Category Archives: Anti-Muslim violence

Blame Muslims for Australian riots

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Of course, the usual claque of agenda-driven ethnic community leaders were quick to condemn the Cronulla incidents as un-Australian and racist. Never mind the multitude of racist attacks on young Australian men and women during the past decade, which have now manifested into full-blown racial retaliation. In an article on this page nearly two years ago (‘Don’t turn a blind eye to terror in our midst’, January 12, 2004), I argued that the increasing frequency of racially motivated attacks on young Australian men and women – including murders, gang rapes and serious assaults by young men of Lebanese Muslim descent – would rise dramatically throughout Australia. These problems remain widespread and have been documented in the ensuing two years. Yet the NSW Labor Government and police have failed to address the issues in any way….”

Tim Priest in The Australian, 13 December 2005

Race violence erupts in Sydney

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cronulla riot

Australian Prime Minister John Howard called for ethnic and religious tolerance on Monday after racial violence, spurred on police say by white supremacists, erupted in parts of Sydney.

Racial tension sparked violence on Cronulla Beach on Sunday when around 5,000 people, some yelling racist chants, attacked youths of Middle Eastern background, saying they were defending their beach after lifesavers were attacked there last week.

Violence then spread to a second beach, Maroubra, where scores of men armed with baseball bats smashed about 100 cars.

“Attacking people on the basis of race and ethnicity is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians, irrespective of background and politics,” Howard told a news conference on Monday, by which time the violence had subsided.

At Botany Bay, riot police confronted hundreds of youths and police said a man was stabbed in the back in a southern Sydney suburb in what media reports said appeared to be racial violence. New South Wales (NSW) police said a group of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists stirred on the drunken crowd at Cronulla.

“There appears to be an element of white supremacists and they really have no place in mainstream Australian society. Those sort of characters are best placed in Berlin 1930s, not in Cronulla 2005,” NSW Police Minister Carl Scully told reporters.

On Sunday, mobs of drunken and angry youths, some draped in Australian flags, shouted “No more Lebs (Lebanese)”. The mobs chased and attacked Australians of Middle East appearance, rushing onto a train at one stage to fight. More than 20 people were injured and 12 arrested.

Arabic and Muslim leaders said the violence had been expected as Muslims had been subjected to racist taunts, especially since the Iraq war and bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali where many Australians were among the dead.

“Arab Australians have had to cope with vilification, racism, abuse and fear of a racial backlash for a number of years, but these riots will take that fear to a new level,” said Australian Arabic Council chairman Roland Jabbour.

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Dar Al-Taqwa bookshop – PCC rules against Evening Standard

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint by Samir El-Atar, managing director of Dar Al-Taqwa bookshop, about an article headlined “Terror and hatred for sale just yards from Baker Street”, published in the Evening Standard on 28 July. As a result of the article, which falsely accused the bookshop of stocking literature advocating terrorism, “abuse and threats of violence had been made against staff and it had been necessary to invoke police protection”.

EU Muslims face challenging conditions: report

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EUMC report 2005The Muslim minorities in Europe has been subject to increasing discrimination and violent attacks, EU’s racism watchdog said Wednesday, November 23, urging the European countries to do more efforts to combat racism and xenophobia.

“Muslim groups face particularly challenging conditions in many member states,” said the Vienna-based European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia in its annual report, reported Agence France Presse (AFP) said.

It said that Muslims in Western Europe have been target of a wave of violent incidents in the wake of the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the murder of Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh.

The 104-page report said that Muslims and mosques in the Netherlands have been under a wave of racist attacks after Van Gogh’s killing. Van Gogh was shot and stabbed by a Moroccan-Dutch after he had written his anti-Islam film “Submission.”

Up to 6,000 Dutch people staged a mass rally in the capital Amsterdam in September to say “enough is enough” to the right-wing government for what they called racism and discrimination against minorities.

The report also cited a rise in attacks against the Muslim minority in France in the wake of the Madrid train attacks.

Islam Online, 23 November 2005

For the EUMC report, see (pdf) here.

Austria mosques guarded after mysterious attack

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A rare attack near a mosque in Vienna has prompted Austrian police to increase patrols in areas having Muslim places of worship. The Interior Ministry has decided to intensify police patrols around the city’s 60 mosques.

Police were investigating a mystery explosion near Osman mosque in Vienna on Wednesday, November 16, in which houses and parked cars were damaged. Vienna’s 17th District was rocked by a powerful blast and windows of houses and cars were broken, but no casualties were reported.

