Abhijit Pandya, an Indian-origin candidate for the Leicester South byelection, has sparked fury by making critical remarks about Islam in his blog less than a week before the May 5 elections.
Pandya, 31, is the candidate for the UK Independence Party, which is opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Union.
On his blog, Pandya called Islam “morally flawed and degenerate” and said he backed Geert Wilders, a controversial Dutch politician who allegedly called Islam a retarded ideology.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on state and national GOP leaders to repudiate a lengthy rhetorical attack on Islam and the Quran by a co-sponsor of a Tennessee bill that, in its original form, would have effectively outlawed basic Islamic principles (Sharia).
During a hearing today of the Tennessee House Judiciary Committee, State Rep. Rick Womick (R) claimed the proposed Material Support to Designated Entities Act is “not about religion,” then launched into a lengthy attack on Islam and its revealed text, ultimately comparing the faith to Nazism and white supremacy. Womick stated:
“[A Tennessee Muslim leader] says that the Quran does not support violence and that he denounces all violence. I believe him. But he is an exception, because those who truly hold the Quran for every word that it speaks cannot believe that…
“With Islam there is no freedom of religion allowed within or outside of Islam. There is no freedom of speech or thought, no freedom of artistic expression, no freedom of the press, no equality of peoples, because non-Muslims are never equal to Muslims. There is one set of laws for Muslim men and different laws for women and non-Muslims. Under Islam, women are to be beaten…
“It’s when you … demand that our Constitution take an exception to your beliefs, whether it be Sharia law or Nazism or white supremacy, it doesn’t make a difference.”
“Representative Womick’s hate rhetoric makes it clear that Islam and Muslims are the true targets of this bill,” said CAIR Staff Attorney Gadeir Abbas, who has helped challenge similar anti-Islam bills in other states. “His rant is evidence of the hateful paranoia that will inevitably lead to this bill being used against peaceful American Muslims.”
“Mr. Womick’s extremist views are obviously based on distortions, misinformation and misconceptions about Islam and Muslims that must be repudiated by fellow Republicans,” said Abbas.
He said the original form of the legislation was reportedly written with the assistance of David Yerushalmi, head of the anti-Islam hate group Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE).
On its now password-protected website, SANE offered a policy proposal that would make “adherence to Islam” punishable by 20 years in prison, called for the immediate deportation of all non-citizen Muslims and urged Congress to declare war on the “Muslim Nation,” which SANE defined as “all Muslims.”
CAIR press release, 26 April 2011
See also ” Hundreds of Muslims Protest at State Capitol”, WSMV, 26 April 2011
MONTREAL — New WikiLeaks documents that describe a Montreal mosque as a terror hub are defamatory, says a local Muslim spokesman.
The newly leaked U.S. documents claim a Mauritanian terror suspect being held at Guantanamo Bay was the leader of a Montreal-based al-Qaida cell that planned terror attacks in the United States.
The secret documents, released by WikiLeaks on their website last weekend, also claim that members of al-Qaida were recruited and trained at Montreal’s Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah Mosque, where the terror suspect served briefly, possibly as an imam.
But the chairman of the Muslim Council of Montreal said the documents serve as an example of how the community’s institutions are unfairly targeted by authorities.
“Our allegations are certainly correct that we’ve been targeted and this is biased targeting,” Salam Elmenyawi said in an interview. “None of the information is based on evidence. It’s rather based on intelligence analysis and this analysis has certainly ignored any other facts that contradicted the conclusion.”
Elmenyawi said the documents defame the mosque and show a blatant bias against the Muslim community.
Update: See “WikiLeaks: Montreal mosque ‘is a top Al Qaeda recruiting zone'”, Daily Mail, 27 April 2011
Needless to say, the Mail fails to quote the views of the Muslim Council of Montreal.
The paper also takes the opportunity to publish a photo of the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, with the caption “Finsbury Park Mosque in London was named by WikiLeaks as another Al Qaeda recruiting ground”. Yesterday’s Mail did the same, with another photo of the mosque captioned “‘Haven for extremists’: US intelligence experts describe Finsbury Park Mosque, in north London, above, as an ‘attack planning and propaganda production base'”.
