An investigation is underway after an arson attack at a mosque in Bury Park in the early hours of this morning (April 2).
Fire crews were called to the Bury Park Jamia Masjid in Bury Park Road at 4.30am, after two large metal bins were pushed up against a door and set alight. The scene has been cordoned off by police while a fire investigation takes place.
An investigation into an allegation that an English Defence League leader had made racist comments on Facebook has been dropped. Kevin Carroll was arrested in January but a Bedfordshire Police spokeswoman said the case had now been dropped due to lack of evidence.
Alan Hays, a Republican state senator in Florida, likened Sharia law to a “dreadful disease” requiring vaccination to protect Americans.
Because of her choice to wear a headscarf, Samia Kaddour, a Muslim, has all but abandoned trying to land a government job in France. Soon, some private sector jobs could be off limits, too.
French President Francois Hollande says he wants a new law that could extend restrictions on the wearing of prominent religious symbols in state jobs into the private sector. His new tack comes after a top French court ruled in March that a day care operator that gets some state funding unfairly fired a woman in a headscarf, sparking a political backlash.
The EDL/NEI protest in Sunderland wasn’t the only far-right anti-Muslim demonstration on Saturday. A number of fascist groups gathered outside the University of Nottingham to protest against the Family Retreat event being held at the conference centre over the Easter weekend, at which Haitham al-Haddad was an advertised speaker.
A Watford man has pleaded guilty to religiously aggravated harassment after leaving a pig’s head outside a mosque in Herefordshire on February 21.
43 year-old Karl Smith, of Gullet Wood Road, was charged with religiously aggravated harassment after leaving the animal’s head in North Jamia Watford Mosque’s car park during evening prayers.
A lecturer at a Swedish university was suspended last month after sending a racist email lampooning a new student as “Mohammed from Mecca”.
“Hello Anneli, can you help Mohammed? He’s probably come straight from Mecca,” wrote Swedish lecturer and local Centre Party politician, Hans-Erik Hellborg, after receiving a request for guidance from newly admitted student Merhan Mahmoudi, 23.
However, Hellborg apparently hit the reply button by mistake, instead sending the note to Mahmoudi.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France is promoting a petition which condemns the hijacking of the principle of secularism in order to demonise the Muslim community and calls for a parliamentary commission to investigate the rise of Islamophobia in France. “There is no real secularism without freedom”, the petition states. It was published with an initial 40 prominent signatories in Le Monde last week under the headline “Do not stigmatise Muslims!”
There was yet another far-right protest yesterday at the site of the planned mosque at Millfield in Sunderland. This one was organised by the English Defence League and the North East Infidels.
The Infidels, you may recall, originated in a split from the EDL two years ago. The EDL leadership, who at that point were still trying to maintain the pretence that they had nothing to do with fascism, denounced the Infidels as Nazis – which was an entirely accurate description.
However, following the disastrous Waltham Forest demonstration last September the EDL leadership issued an appeal for far-right unity in a desperate attempt to reverse declining numbers at its protests. As a result, demonstrations have seen increased co-operation between the EDL and the Infidels, for example at Shotton Colliery in December and in Manchester earlier this month.
Until 9/11, Islam didn’t figure in the New Atheists’ attacks in a prominent way. As a phenomenon with its roots in Europe, atheism has traditionally been the archenemy of Christianity, though Jews and Judaism have also slipped into the mix. But emboldened by their newfound fervor in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the New Atheists joined a growing chorus of Muslim-haters, mixing their abhorrence of religion in general with a specific distaste for Islam (In 2009, Hitchens published a book called “God Is Not Great,” a direct smack at Muslims who commonly recite the Arabic refrain Allah Akbar, meaning “God is great”). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God’s existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling. The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.
Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, skewers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.