The candidate is New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and his “Islam problem” is that he isn’t against Islam. See Matt Duss’s comments at Think Progress.
Hijab in Brussels schools: ban may spread
Le Soir reports that two secondary schools in Brussels are considering banning the hijab.
In 2008, despite a petition with 4,000 signatures objecting to the change in policy, the Institut des Ursulines in Molenbeek decided to ban the headscarf. Since then only 4 out of 98 secondary schools in the city have allowed Muslim pupils to wear the headscarf.
Now two of them, the Institut des Filles de Marie in Saint Gilles and the Athénée Alfred Verwée in Schaerbeek, are considering changing their rules and imposing a ban.
BNP candidate posts racist Facebook comments about Muslims, advocates killing Marxists
John Hurren is standing as a British National Party candidate for Coventry City Council. Via Hope Not Hate, here are some of his comments on Facebook.
Sam Harris advocates profiling Muslims
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and leading proponent of the “New Atheism”, has a piece on his blog advocating racial and religious profiling by airport security:
“We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it…. Needless to say, a devout Muslim should be free to show up at the airport dressed like Osama bin Laden, and his wives should be free to wear burqas. But if their goal is simply to travel safely and efficiently, wouldn’t they, too, want a system that notices people like themselves?”
King’s Lynn community centre given go-ahead by council planning committee
Anti-Muslim graffiti being removed from the wall of the Queen’s Arms
The president of West Norfolk Islamic Association is hoping to build bridges after community centre plans were passed. Azam Gabbair said he was “overwhelmed” with West Norfolk Council’s decision to approve a change of use application for the former Queen’s Arms in London Road.
During today’s planning committee meeting, right-wing activist Stephen Tweed was stopped from speaking after he strayed into religious and cultural issues. An earlier motion to refuse permission due to traffic congestion and the loss of a pub was lost before approval was finally granted.
Dearborn: Arab American Institute meeting shatters anti-Muslim narrative
Yesterday, more than a hundred people gathered at a town hall at the Doubletree Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan to stand in solidarity with the Arab American and American Muslim communities against Islamophobia. The town hall, organized by AAI and local community groups, was held in response to an anti-Muslim conference at the Hyatt in Dearborn, organized by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and other leading Islamophobes.
France: Muslim cemetery desecrated with swastikas and racist slogans
The French press is reporting that a Muslim cemetery in Carros near Nice has been desecrated. Swastikas were sprayed on nine graves and the slogans “Arabs out” and “Long live Le Pen” on the cemetery wall.
In the first round of the presidential election the Front National candidate Marine Le Pen topped the poll in this Socialist-run commune with 27.12% of the vote, ahead of Sarkozy on 26.97% and Hollande on 22.27%.
A press release by the UOIF condemns the desecration, pointing out that this is not an isolated case but a manifestation of the rising tide of Islamophobia in France.
Meanwhile a Front National spokesperson has claimed that the graffiti could well be the work of Muslim youth acting at the behest of politicians who want to discredit the FN.
London Met ‘alcohol ban’: Muslim students accuse vice chancellor of stoking Islamophobia
The Daily Telegraph draws our attention to an open letter to London Metropolitan University’s vice chancellor Prof Malcolm Gillies from the university’s Islamic and Shia Muslim societies in response to press reports that Gillies in considering a ban on alcohol on some parts of the campus.
German far-right party plans to demonstrate outside mosques – Hans-Peter Friedrich scaremongers over Salafist violence
A far-right party on the campaign trial in Germany’s most populous state is threatening to put caricatures of Mohammed outside mosques in a string of cities.
The “Pro NRW” party in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia has already shown anti-Islamic caricatures in Essen and Gelsenkirchen, though the police prevented demonstrations taking place directly outside mosques. Police have also banned “Pro NRW”, which is campaigning on an Islamophobic platform, from using the Danish cartoons that caused massive protests in the Islamic world in 2005.
But “Pro NRW” intends to send activists to 25 mosques throughout the state in the run-up to the election on May 13, staging protests in Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Aachen, Wuppertal and Solingen. A report in Die Welt newspaper on Sunday said the far-right party intended to post around 100 what it called “Islam-critical” drawings outside the mosques.
Anti-Islam gathering in Dearborn protested, defended
Anti-Islam advocates from across the U.S. gathered Sunday in Dearborn for a conference to bring attention to what they say is a problem of Muslim honor killings.
About 150 gathered at the Hyatt in Dearborn for the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference, named after a 20-year-old Arab-American Muslim woman who was killed by her stepfather last year in Warren.
But at another conference in Detroit, about 100 people gathered earlier in the day to oppose the anti-Islam conference, saying it was the latest attack on metro Detroit’s Arab-American and Muslim communities. Dearborn has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the U.S., many of them Muslim.
“We stand for America,” said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab-American News, at a panel at the DoubleTree hotel in Detroit. “And they (anti-Muslim activists) stand against America and against the American way of life.”