FIFA’s youngest vice-president, Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein has been honoured for his efforts to overturn the ban on the hijab in football at the inaugural Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation (MWSF) Ambassador Awards, held at Wembley Stadium last night.
Prince Ali, elected in January 2011 and FIFA’s youngest ever Executive Committee member, was given a Special Recognition Award for his achievements and contribution to Muslim women’s sport.
Free training is being offered for Derby’s voluntary and public-sector workers on how to tackle Islamophobia.
The University of Derby’s multi-faith centre, in Kedleston Road, will be holding three workshops. They are each designed to identify and tackle Islamophobia, defined as prejudice against Muslims or the hatred or irrational fear of Islam.
Sessions will be held on Wednesday, May 23, for Derby’s voluntary sector; Wednesday, June 20, for the East Midlands voluntary sector; and Thursday, July 26, for Derby’s public sector. Each session will run from 9.30am to 4.30pm.
For a booking form, contact Yessenia Aguilera by e-mailing mfc@derby.ac.uk or visit the centre’s website at www.multifaithcentre.org.
Sam Harris’s blog post calling for racial and religious profiling of Muslims at airports has prompted some excellent replies.
See “Sam Harris, ‘Profile the Muslim looking people!'”, Loonwatch, 2 May 2012
And Chris Stedman “Sam Harris, will you visit a mosque with me?”, Huffington Post, 2 May 2012
PVV leader Geert Wilders has called on Muslims throughout the world to leave Islam. He made his call in a speech in New York, to promote his English-language book Marked for Death.
Wilders claims that his book explains that Islam is a “totalitarian ideology” and is an encouragement to freedom-loving Muslims to turn their back on Islam. “I support those who fight for freedom in the Islamic world completely. The Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Pakistani and Indonesian peoples have enormous potential. If they could free themselves of the yoke of Islam, if they could stop seeing Mohamed as their role model and if they could break away from the rancorous Koran, then they could achieve amazing things,” Wilders said in his speech.
“From one end of Europe to the other, in the ultra-liberal democracy of the Netherlands, as in France, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Belgium – from North to South and West to East – the picture is the same: populism rides roughshod, fears are deepening, mistrust is spreading, and racism is increasingly exemplified by the demeaning treatment inflicted upon criminalised migrants, nomads, foreigners: anyone, in short, who is ‘not like us’.”
Tariq Ramadan writes in the Gulf News, 1 May 2012
The candidate is New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and his “Islam problem” is that he isn’t against Islam. See Matt Duss’s comments at Think Progress.
Anti-Muslim graffiti being removed from the wall of the Queen’s Arms
The president of West Norfolk Islamic Association is hoping to build bridges after community centre plans were passed. Azam Gabbair said he was “overwhelmed” with West Norfolk Council’s decision to approve a change of use application for the former Queen’s Arms in London Road.
During today’s planning committee meeting, right-wing activist Stephen Tweed was stopped from speaking after he strayed into religious and cultural issues. An earlier motion to refuse permission due to traffic congestion and the loss of a pub was lost before approval was finally granted.
Yesterday, more than a hundred people gathered at a town hall at the Doubletree Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan to stand in solidarity with the Arab American and American Muslim communities against Islamophobia. The town hall, organized by AAI and local community groups, was held in response to an anti-Muslim conference at the Hyatt in Dearborn, organized by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and other leading Islamophobes.
The Daily Telegraph draws our attention to an open letter to London Metropolitan University’s vice chancellor Prof Malcolm Gillies from the university’s Islamic and Shia Muslim societies in response to press reports that Gillies in considering a ban on alcohol on some parts of the campus.
Anti-Islam advocates from across the U.S. gathered Sunday in Dearborn for a conference to bring attention to what they say is a problem of Muslim honor killings.
About 150 gathered at the Hyatt in Dearborn for the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference, named after a 20-year-old Arab-American Muslim woman who was killed by her stepfather last year in Warren.
But at another conference in Detroit, about 100 people gathered earlier in the day to oppose the anti-Islam conference, saying it was the latest attack on metro Detroit’s Arab-American and Muslim communities. Dearborn has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the U.S., many of them Muslim.
“We stand for America,” said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab-American News, at a panel at the DoubleTree hotel in Detroit. “And they (anti-Muslim activists) stand against America and against the American way of life.”