A man has been arrested after a Koran was allegedly burned during an anti-Islamic rant, police have said.
He was reported to have stood on a street in Carlisle city centre on Wednesday making pronouncements against the Muslim religion in front of a large crowd. The man is then alleged to have set fire to the Koran he was holding before discarding it on the floor and hurrying away. Officers arrived at the scene a short time later and are now investigating.
The Daily Telegraph reports that Sayeeda Warsi will say in a speech today that Islamophobia has “passed the dinner-table test” and is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial.
She will blame “the patronising, superficial way faith is discussed in certain quarters, including the media”.
Controversial US pastor Terry Jones has been barred from entering the UK for the public good, the Home Office says. The pastor, who last year planned a Koran-burning protest in the US, had been invited to address right-wing group England Is Ours in Milton Keynes. Mr Jones told BBC Radio 5 live he would challenge the “unfair” decision and his visit could have been “beneficial”.
A Home Office spokesman said: “Numerous comments made by Pastor Jones are evidence of his unacceptable behaviour. Coming to the UK is a privilege not a right and we are not willing to allow entry to those whose presence is not conducive to the public good. The use of exclusion powers is very serious and no decision is taken lightly or as a method of stopping open debate.”
Mr Jones said he had not been planning to break any laws while in England. “I’m not against Muslims, we are not against their religion,” he said. “We have, here in the West, freedom of religion and limited freedom of speech which we don’t have in their countries. What I am against is the radical element. If I came to England we would expect Muslims to rally with us.”
Barry Taylor, the spokesperson for England Is Ours quoted in the report, is presumably the Barry Taylor who was formerly a member of Milton Keynes BNP and stood for the far-right England First Party in the Milton Keynes Council elections in 2008. That same year Taylor was responsible for organising the annual John Tyndall Memorial Meeting, where a “gathering of white racial nationalists” celebrated the life of the late founder of the BNP. In 2009 Three Counties Unity named Taylor as part of a group of individuals who “straddle a variety of nationalist groupings, having dealings with the BNP, Nationalist Alliance, British People’s Party (BPP) and lately, the England First Party”. It was leaked documentswritten by Taylor which revealed links between Luton BNP and the football hooligans known as the MIGs some of whose members played a central role in launching the English Defence League. England Is Ours are currently involved in a campaign against the contruction of a new mosque in Bletchley which is headed by Milton Keynes BNP organiser and former NF supporter Kieren Trent. However, despite his readiness to work with fascists of all stripes, Taylor is not universally admired on the far right.
A middle school girl was kept out of the first half of a basketball game Saturday because a referee ruled her religious headscarf, called a hijab, was a safety hazard.
Thirteen-year-old Maheen Haq of Hagerstown, Md. was sidelined until Lou Bachtell, the Mid-Maryland Girls Basketball League regional director, arrived to the court at halftime, called league President Jim Shannon and got an exemption approved.
Haq’s parents were upset, though they didn’t protest the referee’s decision. Other parents watching the game volunteered to pull their daughters out of the game and walk out in protest, but Haq’s mother Anila, declined the offer. “My daughter’s heart was broken and I didn’t want to break other hearts as well,” the mother said.
Haq’s parents had to agree to assume liability for any injuries that might occur from their daughter’s traditional Muslim headscarf, before she would be allowed to play, Shannon said.
League coordinator Daphnie Campbell said the official was “right to make that decision” to keep her out of the game because headscarves could be dangerous in sports if not properly secured. “If a child’s hand comes down and grabs it, it very possibly could snap her neck or break the other person’s hand,” Campbell said.
Campbell said she will meet with Haq’s parents Saturday to sign off on a letter stating that they will assume responsibility for any injuries that could occur because of the hijab.
“I am going to approve it that she is able to play in any game that she wants to play in. No questions,” Campbell said. At the spring coaches meeting Campbell said she will re-evaluate the uniform rules. “I really don’t see that as an issue,” she said. “We’re probably going to see more kids with these things on their heads because of their religion.”
This month, when a group of New York City police officers showed up for their required counter-terrorism training, they got to watch a movie. And not just some diddly 20-minute educational film, either. It was a full-length color feature, with more explosions than a Transformerssequel and more blood-splattered victims than an HBO World War II series.
The bad news was that it was a spectacularly offensive smear of American Muslims. The film is called The Third Jihad. It is 72 minutes of gruesome footage of bombing carnage, frenzied crowds, burning American flags, flaming churches, and seething mullahs. All of this is sandwiched between a collection of somber talking heads informing us that, while we were sleeping, the international Islamist Jihad that wrought these horrors has set up shop here and is quietly going about its deadly business. This is the final drive in a 1,400-year-old bid for Muslim world domination, we’re informed. And while we may think there are some perfectly reasonable Muslim leaders and organizations here in the U.S., that is just more sucker bait sent our way.
“Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate,” says the narrator, “when in fact if you look a little closer you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”
The message here is that lurking behind those veils and prayer caps is a secret plan to impose a religious order out of the Dark Ages here in the U.S. The favorite image in The Third Jihad – shown over and over – is an enormous black-and-white Islamic flag flying over the White House.
