Vandals have scrawled offensive graffiti on the door of a building a Muslim community wants to use as a mosque.
The graffiti was spotted on the front door of the Bank Chambers building in Green Lane, which is owned by a Muslim group that has had two applications to turn the building into a mosque for the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jama’at branch of Islam turned down, over the weekend.
The graffiti, which says “f*** off c****”, has been reported to police.
Unknown assailants vandalized a mosque in the Arab Israeli village of Baka al-Gharbiyye in northern Israel on Sunday morning, in what police fear could be a so-called “price tag” attack.
On the walls of a local mosque, graffiti was sprayed reading “Muhammad is a pig” and “greetings from Boaz and David Hai”, the latter an apparent reference to Boaz Albert and David Hai, two West Bank settlers whose movement has been limited by police and army restrictions.
Locals also found a number of broken car windows in the village, and police are probing whether or not the two are linked. The damage was discovered around 5am Sunday morning, and the assumption is that the assailants caused the vandalism in the hours before.
Police said Sunday they view the incident as very grave, and vowed to find the perpetrators.
An anti-mosque protest which is due to be held in Lincoln in the New Year has been labelled as “destructive” by a local politician.
The East Anglian Patriots group, which demonstrated in the city in June, has announced it will return on Saturday, January 18. The previous rally attracted several hundreds of protestors in City Square.
The group says it is protesting about the building of a mosque on the site of the Old Dairy in Boultham Park Road.
The interim chair of Ukip Scotland has been criticised over his support for a notorious far-right politician in the Netherlands who backs a ban on what he terms the “fascist” Koran. Misty Thackeray has described Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders, who said Islam was the biggest threat to civilisation, as “great”.
As revealed by the Sunday Herald, Ukip in Scotland is imploding due to tensions between senior members. Of nine shortlisted candidates for the European election, at least six quit over the alleged tactics used by one candidate, Otto Inglis. Ukip chief Nigel Farage then sacked Monckton by email. That led to Scottish chair Mike Scott-Hayward and fundraiser Malcolm Macaskill quitting in protest. Local branch officials also resigned in a show of solidarity with Monckton, who said Ukip north of the Border had been “wiped out”.
Thackeray said he had been asked to act as Scottish chairman until the next annual general meeting, but his hardline right-wing views are causing alarm. The Glasgow-based 52-year-old, described as a security consultant on a business database, praised Wilders on Facebook last year. Wilders has argued the Koran, which he calls a “fascist book”, should be outlawed. He has called for a block on new mosques and claimed Islam was the “biggest threat to our freedom and our civilization”.
Dutch anti-Muslim racist Geert Wilders has published an open letter to the Pope, pulling him up on his statement that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence”.
Instead, Wilders urges, Pope Francis should “defend the West’s Judeo-Christian and humanistic civilization” and “speak the truth about Islam – the largest threat to mankind in this present age”.
The sad death of Nelson Mandela was one of those events that brought a semblance of unity across the political spectrum.
Left-wingers who had been critical of Mandela’s endorsement of an economic system that kept millions of black South Africans in poverty didn’t hesitate to pay tribute to his heroic struggle against the apartheid regime. Even those Tories who had enthusiastically backed that regime and its suppression of the ANC thought it better to keep quiet about their views on this occasion.
Not sections of the far right, though. Their response to the news of Mandela’s passing was to denounce this freedom fighter as a terrorist and a communist. One such sick individual was Kieran Hallett, Exeter division leader and regional organiser for the English Defence League.
The leader of the Hull city mosque has appealed for his congregation not to take the law into their own hands after he was attacked by a man who stopped his car on the way home from the mosque.
Details of the assault on Imam Hafiz Salih, 60, have only just emerged. His son Ateeq Salih said his father was driving home last Saturday evening from his daughter’s house next to the Hull Mosque and Islamic Centre when two men and a woman tried to stop his car.
“They ran into the middle of the road and he had to do an emergency stop. He beeped the horn at them,” said the imam’s son. “One of the men lay down in the road right in front of the car. My father was confused and thought he was injured. Then the man slowly got up and went to the car and opened the door. My mum was sitting in the front and my youngest sister was in the back. He looked at all of them and he punched my father very hard in the face. It was a very forceful punch and my father’s face was covered in blood. Then the man walked away.”
Around 20 members of the English Defence League (EDL) protested outside the Jami mosque in Southsea last night.
Chanting and waving placards, one of which read “terrorists are being radicalised here”, the protestors said they feared terrorist attacks could be carried out in the city by men from Portsmouth who have gone to Syria to fight with al-Qaeda linked groups.
As reported in The News, young men from Southsea who worshipped at the mosque have gone to fight in the country. Their actions have been condemned by key members of the local Muslim community, including worshippers at the Jami mosque.
EDL members traded insults with a counter demonstration of around 20 people, who were stood next to the mosque, in Victoria Road North, with police present to prevent trouble. The counter demonstration was largely made up of Unite Against Fascism members who said they had come to defend the mosque and worshippers.
Political Scrapbook has an interesting article on the financial problems faced by the Quilliam “counter-extremism” organisation before they jumped into bed with former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”).
Quilliam rejected the suggestion that they were threatened with closure before forming their risky but high-profile alliance with Lennon. But Scrapbook reproduces figures released by the Home Office this week in response to an FOI request, which they say “expose the precipitous collapse in public funding for the group”.
The Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI), an Australian charity dedicated to the growing problem of online hate, has announced the release of a major new report into the targeting of the Muslim community.
The report, Islamophobia on the Internet: The growth of online hate targeting Muslims, is now available to journalists and bloggers by request. Parts of the report are publicly available on the OHPI website, and the full report will be available on 10 December to mark International Human Rights Day.
The report examines anti-Muslim hate on Facebook and was produced by the OHPI in consultation with the Islamic Council of Victoria. More details here.