Al-Azhar Mosque was overcrowded on Friday morning with worshipers who came to attend the Friday sermon given by head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Hundreds of worshipers, mostly young men, lined up outside the gates hoping to enter the mosque, while others decided to listen to the sermon and perform prayers on sidewalks outside.
ENGAGE responds to the attack on Islam Channel CEO Mohamed Ali Harrath by the racist-promoting, terrorism-supporting Zionist blog Harry’s Place.
Islamophobia Awareness Month launch event @ LSE
Tuesday, 20th November 2012, 6pm
At the Quad, East Building, LSE Students’ Union, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE
With Islamophobia entering the mainstream of politics across Europe and with increasing concerns over the penetration of Islamophobia in universities, the LSE Students’ Union is providing a forum for discussion on the nature and extent of the problem and what can be done to challenge it.
Speakers:
• Myriam Francois-Cerrah: Journalist and Academic
• Dr Leon Moosavi: University of Liverpool
• Aaron Kiely: National Union of Students
There will also be an exhibition on Islamophobia in the Quad from Monday 19th November until Friday 23rd November.
Pamela Geller said last month that her campaign to plaster Metro stations with billboards and banners that attempt to stir up “anti-jihad” sentiment by invoking 9/11 would “go on for years.” Seems like she wasn’t lying.
Metro riders spotted more banners at the Glenmont, Petworth-Georgia Avenue and U Street-Cardozo stations featuring a Koran verse accompanied by – yet again – the indelible image of a Boeing 767 crashing into the World Trade Center.
In case of competing rights, a Toronto woman has lodged a complaint against a barber who refused to cut her hair because he’s Muslim.
In June, Faith McGregor requested a man’s haircut at the Terminal Barber Shop in downtown Toronto. Co-owner Omar Mahrouk told her that his Muslim faith prohibits him from touching a woman who is not a member of his family. All the other barbers in the shop said the same thing.
“For me it was just a haircut and started out about me being a woman,” McGregor, 35, told the Toronto Star. “Now we’re talking about religion versus gender versus human rights and businesses in Ontario.”
A celebrity chef has come under fire after making “hurtful” comments about the city’s Muslim community. In her new book, Clarissa Dickson Wright describes a visit to Leicester “as one of the most frightening experiences of my life”.
The 65-year-old dedicates a chapter of Clarissa’s England: A Gamely Gallop Through the English Counties to each county in England, discussing their culinary, cultural and historical merits. On Leicestershire, she writes of the city’s “ghetto”.
She describes coming off the ring road to escape a traffic jam and becoming lost. “I found myself in an area where all the men were wearing Islamic clothing and all the women were wearing burkas and walking slightly behind them,” she wrote. She said the men would not talk to her “because I was an English female and they don’t talk to females they don’t know”.
Liz Fekete replies to Nick Lowles’ article on grooming in the November-December issue of Hope Not Hate:
The way you have broken down Ministry of Justice figures on convictions of sex offences as a whole (8 per cent of which were Asian) to isolate the specific offence of ‘on-street grooming’ so as to reveal a 28 per cent Asian conviction rate (which rises to a 45 per cent conviction rate three lines later in the article) filled me with dismay. It recalled for me the time in the 1980s when the media and the fascists were creating the spectre of the ‘black mugger’ and the Metropolitan police added to the moral panic by isolating ‘assault or threat of violence upon a person, especially with intent to rob’ from all street crime and then providing the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Then, young African-Caribbean men were being accused of racially-motivated attacks on ‘little white old ladies’ in much the same way as Muslims as a whole are accused of anti-white sex crimes. But would we have said, ‘yes the National Front has a point, young black men are muggers – it’s in Jamaican culture, to be violent. Look here are the stats.’ No, as anti-fascist/anti-racist educators, we tried to show how racialised moral panics were created and how statistics could be used to bolster them.
On Tuesday the EDL’s Yorkshire division announced that an “EDL candidate” would be contesting the Rotherham parliamentary by-election. “Vote for him it’s the way to stop grooming gangs”, they urged.
Some on the extreme right expressed surprise that the candidate (at that point still unnamed) wouldn’t be standing under the banner of the British Freedom party, as EDL co-leader Kevin Carroll is doing in the Bedfordshire police commissioner election. According to one contributor to a British Democracy Forum discussion thread, the candidate had originally wanted to stand for the BFP but it had been “mutually agreed” that it would be “best if he stood as an independent due to a colourful past”.
The meaning of this cryptic remark became clear yesterday when the list of candidates was published. The EDL candidate (who can’t of course stand in the name of the EDL as it is not a registered political party) turns out to be one Clint Bristow.
A 19-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage after abusive words were spray painted in view of a mosque.
Surrey Police said the graffiti was sprayed inside a shop on the Lion Retail Park, Woking, in view of the Shah Jahan Mosque in Oriental Road. The words were sprayed between 19:00 and 20:00 GMT on Monday.
The teenager, from Woking, has been released on bail until 13 December pending further inquiries.
See also The Missing List, 15 November 2012
Following Sweden’s 4-2 victory over England in yesterday’sinternational friendly in Stockholm, in which Sweden’s captain Zlatan Ibrahimović played such a spectacular role, his teammate Pontus Wernbloom has taken the opprtunity to have a go at the anti-migrant, Islamophobic Sweden Democrats. He tweets: “What does the SD have to say after The Zlatan Show today? It is an honour to play in the same team as the man.”