Casey councillors have overwhelmingly rejected deputy mayor Sam Aziz’s call for a discussion of the dangers of Islam before they decide on a planning application for a mosque in Doveton.
At last night’s meeting, mayor Amanda Stapledon said such a discussion would create a very poor perception in a multicultural community.
Tensions between the mayor and her deputy, former close allies, were clear during a fiery debate in front of a large public gallery.
All Saints Church in Pasadena has received dozens of e-mails denouncing its decision to host a conference by the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council – and some have been hateful, said the church’s Reverend Ed Bacon.
“We have begun to receive some of the most vile, mean-spirited e-mail I’ve ever read in my life, talking about All Saints participating in terrorism by being hospitable to Muslims,” Bacon said. According to Bacon, one e-mail said “Islam is satanic garbage.” Another accused the church of “consorting with the enemy.”
The union representing Ontario’s elementary school teachers is coming under fire for running an anti-Islamophobia workshop as part of a series of seminars on how to teach students about equality.
The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) began putting the anti-Islamophobia workshop together in 2011 following a request from one of its local presidents for such a seminar “as a response to the collective victimization of the Muslim community” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to an ETFO report from August.
Critics of the workshop, however, are slamming the ETFO for developing an anti-Islamophobia seminar that will not pro-actively address the fact that women and girls are treated as second-class citizens in some circles of the Islamic faith.
Shockjock Alan Jones has been unsuccessful in his latest attempt to have a lawsuit claiming he racially vilified Sydney’s Muslims three days before the Cronulla riots in 2005, dismissed.
In those proceedings, father-of-eight Sam Ekermawi, of Moorebank, claims Jones vilified Muslims when he derided “Lebs”, “wogs” and “Middle Eastern” people in his breakfast program on 2GB on December 8, 2005.
Susi Meret shows how a housing association’s decision not to buy a Christmas tree this year was exploited by the far-right Danish People’s Party with the assistance of the mainstream media. Conservative and liberal figures helped to reinforce the narrative that Danish culture is under attack from Muslims.
“The most worrying aspect of this controversy was the total lack of response from the other side…”, Meret writes. “Those who violently oppose non-western immigration could make their point – extensively. And the voices that should have contradicted them were nowhere to be heard.”
Fighting misconceptions associated with Muslim headscarf, Muslim students at California State University arranged a hijab handout to their colleagues to educate them about criticism and negative image drawn by media over the past decade.
“The goal was to teach what Islam really is because there’s so much negativity going around about Muslim people who are portrayed so negatively in the media,” Amina Hasan, organizer for the Muslim Student Association (MSA), told Daily 49ER, the university’s news website, on Sunday, December 2. “We’re regular people just like anyone else.”
The event, held last Thursday on a rainy afternoon, was sponsored by students of MSA at California State University Long Beach (CSULB).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJTqNeMNWU
Tariq Ramadan talks to Myriam François-Cerrah.
Casey deputy mayor Sam Aziz will seek to impose a planning condition “not to preach hatred from the pulpits” on a proposed Afghan mosque in Doveton.
Despite professing to hate “religious intolerance”, Cr Aziz also suggested that Islam was not a peaceful religion, that the Koran incited hatred and that Islamic terror threats “were not far from home”.
He has backed objections by fundamentalist Christian Catch the Fire Ministries pastor Danny Nalliah, who is rallying against the mosque in Green Street.
Giles Fraser argues that the “Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets” (© Andrew Gilligan) is in fact a successful multicultural borough, where there is “demonstrable social solidarity” between different groups in the community facing common economic problems exacerbated by government policy.
Mainstreamed anti-Muslim sentiment creates the climate for attacks and harassment, argues Jon Burnett.