Category Archives: UK

Headteacher who called parents ‘Muslim f******’ is banned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Simon ParkerThis is Simon Parker, the primary school headteacher who launched foul-mouthed racist and sexist attacks on staff and parents and who has now been banned from the classroom for life.

The disgraced head “bullied and intimidated” terrified staff and “belittled” children at Coppice Primary School, Chigwell, Essex, in 2008 and 2009.

A General Teaching Council disciplinary inquiry heard Parker called parents “Muslim f******” and labelled a supply teacher a “black b****”. He also pulled his eyes sideways to impersonate a Chinese early years teacher, adding “I can’t stand them”.

His shocking catalogue of abuse included Parker calling a prospective teacher a “P*ki” and stating “we don’t want any of those” in respect to a black applicant. Parker also called a governor a “lazy whore”, claimed a teacher was absent because she had “vaginal thrush” and referred to another as a “fat a*** teacher”. The disgraced headteacher called less-able pupils “Congo Bongo” and claimed Muslims are “always blowing things up”.

Shamed Parker refused to attend the two-day disciplinary hearing held in Birmingham or defend his case.

Daily Mail, 3 June 2011

Posted in UK

The sensational story that wasn’t: reports of ‘stoning’ death of Ukrainian girl turn out to be false

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The circumstances around the death of Kateryna Korin, a 19-year-old Ukrainian student on the Crimean peninsula, appeared to point to a made-for-tabloid tragedy: a young beauty-pageant contestant brutally killed by her admirer, a radical Islamist who chose to stone her to death under an unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law. There was just one small problem: They weren’t true.”

Farangis Najibullah reports on press coverage of the “Muslim girl stoned to death under Sharia law” – as the Daily Mail put it, with characteristic disregard for the facts.

RFE/RL, 3 June 2011

UK police cleared of ‘beating up’ Muslim suspect

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Babar-AhmadFour police officers accused of beating up a Muslim terrorism suspect and mocking his religion were cleared of any wrongdoing by a London court on Friday.

The officers from London’s Territorial Support Group (TSG) were on trial on charges of violently assaulting Babar Ahmad during a dawn raid on his home in December 2003 as part of a counter-terrorism operation.

In 2009, the Metropolitan Police admitted wrongdoing over the arrest and paid Ahmad £60,000 in damages. However, the officers’ lawyer said a listening device planted in Ahmad’s home before his arrest backed their account of events.

A jury at Southwark Crown Court took less than an hour to clear Police Constables Roderick James-Bowen, Mark Jones, and Nigel Cowley and Detective Constable John Donohue of causing actual bodily harm. “The officers look forward to returning to work. They are hoping that they will be able to put these unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations behind them,” their lawyer Colin Reynolds told reporters.

Ahmad, 37, was never charged in relation to his arrest but is in custody awaiting extradition to America for alleged terrorism offenses. British courts have granted the extradition but Ahmad appealed and the case has not yet been resolved.

Prosecutors told the court that before the raid on Ahmad’s south London home, officers had been briefed that he had received terrorism training and had fought overseas in support of holy war.

Police had feared Ahmad would resist but prosecutors said in fact he had remained submissive. It was alleged that he was assaulted despite being restrained and officers had put him in a Muslim prayer position and asked him “Where is your God now?” When he arrived at the police station, pictures showed he was battered and bruised.

However, the four constables denied Ahmad’s claims and said he had violently resisted and that had led to his injuries.

EDL Tower Hamlets demonstration set for August

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Tower Hamlets demoThe English Defence League’s long-trailed protest in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets (see here, here and here) is now scheduled to take place on Saturday 27 August.

As we have previously noted, the proposal for a demonstration in an area described by the EDL leadership as “the heartland of Islamic terrorism” has been accompanied by explicit threats of violence by their supporters against the local Muslim community.

Continue reading →

‘Muslim girl stoned to death under Sharia law’ claims Daily Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under “Sharia law” after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine. Katya Koren, 19, was found dead in a village in the Crimea region near her home. Friends said she liked wearing fashionable clothes and had come seventh in a beauty contest.

Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared. Police have opened a murder investigation and are looking into claims that three Muslim youths killed her, claiming her death was justified under Islam.

One of the three – named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev – is under arrest and told police that Katya had “violated the laws of Sharia”. Gaziev has said he has no regrets about her death.

