Yearly Archives: 2012

NYPD secret police spying on Muslims led to no terrorism leads or cases

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloging mosques, the New York police department’s secret demographics unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

The demographics unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and cataloged every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

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National Front targets another mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard Edmonds at Baitul Futuh Mosque
Richard Edmonds in front of the Baitul Futuh Mosque in Morden

No doubt flushed with the “success” of its recent protest at the site of a proposed mosque in Sunderland, the National Front has belatedly latched on to the plan to convert a vacant building in Worcester Park in South London into an Islamic centre, which has already been the subject of local opposition.

The NF reports that fully seven of its supporters (probably almost the entire London membership) leafleted the area on Saturday in order to warn the non-Muslim population of Sutton of the fate that awaits them if the conversion goes ahead. The NF contingent was headed by veteran neo-Nazi Richard Edmonds (who, you may recall, has served as an inspiration to English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon).

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Arrest made in Rhode Island mosque vandalism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

North Smithfield police have arrested and charged a Cumberland man in connection with a case of vandalism at a local mosque.

Robert Scalso, 20, of Mendon Rd. is facing a misdemeanor charge of vandalism, police confirmed Monday morning.

Police said Scalso destroyed the sign outside Masjiad Al-Islam mosque on Sayles Hill Rd. earlier this month.

The crime was caught on surveillance camera Aug. 5 around 3 a.m. A person could be seen driving into the mosque’s parking lot and then smashing the sign with what appeared to be a hammer.

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Bacon scattered before Muslim celebration may be bias crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As the first of an estimated 1,500 Muslims began to arrive at Cpl. Allan E. Kivlehan Park in New Dorp, Staten Island, early Sunday morning to celebrateed Id al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, they discovered uncooked bacon scattered on the ground.

The New York Police Department is investigating the incident as a possible bias crime.

Pig parts have been used in other instances to taunt Muslims, according to a statement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York.

The police said they did not know how much bacon had been placed on the ground. The incident was reported Sunday by the Staten Island Advance.

New York Times, 20 August 2012

Posted in USA

Czech police charge man over ‘Breivik-style’ plot

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police in the Czech Republic have charged a man who is suspected of planning attacks similar to those by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway.

The 29-year-old man was charged with unlawful possession of weapons and endangering the public. Weapons, explosives and police uniforms were found in his flat in the city of Ostrava and detectives say he was using the name Breivik on the internet.

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Chelmsford: English Defence League heavily outnumbered by anti-racists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Chelmsford protest August 2012
The ever-shrinking forces of the English Defence League in Chelmsford

It was a victory for the police as a potentially explosive double-march involving an anti-Islamic group and their anti-fascist opponents passed through Chelmsford almost trouble free on Saturday.

A ring of police officers surrounded more than 50 members of the anti-Islamic group, the English Defence League, as they walked slowly from the Wheatsheaf pub in New Street to Chelmsford Library.

Fearing a repeat of the trouble that broke out during last month’s EDL protest, in which three men were arrested, more than 100 police officers from eight different forces, swamped the city centre, creating blockades with riot vans, to ensure the two groups did not cross paths.

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Muslim trade unionist calls on Houston police to revise frisking rules on headscarfs

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ilana AlazzehA Muslim protester is calling for revision of the frisking process at the Houston Police Department after she said she was stripped of her religious headscarf during a recent arrest this month while rallying for janitor wages.

The incident highlights the varying policies local police agencies have regulating when religious head coverings are allowed during the arresting and booking process. It also shows the fine line law enforcement must straddle when trying to respect one’s faith while ensuring that people who are arrested do no harm to themselves or others.

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Illinois governor signs religious tolerance bill at Eid celebration

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pat Quinn signing billGov. Pat Quinn celebrated the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan at a ceremony that drew 15,000 people to Toyota Park on Sunday morning in the southwest suburb of Bridgeview.

The governor used the occasion to sign a bill that will allow university students who have religious holiday conflicts with tests or assignments to ask for and receive alternate assignments.

Gov. Quinn also decried recent attacks against local Muslims, citing a shooting at a Morton Grove mosque, an attack on an Islamic school in Lombard and the desecration of a grave in an Evergreen Park cemetery.

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Governor’s deputy assures Tennessee Republicans that state government will not impose sharia law

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration is responding to what it calls “confusion” about the role of a Muslim staffer and a council that has advised two state departments on Islamic affairs.

The Republican governor was criticized this summer by several GOP groups over what they perceived as the growing influence of a version of the Islamic code called Shariah in state government.

Claude Ramsey, the deputy to the governor, sent a letter distributed to the state GOP’s executive committee last week seeking to quell those concerns.

“I want to start by clearly expressing there is no effort by the Haslam administration, the State of Tennessee, or any agency or department of the State to promote or advance Shariah law or Shariah complaint finance,” he said in the letter.

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Muslim prayer room defaced with racist graffiti and swastikas

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Barp prayer room

Sud Ouest reports that vandals broke into a former bakery at Le Barp in Val de l’Eyre in south-west France, which has been rented by the Moroccan community for use as a prayer hall during Ramadan, and defaced the walls and carpets with racist graffiti and swastikas.

Belal El Filali, the 70-year-old vice-president of the local Moroccan association, who came to Le Barp in 1969 to work in the strawberry fields says: “For more than forty years I have lived here, and we have never seen this.”

The mayor of Le Barp, Christiane Dornon, who lives nearby, has condemned the attack. “I am outraged, these are people who have lived here for more than thirty-five years, there have never been any problems, it is a community who should be treated with respect.”

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