Category Archives: UK

Burglars target Rotherham mosque, throw copies of the Qur’an on the floor

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Burglars have targeted a town centre mosque in an apparent hate attack. Raiders broke into Chapel Walk Mosque in the early hours of Tuesday morning. They ransacked offices, stole money from a collection box and damaged microphone equipment. They also threw copies of the Qur’an on the floor, leading one faith leader to blame right wing elements.

Rotherham Council of Mosques chair Saghir Alam said: “There was a lot of damage. I just can’t understand it. This is meant to be a place of peace, spirituality and worship.” He added: “This went beyond burglary because they didn’t just steal something and leave – they’ve damaged the electrics and thrown our holy books around. I can’t say for sure it was a hate crime, but these facts suggest that it is.”

Fiyaz Mughal, director of national anti-bigotry group Tell MAMA, said: “Given that the place was smashed up and holy books thrown on the floor, this could well be a hate crime. People target mosques because they are very visible institutions, so sadly this isn’t news to us.” He added: “Before the march on Saturday some were putting addresses of mosques on Twitter and saying: ‘Let’s smash them up.’”

Last week Chief Supt Jason Harwin said police are working with mosques to stamp out attacks on innocent Muslims, following a spate of street attacks. Saghir said officers have been “very proactive” in investigating these reports, as well as Wednesday’s break-in.

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Islamic State and Rotherham abuse ‘fuelling far right’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL grooming placardIslamic State extremism and the Rotherham abuse scandal are fuelling a far-right backlash in the UK, one of the Home Office’s most senior advisers on right-wing extremism has said.

The anonymous worker claims the government has overlooked the problem amid its focus on tackling jihadists.

The Home Office says it is working to prevent “all forms of extremism”. But the Institute for Strategic Dialogue claims the government must engage more with the far right.

The senior adviser works directly with right-wing extremists as part of the Home Office’s Prevent strategy, and asked to remain anonymous to protect his personal safety. He says the government has underestimated the threat posed by the far right in Britain.

“This is one of the most worrying periods in right-wing extremism, given the growth in right-wing groups and the recent news events which are making them more angry,” he explains.

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New plans revealed for Dudley mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dudley mosque new plan

New plans have been revealed for a new mosque in Dudley on the controversial Hall Street site.

Previous plans for the site faced strong opposition from protestors who said the building would dominate the Dudley skyline, it sparked violent demonstrations in the town from the English Defence League in 2010.

The new design has been developed after consultation with town planners and features a shorter minaret, down from 109 feet to 61 feet, and the floor area of the building has been cut by 16 per cent.

The proposed mosque’s designer, Al Samarraie of Archi-Structure (Consultant), said:

“The community has been at its existing site for over 35 years and the building is not fit for purpose, particularly for women, children, elderly and disabled people. The community want to build modern facilities that will be accessible to local people and offer a modern place of worship.”

The is development is lower than the highest roof level of the adjacent Allan Nuttall’s Limited warehouse and designed to be environmentally friendly with green living roofs.

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Don’t let EDL racists divide us! Unite Against Fascism counter-demonstration – London, Saturday 20 September

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Don’t let EDL racists divide us London September 2014

Justice for the Rotherham abuse victims – don’t let the racists divide us!

Demonstrate: Saturday September 20th, Central London

The EDL are cynically trying to exploit the Rotherham child abuse horror, and British fascists are attempting to unify around this. In Rotherham and in London, the EDL are planning to hold demonstrations over the next two Saturdays. Far right and fascist groups are attempting to recover from set backs anti-fascists have inflicted on them and want to divide us.

The EDL have seized on the appalling child abuse to engender racism against Muslims. They want to “racialise” the issue. UAF will be holding a counter demonstration against the EDL next Saturday, 20th September from 11.30am, at Downing Street. UAF invites all who reject attempts to divide our communities to join us. Bring your friends, families and banners.

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Demonstration will protest against EDL’s anti-Muslim violence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Markaz-ul-Uloom Al-Islamia vandalism

A mosque has been vandalised during a far-right protest march in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, as tension rises in the town after the grooming scandal. The glass front door of the Markaz-ul-Uloom Al-Islamia, a Deobandi mosque near the city centre, was broken on Saturday.

Muhbeen Hussain, a local Muslim community organiser, said that the English Defence League had paraded through the city with a banner reading “Muslim groomers”. He also claimed that demonstrators smashed the windows of a halal butcher and a corner shop owned by a Muslim.

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Vandals forced Cardiff mosque to shut

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rabbaniah Islamic Cultural Centre vandalismA Cardiff mosque has been forced to close after being smashed up by intruders. Police are investigating after the Rabbaniah Islamic Cultural Centre suffered thousands of pounds of damage after burglars pulled down the ceiling and ripped charity boxes from the walls.

The cultural centre in Grangetown was completely wrecked by the intruders who stole at least £4,000 of money stored in charity collection boxes and locked safes containing wages for staff.

The burglars first broke into the main hall but then rampaged through the mosque and cultural centre – tearing down the internal roof to get up to the office on the first floor. Computers were stamped on, CCTV cameras were pulled from the walls and doors have been kicked through.

