A Dutch court ordered a retrial Friday for anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders, sending the closely-watched hate speech case back to square one before a whole new panel of judges.
The far-right politician faces charges of inciting hatred against Muslims for many remarks, including some equating Islam with fascism and violence and others calling for a ban on the Quran and a tax on Muslim headscarves.
Two Seattle Muslim women said they were simply trying to fill up at a gas station in Tukwila on Saturday when another woman started yelling slurs, kicked one woman and slammed a car door on her leg, and then pushed the other.
“I’m terrified, I’m crying,” said Imaan, one of the two Muslim women, recounting the incident during a news conference Thursday. “Never in my life have I experienced this kind of hatred and physical assault.” Imaan, 23, and her aunt, Maryan, 34, both American citizens of Somali descent, asked to be identified by their first names only, for fear of reprisal.
They said they were trying to get gas shortly before 6 p.m. at an ARCO AM/PM gas station and minimart on Tukwila International Boulevard. The pump didn’t appear to be working. A woman who was watching started calling them “suicide bomber,” asking if they were going to bomb this country, and telling them to “go back to your country,” Imaan said.
King County prosecutors identified the woman as 37-year-old Jennifer Leigh Jennings, also known as Jennifer Leigh Adams, of Burien, and on Thursday charged her with two felony counts of malicious harassment under the state’s hate-crime law.
Imaan said she went inside to talk to the clerk about the gas pump, and when she came back out, she saw Jennings slam a car door on her aunt’s leg, pull off her aunt’s headscarf and kick her. Imaan told Jennings to leave them alone and Jennings pushed her so hard that she fell, she said. Imaan said she was frantic, yelling for help from about a dozen or so bystanders who didn’t do anything, she said.
An Islamic activist has been sent pages of the Koran with graffiti scrawled on them.
Mohammed Salim, of Letchworth Avenue, Rochdale, received three pages of the Muslim holy book graffitied with the words “crap”, “paper” and “toilet”. The abusive mail was posted anonymously from Canada, addressed to “Allah Hoo Hoo Salim” and arrived at Mr Salim’s family home on Monday.
The father of 11 said: “I am absolutely furious. Unfortunately, this just seems to be the world we live in now. People have no respect for anything any more. Obviously, whoever has sent this simply wants to upset me and it is extremely disrespectful to defile the Holy Koran in this way. It is just sickening.”
Mr Salim is well-known in Rochdale for his religious work and views. He has previously stood as the Islam Zinda parliamentary candidate for Rochdale, a party with an explicit religious policy. Mr Salim has also publicly criticised the war in Iraq, while he staged a three-week hunger strike outside Rochdale Town Hall in protest against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
He added: “I am very active in the Islamic community, but I didn’t know anyone had heard of me in Canada, so I suppose in a very strange way it is flattering. I have been sent abuse many times before and sometimes I do worry that people will take it a step too far and that my family could be in danger.”
A report has been released by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People entitled Tea Party Nationalism, exposing the links between the Tea Party movement and white supremacists, anti-immigration groups, “birthers” and other extremists. It contains a section headed “Pamela Geller and Islamophobia” which examines the role of the Atlas Shrugs blogger in promoting anti-Muslim bigotry in assocation with the Tea Party. We reproduce it here.
Pamela Geller and Islamophobia
From the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights report Tea Party Nationalism
The term “Islamophobia” was defined in a 1997 Runnymede Trust Report as “unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.” Among the characteristic elements of Islamophobia highlighted in the report:
Islam is monolithic and cannot adapt to new realities; Islam does not share common values with other major faiths; Islam as a religion is inferior to the West; It is archaic, barbaric, and irrational; Islam is a religion of violence and supports terrorism; and Islam is a violent political ideology.
In fact, alongside racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism, the elements of Islamophobia have found their way into the Tea Party Movement. Tea Party leaders and members have employed anti-Muslim language. With strong Tea Party ties, Pamela Geller stands out in this regard.
As noted earlier, Geller was a featured speaker at a Tea Party Patriots-sponsored convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee in May. Despite weeks of pressure from community groups who raised concerns about Geller’s history of Islamophobia, the convention organizers refused to reconsider their invitation to Geller.
Geller also spoke at the anti-immigrant rally in Arizona sponsored by Tea Party Nation in August 2010. She is expected to be speaking at the Tea Party Nation Unity Convention in Las Vegas in October.
Geller maintains a tight-knit trio of organizational fronts: Atlas Shrugs, SIOA (Stop Islamization of America), and the Freedom Defense Initiative. All are listed as official “partner” organizations of the ResistNet Tea Party faction. She has appeared on the ResistNet radio program that was heavily promoted by ResistNet leader Darla Dawald.
With leaders like Geller, it is not surprising to find language on a ResistNet Tea Party website that denigrates an entire grouping of people because of their faith. “We are at a point of having to take a stand against all Muslims. There is no good or bad Muslim. There is [sic] only Muslims and they are embedded in our government, military and other offices… What more must we wait for to take back this country of ours…”
Geller, like many Tea Partiers is also a birther. In addition to claiming that Obama’s birth certificate is a “forgery,” she has called President Obama a “third worlder and a coward” who’s “appeas[ing] his Islamic overlords.” She has perpetuated the lie that President Obama is Muslim.
Geller has referred to Obama as “The Muslim president.” Media Matters for America documented that Geller’s blog contains 267 posts tagged, “Muslim in the White House?” She’s gone as far as to seriously make the argument that Barack Obama is the illegitimate childof Malcolm X.