Daily Mail, 31 May 2011

Of course the article was immediately seized on by the English Defence League:

EDL Daily Mail stoning story

If you can stomach it, you can read the comments by EDL supporters here.

And the article provoked the usual succession of bigots into posting anti-Muslim comments on the Mail‘s own website:

“Would be nice to see some supporters of this faith speaking out against this all too common occurance.”

“In a recent demonstration by Muslims against the English, did I not see banners proclaiming ‘Sharia for Britain’.”

“How long before some idiot starts bleating about ‘Islamaphobia’ with reference to this news story? Im suffering from Islamaphobia myself I have a distinct aversion to young girls being brutaly murdered in the name of religion by cowards!”

“I wish apologists for the misogyny of ‘Islam’ would see how despicable their Sharia law is.”

“Another victim of the mysoginistic murder cult that is sharia law.”

“Where are the voices of ‘moderate’ Islam now? I can’t hear them, can you? Can anyone?”

“what a lovely religion NOT”

“Absolutely hideous! I am appalled that such behaviour is deemed justifiable under a law written over a 1000 years ago by uneducated warring idiots!”

“I hope the Archbishop of Canterbury is reading this he is rather a fan of sharia law as I recall, just shows how out of touch he is.”

However, there are several rather more informed comments that suggest the Mail‘s story of Sharia-inspired stoning is completely fabricated. For example:

“Daily Mail, stop lying and instigating hatred for Muslims! The original Russian article from Komsomolskaya Pravda of 28/05 does not mention any religious motives in this murder (I can provide the link to the original story). Katya wasn’t a Muslim. Katya Koren is not a Muslim name. There was no ‘three Muslim teenagers’ who ‘stones Katya’. there was just one mentally distrurbed boy of Muslim origin who hit her on the head once. He doesn’t know himself why he did it. People suspect because Katya rejected him. This has absolutely nothing to do with sharia, Muslims, religion etc. Who is making up such stories? You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

And: “The story is completely inacurrate. Katya Koren was a Ukrainian girl and she was an Orthdox Christian. That was not a stoning, but a cold-blooded murder by a psycho who happened to be from a mixed Ukranian-Tatar family. I am amazed, how things can be distorted.”

And: “This news, made by Russian propaganda apparatus, is provocation. Because the killer even has no any attitude to Islam. Katya is Russian, not Muslim. Boy is Slavic, but is adopted by Muslims. Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry Crimean Branch Press Chairperson Olga Bogoslavskaya said that murder is not motivated by religious belief. All world copied your news! Who will excuse?”

Also: “THE KEY FACTS: 1. Katya is an Orthodox Christian. 2. Bilyal is formally Muslim, just adopted by Muslim man 3. Bilyal is not religious, like his father, even didn’t go to mosque. 4. Murder is not done by stoning. 5. Internal Affairs Dep. announced that murder has no religious roots. 6. Such a news first appeared in pro-Russian media.”

See also “Katya Koren: Ukrainian beauty queen killed by disturbed classmate not Sharia law”, LoonWatch, 31 May 2011

Update:  The Mail has an new article on the case headlined “Was Muslim girl ‘stoned to death for taking part in beauty pageant’ actually murdered by a stalker?” Perhaps that’s a question the Mailshould have asked before it published the original inflammatory article. And the paper is still banging on about how “Sharia law prohibits women from taking part in beauty contests” – which, even if it were true, would hardly apply to Katya Koren, who wasn’t a Muslim.

Torygraph apologises to East London Mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In January this year an article was published on the Telegraph website headlined “Extremist leader jailed for child abuse”. Readers were informed:

“A man has been jailed for a series of sex attacks on children committed while he was the leader of a Muslim extremist group and a teacher at a hardline London mosque. Ashraf Miah, 38, from Mile End, a former teacher at the East London Mosque, repeatedly molested the girls whilst they recited religious texts. The youngest victim was five and the oldest only seven.

“Miah was at the time the East End leader of the notorious extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir, which believes that voting and democracy is forbidden in Islam and wants to turn Britain into a sharia state….

“The court heard that Miah also taught at the hardline East London Mosque, controlled by the Islamic Forum of Europe, which also believes in turning the UK into a sharia state, though by different methods. The mosque has hosted many hate, extremist and terrorist preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda spiritual leader. Some of the victims were introduced to Miah via the mosque.”

