Yearly Archives: 2014

Wikipedia edit from government computer added Muslim insult

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The charity that represents Wikipedia in the UK has condemned edits made from government computers after more incidents of vandalism emerged.

The BBC has discovered that the phrase “all Muslims are terrorists” was added to a page about veils. Another edit deleted text in Cherie Blair’s entry about the flat-buying scandal that made headlines in 2002. The Liverpool Echo last week revealed that insults had been added to the entry for the Hillsborough Disaster.

Stevie Benton, from Wikimedia UK, told the BBC: “We find this kind of vandalism appalling.”

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Secularists assist right-wing anti-sharia hysteria

Posted on by Bob Pitt

OLFA Law Society protest

The hysteria whipped up by the Sunday Telegraph over the Law Society’s guidelines for solicitors drawing up wills for Muslim clients (see here and here) has predictably been endorsed by the One Law for All Campaign, who organised a protest outside the Law Society headquarters.

OLFA, needless to say, denied that the protest was anti-Muslim. They issued a statement saying: “The fight against Sharia is clearly a defence of individual rights and freedoms, not an attack on Muslims. After all, Sharia Law is fundamentally the demand of Islamic states and the political movement to limit citizens’ rights.”

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Israeli forces demolish West Bank mosque as peace talks deadline passes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Khirbet Al-Taweel mosque demolishedIsraeli forces demolished several structures, including a mosque, in a Palestinian village on Tuesday, the day a deadline for a deal in now-frozen peace talks expired.

A Reuters correspondent saw several hundred soldiers deployed in Khirbet al-Taweel, in the occupied West Bank, around daybreak. They guarded six bulldozers that reduced to rubble buildings that were constructed without Israeli permits. Palestinians say such documents are nearly impossible to obtain.

Palestinians saw a link between the demolitions and the passing, without a peace deal, of the April 29 deadline set when the talks began in July. Israel has also drawn Palestinian anger by continuing to expand settlements on land they seek for a state.

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Greater efforts needed to prevent and respond to hate crimes against Muslims, say participants at OSCE meeting in Vienna

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mohamed Abubaker at OSCE hate-crime meetingCommunity-law enforcement measures to combat hate crimes against Muslims were the focus of an expert meeting on 28 April 2014 in Vienna organized jointly by the Swiss OSCE Chairmanship and the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). The meeting brought together government officials, community leaders, civil society representatives and academics from 26 OSCE participating States.

Muslims continue to experience violent manifestations of intolerance and discrimination in the OSCE region, the participants said, and governments need to do more to ensure the security of Muslim communities, including by enhancing their confidence in law enforcement agencies.

Referring to the findings of ODIHR’s annual hate crime report, Floriane Hohenberg, Head of the ODIHR Tolerance and Non-Discrimination Department, emphasized that day-to-day activities of Muslim communities are endangered by violent attacks. “We are concerned, however, that many of these incidents are not reported to the police because the victims believe that their complaints will not be taken seriously or that they will be victimized again,” she said.

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The 9/11 museum’s Muslim problem

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Debra BurlingameJust weeks before the museum’s opening, tensions are rising over a video to be included in the exhibit, denials of media requests, and a board member’s allegedly anti-Muslim sentiments, Dean Obeidallah reports.

Daily Beast, 28 April 2014

The National September 11 Memorial Museum board member in question is Debra Burlingame (pictured), who is the sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

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Baroness Cox tells Israeli audience that ‘Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to destroy it’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury warned about the growing threat of political Islam in Britain and Africa at an event hosted by the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security at Tel Aviv University and The Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies on Monday.

“Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to destroy it,” as some of its adherents try to “inhibit criticism,” said Cox, speaking at the Green House next to the university. In England, if you criticize Islam, you are called a racist, she said.

