Call for cameras at every mosque in France after new attack

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Limoges mosque graffitiA Muslim leader called Wednesday for surveillance cameras to be installed at every mosque in France following the latest in a series of attacks on Islamic places of worship.

A mosque in Limoges in the centre of the country had excrement smeared on its doors overnight in an incident that reflects a growing trend, according to Abdallah Zekri, who chairs an Islamophobia Observatory set up by France’s Muslim Council.

“It is time that town councils took this problem seriously and started putting cameras in front of mosques, as is already the case for synagogues,” Zekri said.

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California man confirms role in anti-Islam film

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The search for those behind the provocative, anti-Muslim film implicated in violent protests in Egypt and Libya led Wednesday to a California Coptic Christian convicted of financial crimes who acknowledged his role in managing and providing logistics for the production.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles that he helped with logistics for the filming of “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad and may have caused inflamed mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. He provided the first details about a shadowy production group behind the film.

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Posted in USA

Another ‘price tag’ attack on mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Price tagVandals sprayed right-wing slogans on a mosque near Hebron on Tuesday night.

The graffiti included the words “Price Tag Migron” spray-painted on the outside wall of the Salman al-Farisi mosque in Imreish, southwest of Hebron, in reference to the West Bank outpost the government evacuated on September 2.

B’Tselem – The Israel Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories said on Tuesday that residents of the nearby village of Avda said they chased off a group of settlers who tried to set cars on fire late Tuesday night.

On Monday, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch announced that police plan to create a unit that will focus on investigating price-tag incidents, the name given to acts of right-wing vandalism or violence perpetrated against Palestinians to protest government policy toward the settlements.

Jerusalem Post, 12 September 2012

Teenager in veil robbed in Blackburn street

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A teenager who had just left a mosque was punched in the face by a thief who stole her handbag. The 17-year-old has been left with a suspected fractured eye socket, swelling and bruising to her face after the incident on Saturday.

At the time the girl was wearing full Asian dress including a veil. She described the experience as “terrifying”.

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Photos from the New York SIOA protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Koran toilet paper placardRichard Bartholomew provides a useful roundup of websites featuring photos of the Stop Islamization of America demonstration in New York yesterday.

As predicted, the threat by Geller and Spencer that only American flags would be permitted on the demonstration and that signs would be “confiscated” was widely ignored.

In addition to posters with the word “Sharia” in dripping blood and flyers reading “No Obama’s Mosque”, slogans included “What God Do You Kill For?”, “Cordoba=Conquer, Not Here!”, “Muhummad was the First Radical Muslim: Osama bin Laden is Following Directions” and “Transform Islam, Not America”. One man carried a placard with the word “Toilet Paper” and a Qur’an attached to it.

New York SIOA 9-11 demonstration2

Update:  Salon.com has a selection of leaflets distributed on Saturday’s demonstration.

Planning application submitted for so-called ‘mega-mosque’ in Newham

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NRAP Riverine Centre designThe Architects Journal reports that NRAP Architects have submitted an outline planning application for a 9,500-capacity mosque at the Riverine Centre in Newham and provides “exclusive images” of the plan. Unfortunately, to subscribers only.

However, the Riverine Centre website has been updated with details of the plan. You can consult an overview of the proposals here.

It would obviously be too much to ask that the right-wing press should cease referrring to the development as a “mega-mosque”, but perhaps they could bring themselves to stop publishing references to and illustrations of the old Mangera Yvars design for a 12,000-capacity mosque that was scrapped five years ago.

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Limoges mosque smeared with excrement

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The outside of a mosque in a French city has been smeared with excrement, the latest in a series of vandalism incidents involving Muslim places of worship in the country.

The Interior Ministry said Wednesday that police are seeking the culprit or culprits, adding in a statement that “to attack a religion is to attack the (French) Republic.”

The Limoges mosque in central France was vandalized in July with Nazi symbols scrawled on its doors. In the latest incident, excrement was smeared on the doors and elsewhere before dawn.

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UPS employee assaulted by epithets, bottles and rocks, US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SAN FRANCISCO — Global shipping company UPS violated federal law when it allowed supervisors and coworkers to discriminate against and harass an employee for being Arab and Muslim, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit filed today. The suit also alleged UPS illegally retaliated against the worker after he reported the harassment to the company, his union and the EEOC.

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Study of Islamophobia in the Netherlands now available in translation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobia in the NetherlandsSince 11 September 2001 – and especially since the murder of Theo van Gogh – Muslims and Islam have frequently been unfavourably portrayed at the heart of public debate.

Manifestations of Islamophobia can be found on the Internet, in comments by the PVV, and in acts of violence committed against mosques. Dutch anti-discrimination policies are coming under pressure now that this ideology has forced its way to the centre of the political stage.

How do negative connotations about Muslims come about? Where are the acts of violence taking place? Is the Netherlands the front line in the ‘clash of civilisations’, as has been claimed by politicians, opinion formers and others in the international arena? Or is it all about an exclusion mechanism?

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