Monthly Archives: December 2011

Israel: school called ‘impure’ after Muslim wedding

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Parents of students who attend the public-religious Ohel Meir school in Afula in northern Israel are demanding that it be spiritually purified following a Muslim wedding that took place there. They are up in arms that the wedding was allowed to happen in the hall where the school’s Torah scrolls are kept, and are threatening to keep their children out of the school synagogue until a purification ceremony is carried out.

“We’re talking about a serious event that should never have happened,” one parent told the Israeli news website Walla! “I am not prepared to let my child pray in a space in which a Muslim wedding took place … this was an impure act.” One father said that he thought a delegation of rabbis needed to enter the school synagogue and perform a special prayer service in order to purify it.

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Resisting the Islamification of Witham

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mark DunbarA local paper reports that the British Freedom Party has appointed a long-time EDL activist named Mark Dunbar as its organiser in the Essex town of Witham, which is of course currently under serious threat from the Muslim hordes.

It’s easy to laugh, but people living in places like this can be susceptible to the EDL/BFP’s Islamophobic propaganda precisely because they very rarely come into contact with an actual Muslim.

Postscript:  I’ve failed to find figures for the number of Muslims living in Witham, but according to the last available census there were only 409 Muslims in the whole of Braintree, compared with 98,116 Christians. Clearly, if Muslims are intent on imposing Islam on Witham they have a long way to go.

Islamophobes try to pin Liege killings on Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Geller on Liege killings

See “Daily Telegraph, Washington Post and Huffington Post report Twitter lie as fact: Liege killer ‘Nordine Amrani was Muslim terrorist'”, Anorak, 13 December 2011

And “Robert Spencer attempts to falsely link Belgian attacker to Islam, based solely on his Muslamic sounding name”, LoonWatch, 13 December 2011

(Atlas Shrugs screenshot from Expose.)

Update:  See also “Geller and Spencer turn another shooting tragedy into an Islamophobic hate fest”, The American Muslim, 14 December 2011

Controversy drives advertisers from ‘All-American Muslim’ – or does it?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

All American MuslimAt least two advertisers have withdrawn commercials from “All-American Muslim,” a new series on the TLC cable channel, since an activist organization called the Florida Family Association condemned the show. But others cited by the organization as pulling out as sponsors are disputing the claim.

The organization has attacked the series as propaganda that obscures “the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.” The series, which has been on TLC at 10 p.m. Sunday since mid-November, follows the lives of five Muslim-American families in Dearborn, Mich., a Detroit suburb with a sizable Muslim population.

The organization says 65 companies have left the show since it began urging advertisers to withdraw their support. Among those that have were Kayak, the travel Web site, and Lowe’s, the home-improvement retailer.

However, at least three of the companies that the Florida Family Association included on its list of 65 say they have not followed the organization’s call to end their sponsorships.

“We didn’t pull” commercials from “All-American Muslim,” John W. Faulkner, a spokesman for the Campbell Soup Company in Camden, N.J., said on Tuesday. Other Campbell Soup commercials “could run in subsequent episodes,” he added.

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Anti-Islam group fights Fribourg ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MOSCIThe Swiss Movement against Islamisation (MOSC) has said it will appeal a Fribourg district court decision blocking it from setting up a stand in the western town.

In October 2009, a few weeks before Switzerland’s controversial vote on the banning of minarets, MOSCI asked the city of Fribourg for permission to erect a stand. The group said it wanted to  present its ideas and ask citizens to vote against the Islamic spires.

After conferring with cantonal police and the prefecture of Gruyère, Fribrourg decided not to grant permission. The town said it wanted to avoid incidents like those in Lausanne several weeks earlier when clashes broke out around a similar stand.

MOSCI has angered many with its insistence that the Muslim prophet Muhammad was genocidal, as well as criticizing his union with Aisha, a very young girl. The organisation also considers Islam a “racist, warlike, and expansionist religion”.

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True Finns’ MP convicted of inciting racial hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An MP from the populist right-wing Finns Party, James Hirvisaari, has been convicted for inciting hatred against an ethnic group by the Kouvola Court of Appeal.

The court ruled that Hirvisaari had published a text in his blog on the Uusi Suomi website that incited hatred against a religious, ethnic or similar group. The court said that Hirvisaari understood that the text was slanderous and likely to cause contempt and hatred towards Muslims. Hirvisaari will now have to pay 25 day-fines, which according to his income amounts to 1,425 euros.

Päijät-Häme district court threw out the charges around a year ago, saying that the text Hirvisaari published simply exercised his freedom of speech.

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Hind Ahmas faces prison sentence for refusing to remove veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hind Ahmas and Kenza DriderA 32-year-old woman, Hind Ahmas, has been sentenced to 15 days of “citizenship service” after she was caught wearing a full-face veil in public and refused to remove it.

Hind Ahmas says she will not obey the court’s ruling and refuses to remove her veil. She risks a two-year prison sentence and a €30,000 fine, if she does not perform her citizenship service, which includes classes on French Republican values, Le Figaro reports.

Ahmas heard her sentence on the pavement in front of the courthouse in Paris because she refused to remove her veil to face the judges.

Her lawyer Gilles Devers says Ahmas is going to appeal and said that the French ban on the veil was illegal, AFP reports. The judge however insists her lawyer cannot appeal her decision because it is not a fine.

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The problem with Gingrich’s simplistic attack on sharia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The epochs of Newt Gingrich’s public life are defined by the books that have revolutionized him – generally of the type that sell well at airports. There is Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy, Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave,” Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich,” Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and various foundational texts of Total Quality Management and Lean Six Sigma.

These idea crushes are mostly harmless. Sometimes they are not. Gingrich has recently been captured by the theory, developed in books such as Andrew C. McCarthy’s “The Grand Jihad“, that sharia law is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world as we know it.

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, 13 December 2011

See also Eli Clifton, “The dangers of Gingrich’s war against Islam”,Think Progress, 13 December 2011

And “Read this before you support Gingrich (the bigot)”, Craig Considine’s blog, 11 December 2011