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Yet another Islamophobe standing for ‘non-racist’ UKIP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Bilcliff is standing as a candidate for the UK Independence Party in the local elections in Tamworth. The Mail on Sunday reported that Bilcliff’s response to the legalisation of same-sex marriage last month was to post a comment on Twitter reading: “Sad day for all us straight people.”

The Mail also reported that in a Facebook post in July 2012 Bilcliff “made a joke against Muslims”. Bilcliff told the paper: “I am not racist and never have been. I have many friends of different nationalities but I enjoy a joke every now and again.”

The Mail didn’t quote the “joke”, so here it is:

Robert Bilcliff anti-Muslim Facebook post

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Muslim leaders denounce police over raids in Czech capital

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim leaders in the Czech Republic on Monday accused the police of abusing their power after armed officers raided Islamic institutions in Prague over the weekend, detaining 20 people during Friday Prayer at a mosque and a community center, and arresting the publisher of a book that law enforcement officials say incites xenophobia and violence.

A spokesman for the Czech police, Pavel Hantak, declined to identify the publisher or the book. He told the Czech news media that he did not want to help promote a book that disseminated racism, anti-Semitism and violence against what it called “inferior races.”

The police said the publisher was a 55-year-old Czech citizen who had the book translated into Czech. He has been charged with promoting hate speech, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Muneeb Hassan Alrawi, the head of the Association of Czech Muslim Religious Communities, said in an interview on Monday that law enforcement officials had indicated that the book behind the raids was “The Fundamentals of Tawheed” by Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, a Jamaican-born imam, who has been banned from entering Australia and Britain and expelled from Germany because of what his critics call extremist views.

Mr. Alrawi said that several copies of the book had been confiscated by the police during a raid Friday at the headquarters of the Islamic Foundation, a community center in Prague, the Czech capital.

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Florida Senate OKs bill banning use of foreign law in family court cases

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Foreign laws would be banned in Florida courts for certain family-related cases, under a bill the Senate sent to the House on Monday.

The Senate voted 24-14 to approve the proposal (SB 386) by Umatilla Republican Alan Hays, who has pushed various versions of the measure the past few years. The bill would restrict courts and arbitration tribunals from applying foreign law and legal codes to matters of divorce, alimony, division of marital assets, child support and child custody.

The proposal is more defined than last year’s effort, which got House support but failed to advance in the Senate. The House companion (HB 903) has reached the floor but has yet to be scheduled for debate.

Hays said the bill will do nothing to impede international trade, a prior concern of business groups, and won’t cast a negative message upon anyone from another country. “For those people who want to come to America we welcome them, but when you come to America you’re going to be governed on American laws and when you come to Florida you’re going to be governed on Florida laws,” Hays said. “We dare not apologize for that, folks. This is a very good bill. It’s an all American bill.”

But the bill has been criticized as anti-Muslim and targeted at Sharia religious law followed in some Islamic countries.

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Gilligan recycles 7-year-old anti-Muslim story as new shock-horror revelation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Express Muslims Tell Us How to Run Our SchoolsFor the last few weeks the Sunday Telegraph has been running a series of witch-hunting articles on the so-called “Trojan Horse plot” in Birmingham. The author of the reports, not entirely unexpectedly, is the discredited stitch-up artist Andrew Gilligan.

In the absence of any real evidence of the existence of such a “plot”, Gilligan has followed his usual method of hyping up the material he has managed to gather and loudly proclaiming that his charges have been proved. His repeated uncritical references to the transparently forged letter that provoked the furore in the first place – the most he is prepared to concede is that it contains “a number of inaccuracies” – give us an indication of Gilligan’s commitment to journalistic honesty.

The latest report by Gilligan is headlined “Guide to school Islamisation, by ‘ringleader’ of Trojan Horse plot”. He assures Telegraph readers that  a “document” produced by the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007, and co-authored by Tahir Alam, offered “a detailed blueprint for the radical ‘Islamisation’ of secular state schools which closely resembles what appears to be happening in Birmingham”.

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