IDF radio host: ‘Islam is most terrible disease in the world’

Loonwatch draws our attention to a comment made by one Avri Gilad on a talk show he hosts on the Israel Defense Forces station Army Radio, during a discussion about the current violent racist backlash against black African migrants in Israel. Gilad stated:

… let us not forget that those knocking on our doors belong to Islam, and Islam today is the most terrible disease raging around the world. It poisons its believers and poisons every place it reaches. The people that come here, especially the South Sudanese, are very moderate people, the real beautiful face of Islam … the problem is that when you carry the virus, you don’t know when it will explode inside you … every Muslim who enters here might become the flag carrier of the global Islam … and therefore we must take care of our lives.

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Islamophobia: Anatomy of an American Panic

Anatomy of an American PanicThe Nation has a special issue entitled “Islamophobia: Anatomy of an American Panic” with articles examining different aspects of Islamophobia in the US.

These include Moustafa Bayoumi, “Fear and Loathing of Islam“, Jack Shaheen, “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth” (subscription only), Petra Bartosiewicz, “Deploying Informants, the FBI Stings Muslims“, Laila Lalami, “Islamophobia and Its Discontents“, Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts“, Ramzi Kassem, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program“, Max Blumenthal, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate“, and Laila Al-Arian, “When Your Father Is Accused of Terrorism“.

Islamophobes call on Tennessee governor to fire Muslim economic development officer

Shariah Finance Watch

Tea party and anti-Muslim activists are taking aim at a recent hire by the administration of Gov. Bill Haslam, targeting one of its top economic development officers based on her religion and past work experience.

The Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C., organization that has frequently attacked Muslims for perceived ties to Islamist groups, and the 8th District Tea Party Coalition, an umbrella organization of West Tennessee tea party groups, have urged their members to pressure Haslam and Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bill Hagerty to dump Samar Ali, an attorney appointed last month as the department’s new international director.

The groups depict Ali as an Islamic fundamentalist with close ties to President Barack Obama. The claims are spurious and ECD has no intention of firing Ali, said Clint Brewer, a department spokesman. “She’s eminently qualified to do the job,” Brewer said. “We are lucky to be able to have her.”

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Wilders was misrepresented by BBC – he never called for the Qur’an to be banned (it says here)

Telegraph blogger Ed West recommends a new report by former BBC journalist Dennis Sewell, A Question of Attitude: The BBC and Bias Beyond News, in which the author accuses the Beeb of abandoning impartiality in order to further its left-liberal political agenda and “cites a number of BBC programmes which have, he feels, been unjustifiably biased”.

West offers us an egregious example: “Worst of all, perhaps, wasGeert Wilders – Europe’s Most Dangerous Man? (BBC Two – February 2011).” He quotes Sewell’s attack on what he claims was the documentary’s misrepresentation of Wilders’ views:

Billed as a profile of the controversial Dutch politician, for much of the time it felt more like a character assassination…. More than once in the film, emphasis was placed on Wilders’ supposed wish to have the Koran banned…. Wilders has many times explained and clarified his position on this – and indeed is briefly glimpsed in the film, trying to do so at a press conference. The truth of the matter is that, within the context of a discussion on banning the sale of Mein Kampf in Holland (a measure that was passed into law at the instigation of the Left), Wilders remarked that, if the Left were to be consistent, the logic of its arguments for banning Hitler’s book should lead it also to seek a ban on the Koran, which contains passages that it should find just as odious as the passages in Mein Kampf that were so objectionable.

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Worldwide counter-jihad alliance to launch with Stockholm demonstration on August 4

SION logoThis is the typically bombastic headline to a press release from Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s Stop Islamization of Nations (SION) announcing a forthcoming protest in Sweden.

The Stockholm demonstration was originally an initiative by British Freedom, the political ally of the English Defence League. At a recent BF/EDL strategy meeting it was reported that “party leaders are planning to go to Stockholm to deliver a public apology on behalf of Luton for the fact that the Stockholm bomber was radicalised in the town”.

Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, who died in a failed suicide attack in the Swedish capital in December 2010, did indeed live in Luton for a number of years, but there is no evidence that the town or its Muslim community had any influence on his turn to violent extremism. In 2007, when Abdaly tried to use the Luton Islamic Centre as a platform to win support for his (at that stage still non-violent) extremist views, he was challenged by the centre’s leadership and forced to leave.

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Shariah charade

In the 19th century, Catholicism was regarded by many people in this country as thoroughly incompatible with Americanism. They saw it as a hostile foreign element that would subvert democracy. Today, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, and they are taken to be as American as Mountain Dew.

We’ve come a long way in religious tolerance. Or maybe not. The belief that Catholics are irredeemably alien and disloyal has given way to the fear that Muslims pose a mortal threat to our way of life.

Steve Chapman on the bogus threat of Islamic law in the US.

Chicago Tribune, 10 June 2012

Torygraph exposes Baroness Warsi’s (non-existent) ‘new links to radicals’

The Sunday Telegraph continues to pursue the Tory right’s campaign against Sayeeda Warsi, who was recently referred to Sir Alex Allan, the independent adviser on the Ministerial Code, after she accepted that she had committed the (very minor) offence of forgetting to declare a business relationship with her husband’s cousin Abid Hussain when he accompanied her on a visit to Pakistan.

According to the Telegraph‘s investigations editor Jason Lewis, “there were calls last week for the inquiry, ordered by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to be widened after Mr Hussain admitted that he had been involved in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Islamist party that the Conservatives had pledged to ban”. Who the people making these calls might be, Lewis doesn’t tell us. Perhaps this is because the “calls” were more in the nature of malicious whispers, which is how some Tory rightwingers have been attempting to undermine Warsi ever since she was appointed party co-chairman.

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Bournemouth councillor ordered to make apology after EDL Twitter comments

Sue AndersonA Bournemouth councillor has been ordered to make a public apology for her controversial online comments about the English Defence League.

Conservative Cllr Sue Anderson has been told she needs to apologise at next Tuesday’s full council meeting, send a written apology to the complainant and undertake equality and diversity training.

Those were the recommendations of Bournemouth’s standards committee, who discussed the issue at a private meeting last month. They concluded that Cllr Anderson had potentially breached the council’s code of conduct with her comments on Twitter late at night on Saturday, May 5.

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Evening Standard warns of ‘terror’ threat to Olympics … from Leyton mosque

The Evening Standard has latched on to the allegations against Masjid-al-Tawhid in Leyton, carrying a report in today’s issue titled “Mosque near Olympics site in ‘terror link’ investigation”. The aim of this scaremongering headline, which is based on a quote provided by the mosque’s former imam Usama Hasan, is obviously to suggest that the forthcoming Olympic Games face a threat from Masjid-al-Tawhid.

Interestingly, the nature of this supposed “terror link” has changed. According to the Standard, the Charity Commission’s investigation, launched in response to a complaint by Usama Hasan, is now “understood to centre on sermons delivered at the mosque between 2004 and 2010 by Haitham al-Haddad, a preacher by whom notorious ‘underpants bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab claims he was influenced”. Indeed, to underline this point the report is illustrated with a photo of Abdulmutallab.

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