The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced today that an anti-Muslim Internet hate site that contained a number of threats of violence targeting mosques, including the comment “I want [Muslim] blood on my hands,” has been taken down by its hosting company.
CAIR said visitors to “Bare Naked Islam,” hosted by WordPress.com, now see the message: “barenakedislam.wordpress.com is no longer available. This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”
As its contribution to the end-of-the-year lists genre, Spiked has published a piece by Patrick Hayes entitled “The worst 10 assaults on freedom”, which has now been reproduced in its entirety by the EDL-linked British Freedom Party.
The BFP’s support is hardly surprising, given that Number 7 on Hayes’ list of “assaults on freedom” is the use of Crasbos against far-right thugs:
“In March, English Defence League (EDL) member Shane Overton received a Criminal ASBO banning him from attending or helping to organise any demonstration, meeting or gathering held by the EDL, and even from visiting its website for 10 years. Later in 2011, police tried to slap an ASBO on EDL leader Stephen Lennon that would have prevented him from having any involvement with his own organisation.”
It’s worth recalling that Overton, while passing through Doncaster railway station on his way back from an EDL demonstration, racially abused a Muslim family as they were waiting for a train, terrifying their children.
Between 2005 and 2010 mosques in the Netherlands were defaced 117 times, according to research by social researcher Ineke van der Valk. The acts of vandalism were motivated by a hatred of Islam, the researcher is quoted as saying on VPRO radio programme Argos.
In 43 cases, the mosques were daubed with offensive symbols or slogans. In 37 instances, the mosques sustained material damage. In 99 of the incidents the police failed to find any of the culprits. In the United States there were 42 similar incidents during the same period. Most of the vandalised mosques in the Netherlands are located outside the major cities.
And that must be a first. However, the two workers in question are Malory Nye, who claims that he was dismissed from his post as principal of an independent college in Dundee “because its hierarchy viewed his race and religion as a threat to its Muslim values”, and his wife Isabel Campbell-Nye, who says she was dismissed as head of the college’s English language centre “because she brought in too many students who were not Muslims or Arabs”.
Three French women’s organizations have expressed concern and disappointment with world soccer body FIFA’s endorsement of a proposal to lift the ban on women players wearing a hijab, an Islamic hair dress, on the pitch.
“To accept a special dress code for women athletes not only introduces discrimination among athletes but is contrary to the rules governing sport movement, setting a same dress code for all athletes without regard to origin or belief,” the three organizations said in an open letter to FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
Over at Little Green Footballs Charles Johnson takes apart Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer:
The so-called “counter-jihad” bloggers are covering themselves in glory again, slobbering and ranting and trying to take advantage of a terrible crime to advance their un-American agenda….
This time they’ve seized on a story about a man in Texas who killed six members of his own family on Christmas morning while dressed in a Santa suit, then committed suicide. The man’s wife had left him, his home had been foreclosed upon, his business was failing, and he had filed for bankruptcy; with anyone else, these things would be considered strong motives for committing this massacre.
But because the man’s name was Aziz Yazdanpanah, and he was apparently unhappy about who his daughter was dating, these bloggers have decided it had to be an “Islamic honor killing.”
A woman in Brittany was slapped with a €35 fine after police spotted her driving her car wearing a full-face veil.
The woman, who was visiting family in the north-west coastal town of Saint-Brieuc, was wearing the face-covering niqab, reported daily newspaper 20 Minutes.
Police stopped the woman who “seemed hesitant in her driving,” said local police spokesman Laurent Dufour. “On closer inspection, they realized she was veiled,” he said.
“This is an issue of skill, safety and visibility,” said Dufour. He compared driving with a full face veil to driving a car with ice on the windscreen, eating a sandwich or smoking a cigarette.
According to the Greek press, Greek Orthodox Bishop Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus appealed to the Council of State to withdraw a Greek bill that would allow the building of a mosque in the capital city, Athens.
Known for his far-right views, Seraphim described the bill as an anti-Christian move and a disrespect to Christian martyrs, although it is billed as democratic move.
“Anti-mosque protests, anti-Shariah laws, and anti-Muslim hate crimes could easily fill any list of ‘top five’ religion stories in 2011”, Charles C. Haynes of the Religious Freedom Education Project writes:
A group of prominent Muslim figures in New York City have said they will boycott an annual meeting on Friday with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in order to protest against police surveillance of their communities.
Bloomberg is scheduled to hold a multi-faith “Bagels with Bloomberg” breakfast with religious leaders from across the city on Friday morning, but the group has written to the mayor’s office outlining their reasons for refusing to attend.
In particular, the group says it is outraged at details that emerged earlier this year of a concerted effort by the New York police department to monitor activities of Muslims in New York. A series of reports by the Associated Press detailed the activities of a unit within the NYPD, called the Demographics Unit, that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, including eavesdropping in businesses and infiltrating mosques.