Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Prison cops in 5hr ‘Muslim riot’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A five-hour rampage by young Muslim prisoners armed with hammers and chisels was broken up by a riot squad yesterday. Dozens of inmates barricaded themselves into a workshop and grabbed tools including saws.

Riot police and 100 specially-trained prison officers – kitted out with body armour, shields and helmets – were called in.

It is believed the rampage at Aylesbury Young Offenders’ Institution started after inmates celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid which marks the end of Ramadan.

Sun, 9 December 2008

Update:  See the analysis of this story at Five Chinese Crackers.

Vandals hit French Muslim graves

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim graves defacedThe graves of as many as 500 Muslim war veterans have been vandalised in northern France, in an attack President Nicolas Sarkozy said was “repugnant”.

Gravestones were daubed with swastikas and letters spelling out anti-Islamic slogans at France’s biggest military graveyard near Arras in the north-east.

The attack took place on the eve of Islam’s Eid al-Adha festival, when Muslims visit the graves of loved ones. Dozens of police searched the graveyard on Monday as an investigation began. It is the third time the Muslim sector of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery has been attacked.

President Sarkozy called the latest incident “abject and revolting” and said it was “the expression of a repugnant racism directed against the Muslim community of France”.

The cemetery holds the graves of tens of thousands of soldiers killed in World War I, including those of 576 Muslims.

The authorities estimated that about 500 graves were damaged. Vandals had sprayed letters on the tombstones which, when linked together, formed anti-Islamic insults, the French news agency AFP said.

The local prosecutor says the damage resembles another act of vandalism in April, for which two young men with neo-Nazi sympathies were later jailed. One of them had already been jailed for a previous attack on Muslim graves at the cemetery.

Police say security has been reinforced but the site remains difficult to guard.

BBC News, 8 December 2008

ECHR backs French headscarf ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Europe’s top rights court ruled Thursday that a French school ban on headscarves was not a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In a case involving two French Muslim girls who had been expelled from school after refusing to remove their scarves during sports classes, the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the decision did not discriminate.

The applicants, Belgin Dogru and Esma-Nur Kervanci, are French nationals who were born in 1987 and 1986 respectively and live in the northwestern town of Flers.

Dogru, then aged 11, and Kervanci, aged 12, went to physical education and sports classes wearing their headscarves on numerous occasions in January 1999 and refused to take them off despite repeated requests to do so by their teacher. The teacher had said that wearing a headscarf was incompatible with physical education classes.

A month later the school’s discipline committee decided to expel the two from the school for failing to participate actively in physical education and sports classes.

The court observed that the purpose of the restriction on the applicants’ right to manifest their religious convictions was to adhere to the requirements of secularism in French state schools. The court also said that the penalty of expulsion did not appear disproportionate, and noted that the applicants had been able to continue their schooling by correspondence classes.

“It was clear that the applicants’ religious convictions were fully taken into account in relation to the requirements of protecting the rights and freedoms of others and public order,” the court said in a press release. It was also clear that the decision was based on those requirements and not on any objections to the applicants’ religious beliefs.

AFP, 5 December 2008

See also ECHR press release, 4 December 2008

Mosques are ‘land grab, not a place of prayer’, says Giordano

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The building of huge mosques throughout Germany is nothing short of a “a bid for power and influence, a land grab”, according to Ralph Giordano, 85, the German Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, in an interview with The Times that is likely to stir Muslim anger.

The comments from Mr Giordano came as the Muslim community of Cologne – about 120,000 strong – prepared to lay the foundation stone for yet another giant mosque, one of more than a hundred that are being planned or built across the country. Barely six weeks ago another mosque, capable of accommodating 1,200 worshippers, was opened in Duisburg in the nearby Ruhr region of northwest Germany. Spiky minarets are starting to punctuate the German urban skyscape – and the rumble of discontent from non-Muslim Germans is growing louder. One result is that the issue of immigration seems sets to be on the agenda in the general election next year.

“When I first saw the blueprints for the grand mosque in Cologne, I was shocked,” said Mr Giordano, who is now very active in the campaign against Turkish mosque-building. “It sent a completely wrong signal, it was a bid for power and influence, a land grab, not a place of prayer, so I told the mayor: Stop this mosque now!” That was in a public discussion that was filmed and placed online. The result was, he says, an avalanche of many hundred of supportive letters. “They all struck the same note: Mr Giordano we are afraid as you are of this creeping Islamification but we can’t say anything in public because we will end up being branded as neo-Nazis.”

Fritz Schramma, the Mayor of Cologne, argues that the mosque will become a tourist attraction and that it will be integrated into the urban culture. “It’s not right that Muslims should have to pray in old factory warehouses,” he said.

Times, 6 December 2008

Muslim barrister called ‘tent head’ wins £75,000

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Saleca ParkerSaleca Faisal-Parkar, 31, was harassed, overlooked for jobs and training and was even branded “lazy” after she became seriously ill while pregnant.

The abuse was led by Stephen Jones, then head of litigation at the leading law firm Shakespeares, who also referred to her as a “flipping nun”. He was also a deputy district judge and a member of the Solicitors Disciplinary Panel, but has resigned both positions in the light of the scandal.

Mrs Faisal-Parkar, who has a young daughter, joined Shakespeares in 2002 as a legal assistant. Not long after she started, she found out from a fellow worker that she had been nicknamed “Mother Teresa” because she wore a hijab, which covers her head.

