Hundreds of police have staged a show of force in central Edinburgh at a rally by the Scottish Defence League. Almost 200 supporters of the far right group were heavily outnumbered by officers drawn from forces across the central belt. They were penned in after the city council refused them permission to march.
A counter demonstration of about 400 Unite Against Fascism protesters was allowed to hold a procession. They marched along Princes Street before attending a rally.
A Catholic secondary school in Volendam is within its right to ban pupils from wearing Islamic headscarves, Amsterdam appeal court said on Tuesday.
The court said independent schools, such as the Don Bosco College, can set standards to uphold their own values, as long as they apply the rules consistently. This is the case at the Volendam school, the court said.
In addition, the pupil was well aware the school was a Catholic institution when she applied and should have realised that adopting Islamic dress would not be allowed.
The school in the former fishing village introduced the ban several months after Imane Mahssan had requested permission to wear a headscarf and had begun doing so. She was then banned from attending lessons.
The girl’s father took the case to the Equal Opportunities Commission. It ruled in the girl’s favour, but the school decided to ignore the ruling, prompting the girl to go to court. It found in favour of the school, prompting the girl to take the case to appeal.
The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday (Sept. 6) announced a settlement with Henrico County, Va., over the county’s alleged violation of a federal anti-discrimination law when it refused to rezone property for a group of Muslims who wanted to build a mosque.
The Justice Department claimed the county’s actions violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), which prohibits religious discrimination in land use and zoning decisions. The settlement requires the county to allow the mosque to be built without improper interference or delay.
“Religious freedom is one of our most cherished rights, and that right includes the ability to assemble and build places of worship without facing discrimination,” said Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez.
The case arose in late 2008 when local Muslims were denied the ability to build the first mosque in the county, just north of Richmond. The Muslims filed suit, charging that the denial of the request was “arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.”
The Justice Department joined the case in March 2010 and found evidence that the request to build had been denied on the basis of hostility toward Muslims. The county had never turned down a rezoning application submitted by one of its 209 Christian churches, government attorneys said.
The settlement requires Henrico County to publicize its nondiscrimination policies and to provide training on RLUIPA to all county officials involved in land use matters.
“This agreement will ensure that religious freedom is upheld in Henrico County,” said Neil H. MacBride, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
More than three in four Americans say it is likely that Muslims, Arab Americans and immigrants from the Middle East get unfairly singled out in the United States, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll taken in conjunction with the ten-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Twenty-nine percent of Americans – including 35 percent of New Yorkers – said it’s very likely that people in those groups are singled out unfairly. Another 49 percent called it somewhat likely. Eighteen percent said they did not think such singling out is taking place.
Democrats and younger Americans were more likely than Republicans, independents and older Americans to say people in these groups are being unfairly singled out.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, a full 90 percent of Americans said it was at least somewhat likely that Muslims, Arab Americans and immigrants from the Middle East would be unfairly singled out – including 50 percent who said it was very likely. That figure fell to 80 percent in Sept. 2002, and it stands at 78 percent today.
Hundreds of Muslim youths could be trained to steward volatile events following the good work of a peace-keeping team deployed on Saturday.
About 300 volunteers – most of them aged 18 to 25 – patrolled the streets around Whitechapel dispersing large groups of youths to prevent trouble breaking out over the English Defence League demonstration at Aldgate. Volunteers and youth workers played a “vital role” in keeping young people calm, police said. A Met spokeswoman added: “The stewards who worked on Saturday were well trained and effective.”
Billboards are going up around Metro Detroit highlighting contributions by Michigan Muslims as the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks nears.
The “Remember Through Service” campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations – Michigan will run for a month. The billboards are up in Wayne and Oakland counties, and a third will be up by this weekend on the Lodge near Seven Mile Road.
“As we reflect on the 10th anniversary of the national tragedy of 9/11, it is important for all Americans to recognize the positive contributions that Muslims have always made to our society,” CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid said. “Our fellow Americans need to know that we are first responders, law enforcement officers and military veterans who serve and protect our nation like citizens of other faiths.”
The billboards feature a doctor who was a first responder at Ground Zero in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001; a Detroit police officer; a Wayne County assistant prosecuting attorney; an assistant principal in a Canton public school; a Vietnam veteran; and a volunteer doctor at a free medical clinic in Wayne.
The campaign is designed to tell the stories of Michigan Muslims and their contributions to society, Walid said.
Detroit News, 7 September 2011
See also CAIR press release, 7 September 2011
WASHINGTON — Florida Congressman Allen West, no stranger to controversy for his remarks about Muslim-Americans, on Wednesday renewed the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York, just days before the country marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
West, who sponsored the screening of a movie about the opposition to the Islamic center, said he hosted the event because he believes the center’s backers have a moral responsibility to honor the wishes of the families of the victims of the attacks who don’t want it near what will soon be a public memorial to those killed.
“If 10 years, or nine years after Pearl Harbor, if the country of Japan had come to the United States of America and said ‘we want to erect a memorial to Japanese naval seamanship at Pearl Harbor’, what would we have said?” West said. “Decades from now, centuries from now, we must remember what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.”
