A member of the British National Party and former Stoke-on-Trent councillor has denied charges of racism.
Michael Coleman, 45, of Caverswall Road, Weston Coyney, denied two counts of racially aggravated harassment. The charge relates to allegedly racist language used in two articles on his website between 8 August 2011 and 8 March 2012.
He appeared at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court and will go on trial later this year at a date to be set.
Meetings of the controversial English Defence League have been banned at a Norwich pub after a string of complaints.
About 45 members of the group, which is associated with violent demonstrations, have met at the Marlpit pub in Hellesdon Road. No trouble was reported and another meeting was booked for last weekend. But after complaints about the meetings from an anti-EDL group, the pub’s owners, Enterprise Inns, banned the EDL and the meeting was cancelled.
A spokesman for Enterprise said the licensee had been “reminded of their obligations”. She said: “We have spoken to the publican, who we understand has instructed pub staff to ensure no further meetings of the English Defence League are hosted at the Marlpit pub.”
On Wednesday in Strasbourg three youth from the skinhead movement received sentences of between 12 and 18 months in prison for desecrating three Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, in a stormy trial during which the families of the victims exploded in anger.
Nicolas Lecureur Matthias Leyer and Jonathan Husser, all aged 22, were charged with racially motived criminal damage and incitement to racial hatred. They faced the prospect of three years in prison.
The first two, described in the survey as “ringleaders” of these desecrations, were sentenced to 18 months in prison. After spending two months in custody last year, they appeared at the hearing and emerged from it at liberty, the criminal court not having issued a warrant.
The third, who was prosecuted for two of the three defilements, was sentenced to a year. He is currently detained for theft and remains in prison.
The three young were part of a group that often met in a square in Strasbourg “to booze” and did not hide their xenophobic ideas.
“I was stupid, an idiot. It was to make me look different, to make me interesting. I was not thinking of the consequences,” Matthias Leyer, the only one of the three defendants who admitted to the acts, stated at the hearing. “I was a skin from the age of 13 or 14,” said the young man, who was tattooed with a Celtic cross on his leg and “88” (for “HH”, “Heil Hitler”) on his wrist.
The hearing took place in a tense atmosphere. Many civil parties were present and police were deployed in large numbers to prevent possible outbursts.
The damage to a total of 90 graves took place between January and September 2010 in three different places of the city of Strasbourg. Headstones overturned, swastikas, the inscription “Juden Raus” (Jews out): the desecrations had provoked an outcry, including in the political world.
More than a year after the first incident, and after a long investigation, 16 suspects were arrested in March 2011. Nine were eventually prosecuted, three of whom were acquitted. The other three members of this gang, aged between 16 and 17 at the time of the first desecration, subsequently appeared before a juvenile court.
See also “36 Muslim graves desecrated in Strasbourg”, Islamophobia Watch, 24 September 2010
And “Strasbourg: 18 Muslim graves desecrated”, Islamophobia Watch, 29 June 2010
A French appeals court granted permission Tuesday for the building of a mega-mosque in the southern city of Marseille that has been touted as a symbol of Islam’s growing place in France.
The court overturned an October ruling by Marseille’s administrative tribunal that cancelled the project’s construction permit for supposed failures to meet urban-planning requirements.
Unknown assailants torched and spray-painted Hebrew slogans on a mosque in the village of Jaba, southeast of Ramallah.
Damage was caused to the building. The slogans read, “Ulpana war” “The war has started” and “Pay the price.”
IDF and police forces are canvassing the area. It is suspected the vandalism was a “price tag” act.
A Bournemouth councillor made a public apology for controversial online comments about the English Defence League.
Conservative Cllr Sue Anderson read out the apology at Tuesday’s full council meeting. The mum of four, who represents Moordown, had said “nobody else except the EDL stick up for the English”. She also tweeted to an account jointly run by a woman of Asian descent: “If you don’t like it here go back to where you came from.”
The question is posed by Ted Jeory in the Sunday Express. The English Defence League member in question is one Toni Macleod, who claims she has now in fact left the EDL, though reportedly this is only because she’s joined the overtly neo-Nazi breakaway group the Infidels.
Thirty-five weeks pregnant, Macleod has been told by Durham County Council social services that she would pose a “risk of significant harm” to her baby and they want to put the child up for adoption. According Jeory, this is because they “fear the child would become radicalised with EDL views”.
The Islamophobic blogosphere continues to set new standards in craziness. This poses some problems for those of us dedicated to combating it. The traditional reference to Melanie Phillips as “Mad Mel” now seems outdated since, compared with Pamela Geller, Phillips appears almost balanced and rational. And Geller, in turn, is outbid in the competition for sheer lunacy by Bonni Benstock-Intall of Bare Naked Islam. As quick scroll through her blog will confirm, “Bonkers Bonni” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The victim of a vicious Islamophobic attack awaits the verdict of a Versailles appeal court after his alleged attackers, one a known violent racist, were acquitted.
Nouredine Rachedi and his supporters in the campaign group Justice for Nouredine were in court on 12 June and now anxiously await the verdict.
The case concerns the acquittal of two young men accused by the 34-year-old Frenchman of assaulting him late one night in July 2008. Nouredine Rachedi was walking home through a public park in Yvelines when he was beaten up by two men who stopped him, asked for a cigarette and then asked him if he was a Muslim, how long he had lived in France (he was born there) and what he thought of Radovan Karadzic, who had just been arrested. Then, telling him they were nazis, they set upon him with fists and feet, kicking him all over his body and in the head. The statistician was off work for three weeks with a collapsed lung and head injuries.
The Institute of Race Relations has published an important study by Liz Fekete, Pedlars of Hate: the violent impact of the far Right.
The report “documents patterns of violence, from the peddling of hate online and the drawing up of lists of ‘national traitors’, to violence, arson and murder on the streets, and the stockpiling of weapons in preparation for ‘race war'”.
The IRR points out that Islamophobia is just one element in the rise of violence on the part of the European far right. While Muslims are the far right’s principal targets in western Europe, in eastern Europe it is the Roma who are the main victims, while anti-black racism and antisemitism are also on the increase.
Another worrying development is that “attacks on Social Democrats, Left politicians, academics and journalists that report on the far Right around Europe are intensifying too”.
The report can be downloaded here.