This is pretty toxic stuff, the kind of film likely to spark a picket line at a local theater. In this case, however, the impact is somewhat more sinister, since the audience was law enforcement officers attending a mandatory prep session on what to know about the terrorist threat.
“After it was over, I was thinking, ‘What was that?'” said a cop who saw the movie at a training facility used by the department in Coney Island. “It was so ridiculously one-sided. It just made Muslims look like the enemy. It was straight propaganda.”
Muslim leaders tonight backed the Conservative party chairwoman, Lady Warsi, after she claimed Islamophobia had “crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability” in Britain and was now seen as normal and uncontroversial. The Muslim Council of Britain warned the spread could be “the beginning of something horrendous” in a British society with an estimated 2.4m Muslims.
At Leicester University tonight Warsi claimed that parts of the press had embraced casual Islamophobia and that other parts of society including employers and even school children would be next. “You could even say that Islamophobia has now passed the dinner-table-test,” she said, accusing Polly Toynbee, a Guardian columnist and Rod Liddle, a Sunday Times columnist, of invoking Islamophobia.
Her comments were the most strident intervention yet in religious affairs by a member of the coalition government and there were reports they had not been cleared by Downing Street. David Cameron’s official spokesman said: “She is expressing her view. He agrees that this is an important debate”.
Gulam Noon, the curry magnate, and Akeela Ahmed, chief executive of the Muslim Youth Helpline, were among other leading British Muslims to supported Warsi. “Islam is under attack, there is no doubt,” said Noon. “It is the responsibility of the press, the government and the Muslim community, to deal with it.”
Ahmed warned that young people increasingly feel Muslims are viewed as being different or apart from society. “I have Muslim friends who complain they go out after work and it is ok for their non-Muslim colleagues to make jokes about people with long beards or wearing burqas,” she said. “If you were to replace the word Muslim with black or Jew, you would be jumped on straight away as racist or antisemitic.”
Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the mosques and community affairs committee at the Muslim Council of Britain, said Warsi was correct to try and tackle growing anti-Mussim attitudes which he said have been partly been caused by the public becoming “desensitised” to anti-Muslim messages in the media in the wake of Islamist terror attacks in the US and Europe while he said Muslims’ positive contributions to British society attract less coverage.
“When I reflect on the tragedy of the Holocaust I think about how the Jew was persecuted as a misfit and somebody not to be trusted, as an alien. The drip, drip of hatred and bigotry by the Nazis led to them being described as rats and murdered in a horrible way. This situation is nowhere near that but there is always a beginning for everything. I hope this is not the beginning of something that could be horrendous. We said ‘never again’ and we have to nip this in the bud.”
Islamic Forum of Europe categorically denies the Telegraph’s claim that it hired a Newham Council venue “in the name of a body called TELCO, the East London chapter of the community organising group London Citizens”.
This is a completely fabricated claim made by its London Editor, the infamous Andrew Gilligan, on his Telegraph blog (17/01/2011). Mr Gilligan’s unjustifiable laziness in relying on the notorious blog Harry’s Place, instead of proper journalism, has once again resulted in a claim which is completely baseless. Had he bothered to check, either through a Freedom of Information request to Newham Council, or asked IFE for comment, he would have discovered the true facts.
We shall be publishing the evidence in due course. Mr Gilligan needs to explain how it is ever justifiable to publish claims, without verifying the facts first. The Telegraph also needs to decide how much longer it will offer patronage to a pseudo-journalist who has a history of making false claims.
Due to the serious nature of this false allegation, and the distress caused to the organiser (IFE member) who has effectively been accused of fraudulent misrepresentation – we are exploring the options available and will be issuing a further statement soon.
Writing in the Telegraph Andrew Knowles takes issue with an article by an anonymous vicar’s wife that appears in the current issue of Standpoint magazine, and was seized on by Torygraph blogger Ed West to bolster the myth of Muslim ghettos.
See also ENGAGE, 19 January 2011
Update: Ed West will be pleased to hear that his piece has been reproduced by the English Defence League.
Catalunya High Court has suspended the ban on the Burkha in public places imposed by Lleida city council in October. The verdict, passed on Tuesday, January 12, says the ban will be lifted until a decision has been made by a judge on the appeal put forward by the Muslim association Watani.
On October 8, 2010, the city council forbade the wearing of not only Burkhas but also other Muslim headgear such as the niqaband the hiyab – which only cover the wearer’s hair – in any public building. This means indoor markets, public transport, community centres and council-owned buildings. When the prohibition came into full effect on December 9, it made Lleida the first town in Spain to have taken such a radical step.
But members of Watani say this is discrimination on religious grounds, since many women choose to wear niqabs and hiyabs, rather than being forced to by their husbands or male relatives. Watani’s lawyer, Carlos Antolí, believes the association has a strong case on these grounds.
An interesting video on the Guardian website by Masood Khan, showing how Salafi Muslims in Luton are combating al-Muhajiroun. Worth reading in this connection is Bob Lambert’s article in the Summer 2008 issue of the Cordoba Foundation’s Arches Quarterly, which points out that “Salafi and Islamist community groups (in London as elsewhere) often have the best tools with which to undermine al-Qaida propaganda within their own youth communities”.
Update: See also Masood Khan, “Filming British Muslims’ fight against extremism”, Inside Guardian blog, 18 January 2011