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civil rights advocacy group has urged the federal Justice Department to investigate who is responsible for leaving pig feet at the site of a planned mosque in Ontario.
In a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday, the Greater Los Angeles Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations urged the government to probe the incident as a hate crime.
Officials in the south-eastern city will later this month take a stand on a local council proposal to ban mosques.
In 2009, Finns Party councillor Freddy van Wonterghem made the proposal, which seeks to ban buildings “harmful to the cultural identity of the city.”
The proposal will come before the city planning board on August 21. Kotka city zoning chief Lars Olsson says current laws don’t provide for a ban on building mosques and says public debate is instead needed on Finns’ attitudes toward newcomers and representatives of different faiths.
Former soldier Simon Parkes stuck a pig’s head to the gates of a Cheltenham mosque in an act of revenge.
Wearing a balaclava, the 45-year-old also sprayed an insult aimed at Muslims along Masjidul Falah Mosque in the High Street. He claimed he was angry after seeing extremists burning poppies in London during a Remembrance Sunday service.
Parkes, of Crown Close, Bishop’s Cleeve, admitted causing religiously aggravated criminal damage and causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress when he appeared before Cheltenham magistrates. The crime was committed on November 13, 2010.
MARSEILLE, France — Though it was almost midnight, streets were full of Muslim families taking a stroll after breaking the Ramadan fast with a late dinner. As two police officers drove by a storefront recycled as the Grand Sunna Mosque, they noticed a woman wearing flowing black robes and a full-face veil.
The police officers alighted from their patrol car and challenged the woman about her veil, which has been illegal in France since April 2011. After an angry exchange, police said later, the woman shouted that she would not abide by the anti-veil law, and a youth told police that they had no business patrolling the neighborhood and accosting its predominantly Muslim residents.
The confrontation quickly escalated into a shoving match, with several dozen young bystanders joining in and carloads of police reinforcements speeding up to lend a hand. Before long, it erupted into what was described in the National Assembly in Paris as a riot, during which a female police officer was bitten on the arm and two of her male colleagues were bashed and bruised.
The sudden clash, which took place July 24 in Marseille, was the most serious instance of resistance to the veil ban during its 16 months of enforcement, according to police. Although it subsided almost as quickly as it flared, the outburst focused national attention on simmering resentment over the ban among France’s most militant and tradition-minded Muslims.
JOPLIN, Mo. — An online fundraiser for the Islamic Society of Joplin is well on its way to its goal of $250,000.
The fundraiser, on the crowdsourcing website indiegogo.com, has caught the attention of people worldwide. The site is indiegogo.com/joplinmosqueofficial.
Kimberly Kester, a member and spokeswoman for the local mosque, said the contributions have come from faraway places, including Indonesia, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, and from mosques all over the United States. “It’s really amazing,” Kester said. “I’m really surprised and really thankful.”
Just before 5 p.m. Thursday, the website had raised more than $205,000 from 1,758 contributors. Of those, 216 had contributed $250 or more.
U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh went on another anti-Islam tirade Wednesday, calling for an end to “political correctness” in dealing with the “radical strain of Islam” he described as an imminent danger to America.
“It’s a real threat,” Walsh said at a town hall meeting in Elk Grove Village, Ill. “And it’s a threat that is much more at home now than it was right after 9/11.”
“It’s here,” he continued, referring to “radical Islam” in the suburbs of Chicago. “It’s in Elk Grove, it’s in Addison, it’s in Elgin. It’s here.”
Nashville Public Radio interviews Lee Douglas, a right-wing Republican activist who helped to draft a resolution condemning Tennessee governor Bill Haslam and making a case that Islam is bent on world domination. Douglas, a dentist from Brentwood, sees what he calls an “infiltration” of Islam in federal and state government and says “we have a duty as Americans to understand that they intend to take us over and compel us to become Islamic”.
Mitt Romney held a meeting Thursday with a group of right-wing activists that included several leaders who have been vocal supporters of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN)Islamophobic witch hunt, deepening his association with right-wing, anti-Muslim sentiment.
One of the guests at Thursday’s event was Vice President of the Family Research Council Jerry Boykin, who has a long history of Islamophobia, and once said that Islam “should not be protected under the First Amendment.” Most recently, Boykin piled on to Bachmann’s baseless indictment that top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin is part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot. “I believe in some aspects of this situation there is support for the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our government, that sounds extremist but it is just a fact, it’s a reality,” he said.
Two others in attendance at Thursday’s event – American Values president Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson – penned a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) defending Bachmann’s witch hunt. In that letter, they argued there is legitimate concern about “senior federal officials or branches of the federal government could be animated or influenced by groups affiliated with, or a philosophy grounded in, radical Islam.”
A New York-based magazine has sparked outrage after publishing a story about its fashion editor wearing a niqab for a day.
Vice magazine published a story on its website yesterday that details difficulties experienced by Annette Lamothe-Ramos, its fashion editor, while wearing a five-piece niqab, a cloth normally worn by some Muslim women when they are out in public.
The editor, who incorrectly labelled the cloth a burqa in the story, told of how she “scared tourists”, felt like Batman and began to sweat in places she had never sweated before, all of which offended readers of the consistently irreverent magazine.
Ms Lamothe-Ramos, who also works as a DJ in New York, wrote about how she would never “do anything like this again because it suckkkkked”.
See “I walked around in a burqa all day (And I’m not Muslim)”, Vice, 8 August 2012
And “A response to the detractors of our burqa-for-a-day article”, Vice, 9 August 2012
HAYWARD — Four teenagers who police say threw lemons at a local mosque and struck at least one person inside have been arrested on suspicion of vandalism that interferes with civil rights.
It was the fourth time vandals targeted the Hayward mosque during the last eight months, police said.
At about 10 a.m. Friday about 40 congregants had gathered inside the American Muslim Association, at 26320 Gading Road when four male teenagers threw lemons at the building and then ran, said Hayward Police Lt. Roger Keener. At least one person was hit in the arm.