San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency has a policy against political ads on its buses, but an ad being displayed now comes pretty close. The ad says, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”
The pro-Israel ad was purchased by the American Freedom Defense Initiative run by Pamela Geller.
The imam and worshipers at a new Tennessee mosque that hosted its first prayers on Friday after fighting for two years to open said they forgive those who have been enemies of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.
“Love your neighbor is a concept in every religion,” Imam Ossama Bahloul told more than 200 men and women in attendance during his sermon in the mosque that replaces one where the congregation worshiped for 30 years.
To those who opposed the mosque, Bahloul said, “We forgive you all and we welcome you to our facility.”
President Obama on Friday voiced strong support for Huma Abedin, saying the top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been “nothing less than extraordinary in representing our country and the democratic values that we hold dear.”
Obama praised Abedin during remarks at a White House iftar dinner to mark the end of the fasting during the Ramadan holiday observed by Muslims. Abedin has been subject to unproven accusations by some House Republicans, including Michelle Bachmann (Minn.), that she is part of a conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the top reaches of the U.S. government.
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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”.