Some thoughtful observations by Yasir Qadhi on the media response to the Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria.
Muslim woman called ‘Taliban’ during interview about anti-Muslim candidate
Republican Louis Tafoya is running against New Mexico State Rep. Georgene Louis (D), but Tafoya is raising eyebrows by sharing some anti-Muslim statements and links on his Facebook page.
Tafoya’s Facebook page includes a link titled, “Pedophilia & Islam,” noted Progress Now New Mexico. Tafoya also shared a post on Facebook that all religions can get along, except for Muslims.
The GOP candidate refused to comment about his Facebook posts, but Khadija Chudnoff, a member of the University of New Mexico’s Muslim Student Association, told KRQE, “New Mexico deserves somebody who is going to check their facts before they click, ‘share,’ on their Facebook page. This is something a teenager would do. It’s not something someone searching for political office should be doing.”
Vlaams Belang tries to boost election prospects with anti-Islam stunts
The Helsinki-based company Sanoma Media is threatening to take action against the Belgian far-right party Vlaams Belang for circulating fake front pages of the magazines Flair and Libelle featuring women in veils and burqas.
VB is protesting against the magazines’ refusal to accept adverts for the book Hoer noch slavin – vrouwen en islam (“Whore or slave – women in Islam”) by Anke Van dermeersch, who is leader of the Vlaams Belang group in the Belgian Senate.
VB leader Filip Dewinter has accused Sanoma Media of upholding “the misogynistic views of Islam”. He defended the fake covers, which associate Muslim women with firebombs and grenades, as merely a “humorous parody”.
Last year VB was successfully sued by French footwear designer Christian Louboutin over the use of his shoes on an anti-Islam poster.
Six men in court over EDL violence outside Nuneaton pub
Six men have appeared in court following an incident in which English Defence League supporters were involved in violence outside a Nuneaton town centre pub. The men were arrested after police turned up to deal with fights which broke out in Bridge Street, Nuneaton, and in the doorway of the George Eliot pub.
Noting at the crown court in Leamington that the incident had taken place as long ago as February 2011, Judge Sylvia de Bertodano asked why it had taken so long to get to court. Prosecutor Aliya Rashid explained that the police had been searching for witnesses and trying to track down other people who had been involved.
EDL member described as future killer by own mother
A teenager accused of plotting a “new Columbine” massacre was called a future mass killer by his mother, a court heard.
Michael Piggin allegedly had a hit list of pupils and teachers he wanted to kill. He also plotted to attack a mosque, threatened to murder TV’s David Dickinson and said he wanted to blow up Poundland because “it’s too expensive”.
Piggin’s mother compared him to Adam Lanza who killed 20 US schoolchildren and six staff in Connecticut in 2012, the Old Bailey heard.
Unless you called Lord’s Resistance Army ‘Christianist’ stop calling Boko Haram ‘Islamist’
Over at the ever-excellent Loonwatch, Garibaldi writes: “Western journalists and media outlets have been extremely irresponsible in lazily describing Boko Haram as an ‘Islamist’ and or ‘Islamic’ group…. This is a good place to remind readers that ‘Islamist’ is quite often used as a blunt polemical hammer that dumb downs our understanding and quite often conflates fringe and even cult-like groups such as Boko Haram with ‘Islam’ as a whole.”
Garibaldi notes the media’s very different reporting of the Lord’s Resistance Army: “In a clear double standard the LRA’s (its leader Joseph Kony is fond of describing himself as a ‘devout Christian’) relation to Christianity is rarely mentioned in media reports. When it is mentioned there is a painstaking effort to relate how bizarre, cult-like and deviant the LRA’s ideology is from mainstream Christianity. Most news outlets and agencies refer to the LRA as a ‘rebel army’.”
Channel 4’s Muslim call to prayer is top in viewer complaints tally
Channel’s 4 broadcast of a Muslim call to prayer during the holy month of Ramadan was the programme that brought the broadcaster the most complaints last year.
The broadcast received 2,011 complaints about its 4Ramadan season, with 1,658 specifically about the broadcast of the daily call to prayer.
Writing in the broadcaster’s annual report, the head of factual programmes for Channel 4, Ralph Lee, said: “The level of Islamophobia we encountered with the 4Ramadan season was unexpected, though much of it came from communities that were either very polarised or very undiverse.”
Lee said he had personally received hundreds of emails complaining about the broadcast after he defended it in an article for the Radio Times, in which he said it would “act as a nationwide Tannoy system” and a provocation to viewers “in the very real sense of the word”.
Channel 4 received a total of 16,835 complaints in 2013. The second most complained about show was Crazy About One Direction, a documentary about the boyband’s most devoted fans, which attracted 1,056 complaints.
Stand Up to UKIP holds protest against Farage in Edinburgh
The hateful views of UKIP candidate Magnus Nielsen
I sent a letter to the Camden New Journal this week exposing the bigoted views of local UK Independence Party council candidate Magnus Nielsen. They didn’t see fit to publish it.
Evidently the CNJ doesn’t think it newsworthy that a rabid Islamophobe like Nielsen is standing for local government in a borough with a large Muslim population. At any rate, whereas the Hampstead & Highgate Express ran an article on it, and Nielsen’s obnoxious views even made the national media, the CNJ hasn’t bothered to report the story.
The CNJ did, however, think it appropriate to publish a letter from Nielsen last year claiming that “the logic of ‘affirmative action’ on behalf of the self-styled ‘underprivileged’ is seriously flawed and can only have disastrous consequences for society as a whole”, and that a House of Commons which reflected the diversity of the British electorate would necessarily discriminate against “able-bodied, happily-married, heterosexual, men of Anglo Saxon heritage”.
Daily Mail follows Sun in stoking halal hysteria
Yesterday we had the Sun running an anti-halal story on its front page under the screaming headline “Halal secrets of Pizza Express”. Not to be outdone in the field of right-wing anti-Muslim scaremongering, the Daily Mail decided to run this story on its front page today.
Of course, this is not the first time the Mail has tried to work its readers up into an anti-Muslim frenzy over the issue of halal slaughter by appealing to their ignorance and bigotry.