“The mosque is not likely to be the target of the bombing,” Turfa Bagaghati, Deputy Chairman of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), said in Friday sermon at the Shura mosque. “If the mosque was the target of the attack, why did not the assailant go directly and throw the bomb inside the mosque instead of a nearby house,” he wondered.

Yet, he made it clear in case the mosque was targeted, Muslims would not remain silent. “We will take positive and peaceful stance by demonstrating and denouncing the attack to let officials know we are not helpless,” he added.

The Islamic Religious Authority, the official Muslim body in Austria, condemned the attack, but said one must not jump to conclusions and wait until the investigation takes its course.

Islam Online, 19 November 2005

Race crime prosecutions up by 29%

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Iqbal SacranieRace hate crime cases rose by almost a third in England and Wales in 2004-05, latest figures from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have shown.

The CPS prosecuted 4,660 defendants for racially aggravated offences, up by 29% from 3,616 for the previous year. The CPS said better co-ordination with police and lawyers had increased the confidence of victims to prosecute.

Religiously aggravated cases dropped to 34 from 49 the previous year, with 23 of the victims’ actual or perceived religion being Muslim. It was Jewish in five cases, Christian in four, Hindu in two and Mormon in one. In four cases the religion was unknown.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said the CPS figures were “obviously very troubling”.

“What adds to our concern is that they refer to race hate incidents prior to the July 7 atrocities after which we saw a large number of ‘revenge’ attacks against Muslims. We would urge people from all communities to report these kinds of racist attacks to the police immediately. There must be no toleration at all of race hate or faith hate crimes.”

BBC News, 11 November 2005

‘Muslim groups may gain strength from French riots’ WSJ warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FireThe right-wing myth that the unrest in France is the result of an “Islamic uprising” has been rather undermined by the observable reality that French Muslim organisations have all intervened to oppose rioting. So some “Islamic conspiracy” theorists have found it necessary to shift their ground. Now, it seems, the real danger lies in the fact that Muslim organisations have intervened at all:

“These groups don’t preach violence, but they do advocate something that is troubling Europe’s secular democracies: that Muslims should identify themselves with their religion rather than as citizens. Effectively, they are promoting a separate society within society and that brand of Islamist philosophy is seeping into many parts of Western Europe. Countries from France and Germany to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands haven’t succeeded in integrating their Muslim minorities – and Islamic organizations have carefully positioned themselves to fill the breach.

“The riots ‘are a blessing for them because it gives them the role of intermediary’, says Gilles Kepel, a scholar who has studied and written extensively about the rise of Islam in France. That, in turn, puts them in a stronger position ‘to force concessions from the state’, such as demanding a repeal of the law France passed last year banning headscarves from public schools, he says.”

Wall Street Journal, 7 November 2005

Robert Spencer, though, has carefully considered the evidence and, on balance, prefers to stick with the view that it’s probably the result of a carefully prepared jihadist plan.

Front Page Magazine, 8 November 2005

Police investigate claim that officer threw Qur’an into rubbish bin

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An investigation is under way into claims by a British Muslim man that a police officer desecrated his Qur’an by throwing it into a rubbish bin while arresting him, the Guardian has learned.

The incident is alleged to have happened last Monday in south London and the man also alleges he was assaulted while being detained at his home.

The allegation comes from Mohamed Osman, 29, who says the officer said “fuck you and your Qur’an” before grabbing the holy book and his prayer mat from him. The constable is then alleged to have thrown them into a nearby bin.

Guardian, 7 November 2005

Hate wave hits Muslim women in Australia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim women in Australia are enduring a rising wave of violence and intimidation. Women wearing headscarfs have been spat on, sworn at and assaulted while hate graffiti such as “Kill Muslims” and “Muslims Out” has appeared in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. In the past two weeks, two Muslim women have been attacked in daylight.

In one, a milkshake was hurled at a Muslim woman as she waited at a Sydney Rd tram stop with her three children. In the other a man swerved at a Muslim woman and shouted: “F— off terrorist” while she was crossing the road carrying her baby. There are also reports of Muslim girls being spat at and abused by drivers.

Herald Sun, 21 October 2005

Egyptian reveals fresh Guantánamo horrors

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Egyptian man freed from Guantanamo detention camp has revealed that US guards in the notorious facility “took pleasure” in torturing the inmates, who have been held for over four years without charge or trial. “The torture I suffered in the military camp left me crippled in a wheelchair,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Sami Al-Leithy as telling the Egyptian television Sunday, October 9, night. “They used to grab me by the arms and then hurl me on the floor, on my back. They took pleasure in torturing us,” he said.

Islam Online, 10 October 2005