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UKIP’s former deputy leader calls for passages from Qur’an to be banned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Christopher MoncktonBritain’s Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a politician and globe-trotting climate-change denier, has called upon the United States to outlaw certain parts of the Islamic holy book the Koran and to make reading them aloud illegal.

Right Wing Watch reported on Monckton’s latest column for conspiracy website and “Birther” hub World Net Daily, in which the former advisor to England’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher urged the U.S. Congress to outlaw passages of the Koran as incitement to murder.

“Nearly all acts of terrorism perpetrated throughout the world in the past quarter of a century were carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah,” Monckton falsely claimed, omitting acts of terror by U.S. right-wing militia and the ongoing campaign of brutal violence being waged by Mexican drug cartels.

“Why?” Monckton asked. “One does not need to look any further than their “holy” book, the [Koran].”

“Craven public authorities have failed to act against the circulation of the [Koran] in its present form because they fear a violent backlash,” Monckton claimed. But, he said, anti-Islamists should not shrink from banning the portions of the Koran that call for violence against nonbelievers. The rights of free speech, he said, are outweighed by the need to stop incitement.

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Yet more anti-Muslim scaremongering from the Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily Mail Changing Face of Britain

This article from yesterday’s Daily Mail is the latest in the newspaper’s long-running series of “Islamification of Britain” scare stories. It begins:

“There are more Muslim children than Christian growing up in Birmingham, figures show. The latest statistics, extracted from the 2011 Census, give an insight into the fast pace of demographic change across Britain. They pinpoint several parts of the country where traditional religious beliefs are being eclipsed for the first time.”

(Quite why Christianity alone should fall into the category of “traditional religious beliefs” is unclear, given that Islam along with Judaism and other minority faiths have a long historical tradition in the UK.)

We are then offered the following table to show how Christianity is being “eclipsed”:

Daily Mail Changing Face of Britain (2)

The examples selectively chosen by the Mail to demonstrate the supposed eclipse of Christianity are of course all areas with untypically large Muslim communities.

The Daily Mirror has done some number crunching of its own and points out that there is in fact a grand total of 7 local authorities across England and Wales where there are more Muslim children than Christian, compared with 340 in which Christian children outnumber Muslims.

The Mirror also notes that there are 21 local authorities where children registered as having no religion outnumber those registered as Christian, although for some reason the Mail seems less concerned about the “eclipse” of Christianity by atheism.

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The untold cases of Islamophobia in schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fourteen year olds resolutely defending hostility towards their Muslim neighbours.

When it was said that nothing justified the abuse of a woman just because she decided to dress differently, the response was that it was because “she probably has a bomb underneath her clothes”.

Muslims were openly derided as terrorists by a significant number of over zealous white students.

Students whom I later realised were themselves victims of a raucous media campaign to give them an enemy and distract them from the disfranchisement and misery faced by many of their families.

Perhaps our words and slides were just too high brow and academic for young minds to relate to.

So when a victim stood to speak honestly and emotionally of her harrowing experiences which included having dogs set upon her and her young children and having an unopened beer can thrown at her whilst she was driving, the unrelenting coldness amongst the audience remained.

Maybe the sight of a young classmate breaking down in tears after relating the incident of seeing his mother racially abused at a local supermarket over the weekend just gone would bring a modicum of sympathy. Again none was forthcoming.

Amongst the young faces and clearly in the minority young Muslim girls wearing hijabs, others without and their male compatriots sat glum faced seemingly unable to speak up or defend their rights to be treated as human beings.

Faisal Hanif recounts his experience of promoting human rights in a Rotherham secondary school.

Asian Image, 15 September 2014

Rise Up Australia campaign launch told Islam is a ‘death cult’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Danny Nalliah at campaign launchMaverick MP Geoff Shaw and UK climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton are expected to join forces and attend a campaign meeting for a hard-right Christian party.

Rise Up Australia’s firebrand leader Danny Nalliah said he recently spoke to Mr Shaw and the balance-of-power MP would attend a party meeting in Frankston this weekend.

It comes as the anti-Islam party and the independent MP work to strike a preference deal ahead of November’s state election. “We will be preferencing each other,” Mr Nalliah told The Age. “I have known Geoff for 10 years. He says it as it is. I feel the treatment of him has been unfair.” A spokesman for Mr Shaw said he was unable to make any comment.

On Monday, Mr Nalliah launched the party’s Victorian election campaign, declaring that Islam was a “death cult”.

The flag-waving gathering at St Kilda town hall attracted an ethnically diverse crowd of about 100, with supporters from India, China, Hungary and Malaysia united by their fear of Islam. There was lots of rising up – for prayers, rounds of applause and the singing of the national anthem. Australian flags swayed as the crowd sang the party’s theme song.

Mr Nalliah, who is president of the Catch the Fire Ministries and previously blamed the Black Saturday bushfires on the state’s abortion laws, spoke out against sharia law and said he loved Muslims but not their religion. “Tony Abbott, our prime minister called the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria a death cult. I go one step further. I call Islam the death cult.”

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