Category Archives: USA

San Diego: right-wing Christian cranks target school pupils with anti-Muslim leaflets

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Defend Christians leaflet

A religious organization’s campaign that focuses on passing out anti-Muslim literature to students is being criticized, but the group’s founder believes he is doing nothing wrong.

The organization Defend Christians has been passing out fliers to students at some local high schools, including Clairemont High School. But some say teenagers should not be the ones receiving the fliers.

Zac Patchett recently saw a flier sitting in his Clairemont home. The two-page paper shows a headline which reads “Ayatollah Khomeini had sex with a 4-year-old girl” and is critical of Islam for its beliefs. Patchett learned someone passed it out to his younger sister, a sophomore at Clairemont High School. When he saw what was on it, he said, “I was just personally offended. It goes against being an American.”

When asked whether the fliers are a form of racism, Gary Cass of Defend Christians said, “This isn’t racist at all. All it’s doing is telling the truth about a group of people that are organized around a religious ideology. It transcends race.”

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Lisa Valentine wins settlement: Douglasville courthouse screenings will now be adapted to accommodate religious head coverings

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lisa_ValentineDOUGLASVILLE, Ga. — A Muslim woman who was arrested in 2008 after refusing to remove her hijab in a Douglasville courtroom has received a settlement from the city.

The settlement includes changes to the way people wearing religious head coverings are screened when they enter the courthouse, according to Azadeh Shahshahani with the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.

Lisa Valentine spent several hours in jail in December 2008 after declining to take off her hijab while accompanying her nephew to a traffic hearing in Douglasville Municipal Court. She sued the city in December 2010, saying her free speech rights were violated when she was asked to remove the head covering.

“We are glad that the city of Douglasville has acknowledged that the way that Ms. Valentine was treated was inexcusable and awful,” Shahshahani said. “No one should feel singled out in a court of law simply for observing her faith.”

According to Thursday’s settlement, Douglasville has adopted a special policy that allows people wearing religious head coverings to be screened in a private area by an officer of the same gender.

“I am glad that Douglasville has agreed to formal policies to make sure this never happens to anyone else,” Valentine said after her settlement hearing.

WXIA-TV, 6 October 2011

See also ACLU press release, 6 October 2011

Former employee sues US security agency over anti-Muslim bias

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A former employee is suing one of the government’s most secretive security agencies, alleging he lost his security clearance because his wife attended an Islamic school and worked for a Muslim charity. Mahmoud Hegab filed the discrimination lawsuit this week in federal court in Virginia against the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at Fort Belvoir.

The Alexandria resident worked at NGA as a budget analyst with a top-secret security clearance. But his clearance was revoked in November after he got married. NGA officials told him they were concerned about his wife’s schooling at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school in northern Virginia. Officials also cited her employment with an Islamic relief agency as a reason for revoking the clearance.

Associated Press, 6 October 2011

Bomb alert over Muslim jogging in weight vest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A shocked student was stopped and searched by armed cops after he was mistaken for a suicide bomber – while out jogging in a WEIGHT VEST.

Stunned Goudarz Karimi, 25, was simply on a mission to get fit when he was forced to remove the 30kg personal training vest so it could be checked for explosives. Officers were called by a concerned member of the public who reported seeing a man wearing what he thought was a bomb suit.

The shocked Iranian was then advised by police to wear his coat over the outfit when using it in the future. He said: “I’m 100 per cent sure that if I was blond with Caucasian skin type nobody would have noticed and said anything about it, but I am of dark skin complexion and from Iran and I’m sure that is related to it.”

Oxford University student Goudarz, who was training in the city at the time, added: “I felt a bit like my rights were violated. The police told me to take my vest off and to go home and I don’t see why I should.”

Sun, 5 October 2011

Muslim superhero comics meet resistance in U.S.

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dan Merica reports on the difficulties faced by Naif Al-Mutawa in getting a TV series based on Islam-inspired comic book THE 99 aired in the United States.

CNN Belief blog, 5 October 2011

Pamela Geller, who has featured prominently in the campaign against THE 99, reports: “CNN, the crescent news network, is shilling for a particularly insidious form of cultural jihad that is targeting our children: comic books featuring Islamic superheroes.”

NYPD spied on city’s Muslim partners

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reda ShataThe New York Police Department’s intelligence squad secretly assigned an undercover officer to monitor a prominent Muslim leader even as he decried terrorism, cooperated with the police, dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and was the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by The New York Times about Muslims in America.

Sheikh Reda Shata was among those singled out for surveillance because of his “threat potential” and what the NYPD considered links to organizations associated with terrorism, despite having never been charged with any crime, according to secret police documents obtained by The Associated Press.

This was life in America for Shata: a government partner in the fight against terrorism and a suspect at the same time.

During his time at the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge since 2002, he welcomed FBI agents to his mosque to speak to Muslims, invited NYPD officers for breakfast and threw parties for officers who were leaving the precinct. As police secretly watched Shata in 2006, he had breakfast and dinner with Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion and was invited to meet with Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Shata recalls.

“This is very sad,” Shata said after seeing his name in the NYPD file. “What is your feeling if you see this about people you trusted?”

Associated Press, 5 October 2011

Lilburn, Georgia: bigots threaten to oust local politicians who approved mosque expansion

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a report on the Georgia town of Lilburn, where the city council was the target of a lawsuit by the US Justice Department over claims that it discriminated against an application by the Dar-e Abbas Islamic centre for planning permission to expand its premises.

The city council, which spent nearly $63,000 in legal expenses on the case before finally settling with the Justice Department in August, received emails from concerned residents, such as: “Remember the World Trade Center and what these people stand for. By letting these people having [sic] a Mosque built is only a stepping stone to possible future disasters.”

Opponents of the mosque development have threatened that council members who approved the application will pay a political price in Lilburn’s municipal elections in November.

Pam Geller linked anti-Muslim activist calls for mass murder of Congressmen, Muslims, liberals and journalists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Further evidence has emerged of violent threats (“send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes”, “burn all the mosques”) by John Joseph Jay, a founding members of the board of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, the umbrella organisation for Stop Islamization of America. Think Progress has the details.

Update:  See “Spencer and Geller disavow anti-Muslim activist’s call for violence, say he was never a board member”, also at Think Progress.