A coordinated campaign is underway by a prominent Nassau County official to persuade Great Neck Synagogue leadership to cancel an appearance next month by outspoken Islam critic Pamela Geller, according to several sources.
Habeeb U. Ahmed, one of 15 appointed members of the Nassau Commission on Human Rights, has urged members of an interfaith group to bar Geller from speaking April 14 in Great Neck, according to a Jewish Press report.
The East London Mosque is opening its doors to non-Muslims in an attempt to promote a better understanding of Islam and what goes on inside the building.
Members of the local community are invited to take a look inside the mosque, observe prayers and ask questions about the religion, however challenging.
There will be an exhibition about the way of life for Muslims in the UK, as well as information about culture and history.
French Muslim leaders opened on Friday, March 29, the Bourget’s 30th annual gathering in a climate of anxiety resulting from the recent controversy about hijab ruling.
“There is a real sense of unease among us,” Ahmed Jaballah, the president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), told Agence France Presse (AFP). “The latest statements on secularism show that there is a drift away,” he added.
Ahmed was referring to the recent controversy which followed a ruling by France’s top court that the dismissal of a Muslim woman from a private nursery school for refusing to remove her hijab amounted to “religious discrimination”.
In an unusual move, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls criticized the ruling against the nursery school as putting “secularism into question”.
The parents of a Muslim student say their daughter was discriminated against when a teacher sent her to the office for wearing traditional Muslim headwear called a hijab, but school officials say the teacher was only following school policy regarding hats and head coverings.
Attia Gray, 15, a sophomore at the Hammond Academy of Science and Technology, said her teacher looked at her hijab on Tuesday and told her she couldn’t wear it. “I said I can’t take it off, it’s for religious purposes. She sent me down to the office.”
Both Jessica Huseman at PolicyMic and Jason Stanford at the Huffington Post report on a controversy stirred up by two right-wing lunatics named Ginger Russell and Janice VanCleave, who claim to have discovered that “for the last seven years students all across the state of Texas have been indoctrinated with a pro communist, pro Islamic curriculum called CSCOPE”.
It all began when VanCleave found she was unable to access details of CSCOPE lessons online. As Russell recounts: “After further research it was discovered the Marxist philosophy behind Cscope and numerous lessons with a bias toward Communism pro Islam content.”
You might think that Russell and VanCleave would be dismissed as a couple of hysterical nutters. Not in Texas, however: “Instead, politicians are giving the conspiracy oxygen, and like a fire it is spreading. The Texas Attorney General is investigating CSCOPE and reportedly promised to ‘shut them down completely’ if he uncovers illegality.”
Inayat Bunglawala welcomes this week’s ruling by the Appeals Court rejecting home secretary Theresa May’s latest attempt to deport Abu Qatada. He writes:
“Abu Qatada has now spent around ten years in prison without having been charged with any crime in the UK, let alone having been convicted of one. Can you imagine a middle class white person being treated the same way in the UK?”
As Cadbury ramps up its inventory for Easter, a little-known fact has come to light about its candies – many are sharia-compliant.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, halal certification has become a big business as sharia law continues to extend throughout Australian culture.
Cadbury’s halal certification includes 71 products which are halal, ranging from Cadbury mini eggs to Caramello Koalas to Red Tulip chocolates. The website also states: “We do not have any kosher-certified products.”
“Cadbury also pay for halal certification on the Easter product range, even though Easter is a Christian celebration and nothing to do with Islam,” says Kirralie Smith, who runs a website called Halal Choices, The Herald reports.
According to The Herald, “The essence of halal is that any food is forbidden to Muslims if it includes blood, pork, alcohol, the flesh of carnivores or carrion, or comes from an animal which has not been slaughtered in the correct manner, which includes having its throat slit.”
The pro-Israel group that called enemies of the Jewish state “savage” in subway ads will launch a new campaign to counteract pro-Palestinian billboards that were installed on Metro-North trains this week.
The new ads, paid for by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, feature disturbing images under the headline: “This is Islamic apartheid.”
One of the images shows two blindfolded men getting wrapped with nooses. Below the image, it reads, “Gay under Islamic law (Sharia).” The picture is from Iran, said Pamela Geller, head of the AFDI.
Another picture shows a woman dressed in a white burqa getting whipped above the words: “Under Islamic law rape victims are tortured or killed unless they agree to marry their rapist.” Geller said that picture is from Indonesia.
She submitted the ads to the MTA yesterday. It’s unclear when they will go up; her ads have been approved before.
A small but vocal group of bigots can congratulate themselves for successfully hijacking a much-needed national discussion on multicultural service provision, writes Dr Chloe Patton.
An advocacy group says 18 Muslims have filed federal complaints against a Westerville-based logistics company, saying they were fired for praying at work.
Exel Inc., a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, is accused of denying requests to adjust break times to accommodate prayer or to allow employees to take unpaid prayer breaks, according to the Columbus chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The council said it filed the complaints on behalf of the workers with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission yesterday.