A man threatened to blow up a Glasgow mosque and claimed he had a bomb in his backpack. Fraser Rae was jailed for the incident at the city’s Central Mosque on Thursday.
The 28-year-old launched a racist tirade when he entered the site in the south side of Glasgow and told followers at the mosque that he had a bomb inside his backpack and they should run away. Rae, of Johnstone in Renfrewshire, also shouted that he had a gun and threatened to shoot those near him.
An atheist shocked Muslim volunteers at a stall promoting Islam when he ripped out pages from the Koran. Peter James Crawford (52) then threw the holy book onto the ground and told them: “Your religion is a load of b******s.”
He is on trial at Leicester Crown Court accused of causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress, by demonstrating hostility based on membership of a particular religious group, Islam. He denies the charge.
The incident happened at the Islamic Information Centre’s stall, near the Clock Tower in Leicester city centre, on a busy Saturday afternoon, on May 12.
It was introduced as a way to promote harmony, respect and be inclusive of all religions, but councillors have claimed they were “concerned and baffled” when Islamic prayers were sung before a town hall meeting.
All elected members on Brighton and Hove City Council are invited to bow their heads before meetings of the full council. Usually prayers are led by a Church of England priest. For the first time, mayor Bill Randall has invited religious leaders from other faiths to lead the moment of reflection.
After an imam delivered a prayer in Arabic in the council chamber last week, independent councillor Christina Summers said she felt it was “exclusive”. Last night some questioned her commitment to diversity in the city, which according to most recent census figures has 6,095 Muslims.
Mohammed Ansar reports on how a charity called the Quran Project planned to place posters in five major London railway stations – Waterloo, Victoria, Liverpool Street, Marylebone and St Pancras International – over the two weeks of 10-24 December, with the aim of countering misrepresentation of Islam by offering free copies of the Qur’an.
Mohammed says that the campaign had been six months in the planning and the sites were reserved by the advertising company JCDecaux at a cost of £30,000, two thirds of which was raised online through the crowd funding site JustGiving.
However, by Monday 17 December the adverts had all been taken down. An email from JCDecaux to the Quran Project stated with regard to the running of the ads that “rail companies have pointed out that this is not acceptable and we should not have done so. As a consequence, we began the process of removing your posters from the rail stations over the weekend”.
It was only last May that the tiny British Freedom party announced with a loud fanfare that English Defence League leaders Stephen Lennon and Kevin Carroll had become its joint vice-chairmen. The BFP declared that this was a “historic development” which established the party as “a new force in British politics”.
Since then things haven’t been going too well for the BFP. In October, Lennon tweeted that he had resigned from the organisation in order to concentrate on building the EDL, and he told the Independent that he was intending to stand for election under the banner of the EDL rather than the BFP. Even Carroll’s 10.6% of the poll as the British Freedom candidate for Bedfordshire police commissioner in November failed to provide a boost for the party. Although this was in fact a worryingly high vote for such a notorious figure on the far right, the result inevitably had a demoralising effect after the BFP led its supporters to believe that Carroll had a serious chance of winning, only for him to finish a distant fourth behind the successful Labour candidate.
Hope Not Hate now reports that on 11 December the electoral commission de-registered British Freedom because the BFP leaders failed to complete the necessary paperwork or pay the fee required to renew its registration as a political party, despite repeated reminders. Acording to HNH, this development “spells the end for the short-lived religious and racial extremists”. Well, maybe.
Muslims in Greater Manchester are calling for changes to the Terrorism Act which allows passengers to be stopped and searched at airports. A letter signed by several organisations has been sent to the Home Office highlighting concerns over religious profiling.
Representatives from mosques and Islamic human rights groups claim some people are detained but never charged. They want shorter detention times and more intelligence-led policing. The campaign also wants no DNA samples to be taken from anyone who has not been charged with an offence.
The English Defence League (EDL) is to stage a demo in Newcastle after the city council approved plans to turn the Byker Grove building into an Islamic school.
The protest has been criticised by interfaith and anti-fascist groups, with plans already under way for a counter-demonstration.
The rally, the first to be organised in Newcastle by the organisation since 2010, has been approved on a national level and will take place in May next year, according to an EDL regional spokesman.
A Dundee man who hurled a sword at three Muslim men after they escaped from a fire has been jailed for almost two years.
Dundee Sheriff Court heard Grant Robertson also shouted racist abuse at the men as they waited for the fire service outside their flat on 26 January.
Robertson pleaded guilty to a charge of acting in a racially aggravated manner. The 28-year-old also admitted a second charge of assaulting the three men.
The court heard that when he was arrested Robertson told police: “I threw my sword out the window at them, I wish it got them in the throat.”
London is rapidly becoming a separate nation, as different from England as Scotland or Wales are, with indigenous British people now in a minority, in some areas a very small minority indeed, and incidentally with extremes of wealth and poverty not known since Edwardian times.
Then of course there is the decline in Christianity, down by four million, from 72 per cent to 59 per cent; the growth in indifference to religion, with non-believers almost doubling to 14.1 million; and also of Islam, rising so fast that one British resident in 20 is now a Muslim.
The Muslim population is young, and keen on large families, while the Christian population tends to be older and less likely to have children.
This is very much a work in progress, far from complete. A lot of nominal Christians are no longer bothering to pretend to a faith they have never cared much about.
Do not be surprised if, in ten years, the gap between the number of professing Christians and the number of Muslims has grown much smaller.
The secularists, who have so enthusiastically sought to drive Christianity out of British life, may realise with a gulp of apprehension that they have only created a vacancy for Islam – a faith that is not at all troubled by Richard Dawkins.
Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday, 16 December 2012
Hitchens goes on to assert that the increased diversity of the UK is “the result of a deliberate, planned attempt to change this country for ever”, an accusation derived from a tendentious account of government immigration policy by former New Labour adviser Andrew Neather. This conspiracy theory is much loved by the anti-migrant, anti-multiculturalist right and proved a source of particular inspiration to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
Byker Grove will be transformed into an Islamic school. Council planning chiefs have given the go-ahead to plans to convert Bishop’s Palace – used to film the popular TV series – into a fee-paying faith school.
The BAHR Academy will cater for up to 340 boys and girls between 11 and 16 in Benwell, Newcastle. But the development of the currently empty and run-down site will also include a community building, coffee shop and events space open at weekends.