Shockjock Alan Jones has been unsuccessful in his latest attempt to have a lawsuit claiming he racially vilified Sydney’s Muslims three days before the Cronulla riots in 2005, dismissed.
In those proceedings, father-of-eight Sam Ekermawi, of Moorebank, claims Jones vilified Muslims when he derided “Lebs”, “wogs” and “Middle Eastern” people in his breakfast program on 2GB on December 8, 2005.
Susi Meret shows how a housing association’s decision not to buy a Christmas tree this year was exploited by the far-right Danish People’s Party with the assistance of the mainstream media. Conservative and liberal figures helped to reinforce the narrative that Danish culture is under attack from Muslims.
“The most worrying aspect of this controversy was the total lack of response from the other side…”, Meret writes. “Those who violently oppose non-western immigration could make their point – extensively. And the voices that should have contradicted them were nowhere to be heard.”
Up to 15,000 militant Islamists are set to descend on east London this week to pressure town hall chiefs into allowing a 9,000 capacity mega-mosque.
Supporters of Islamist sect Tablighi Jamaat are irate after Newham Council rejected plans for the group’s new HQ. The sect, which has been linked to shoe bomber Richard Reid and 7/7 terrorists Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, owns the Abbey Mills site near the Olympic Park in West Ham.
In a YouTube video, extremist cleric Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad urged Muslims to come together to support what should be a “big Islamic symbol in the heart of London”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJTqNeMNWU
Tariq Ramadan talks to Myriam François-Cerrah.
Casey deputy mayor Sam Aziz will seek to impose a planning condition “not to preach hatred from the pulpits” on a proposed Afghan mosque in Doveton.
Despite professing to hate “religious intolerance”, Cr Aziz also suggested that Islam was not a peaceful religion, that the Koran incited hatred and that Islamic terror threats “were not far from home”.
He has backed objections by fundamentalist Christian Catch the Fire Ministries pastor Danny Nalliah, who is rallying against the mosque in Green Street.
The Leveson report into press standards includes a section on “Ethnic minorities, immigrants and asylum seekers”, which draws on evidence presented by ENGAGE, former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt, Peter Oborne of the Daily Telegraph and others about the atrocious treatment of Muslims by the tabloid press.
Leveson writes that “the identification of Muslims, migrants, asylum seekers and gypsies/travellers as the targets of press hostility and/or xenophobia in the press, was supported by the evidence seen by the Inquiry”.
He concludes that, while much of the press has acted responsibly, “there are enough examples of careless or reckless reporting to conclude that discriminatory, sensational or unbalanced reporting in relation to ethnic minorities, immigrants and/or asylum seekers is a feature of journalistic practice in parts of the press, rather than an aberration”.
The relevant section of the report has been reproduced by the Electronic Immigration Network, or you can read it here.
Plans to build Britain’s biggest place of worship – a “monolithic, overly dominant and incongruous” mosque in east London – are set to be thrown out despite 25,000 letters in favour.
The mosque, which could take 12,000 people – four times as many as St Paul’s Cathedral – would be as big as Battersea power station and become the HQ of Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat. However, officers for Newham council recommend the plan is refused.
Earlier this month Anjem Choudary announced his latest publicity stunt – a conference at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad on 30 November, where fatwas would be issued against Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its current president Asif Zardari, and Malala Yousafzai, the young woman shot by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan last month.
Choudary of course has a long history of announcing provocative plans that he has no intention of actually carrying through, and then, having milked the resulting outrage for all the publicity he can, calling them off at the last minute. These non-events have included a March for Shari’ah in London in 2009, a demonstration at Wootton Bassett in 2010 where his followers were to carry 500 coffins to symbolise the deaths of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rally outside the White House the same year to advocate sharia law in the US, and a protest against the royal wedding in April 2011. So nobody had any excuse for falling for Choudary’s latest con-trick.
A Sinn Fein councillor has challenged former Craigavon Mayor Alan Carson to “make a full public apology to Muslims living in Craigavon” after remarks he made during a debate on Monday night. However the DUP man insists that Councillor Johnny McGibbon is “simply scoring political points from a genuine mistake I made and for which I apologised immediately”.
The Daily Telegraph, whose sister paper the Sunday Telegraph waged a disgraceful smear campaign against Foreign Office minister and former Tory party co-chair Sayeeda Warsi, carries a report titled “Baroness Warsi rapped by Lords sleaze watchdog over undeclared Wembley flat income”.
The Lords Commissioner for Standards found that Warsi had omitted to register an interest as the recipient of £6,937 in rent during 2010-11 from a flat in Wembley, which she had been forced to leave for security reasons on joining the cabinet and was unable to sell due to negative equity. The rent she received was in fact less than the mortgage and other expenses she paid on the flat, but it exceeded the £5,000 threshold and should therefore have been declared.
The Commissioner accepted that Warsi’s oversight did not result in any financial loss to the taxpayer or additional monetary gain to herself, and that she had made no attempt to conceal the existence of the flat or the fact that she was renting it out. Indeed, Warsi herself pointed out that she had made the rental arrangement known to the Cabinet Office, the Leader of the House and HM Revenue and Customs.
In other words, this is pretty much a non-story. Which didn’t prevent the Telegraph from hyping it up for the benefit of Warsi’s enemies in the Tory party and the paper’s own readership of right-wing anti-Muslim bigots.