Mosque imam fears fire was arson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Madni Masjid MosqueA Nottingham mosque has been severely damaged in a fire described by a leading imam as “an act of terrorism against Muslims”.

Police and fire investigators are trying to determine the exact cause of the blaze at the Madni Masjid Mosque on Alberta Terrace in Forest Fields. Imam Raza ul Haq said he believed paint was thrown around the inside of the mosque and then set alight.

The fire, which started on Thursday night, is being treated as suspicious. “It’s not fair. It’s our understanding and belief that this is an act of terrorism against the Muslims,” Imam Haq said. “It’s completely something which people have done deliberately. Someone has entered the building – he has thrown the paint all over the place.”

More than 900 people worship at the converted church which has been used as a mosque for at least 20 years.

BBC News, 6 April 2007

Stop the ‘cancer of Islam’ spreading in universities, urges fascist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… there are now huge numbers of overseas students that are swamping our halls of education. This means that the future of our country – our students – must work that much harder to achieve office and prevent the growth of the cancer of Islam spreading.”

A BNP blogger responds (rather belatedly, and with some confusion over gender) to the election of Fadhil Bakeer Markar and Ruhana Ali as, respectively, General Secretary and Education & Welfare Officer for the LSE Students’ Union.

Home of the Green Arrow, 5 April 2007

‘Anti-Muslim rhetoric’ cited after vandalism at Arizona mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamic Center TucsonOfficials with the Islamic Center of Tucson say a recent rise in “anti-Muslim rhetoric” may have spurred vandalism at the University of Arizona-area mosque.

Tucson Police Department detectives are investigating a Sunday-night break-in at the mosque during which someone smashed the lock on a side door, broke an office window, ransacked the office and wrote “Bush was here” in magic marker across a computer screen. Nothing was stolen, mosque officials said.

Mosque spokesman Muhammad As’ad said it’s possible Sunday’s break-in was a hate crime. “There’s an increasing obsession with Islam that’s been stirred up by a small cadre of people,” he said. “The obsession is growing because of events overseas. We deplore the hate speech going on. After all, Muslims, like Christians, are encouraged to love their neighbors.”

As’ad said an example of the “anti-Muslim rhetoric” was former CNN reporter Steven Emerson’s December lecture at the Tucson Jewish Community Center. Though he denied the accusations, local Muslims accused Emerson of being a disingenuous “fear-monger” who carelessly interchanges the words “Muslim” and “terrorist.”

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Kelly continues to sideline MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The government is planning to intervene in some mosques to support Muslims who want to marginalise extremists. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly will announce a new role for the Charity Commission, strengthening its task of overseeing religious institutions. A £600,000 faith unit within the commission will help Muslims strengthen governance and leadership in mosques.

Ms Kelly’s department has changed government strategy by launching talks with a broader range of Muslim groups. But at the same time, the largest body, the Muslim Council of Britain, has fallen out of favour, leading to claims that ministers are talking only to those prepared to agree with government.

BBC News, 5 April 2007

Standard remove controversial mosque poll

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Evening Standard have removed a controversial poll from their ThisisLondon website after London Mayor Ken Livingstone highlighted an email an campaign to influence the outcome.

The poll asked readers to vote whether or not they were in favour of the Mayor spending £100 million of public money on a new Mosque in East London however Mr Livingstone has repeatedly denied any public funds would be spent on the project.

Yesterday Mr Livingstone said his office has been alerted to a series of emails being sent which make what he calls “a series of false claims about the mosque proposals in such a way as to stir up communal hatred” leading him to write to Veronica Wadley, Editor of the Evening Standard.

In his letter the Mayor asked Ms Wadley to “clarify to readers and visitors to the website that the poll will be disregarded as totally unrepresentative due to the attempt to influence its outcome through untrue mass emails likely to damage community relations in London.”

In response the Standard’s Managing Editor, Doug Willis, told Mr Livingstone the poll had been “published…last September. As is normal with daily polls, it remains on the website. We have today added a sentence to the website saying that since publication of the original poll and article, proposals for this mosque have been revised.”

Mayor Watch, 5 April 2007

Netherlands – Islamophobes split over Wilders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

geert_wildersIn the past few weeks, a debate on the alleged conflict of interest presented by the dual nationality held by two deputy ministers in the Dutch government has demonstrated the ability of right-wing Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders to set the political agenda.

But opposition to Mr Wilders is growing among fellow politicians and journalists, and even well-known Islam critics such as Afshin Ellian and Sylvain Ephimenco are now publicly distancing themselves from the PVV leader. Their opponents, in turn, are jeering at them, saying they must be scared of the monster they helped create. These developments appear to mark a new episode in the Dutch Islam debate.

An open letter to Geert Wilders published in the 12 March edition of the magazine Opinio states: “You are using pseudo-theological one-liners about the Koran and the Prophet to intentionally create as much resentment as possible among offended Muslims.”

The letter would not have created much of a stir had it been written by anyone other than columnist Sylvain Ephimenco, who in the past years has manifested himself as a sharp-tongued critic of Islam. He is one of a group of intellectuals known as The Friends of  Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who give their unconditional support to the former Somali-Dutch MP in her campaign against the “excesses of Islam.”

Geert Wilders has never made a secret of the fact that his objections against immigrants mainly concern Muslims. But he has outdone himself with his recent diatribes against Islam. He has called the Prophet Muhammad a barbarian, an aggressive warlord and says that Muslims who want to stay in the Netherlands had better tear out and throw away half the Koran.

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No.10 website carries threats of violence against Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The extreme right have threatened violence against Muslims on Downing Street’s website in a protest over a proposed Mosque. The British National Party and other neo-Nazi groups are supporting a petition on No.10’s website which warns, ominously, of “terrible violence and suffering” should the so-called mega mosque go ahead. This is certain to be taken as a warning that physical violence could be unleashed against Muslims unless the dissenters get their way and defeat plans to build a mosque on the Olympic site in Stratford, east London.

Blink is encouraging readers to complain to No.10 over the reference to “terrible violence and suffering” if the mosque is built. Please email webmaster@pmo.gov.uk and ask for these words to be removed or failing that, the whole petition taken off line

BLINK, 5 April 2007

Relatives of interned Japanese-Americans side with Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

New York Times, 3 April 2007

Four years in Guantánamo – the man who said no to MI5

Posted on by Bob Pitt

guantanamo-bayBritish resident Jamil el-Banna, 44, knew Abu Qatada, a cleric accused of being al-Qaida’s spiritual leader in Europe.

In 2002 Mr Banna, a father of five from London, was seized by the CIA and secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay, after MI5 wrongly told the Americans that his travelling companion was carrying bomb parts on a business trip to Gambia.

On Friday, his companion, Bisher al-Rawi, was released without charge after four years in the US detention camp, after it emerged that he had helped MI5 keep track of Qatada. But Mr Banna’s incarceration in Cuba continues.

It has now emerged that only days before Mr Banna’s arrest, MI5 visited him at his home and attempted to recruit him as an informer, with the lure of a new identity, relocation and money. The Guardian has obtained this MI5 document in which the intelligence officer details, in his own words, that encounter.

Guardian, 4 April 2007