Among the many inflammatory statements Geller has posted on her blog, Atlas Shrugs, she has written that: “It is increasingly clear that the most divisive President in history is itching for a civil war. And at the rate he is going, he is going to get one – if he continues to ignore the will of the American people.”
Once again we’re faced with the annual right-wing campaign against the Global Peace and Unity event, which takes place this weekend at the ExCeL centre in London.
There has been a last-minute push by the usual bunch of Islamophobes to pressure government ministers into boycotting the event. An appeal to that effect by Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome has unsurprisingly been endorsed by Harry’s Place. Given the role of the latter blog in witch-hunting the likes ofNew Statesman political editor Mehdi Hasan as Muslim extremists, you might have thought their support would hardly help Goodman’s case.
In that connection, note the Harry’s Place discussion thread where Ajmal Masroor of all people is denounced as an extremist on the grounds that he is “a presenter on the Islam Channel: a Muslim Brotherhood dominated organisation, whose CEO, Mohammed Ali Harrath is a convicted terrorist” and is accused of placing himself outside “mainstream politics” because he refuses to join Harry’s Place in witch-hunting Muslim organisations.
Meanwhile, on the discussion thread at ConservativeHome, Tory London Assembly member Andrew Boff comments: “Hey Paul – You should recruit this guy – he doesn’t like the GPU either.” And Boff provides a link to this anti-GPU rant at IslamicTube.
If the two parties that make up the coalition government really want to damage their reputation among Muslim communities across the UK, they really couldn’t do much better than succumb to this sort of hardline right-wing campaign and withdraw speakers from the GPU.
A former leader of Tower Hamlets Council who was dumped by Labour then stood as an independent has been voted in as the borough’s new mayor. Lutfur Rahman secured 51.76% of the vote to become the east London borough’s first directly elected mayor.
Former council leader Mr Rahman was Labour’s initial candidate. But when he was rebuffed by the party he announced he would stand as an independent with several Labour councillors’ backing.
Thursday’s poll was the first ever ballot for a directly-elected mayor in Tower Hamlets, with a 25.6% turnout.
Labour’s London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has risked internal discipline by campaigning for Mr Rahman against the party’s new candidate, Helal Abbas. On Monday, he was seen on the streets of Tower Hamlets campaigning with Mr Rahman.
Mr Livingstone called the deselection of Mr Rahman an “utterly unacceptable” move by Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) which “ignored the views of the local electorate”.
He insisted however that he backed the official candidate and was simply trying to encourage voters to put the independent down as their second choice in an effort to keep out the Conservatives.
Labour’s Mr Abbas launched a bitter attack on Mr Rahman, accusing him of being “in the gutter”. “This is a sad night for those of us who want to build a better future and a united Tower Hamlets. Lutfur Rahman has won tonight but not as he wanted, as the Labour candidate,” he said in a statement.
“Thankfully, Labour’s ruling National Executive had the backbone to stop him from being the Labour candidate. We may have lost tonight, but at least the Labour Party has clean hands.”
Votes were as follows:
See also Dave Hill’s London Blog, 22 October 2010
So Andrew Gilligan’s contemptible witch-hunting was all in vain. Needless to say, he is not happy.
Update: And now Gilligan has posted a transcript of his Channel 4 documentary “Britain’s Islamic Republic” on his Torygraph blog. Give it a rest Andrew. You spent all that time and effort trying to stitch up the IFE and turn public opinion against Lutfur Rahman – and you lost.
Richard Bartholomew examines another “Muslims are imposing their culture on us” story in the Daily Mail. See also Tabloid Watch.
Day five of a hearing into whether to stop construction of an approved Islamic Center of Murfreesboro mosque continued with the opponents’ attorney trying to paint the project as a doorway to Islamic domination and tyrannical Shariah law in the United States. Attorney Joe Brandon Jr. called several witnesses on Thursday who tried to connect the Islamic Center to terrorism and plots to overthrow democracy.
Murfreesboro resident Jeanetta Alford was characteristic of Brandon’s approach in explaining her opposition to the mosque. She said she believes that the teaching of Islam violates the United States Constitution because it advocates beheadings, forced conversions and pedophilia. When asked if she would like to be rid of mosques in America, she responded, “That would be wonderful, probably.”
Rutherford County’s attorneys countered that there’s zero proof that the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has broken any law. “Has the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro beheaded anyone?” asked County Attorney James Cope. “No, they have not,” Alford replied. Later, she said that the center wasn’t fully practicing Shariah law “because they can’t do it yet.”
The Tennessean, 22 October 2010
See also the Daily New Journal, which reports another witness, one Lisa Moore, as saying that “the religion part of Islam is only about 30 percent and ‘the rest of it is about killing non-believers’.”
WSMV Nashville reports the following exchange between Brandon and Randy Groce, an investigator with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department:
“Is Islam a religion?” Brandon said.
“In my opinion, yes,” said Groce. “They have a belief in a deity, an afterlife.”
“You say an afterlife. Is this the same afterlife that, like, when you yell, ‘Allah akbar,’ and blow up several people, and you get several virgins – is that the afterlife you’re talking about?” said Brandon.
In the wake of NPR’s decision to terminate Juan Williams’ contract following controversial remarks he made about Muslims on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Media Matters provides a retrospective of the many anti-Muslim statements made on Fox News or by Fox News personalities.
Geert Wilders is not trying to create conflict and divisions in society with his statements about Islam, Wilders’ lawyer said on Thursday at the MP’s trial in Amsterdam for inciting hatred and discrimination.
“Wilders does not preach violence,” Bram Moszkowicz said on the second day of the defence case. “He counters his opponents with words, with reason, with debate, because he feels this is what he must do,” Nos quoted the lawyer as saying.