Many Muslims, fed up with what they see as Islamophobia, are upping sticks and heading for the Middle East.
Italy asks Muslim groups to join ‘values charter’
Italy’s interior ministry has published a “values charter” for religious minorities that promotes integration while shunning polygamy and the wearing of face-concealing veils. Regarding the veil, it says that while “no restrictions on clothing exist in Italy … (veils that) cover the face are not acceptable because they prevent the recognition of the person and are an obstacle for establishing relationships with others.”
French presidential election: Muslims reject Sarkozy
Muslim electors in France shunned rightwing presidential frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy and opted in droves for Socialist candidate Segolene Royal in the first round of voting on Sunday, according to a newly published CSA-CISCO poll commissioned by Catholic daily La Croix. Just one percent of Muslims cast their ballot for crime busting free marketeer Sarkozy, compared with a massive 64 percent for Royal and 19 percent for centrist candidate Francois Bayrou.
Mosque at Abbey Mills
“There has been a deliberate attempt to sensationalise this issue and it has been done on the basis of limited knowledge and misinformation. Some of the consequences, whether they were intentional or not, have been to create fear and anxiety to polarise people within our wider community.”
Transform Newham, 24 April 2007
The article also contains some interesting information about leading anti-mosque campaigner Councillor Alan Craig:
“His letter to the ‘Newham Recorder’ was published on 20th June 2001 ‘Unless there are safety or other technical objections the Muslim community should be allowed to build the mosque at West Ham’. He wrote on 27th February 2002 ‘I argued publicly that the council should give the go-ahead to the West Ham mosque’. He wrote this of the same Muslim group that in 2006 he was accuse of involvement in terrorism.”
‘In this country we are able to dress, or undress, exactly as we see fit’
In a letter to the Guardian, one Linda Allan of Bath responds to Manal Omar’s article detailing the hostility she faced when wearing an “Islamic-style” swimsuit at a fitness club in Oxford:
“I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t go swimming like this in Britain; it’s because women in this country are equal to men and are not obliged to cover themselves up when swimming – or indeed at any other time – because some men somewhere have decided that’s how it has to be.
“Women in Britain fought for and died for the right to be equal. In this country we are able to dress, or undress, exactly as we see fit. If that’s not your choice, poor you. But don’t be surprised when people mock you and pass comment on your totally inappropriate clothing for swimming.”
Happily, most of the other letters are in support of Manal Omar.
Muslim veil ‘allowed in courts’
Muslim women will be allowed to wear a veil in court under new guidelines issued following a dispute last year. The Judicial Studies Board’s Equal Treatment Advisory Committee examined whether women should be allowed to wear the full facial covering, the niqab. Decisions should be made on each case and veils should not interfere with the administration of justice, it found.
See also Judicial Communications Office news release, 24 April 2007
The Islamic threat to Europe: by the numbers
Europol’s report on terrorism in the European Union reveals that Islamists carried out only one of the 498 terrorist attacks in the EU in 2006.
Swedish security police ‘harasses Muslims’
A major crisis management training exercise taking place in Stockholm next week will contribute to further stigmatization of Muslims, according to two leading members of the Green Party. “The security police constantly engages in harassing Muslims and actively contributes to fuelling Islamophobia,” wrote Stockholm’s opposition vice mayor Yvonne Ruwaida and member of parliament Mehmet Kaplan on Dagens Nyheter‘s opinion page.
The politicians believe that the crisis exercise which the Swedish Emergency Management Agency (Krisberedskapsmyndigheten) is starting on Wednesday will follow this pattern. Around 4,000 people will participate in the exercise and the scenario which they will attempt to deal with is described as “a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction”.
The terrorists in the exercise have been given the fictional name of ‘Bogalanders’. They live in one of the predominantly immigrant “Million Homes” areas, their religion is split into two factions and they are protesting against the occupation of holy ground in “Bogaland”. “The parallels with Muslims and Islam are not exactly hard to find,” wrote Kaplan and Ruwaida.
Fascists reject poll of London Muslims
The British National Party joins Civitas and Melanie Phillips in rejecting Gallup’s poll of London Muslims as a Saudi-financed fraud:
“The recent Times article, claiming that a new poll shows Muslim Londoners are ‘model citizens’, is merely the latest example of the time-honoured art of deliberately-biased polling. It proves basically nothing, except that the Times, once the house organ of the old-time establishment, is now the perfectly-tuned spokesman of the new, liberal, establishment. The poll numbers are probably not literally faked, though this cannot be ruled out. The trick is all in the selection of rigged questions, and knowing how to call the right people, at the right time, so as to get the desired result.”
Far Right targets the suburbs
Revealed: How the far-Right targets suburbs by stealth
A community action group campaigning to save local shops and running a May Fayre sound harmless. But its leader was a prominent member of the National Front …
By Andrew Gilligan
Evening Standard, 23 April 2007
FORTY MILES apart, two different election candidates are presenting two different faces of the Right. Ian Anderson, a community activist standing for election in Epping, is talking about the need to save the town’s small shops, the iniquity of fortnightly refuse collections, and the inadequacy of the local council. But he has a past that not all his voters might know about.
An hour and a half round the M25, on this St George’s Day afternoon, several members of the BNP, ‘Britain’s foremost patriotic party’, are more than half-way through their most patriotic endeavour yet: to become local councillors to the Queen.
For the first time in history, and much to the consternation of the locals, the BNP is standing candidates in the expensive environs of Windsor. From one of the wards they are contesting, you can see the Royal Standard fluttering over Windsor Castle as Her Majesty winds up her Easter break.
‘I would like to feel the Queen approves of what we’re doing,’ says Matt Tait, 22, the BNP’s own standard-bearer in Windsor’s Clewer North ward, generously overlooking the fact that Her Majesty is herself of German ancestry. ‘One of the main issues is to keep Windsor as an English town. We do not want to become like Slough.’
The Queen can, in theory, vote in this election, although she does not seem to be on the register (her husband is listed, under the name ‘HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh’). It does, however, seem rather unlikely that she, or many other Windsor residents, will be turning out for the BNP.
The racist party’s presence in this middle-class town is the result of a kind of accident: the three days of disturbances last year that followed firebomb attacks on a Muslim-owned dairy that was seeking planning permission to add an Islamic education centre on its site.
It is also supposed to symbolise what is being called the BNP’s ‘push into the suburbs’, with far-Right candidates fanning out from their traditional council-estate territory into such unlikely places as Shrewsbury, Harrogate, and Henley-on-Thames.
In the South-East alone, the BNP is standing in 20 councils, including Horsham, parliamentary seat of the Tory chairman, Francis Maude, where the party won 13 per cent in a council by-election only five months ago.