The article has since been removed from the website and today theTelegraph published the following retraction:

“Our report ‘Extremist leader jailed for child abuse’ (Jan 20) wrongly said that some of the victims of Ashraf Miah, described in a court report as a former teacher at the East London Mosque, were introduced via the Mosque. We are happy to confirm that the Mosque has no record of him ever having taught there and that there was no suggestion at trial of his victims having been introduced to him there.”

Now, which Telegraph journalist do you suppose could have adopted such a slipshod attitude towards the basic facts of the case, with the evident aim of stitching up the East London Mosque? No prizes for guessing that it was of course Andrew Gilligan.

Update:  Gilligan complains that Islamophobia Watch has attacked him over “an incorrect news-in-brief item about the mosque in the Telegraph which I did not write”.

As it happens, I couldn’t find the news-in-brief report that appeared in the print edition of the paper so I quoted from the unedited version of the article as it appeared, under the title “Extremist leader jailed for child abuse”, on Gilligan’s Telegraphblog. This was the link to the article:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100072691/extremist-leader-jailed-for-child-abuse/

As you can see if you click on it, the link is dead and the article has been deleted.

It was, however, reproduced at the time on a number of right-wing Islamophobic websites, where it can still be found (for example here, here and here). Is Gilligan now saying that he didn’t have a hand in writing an article that he posted on his own blog?

Youth pleads guilty to posting ‘gay free zone’ stickers in East End

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Homophobic sticker Tower HamletsThe Telegraph reports that a youth named Mohammed Hasnath has been fined for posting up some of the offensive “gay free zone” stickers that appeared in Tower Hamlets earlier this year.

It is good that a conviction has been secured in connection with that disgraceful campaign, but it would be even better if the police could identify and charge the people who produced the stickers and gave them to Hasnath – as it is they, rather than a naive-sounding 18-year-old, who are the real villains of the piece.

Judging by the Telegraph report Hasnath was convicted under Section 4A of the Public Order Act, which criminalises the display of “any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting” with “intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress”. In his defence Hasnath stated that he was merely expressing his belief that homosexuality is a sin and had not actually threatened anyone – “it doesn’t say that I am going to punish them it just says what God says in the Koran”.

It will be interesting to see if those right-wing – and liberal – commentators who have defended Geert Wilders’ right to free speech will do the same for Mohammed Hasnath. You can bet they almost certainly won’t. Yet, just as members of the LGBT community should be able to go about their lives in Tower Hamlets without suffering abuse and harassment from homophobes, the Muslim community in the Netherlands should equally have the right to live in peace without a far-right politician inciting hatred against them. Freedom of expression is not absolute in either case.

Update:  It turns out that Hasnath wasn’t charged under Section 4A of the Public Order Act but under Section 5, which criminalises the display of “any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby”.

Rainbow Hamlets have issued a press release criticising British Transport Police and the Crown Prosecution Service for not proceeding with a charge under 4A, which is a more serious offence. However, 4A requires the prosecution to prove intent, which is almost impossible to establish. (That is one reason why the law against incitement to religious hatred, which also requires proof of intent, is completely useless.) So, to be fair to the CPS, they drew the not unreasonable conclusion that a prosecution under 4A would be likely to fail.

University campuses are not ‘hotbeds of radicalisation’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

ENGAGE draws our attention to an interview in the Daily Telegraph with Nicola Dandridge of Universities UK, who rejects the view, promoted by the likes of Anthony Glees and the Quilliam Foundation and widely publicised by the right-wing press, that universities are training grounds for violent extremism among Muslim students.

Needless to say, James Brandon of Quilliam is on hand to rubbish Dandridge’s analysis: “Every week, radical Islamists on campuses around the UK preach a steady mixture of anti-western conspiracy theories and hard-line Islamist ideologies. At the same time, a steady stream of British Muslim university students are being convicted of a wide range of terrorist offences.”

But then, Brandon and his colleagues at Quilliam have made a comfortable living out of hyping up such threats, haven’t they?

‘Religious hardliners’ attack Moscow gay rights rally

Posted on by Bob Pitt

RFI reports: “Moscow police Saturday detained three prominent foreign gay rights leaders and a number of local activists after religious hardliners attacked them.”

The “religious hardliners” responsible for this shameful attack were of course Russian Orthodox Christians. But then, nobody would imagine that gay rights demonstrators in Moscow would be attacked by any other sort of religious hardliner. Would they?