The police are failing to investigate hundreds of cases of anti-Muslim hate messages on the internet, according to a government-funded monitoring group.
Tell Mama, which records anti-Muslim attacks, says it recorded 1,432 cases of abuse in the last 22 months. But Tell Mama has told the BBC it has only had a response from the police regarding 70 cases. The Association of Chief Police Officers said it was working to address the concerns expressed by Tell Mama.
Hundreds of people gathered in Wakefield today to oppose a protest by the far-right English Defence League.
Community group We are Wakefield staged a multi-cultural celebration as a counter-protest to an EDL demonstration in the city centre this afternoon.
Around 100 EDL members gathered on Brook Street amid a heavy police presence for around an hour from 2pm.
A far-right activist has been handed a community order for assault and firing an air rifle out of his New Addington home.
Frank Day, 65, attacked Samuel Bartlett and later fired a Titan air rifle from his house in Arnhem Drive, New Addington, on September 3. He pleaded guilty to assault by beating and firing the weapon at Croydon Magistrates’ Court today (Friday).
Anne Marie Waters seems to be making a habit of resigning these days. Last month she left the Labour Party – citing its support for multiculturalism, selection of Ken Livingstone as its London mayoral candidate, and imposition of legal restrictions on hate speech as reasons for her departure – and now she has resigned from her post as joint spokesperson for the anti-sharia campaign One Law for All.
Last week Waters’ co-spokesperson Maryam Namazie posted Waters’ resignation letter on the OLFA website. Waters says in it that she still believes the “fight against sharia and Islamism” is “one of the most important and urgent causes we face in the 21st Century”. But rather than conducting this struggle through OLFA she will be “working with other people and groups to speak out for democracy, liberty, and the right to freedom of speech and association”. No doubt she has in mind her friends at the Danish-Swedish “counterjihad” publication Dispatch International, to which she has become a regular contributor (her most recent article is entitled “Stoning to death is now a moderate position in the UK”).
A teenager posted a hate message on a Muslim organisation’s Facebook page after seeing a video of a woman being stoned to death, York magistrates were told.
Aaron Hodgson, of Pinfold Avenue, Sherburn-in-Elmet, “took exception” after watching a video online showing two Muslim men stoning a Muslim woman, said his solicitor, Stephen Welford.
He posted the message on the Muslim Defence League’s Facebook page, said Christine Turnbull, prosecuting.
Hodgson, who is now 20, admitted sending a message that was grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing, and was fined £100.
A sickening spate of brutal attacks on Asians in Cradley Heath has led to the arrest of a gang of local teenagers.
Asian pensioners have been beaten up, a young boy slapped in front of a mosque and a driver traumatised after the gang smashed his car up. Police launched a major hate crime investigation and arrested a five teenagers on suspicion of racially aggravated assault and criminal damage.
Two men who set fire to a Gloucester mosque were former members of the EDL, a court heard.
Clive Michael Ceronne, 37, from Gloucester, and Ashley Henry Juggins, 21, from Cheltenham, had both been on the controversial group’s marches prior to starting the blaze at the Masjid-E-Noor in the city’s Ryecroft Street. Gloucester Crown Court heard today the pair had been driving around and shouting abuse at Muslims on the evening before the arson.
Ceronne was jailed for four-and-a-half years and Juggins for three-and-a-half for the arson.
Lars Hedegaard accepts award for ‘Silent Conquest’ (left) and Nick Cohen with Firoozeh Bazrafkan (right)
Nick Cohen recently treated us to yet another of his “Left capitulates to Islamism” articles, this one in the Spectator. As is often the way with Cohen, he tried to evade accusations of Islamophobia by framing his arguments as an expression of admiration for a non-white opponent of Islam, in this case the Danish-Iranian artist Firoozeh Bazrafkan. He recounted:
When I met her, she was enduring a crash course in politically correct Europe’s many hypocrisies. White Danes reported her to the police for writing that Muslim men abuse and murder their daughters, and adding for good measure that the ‘Koran is more immoral, deplorable and crazy than manuals of the two other global religions combined’.
You could say that her remarks were offensive. You could say that the inattentive reader might just take them to mean that all Muslim men abuse and murder their daughters. But if every remark that someone might find offensive or misinterpret were banned, the human race would fall silent.
UK Muslim communities are home to “thousands of potential home-grown terrorists”, former UK Independence Party leader Lord Pearson has warned.
Such people “hate us with frightening religious fervour”, he said during a parliamentary debate on Islam. Sharia law was “running de facto in our land” and calls for violence were not simply coming from a “few extremists”.
But faith minister Baroness Warsi said Lord Pearson was either “ignorant” or attempting to “distort” views of Islam.
The jury in the trial of a Loughborough teenager accused of planning a repeat of the Columbine high school massacre has been discharged after failing to reach a verdict on his terrorism charges.
The 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named because of his age, was accused of stockpiling weapons for an assault on his former school in Loughborough, as well as naming a sixth-form college, a local mosque, cinema and council offices as potential targets.