The West Sacramento Islamic Center was vandalized overnight and leaders there are calling it a hate crime.
The center is under construction, being rebuilt, but leaders fear it won’t ever get done if someone doesn’t stop damaging their sacred place.
Abdul Karim Yusufzai on Saturday showed CBS13 the damage done by vandals, vandals he’s convinced are filled with hate. “It is hate,” he said. “They know this is a community center, a religious building.”
The organization that represents Texas’ Catholic high schools on Thursday called for a comprehensive review of the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, calling TAPPS’ treatment of Jewish and Muslim schools unacceptable.
“Failure to sufficiently improve the structure and management of TAPPS will require a re-examination of our 43 Catholic schools’ continued affiliation with TAPPS,” wrote Margaret McGettrick, education director of the Texas Catholic Conference Education Department.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is amping up his language on President Obama’s faith and his relationship with Muslims. Gingrich told ABC News Friday that that he takes the president at his word that he’s a Christian, but finds it “very bizarre” that Obama is “desperately concerned to apologize to Muslim religious fanatics.”
The Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and a civil rights law firm have filed a joint complaint against the city of Lomita for denying the Islamic Center of South Bay’s application to rebuild and renovate its mosque.
The federal complaint, filed Wednesday at the U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles, contends that the city is discriminating against the mosque and that there is no evidence to back up neighbors’ concerns of increased traffic.
”This is a last resort for the center under federal law,” said attorney Anne Richardson. “We are seeking injunctive relief and we’re asking the city to reverse its denial of the application and allow the mosque to move forward with its plans.”
American lobbyists make large donations to a foundation set up by the anti-immigration PVV, Hero Brinkman, the MP who left the party on Tuesday, told a television talk show on Tuesday evening.
Brinkman said he could not rule out the money being used to pay for Geert Wilders’ defence on racial hatred charges but declined to comment further on what the money had been spent on. Nor would he comment on the size of the donations.
The PVV is thought to generate significant funding from Israeli and far-right supporters in the US.
Because the PVV has no members, it does not receive government subsidies to run the campaigning side of its operations and relies instead on donations.
Brinkman’s allegation about the PVV’s finances confirms what had already been revealed in the Dutch press. In 2010 Volkskrant and NRC reported that the two main US sources for Wilders’ funding were David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes.
Update: See “U.S. groups helped fund Dutch anti-Islam politician Wilders”, Reuters, 10 September 2012
Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau’s more ethically murky practices.
BAY CITY — A Bangor Township man who police said yelled racial slurs outside a Bay City bar has accepted a plea deal, and he may avoid jail if he writes a convincing report on Muslims’ cultural contributions.
Delane D. Bell, 25, earlier this month pleaded no contest to a two-year felony count of ethnic intimidation. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to dismiss misdemeanor counts of assault and battery and malicious destruction of property between $200 and $1,000.
We dealt rather contemptuously with Andrew Gilligan’s “revelation” that Ken Livingstone is intending to turn London into a “beacon of Islam”. However, in the interests of balance, it should be pointed out that Gilligan does have his admirers:
Federal and state grand juries have indicted a New York man on suspicion of hate crimes in connection with five New Year’s Day Molotov cocktail attacks, including one against a mosque and another on a building used as a Hindu place of worship.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and the Queens District attorney on Monday announced their indictments separately in “parallel cases,” an unusual circumstance in which state and federal charges are brought over the same incident.
The Bartlett meeting began with the Pledge of Allegiance — to the American flag and to the Republic for which about 50 citizens have gathered to express their deep concern. “Radical Islam is here and it’s threatening every freedom we hold dear,” said Mason Ezzell, a local businessman and former Air Force pilot.
He was addressing the February meeting of the Memphis chapter of ACT! for America, a grassroots, anti-Islam organization that claims more than 150,000 members in 650 chapters across the country. “I wish it wasn’t true. I hate that it is. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Many Muslims are good people who just don’t know what’s happening. We don’t want to believe what’s happening, but it is. This is real, folks.”