Dressed in black shirts with faces hidden by helmets, ten men on motorbikes came to find him on a Saturday, after darkness fell.
Finding the door bolted at his home in a pot-holed Athens side street, they smashed the windows, broke in and trashed the place. Then, their dirty work done, the neo-Nazi gang roared away into the hot evening. It had taken less than a minute for them to sound an ugly warning that foreigners were not welcome in Greece.
A Queens man has been trapped in Europe for the last 17 days, says a civil rights group, because his name is allegedly on the no-fly list.
Samir Suljovic, 26, first tried to fly back home to New York from Vienna, Austria, on October 1. Airline agents told the New Yorker that he could not board a return flight at the request of his own government.
On Wednesday, the New York Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NY) issued a statement that demands that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) allow Suljovic to return home from his current location, Germany.
In an exclusive interview, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Ahmed Rehab tells Gihan Shahine of Al-Ahram how Muslims should react to the current wave of anti-Islamic bigotry.
“Spencer takes it upon himself on this blog, with help from his triple-digit income and single digit IQ cohorts, to try to ‘expose’ the way Muslims are trying at some sort of world domination.”
Dartunorro Clark on the man behind Jihad Watch.
A judge slammed prosecutors today (Mon) for failing to charge a knifeman with racism after he screamed vile abuse at worshippers outside a mosque.
Jonathan Russell, 32, waved a blade at two men on their way to prayers before snarling: “Where’s Allah to protect you now?” But in a bizarre move, lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to class the crime as racially motivated because they said he was “commenting generally”.
Some national Jewish organizations joined a coalition of religious groups calling on the Washington Metro system to donate profits from an anti-Islam ad to charity.
“The placing of offensive, anti-Muslim ads in the D.C. Metro system is an important opportunity to affirm our commitment both to free speech and to a society that deplores hate and hate speech,” said Rabbi Batya Steinlauf, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington’s director of social justice and interfaith initiatives, and president of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. “We are all part of one community,” she said.
A Roman Catholic cardinal has caused an uproar at the Vatican by screening a spurious YouTube video that makes alarmist predictions about the growth of Islam in Europe.
The seven-minute clip, called “Muslim Demographics,” was the talk of an international gathering of bishops on Monday, two days after Cardinal Peter Turkson screened it during a free discussion period.
The family of Babar Ahmad have spoken out following the Government’s decision to block the extradition of Gary McKinnon on human rights grounds.
Mr McKinnon, 46, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, was facing extradition and a lengthy jail sentence after he admitted “hacking” into US government computers but claimed he was looking for evidence of UFOs.
Home Secretary Theresa May today blocked the move citing McKinnon’s illness as the primary reason for not sending him to the United States.
Last week Tooting residents Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan, who also suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, were extradited to the US on terror charges despite being detained without trial for more than five years.
But the family of Mr Ahmad, reacting to today’s news, accused the Government of “double standards” and “old-fashioned racism”.
Several Muslim families pulled their daughters out of schools in Russia’s south after the girls were told they were not allowed to wear their hijabs, a top Muslim said on Monday.
The Mufti of the southern Stavropol region Muhammad-Haji Rakhimov said he had received complaints from several parents whose daughters were for the first time not being allowed into their schools wearing their hijabs. The situation resembles a “stalemate” because both the Muslim parents and school authorities refuse to budge, and several girls including second-graders have not been to school for two weeks now, he said.
“The parents of these girls are not letting them go to school, which can lead to the child welfare services taking them away,” Rakhimov said. He could not explain the authorities’ sudden change in school policies. “There have not been any problems before this month.”
He added that there were now “many girls” in the Stavropol region who were being kept out of school for this reason, and their parents were too poor to send them to private schools.
One such institution is a rural public school in the village of Kara-Tyube, close to the overwhelmingly Muslim region of Dagestan. The school’s list of rules posted on its website says that students’ appearance should be in line with the “business style used in a secular society, excluding provocative elements”.
Nationalist organizations have criticized Moscow Chief Mufti Albir Krganov’s initiative to build more mosques in Russia to accommodate the needs of the large inflow of immigrants from Muslim countries.
“This approach is not totally correct,” chairman of the Russkiye movement’s supervisory board Alexander Belov [pictured] told Interfax on Tuesday.
“It is necessary to decide once and for all – whether Russia will turn into an Islamic state or will remain a secular state, where foreign immigrants come, find jobs and leave after their work is over,” he said.
“If immigrants live no one knows where but want to build a mosque in my yard, this approach is certainly wrong,” Belov said.