Critics of the planned Cambridge mosque had plenty of opportunities to raise objections before plans were submitted, the Cambridge Muslim Council (CMC) has pointed out.
Leaflets posted through doors in Mill Road claim the new mosque’s dome dominates the skyline. It also states the ‘megamosque’ will cause traffic chaos.
Ten years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the British government passed laws allowing them to detain and imprison foreign “terrorism suspects” without charge or trial. By December 2001, almost a dozen Muslim men, mainly from Algeria, had been detained and later became known, with others, as the “Belmarsh detainees”. They were held without trial or charge for over three years until the courts ruled this system illegal in 2004.
The men were released but things did not get better for them or their families… control orders were introduced in 2005 and others were subject to harsh bail restrictions after being threatened with deportation to their countries of origin – Algeria, Jordan and Libya. Tagged, with restrictions on their freedom, all without having any idea of the reason why, this has been the life of at least 18 individuals and families over the past decade, with no end in sight… 10 years of not knowing the accusations, of coming up against a wall of silence and secret evidence by the Home Office in court, not knowing if they will be deported to countries that will torture, of abuse, misuse and being ignored by the wider community.
At the same time, the British government is seeking to replace the control order regime with new Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (T-PIMs), to broaden the number of countries so-called terrorism suspects can be deported to without knowing the reason why and to harshen its anti-terrorism laws.
The Daily Telegraph reports on the conviction of Ahmed Faraz for producing and distributing extremist literature (“Terrorists’ favourite bookseller guilty”). According to the report:
“Faraz made profits of at least £62,000 and employed a number of salesmen, sending unsolicited copies of his books to Islamic shops around the country. Financial records showed that he had distributed his wares to bookshops including the al-Furqan bookshop at East London Mosque….”
But the al-Furqan bookshop has no connection to the East London Mosque and isn’t even geographically adjacent to it, being situated some distance away down Whitechapel Road, as the Telegraph‘s intrepid Security Correspondent could have found out if he had bothered to check Google Street View (see photo above).
“Lowe’s has fallen for a demagogic ruse dreamt up by an obscure Floridian Christian outfit.” The Financial Times opposes the US retailer’s decision to withdraw advertising from All-American Muslim.
Thus the headline to a report by the British National Party. They have uploaded a video of the annual procession held by Shia Muslims in Newport to mark the Day of Ashura. According to the BNP, this is a “striking example of the steady colonisation of our country”.
All is not lost, though: “The good news is that these Muslim colonists are still massively outnumbered in Wales, and indeed through the UK as a whole. It is not too late to both stop and reverse the immigration tide. But time is running short.”
Not that short, you might think. Shia Muslims currently comprise around 0.3% of the population of the UK.
The Home Office has written to an umbrella group representing a range of Jewish communal and religious groups in response to statements distancing themselves from the methods and aims of the English Defence League.
Earlier this year the leaders of the United Synagogue, Reform, Liberal and Masorti communities, as well as the Board of Deputies and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ congregation, highlighted their opposition to the EDL’s tactics and called on the far right organisation to refrain from using Jewish and Israeli symbols in its campaigns.
The Crown Prosecution Service has been asked why four defendants who assaulted a woman in Leicester were not charged with a racially aggravated offence. Here is the statement on the case issued by the CPS:
“The CPS reviewed all the evidence in this case, including whether a racially aggravated offence should be brought on the basis that the comment ‘white bitch’ was reported to have been heard during the incident. However, this racist comment could not be attributed to any particular suspect and was not adopted by the group as a whole. There was therefore no realistic prospect of conviction for a racially aggravated offence.”
Paul Weston with Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
There’s an interview with the British Freedom Party’s chairman Paul Weston at the European Son blog. It doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know but it’s of interest all the same.
A former member of UKIP, Weston states that he joined that party “because of Lord Pearson, who was the only person to speak about Islam”. He resigned after Nigel Farage replaced Pearson as leader of UKIP: “Mr. Farage has actually come out and said that he will not say anything about Islam because he will no longer be invited on to BBC television programs such Have I Got News for You. I think it’s terrible, so that’s really why I left UKIP.”
This is hardly an accurate summary of Farage’s position – he’s been quite happy to play the anti-Islam card on behalf of his party – but it’s probably true that the current UKIP leader doesn’t entirely share the raving anti-Muslim bigotry of his predecessor, at least as far as his public utterances are concerned. So you can see why Weston became disillusioned and saw the need for a more hardline party that placed Islamophobia at the centre of its programme.
A local paper reports that the British Freedom Party has appointed a long-time EDL activist named Mark Dunbar as its organiser in the Essex town of Witham, which is of course currently under serious threat from the Muslim hordes.
It’s easy to laugh, but people living in places like this can be susceptible to the EDL/BFP’s Islamophobic propaganda precisely because they very rarely come into contact with an actual Muslim.
Postscript: I’ve failed to find figures for the number of Muslims living in Witham, but according to the last available census there were only 409 Muslims in the whole of Braintree, compared with 98,116 Christians. Clearly, if Muslims are intent on imposing Islam on Witham they have a long way to go.
Jon Morgan, farming editor of the Dominion Post, calls on the New Zealand government and meat industry to challenge the anti-halal hysteria promoted by the Daily Mail