Monthly Archives: August 2014

BNP offshoot Britain First rapped by ASA for using royal symbols

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Britain First badgeBritain First, an offshoot of the British National party, has been rapped by the advertising watchdog for using official royal symbols on its website and activists’ uniform without permission.

The far right party, which contested May’s local and European elections, campaigned in Yorkshire wearing flat caps and green jackets embossed with the party logo, which features the royal crown and the words “Taking our country back” and “Rule Britannia”. The jackets, as well as other clothing including a beanie hat and hoodie, are for sale on the group’s website.

The Advertising Standards Authority investigated the site after a complaint that it breached the Committee of Advertising Practice code on use of the royal crown. It said Britain First had breached the advertising code by not responding to its enquiries and by using the royal images without proper permission. However, it has no power to rule on the use of the crown image on the group’s uniform.

Paul Golding, the party leader, said the group had already removed images of a T-shirt featuring an official royal crest but would continue to use its logo, including the crown. “We’ve checked it out with our solicitors and it’s used by multiple organisations up and down the country. It’s not an official crown, it’s something we’ve designed with a graphic designer,” he said. Golding also dismissed the ASA as a “toothless quango with no power which no one takes any notice of”.

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Mosque fires in Germany trigger concerns of Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mevlana Mosque arsonA Turkish delegation comprised of officials from Turkish Parliament’s Human Rights Committee and head of Turks Abroad and Related Communities directorate of the Turkish Prime Ministry started a two-day visit to Germany yesterday to inquire about the extent of attacks and suspicion of arson.

Their first visit was to Berlin’s Mevlana Mosque. A fire broke out in a part of the mosque that was being redecorated on August 11. The cause of the blaze is not yet known but German officials said they found traces of a flammable liquid at the scene, pointing to arson. Located in Kreuzberg, a district of Berlin dubbed as “Little Istanbul” due to its large population of Turks – approximately 40,000 people – the mosque was partially open for prayers as reconstruction was underway on the 40-yearold structure.

One day before the attack in Berlin, the Süleymaniye Mosque in the German town of Bielefeld was set on fire by suspects who burned Qurans in the mosque. In February, the Central Mosque in Cologne, one of the largest mosques in Germany, was subject to attacks. Suspects crashed a car into the door of the mosque and attempted to set the mosque on fire.

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Complaint filed against politician for Islamophobic tweet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jean-Luc AddorThe Islamic Central Council of Switzerland has filed charges against a Swiss politician for incitement to commit a crime after he appeared to welcome the recent shooting of a Muslim and called for more such shootings.

Minutes after a man was shot to death in a mosque in northeastern Switzerland on Friday, Jean-Luc Addor, vice-president of the rightwing Swiss People’s Party in canton Valais, tweeted “On en redemande!” (“Let’s have more!”)

The shooting in St Gallen appears to have been part of a family feud. Police arrested a man who was found in the mosque holding a handgun.

The central council said in a statement on Monday that Addor was well-known for his Islamophobic comments. The council said that on August 13, for example, he tweeted: “Islam is disgusting and is only supported by dirty pigs, traitors and collaborators.”

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Tory MP says ‘Trojan Horse’ affair shows Enoch Powell was right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Baroness Thatcher death
“Want to wear the niqab? Prefer not to shake hands with the opposite sex? Then get out of our ‘tolerant’ Christian country”

A Tory MP has threatened to pour petrol on the glowing embers of the Birmingham schools ‘Trojan Horse’ row – by invoking Enoch ‘Rivers of Blood’ Powell. In a letter to a constituent seen by Scrapbook, Sir Gerald Howarth – the chairman of Thatcherite group Conservative Way Forward – writes:

“Clearly, the arrival of so many people of non-Christian faith has presented a challenge, as so many of us, including the late Enoch Powell, warned decades ago. Recent events have illustrated that some of these new arrivals have a very different ethos from traditional Christian schools and we are right to intervene to prevent them from teaching divisive ideology to children born here.”

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MCB says Prevent anti-terror scheme has ‘failed’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Harun KhanA senior figure in the Muslim Council of Britain says a key government anti-terrorism strategy has “failed”.

Deputy secretary general Harun Khan told BBC Radio 5 live the Prevent scheme was having a “negative impact”. The scheme seeks to lessen the influence of extremism – but Mr Khan said it alienated young Muslims and pushed them towards radical groups.

The government said it was supporting the vast majority of UK Muslims in combating extremism.

Prevent, which is part of the government’s broader counter-terrorism strategy, aims to “stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”. Work carried out as part of Prevent includes stopping “apologists for terrorism” coming to the UK, supporting community campaigns which oppose extremism and mentoring for individuals who are “at risk of being drawn into terrorist activity”. The strategy covers “all forms” of terrorism, including far-right extremism.