Over the course of the following months, she said Mr Jones – who made the derogatory comments in emails – harassed her, refused her training requests and potentially reduced her annual salary increase by the type of work he gave her. In one email he says to a colleague: “From where I sit tent ‘ead looks like a flipping nun today unless there are auditions for the Sound of Music on somewhere?”

Mrs Faisal-Parkar told The Daily Telegraph: “It was the worst experience of my life; it was just one thing after another. It had a terrible effect on my life at a time that should have been my happiest, getting married and having a baby. To this day I don’t know what motivated Mr Jones to treat me like he did, but I’m glad now he’s been shown up to be the sort of man he was.”

Mrs Faisal-Parkar, from Great Barr, West Mids, accepted an out of court settlement at the beginning of a three-day tribunal in Birmingham. Mr Jones has been demoted and fined a five-figure sum by the company.

Daily Telegraph, 5 December 2008

Two arrested over Mido chanting

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MidoTwo men have been arrested over racist chanting aimed at Middlesbrough’s Egyptian striker Mido during the 0-0 draw against Newcastle on 29 November. The pair, aged 49 and 23, will appear before Teesside Magistrates Court on Tuesday charged with racial chanting.

A Football Association spokesman said: “The FA condemns any racist or Islamaphobic behaviour and is committed to working to stamp it out. We will fully support banning orders for anyone found guilty.”

Mido, 25, suffered similar abuse during the corresponding fixture at the Riverside last season but no action was taken because police were unable to identify the culprits. “It happened again because after the first time the English FA did nothing,” Mido told Egyptian TV station Al Hayat.

Piara Powar, director of anti-racism campaign Kick It Out, believes the authorities should be able to identify the culprits via closed-circuit television footage and has called on football supporters to help “self-police” any racist incidents on the terraces.

“The police are now saying they are going to put in extra monitoring for the next game, but by then it will be too late,” he said. “What we need is for the police to go over the CCTV footage and do what they can, in similar way which they are in Hampshire concerning the recent incident with the Tottenham fans at Portsmouth.

“The key change we do have in English football now is there is self-policing, peer pressure which supporters who understand the implications can put on fans who are involved in abuse. We would urge Newcastle fans to start rooting out themselves the individuals who were involved.”

BBC News, 5 December 2008

‘One Law for All’ – another Islamophobic WPI fraud

Posted on by Bob Pitt

namazie and racist placards 2The One Law for All campaign – supported by the National Secular Society – is to be launched in the House of Lords on International Human Rights Day, 10 December.

According to campaign organiser, Maryam Namazie, “Even in civil matters, Sharia law is discriminatory, unfair and unjust, particularly against women and children. Moreover, its voluntary nature is a sham; many women will be pressured into going to these courts and abiding by their decisions. These courts are a quick and cheap route to injustice and do nothing to promote minority rights and social cohesion. Public interest, particularly with regard to women and children, requires an end to Sharia and all other faith-based courts and tribunals.”

The campaign has already received widespread support.

National Secular Society news report, 5 December 2008

Sure it’s received wide support. The campaign is backed by a total of ten organisations, five of which – Children First Now, the laughably misnamed Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, the International Committee against Stoning and the Iranian Secular Society – are all front organisations for the Islamophobic far-left sect, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran. You do sometimes wonder whether the WPI has more front organisations than members.

School cancels Christmas nativity in favour of Muslim Eid celebrations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Greenwood Junior School sent out a letter to parents saying the three-day festival of Eid al-Adha, which takes place between December 8 and 11, meant that Muslim children would be off school.

That meant planning for the traditional nativity play were shelved because the school felt it would be too difficult to run both celebrations side by side.

The move has left parents furious. Janette Lynch, whose seven-year-old son Keanu attends the school, in Sneinton, Nottingham, said: “The head has a whole year to plan for Eid and so she should be able to plan for both religious festivals. I have never heard of this at a school. It is the first year my son has been there and a lot of the mums like me were really looking forward to seeing the children in the nativity.”

Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2008

See also the Daily Mail, 4 December 2008

Yes, it’s another of those seasonal “Christmas banned because of Muslims” stories. However, according to a Press Association report, the performance has not in fact been cancelled but only postponed till January – and it’s not a nativity play but a pantomine (Cinderella, since you ask). A spokeswoman for Nottingham City Council is quoted as saying that in December the school will be staging “a range of events, including a Christmas carol concert and Eid celebrations”.

Predictably, the story has been seized on by the BNP. Under the headline “Nottingham school cancels Christmas to make way for Islam“, the fascists declare that “such outrages will inevitably progress from the exception to the norm, if Britain fails to embrace the BNP and continues its present headlong plunge into the abyss”.

The Nottingham Evening Post reports that Greenwood Junior School has received phone calls from BNP members accusing the school of responsibility for the “erosion of Christian values”. In other words, we have here yet another example of the mainstream media’s biased and inaccurate reporting giving a boost to the far right.

Inspector Andy Townsend, the local area commander, is quoted as saying: “There have been a lot of angry people phoning the school, some of whom are claiming to be from the BNP. Other agencies including the national press have contacted the school, including one journalist pretending to be a social worker. There’s also been vans pulling up and people taking pictures. We are dealing with the potential for disorder. No actual criminal acts have been committed but we are increasing patrols in the area around the school to keep the peace.”

Update:  Needless to say, this distorted report has spread across the right-wing blogosphere. Here is a characteristic comment, by Phyllis Chesler: “Muslim fanatics are also demographically populating beachheads deep in the West where they are also demanding that their holidays be recognized in a more paramount way than Christian holidays are. Just yesterday, in England, a Nativity play was cancelled at a primary school because it interfered with the Muslim celebration of Eid.”