Disgracefully, there is no mention in either article of the fact that this charge dates from the time when Abu Hamza al-Masri and his followers were in control and that the mosque has been under new management since 2005.
See NLCM press release.
Press TV interviews Naima Bouteldja, who interviewed niqab-wearing French Muslim women for the recently published study Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France.
The Rev. Terry Jones, controversial Florida pastor whose church burned a Qur’an last month, has rescheduled a protest for 5 p.m. Friday in front of Dearborn City Hall, this time protesting “the denial of our First Amendment rights.”
A protest against “radical Islam, Sharia, and jihad” had been scheduled for last Friday outside the largest mosque in North America, but was postponed after Pastor Jones spent most of the day and part of the evening in Michigan’s 19th District Court. The city had denied him a permit to speak outside the Islamic Center of America and a jury on Friday evening determined that Mr. Jones was “likely to breach the peace.”
Judge Mark Somers then set bond of $1 each for Mr. Jones, pastor of Dove World Outreach Center, and his associate, the Rev. Wayne Sapp, and barred them from going near the Islamic Center. The two ministers were jailed after telling Judge Somers they would not post the $1 bond, but were released several hours later after posting bond.
Dearborn’s City Hall is one of the city’s four “free speech zones” where anyone can speak or protest without requiring a permit.
See also “Terry Jones says he’ll sue over his arrest”, Detroit News, 25 April 2011
Denis MacEoin, who was responsible for the discredited Policy Exchange report The Hijacking of British Islam among other axe-grinding anti-Muslim “studies”, has posted a “customer review” of Gilbert Achcar’s book The Arabs and the Holocaust on the Amazon website.
Not that MacEoin has actually bought the book, still less read it. But he has no hesitation in warning potential purchasers that Achcar is an unreliable historian, beginning with the charge that “He’s an Arab….” As one of the comments on MacEoin’s “review” points out: “One can imagine the uproar from you and your ilk if the assertion you make was followed by ‘He’s a Jew’.”
Florida Pastor Terry Jones isn’t the only controversial character fighting for the First Amendment right to bring a controversial anti-Islam message to Metro Detroit.
New York activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer last month won a temporary injunction against the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation, which initially denied their application for bus ads that seemed to characterized Islam as a violent religion and encouraged Muslims to leave the faith.
The ruling effectively required SMART to run the ads on buses it operates in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties, but Crain’s Detroit reports SMART filed an appeal Monday in an attempt to overturn the injunction.
Geller is not happy. She sees the legal challenge as evidence that SMART “seeks to impose Sharia laws on Dearborn buses”.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Plaintiffs in a civil trial trying to block a proposed mosque in Tennessee on procedural grounds were largely blocked Wednesday in trying to raise claims that Islam is not a real religion and that its followers are violent.
A former Special Air Services commander turned conservative Christian commentator has conceded that a tweet he made attacking homosexuals and Muslims was ill-timed on Anzac Day.
Jim Wallace, the head of the Australian Christian Lobby and a one-time SAS commander, used Twitter on Monday to say: “Just hope that as we remember servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for – wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic!”
Followers of Mr Wallace soon attacked him. SeandBlogonaut said Mr Wallace was “despicable”. “Using ANZAC Day to push your anti-gay, anti-muslim agenda – you are truly a despicable individual,” he tweeted. Others declared him a “bigot”, “homophobe in disgrace” and an “A-grade douchebag”.
Mr Wallace later issued a statement where he said he made the comments after he had been sitting with his 96-year-old father, a World War II veteran. “My ill timed tweet was a comment on the nature of the Australia he had fought for, and the need to honour that in the way we preserve it into the future,” he said in a statement on Monday.
Letter from Alan Craig in the Sunday Times, 24 April 2011
Both the Tower Hamlets police borough commander and the Quilliam Foundation, the anti-extremist think tank, are wrong to minimise the threats to the Whitechapel pharmacy assistant as just the work of a “small minority” of “Talibanesque thugs” (“Tower Hamlets Taliban order women to cover up“, News, last week). The issue is much more serious than that.