A booklet to accompany the new CD by popular “farmers rock” band Normaal has been destroyed by its German printers because it features a swastika, Nos television reports.
The public showing of swastikas is banned in Germany, apart from for scholarly reasons.
The printer did not check the digital version of the cover and it was only noticed after a couple of thousand were printed, Maarten Steinkamp, director of Normaal’s record label CNR told the Nos.
Anti-EDL campaigners outside Waltham Forest Town Hall yesterday
Police have told the Guardian they have no intelligence to suggest that a controversial march by the far right English Defence League (EDL) this weekend will be violent or disrupt the community.
The extremist group, which describes itself as a movement against Islamic extremism but which critics say is racist, is set to protest in Walthamstow this Saturday (September 1) despite widespread opposition from residents.
A meeting of councillors, community leaders and police was held on Tuesday evening (August 28) to discuss the possibility of banning the march, but the Met has declined to apply to the government for such a move and the protest is still due to go ahead.
Canberra’s Muslim community has described planning approval for the territory’s second mosque as a “victory of goodwill”.
The ACT Planning and Land Authority yesterday approved Canberra Muslim Community Inc’s application to build a 500-capacity mosque on The Valley Avenue in Gungahlin.
In their assessment, ACT planners found surrounding roads could cope with traffic generated by the mosque and that the proposed 43 on-site parking spaces were sufficient. Planners also said several objections to the mosque on religious and cultural grounds were found to be “irrelevant” and “unsubstantiated”.
Thousands of people were set to take the streets to stop the racist English Defence League (EDL) in Waltham Forest, east London, this Saturday.
Determination to oppose the EDL has united people in the area – and left the racists running scared. The EDL had originally planned to march there on 18 August but postponed it.
Weyman Bennett, joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism, spoke to Socialist Worker. “The EDL moved the date because it is not confident marching through Waltham Forest,” he said.
The We Are Waltham Forest campaign, which was set up to stop the EDL, has widespread support. Trade unions, community groups, churches, local Labour councillors and local MP Stella Creasy pledged support for the counter demo.
Lawyers representing a metro Atlanta city say they’re fighting a local mosque’s expansion plan because of its size and scale, and they deny any discrimination.
The Islamic Center of North Fulton maintains in a lawsuit that Alpharetta wrongly denied its 2010 proposal to tear down its existing facility and rebuild a larger facility. WSB-TV reports that Islamic Center officials contend that their current facility is inadequate because it doesn’t face Mecca and is in disrepair.
Attorney Doug Dillard, who represents the Islamic Center, says other churches in the Atlanta suburb have been given approval for gymnasiums and large sanctuaries.
Attorneys for the city this week responded to some of the allegations, saying the proposed expansion is simply out of scale in size, mass, and scale to the property and surrounding area.
The mainstream political rhetoric concerning Islam in Norway has undoubtedly changed for the better in the past year. The number of ordinary citizens willing to contest Islamophobic discourse publicly has risen. But popular attitudes often remain stubbornly unchanged. A 2012 survey indicates that Norwegians hold more negative attitudes towards Muslims than towards any other minority group, except the Roma. Such negative attitudes are more prevalent among Norwegians who profess adherence to rightwing political parties. It hardly seems coincidental that the one witness in the Breivik trial who received death threats on the day was Muslim. It is now little more than two weeks since a provincial leader of the Progress party in Norway declared on a party blog that he “hated Muslims”. The response was full and unconditional support from fellow provincial party colleagues, and only the mildest of rebukes from the party’s national leadership.
Following the 22/7 trial, it will no longer be possible for Norwegian extreme rightwing Islamophobes to deny that Breivik was in fact inspired and motivated by their ideals, fabrications and distortions. Nor will it be possible for the Progress party, Norway’s third most popular party, to deny that its political rhetoric on Islam and Muslims in Norway was part of the ideological formation of Breivik, who was one of their dedicated party members for about 10 years until 2006. After a national trauma, the verdict presents us with the opportunity to finally face and confront the hatred in our midst with the honesty, seriousness and commitment it requires of us all.
Sindre Bangstad at Comment is Free, 28 August 2012
A family has had racist graffiti sprayed on to the home it moves into today.
Andre Bell and his wife Elly were shocked to discover their new home in Scholes, Holmfirth, was pelted with eggs, and had a Nazi swastika and the acronym for a far-right party spray painted on to the doors and walls. Just days after the couple got the keys to the home, offensive words were daubed onto the exterior walls and doors of the council house.
Filmmaker Eric Allen Bell is little known in the UK (not least because he hasn’t had much success with the few films he’s made) but he has become something of a celebrity among right-wing Islamophobes in the US.
It was Bell who directed a 2011 documentary titled Not Welcome which (at least in its original version) chronicled the backlash against the construction of an Islamic centre in Murfreesboro Tennessee, from a standpoint sympathetic to the Muslim victims of that campaign. More recently, however, the clearly unstable Bell has become a convert to the views of notorious anti-Islam propagandist Frank Gaffney, whose hysterical warnings about the “enemy-threat doctrine” of Sharia figured prominently in a court case launched by opponents of the Mufreesboro centre.
Bell’s increasingly demented Facebook page now features posts like this (note the use of block caps – the internet equivalent of green ink):
If you thought that was bad enough, Loonwatch draws our attention to a more recent Facebook post (from 15 August) in which Bell urges his readers to consider the merits of a nuclear attack on Mecca:
This was followed by further comments such as these:
As Loonwatch notes, Bell allowed this stuff to pass while at the same time deleting comments that were critical of his proposal.
Some might imagine that even the likes of David Horowitz would draw the line at supporting a clearly disturbed individual who promotes this sort of sick lunacy. But they’d be wrong.
Only yesterday Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine happily posted a new piece by Bell, “The threat of Sharia and the leadership of America’s two parties”, a Gaffney-inspired rant about a conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood (who else?) to impose Sharia law on the United States.
An immigration officer sacked over alleged links to Islamic terrorism has attacked the Home Office for not allowing him to defend himself against the unspecified allegations.
The Arabic interpreter, who helped Special Branch interview terror suspects, had his security clearance removed in 2005, a month after returning from a year-long sabbatical in his native Yemen.
He was suspended on full pay for five years then sacked after the Home Office deemed him a risk to national security.
The 44-year-old father of three claims it was only because of his race and the fact that he is a Muslim that he was suspected of associating with terrorists, and is suing the Home Office for discrimination and unfair dismissal.
A British racist has PRAISED massacre gunman Anders Breivik, saying: “I take my hat off to you, sir.” Twisted right-winger Philip Horn said Norwegian misfit Breivik, who slaughtered 77 innocents, had “done what he thought was right”.
Horn, 44, who has links to the English Defence League, backed Breivik’s claim of being motivated by a political crusade to protect his homeland from Muslims. He spewed out his bile on Facebook after an Oslo court jailed Breivik for 21 years.
Under a photo of the monster giving a clenched fist salute, Horn wrote: “Well done Anders Breivik. I take my hat off to you sir. You proved you were not insane, and that you are just one of many like myself who wish their country to return to the way it was before it was invaded by the Muslim population. Respect to you.”