Mr Khan said Prevent had “really failed” when it came to Muslim communities, and said many young Muslims were “not interested in engaging for anything to do with Prevent”.

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Lock up Muslims who travel to Syria, says Boris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Conservative Party Conference ContinuesLondon mayor Boris Johnson devotes his column in today’s Daily Telegraph (“Do nothing, and we invite the tide of terror to our front door”) to the murder of James Foley and ISIS’s success in extending its control over areas of Syria and Iraq.

Johnson asserts that we “need to be far more effective in preventing British and other foreigners from getting out there”.

In order to suggest that this is a specifically British issue, he adds sarcastically: “I am interested to see how many Belgians are there.” Obviously not interested enough to check the figures, though. A report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation estimated that, as of December 2013, up to 296 Belgians had travelled to Syria to participate in the resistance to Assad. The figure for the UK was 366.

Johnson, however, apparently knows better than the ICSR’s researchers how many fighters from the UK are in Syria. He tells his readers that there are “perhaps five or six hundred Britons currently out there”. Where he gets that statistic from is unclear. Five hundred – the figure suggested by Sir Peter Fahey of ACPO – is at the top of the range of official estimates of the number of people who have gone to Syria to join the opposition forces since the outbreak of civil war there in 2011.

It is thought that half of these individuals have since returned to the UK, while as many as 40 fighters have lost their lives. So the number of people still out there is probably little more than a couple of hundred. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that the majority of them joined ISIS rather than the other anti-Assad opposition forces – who have been engaged in armed conflict not just with Assad’s regime but with ISIS too.

The majority of young Muslims who travelled to Syria would have been motivated, not by the desire to join a murderous gang of fanatics, but by the entirely admirable wish to defend the Syrian people against the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. It seems likely, therefore, that the number of UK citizens who have joined ISIS is in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Not that any of this enters into Johnson’s assessment of the situation. He writes: “The police can and do interview the returnees, but it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.”

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Reports and comment from Islamophobia Watch 18‑24 August

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reports and comment from Islamophobia Watch 18-23 August 2014

Indiana: CAIR calls for attack on Muslim woman to be investigated as hate crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bouchra BahdaA leading US Muslim advocacy group has called for investigating a possible hate-crime attack against a veiled Muslim woman who has been struck in an Indiana store a few weeks ago.

“Without an alternative theory for the motive of the attacker, anti-Muslim bias based on the victim’s ethnicity and religious attire must be investigated by law enforcement authorities,” Ibrahim Hooper, National Communications Director for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement obtained by OnIslam.net on Saturday, August 23.

Bouchra Bahda, the Muslim mother of two, was attacked form from behind last Ramadan when a young man struck her with a hard downswipe on the shoulder outside a Wal-Mart store in Indiana.

The Muslim woman and her husband, both native Moroccans, were accompanying kids to shopping in the Wal-Mart in Avon where the assault happened.

“What was he thinking?” Abdelhakim Ejjair, the husband who moved to the US in 1998 told Indystar. “Does he hate Muslims? I just want know what was in his head. What was the reason?”

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Nick Ferrari denounces the ‘creeping tide of treachery’ among British Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

This is the price we have to pay for the years we allowed hate-filled preachers to spread their messages of evil and unrest to vulnerable young recruits outside mosques each week with police just watching and doing nothing more than making up the numbers.

We did nothing as some of our schools were infiltrated to the point where Christmas was banned, non-Muslim children were denied the opportunity to go on school trips and the public address system was hijacked to broadcast the daily call to prayer.

We permitted groups of mostly Muslim agitators to burn poppies in front of horrified former servicemen, carry posters advocating the murder of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and yell ugly chants with the police again doing nothing more than acting as spectators.

The liberal Left, egged on by a combination of the chattering classes and a supine media led by state broadcaster the BBC crippled with the fear of being seen to be anything less than insanely tolerant, ensured that instead of offering any credible resistance to the creeping tide of treachery, the perverted zealots were as much encouraged as they were indulged.

Everything was done in favour of a tiny and, in some parts, twisted minority, and the rest of us would have to lump it….

Perhaps the most sickening aspect of the lot is that so many of those nursing hate in their hearts and murder in their heads are being funded by our benefit system. They might despise the West and all it stands for but clearly they can suspend the disgust long enough to cash their giros.

Nick Ferrari explains the presence of a British recruit to ISIS in their video of the murder of James Foley.

Sunday Express, 24 August 2014

South Park creator sings song at ‘Ground Zero mosque’ protest – shock revelation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The report by the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero on yesterday’s right-wing protest against the Park51 development features the astonishing news that “Trey Parker sang his original song about stopping the Ground Zero Mosque”. Presumably they mean Trade Martin. Martin’s song has been ridiculed as the sort of tasteless parody that the creators of South Park might come up with, and it would appear that the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero agrees.