”, these supposed lies included “Islam is a religion of peace”. Among the “experts” who appeared in the documentary were notorious Islamophobes such as Nonie Darwish.

One of them, Jack Kinsella of the Christian Zionist Hal Lindsey Ministries, derided what he called “the popular myth” that the majority of Muslims are non-violent. “If you’re going to use the Muslim definition of what is a good Muslim, then Osama bin Laden is a good Muslim,” he asserted.

Continue reading →

Whitehall report into Muslim Brotherhood delayed by wrangling

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The publication of a UK government report into the Muslim Brotherhood has been delayed as ministers and officials wrangle over its findings, the Financial Times has learnt.

David Cameron asked Sir John Jenkins, Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to conduct an investigation into whether the Egyptian political group should be classified as a terrorist organisation. The prime minister did so after coming under heavy pressure from allies in the Gulf such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which has banned the organisation.

Whitehall officials have told the FT the report has found the group should not be labelled a terrorist organisation, and in fact has found little evidence that its members are involved in terrorist activities. But ministers are so concerned about the reaction from Britain’s Middle East allies that they have stalled publication for several weeks, according to two people with knowledge of the report.

One person said: “Sir John will say that the Brotherhood is not a terrorist organisation. The Saudis and Emiratis will then be very upset with us.”

Continue reading →

The French ‘burqa’ ban: ECHR judgment poses general threat to minority rights

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hilal Elver, author of The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion, examines last month’s ruling by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights affirming France’s ban on the wearing of the full-face veil in public. She writes:

By now, it is clear that Article 9 of the European Convention does not protect freedom of religion when the subject is a woman and the religion is Islam…. The ECHR acted politically and opportunistically not to challenge France’s strong Republicanism and principles of laicité, sacrificing the rights of the small minority of Muslims who wear the full-face veil. Rather than protecting the individual freedom of the 2000 women, the ECHR protected the majority view of France.

The ECHR is the most powerful supra national human rights court and its decisions have widespread impact. Several countries in Europe, such as Denmark, Norway, Spain, Austria, and even the UK, have already started to discuss whether to create similar laws banning the burqa in public places. This raises concerns that cases related to the cultural behavior and religious practices of minorities could shift public opinion dangerously away from the principles of multiculturalism, democracy, human rights and religious tolerance.

The most recent law bans the full-face veil, but tomorrow, the prohibitions may be against halal food, circumcision, the location of a mosque or the visibility of a minaret; even religious education might be banned for reasons of public health, security or cultural integration.

OUP Blog, 17 August 2014

John Lewis sells school uniforms to Muslims shock

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mail John Lewis hijab report

Today the Daily Mail reports that John Lewis is offering the hijab in its school uniform department for the first time, after signing contracts with two schools in London and Liverpool.

Perhaps because it is written by the paper’s consumer affairs editor, rather than one of the usual hacks specialising in anti-Muslim stories, the article itself  is – by the Mail‘s standards – a quite straightforward and non-inflammatory piece of reporting.

However, it doesn’t take much to set off an outbreak of Islamophobic hysteria among the Mail‘s readers. With a few exceptions, pointing out that this is merely a case of a retailer responding to customer demand, the below-the-line comments are vitriolically hostile, featuring repeated calls for a boycott of John Lewis.

Continue reading →