The film, “SACRIFICED SURVIVORS: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Mega Mosque,” was produced by Martin Mayer of the Christian Action Network, and shown in a conference room in the Rayburn House Office Building across from the Capitol.
The film’s producers bill their movie as a depiction of how “survivors and family members are experiencing yet another type of Islamic jihad.” Survivors, the filmmakers said, “believe they must work to keep people vigilant and fighting against the march of radical Islam,” including efforts to build the center two blocks from Ground Zero.
At Wednesday’s press event, West was flanked by about a half-dozen relatives of people who died in the terrorist attacks. One man, Bruce DeCell, held up a photo of his son-in-law who was killed on 9/11, and said he wanted to tell people that “we are at war with the Islamic culture.”
West didn’t disagree with him publically, but said he believes there needs to be “a recognition of some concepts, such as Sharia, that are the antithesis of what we believe in here in the United States of America,” he said, referring to a system of Islamic law.
Although billed as a press conference before the film’s screening, most of the people asking West questions were those tied to the movie or participants in a panel the filmmakers and other groups were organizing later in the day.
West didn’t disagree with those asking questions at the event, including one man who suggested that “Islam has a history of building victory monuments on places it has triumphs.”
“Throughout the history of Islamic conquest, you do see the same type of parallels,” West said, citing his recent trip to Israel and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a spot sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.
Miami Herald, 7 September 2011
See also “Supporters praise Allen West comments on Islam”, Sun-Sentinel, 7 September 2011
And “Islamic leader blasts Congressman Allen West’s comments”,Sun-Sentinel, 7 September 2011
Update: See “Allen West brings ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy out of hibernation”, TPM, 8 September 2011
Bruce Bawer, a notorious Islamophobe much admired by Anders Breivik, throws a wobbler over Eliyahu Stern’s interesting and informed article in the 2 September edition of the New York Times, which drew some revealing parallels between the current anti-Sharia hysteria in the US and 19th-century denunciations of Jewish religious law in Europe.
Pajamas Media, 6 September 2011
See also “Pro-Sharia lunacy at the New York Times”, FrontPage Magazine, 6 September 2011
The New York Police Department collected intelligence on more than 250 mosques and Muslim student groups in and around New York, often using undercover officers and informants to canvas the Islamic population of America’s largest city, according to officials and confidential, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The documents, many marked “secret,” highlight how the past decade’s hunt for terrorists also put huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they went about their daily lives in mosques, businesses and social groups.
An Associated Press investigation last month revealed that a secret squad known as the Demographics Unit sent teams of undercover officers to help key tabs on the area’s Muslim communities. The recent documents are the first to quantify that effort.
Since the 2001 attacks, the police department has built one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, one that operates far outside the city limits and maintains a list of “ancestries of interest” that it uses to focus its clandestine efforts. That effort has benefited from federal money and an unusually close relationship with the CIA, one that at times blurred the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering.
After identifying more than 250 area mosques, police officials determined the “ethnic orientation, leadership and group affiliations,” according to the 2006 police documents. Police also used informants and teams of plainclothes officers, known as rakers, to identify mosques requiring further scrutiny, according to an official involved in that effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the program.
Armed with that information, police then identified 53 “mosques of concern” and placed undercover officers and informants there, the documents show.
Many of those mosques were flagged for allegations of criminal activity, such as alien smuggling, financing Hamas or money laundering. Others were identified for having ties to Salafism, a hardline movement preaching a strict version of Islamic law. Still others were identified for what the documents refer to as “rhetoric.”
Other reasons are less clear.
Two mosques, for instance, were flagged for having ties to Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old Egyptian mosque that is the pre-eminent institute of Islamic learning in the Sunni Muslim world. Al-Azhar was one of the first religious institutions to condemn the 2001 terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush’s close adviser, Karen Hughes, visited Al-Azhar in 2005 and applauded its courage. Al-Azhar was also a sponsor of President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech reaching out to the Muslim world.
The list of mosques where undercover agents or informants operated includes ones that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has visited and that area officials have mentioned as part of the region’s strong ties to the Muslim community. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stood beside leaders of some mosques on the list as allies in fighting terrorism.
Anti-EDL demonstrators in Tower Hamlets on Saturday
By any standards, the English Defence League’s attempt to hold an intimidatory protest against the Muslim community of Tower Hamlets on Saturday was a failure.
The state ban on the EDL’s march, which reduced them to holding a static demonstration instead, not only dissuaded some of their supporters from attending the protest (a number of divisions complained that they had been unable to fill the coaches they had hired) but also created considerable logistical problems for the EDL leadership. The RMT’s threat to close down Liverpool Street station if the EDL gathered there, and the announcement by pubs in Camden that they would refuse to host the EDL, left Stephen Lennon and Kevin Carroll scrabbling around for a place to assemble their troops before entering the East End for the planned rally.
As it turned out, the EDL didn’t even get into Tower Hamlets anyway. The police penned them in at Aldgate, in the City of London, just short of the borough border. With the local community and its supporters having mobilised en masse against the EDL, the police no doubt reasoned that an attempt to hold an EDL rally in Tower Hamlets itself would have resulted in serious public disorder.