Writing at the Jerusalem Post, Jonathan Rosenblum sees nothing wrong with the NYPD spying on Muslims or its use of the Islamophobic propaganda film The Third Jihad to train officers.
Category Archives: Right wing
Fighting Islamophobia at Yale
Mostafa Al-Alusi and Faisal Hamid, president and vice president of the Yale Muslim Students Association, call on their fellow students to take up the fight against Islamophobia.
Tennessee: state panel unanimously approves anti-Muslim training course for police officers
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A state panel has unanimously approved credits for a law enforcement training course that critics have called anti-Muslim.
The Muslim civil rights organization Council on American-Islamic Relations is among those that have publicly denounced the “Understanding the Threat to America” course by a Virginia nonprofit. One of the trainers was John Guandolo, who recently told a Nashville audience that local mosques do not have a right to constitutional protections.
Members of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office participated in the training earlier this week and asked the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission to approve it.
The commission gave its unanimous approval at its Friday meeting without discussing the objections from Muslim groups. New commission member Sen. Jim Summerville said he voted in favor because he supports anti-terrorism training.
Right-wing Christian bigot resumes campaign against Newham ‘mega-mosque’
Fresh proposals for a permanent mosque risk turning part of West Ham into an “Islamic ghetto”, say opponents.
A public exhibition was held by Tablighi Jamaat in Stratford in a bid to gather support for the Riverine Centre in Canning Road – dubbed a “mega-mosque”. The plan includes a 9,500 capacity mosque with 40m high minarets, library, visitors centre, and a 300-space car park for worshippers.
Florida: anti-CAIR ‘patriots’ boo school board chairwoman for defending teachers
TAMPA — If members of the Hillsborough County School Board thought they had put controversy over a Muslim speaker behind them, they were wrong.
More than a dozen who oppose school appearances from the Council on American-Islamic Relations attended Tuesday’s board meeting, some asking the board to call for a workshop and others displaying signs on the sidewalk outside that said, “Welcome to Tampastan.”
The group included Kristina Gionet of the Pinellas Patriots, who said, “I guarantee that if CAIR comes across the bay, we will stop them at the Howard Frankland Bridge.”
Minds of South Carolina anti-sharia legislators have fallen victim to ‘stealth-alien invasion’, critic suggests
A long list of S.C. lawmakers plan to send a message to Palmetto State courts: Don’t apply foreign laws here. A proposed law, which a House panel will consider later this month, is part of a growing movement in legislatures around the country.
Twenty other states are considering similar measures to ban judges from applying the laws of others nations, particularly in custody and marriage cases. Three states – Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona – already have added the laws to their books. Oklahoma put it in its state Constitution in 2010, a move now being challenged in federal court.
Proponents say the S.C. measure will ensure only U.S. and S.C. laws are applied in Palmetto State courtrooms, and foreign laws do not trump constitutional rights guaranteed to Americans.
Opponents say the proposal addresses a nonexistent issue and, while not specifically naming Islamic Sharia law, smacks of anti-Islamic sentiment. They say such bills target the practice of Sharia, a wide-ranging group of Islamic religious codes and customs that, in some countries, are enforced as law.
Demagogues lose ground in their bid to smear Muslim students
Amandla Thomas-Johnson of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies argues that the recent Home Affairs Committee’s report on the Roots of Violent Radicalisation debunks claims by the Centre for Social Cohesion/Henry Jackson Society and others that the UK’s universities are breeding grounds for extremism among Muslim students.
Murfreesboro: right-wing Islamophobe trains deputies
MURFREESBORO, TN — A group that states on their website that the “Islamic Movement” is a “threat to our civil liberties” is training deputies in Rutherford County this week.
Deputies from the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department are getting three days of training from Strategic Engagement Group, a Washington-based nonprofit that says its purpose is to counter the Unified Islamic movement in the United States.
Virginia: business groups block anti-Sharia bill
Last month, a bill intended to combat the nearly non-existent problem of courts citing Sharia law was cruising to passage in the Virginia House of Delegates. For the moment, however, the bill appears to be dead after numerous business groups stepped forward to oppose it:
One bill, HB825 from Republican Del. Bob Marshall of Prince William County, would have prohibited judges and state administrators from using any legal code established outside the United States to make decisions. […]
But when legislators started hearing from business groups concerned about how the proposal could affect their dealings abroad and foreign companies located here, they sent the bill back to committee.
“I had some business concerns,” said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, after making the motion Thursday to kick back the bill. “It’s just something that needs some work.”
It’s unfortunate, if far from unexpected, that similar protests from religious groups, both Islamic and otherwise, were not enough to kill the bill. Nevertheless, the emergence of business opposition to these sorts of bills is a very important development.
Ray Honeyford – is he still Boris Johnson’s hero?
Today’s Daily Telegraph has an editorial endorsing the views of the late Ray Honeyford, the former Bradford head teacher whose racist statements were widely condemned in the 1980s.
According to the Telegraph, Honeyford merely “believed that multiculturalism was doing a disservice to children from immigrant backgrounds, who were denied the benefits of full integration with the society into which they would grow up”. The editorial denounces the “vilification of Mr Honeyford”, which supposedly “played into the hands of extremists seeking to foment discord, such as Abu Qatada”. It claims that the lesson to be drawn from the controversy is that “shutting down debate about cultural assimilation is short-sighted and dangerous”.
These arguments are no doubt familiar to Telegraph readers. Back in 2006 one of the paper’s columnists wrote an article that took a similar line on Honeyford and multiculturalism. In an attack on the then Labour home secretary the columnist wrote:
… here is how John Reid could prove that he was really tough. Here is the bravest thing he could possibly say. He should say that the real problem in our society, and the reason we have so many disaffected and alienated Muslim youths, is that for a generation he and people like him supported the disastrous multicultural agenda. The reason that 40 per cent of British Muslims would like some form of Sharia law in this country is that the Left has traditionally deprecated British institutions and even the teaching of English. A truly brave John Reid would now publicly grovel to Ray Honeyford, the Bradford head who called for teaching in English and who was vilified and persecuted by the Left.