The Archbishop of Canterbury believes that British Muslim women can “help assert themselves” by wearing a veil. Speaking at The Sunday Times Literary Festival in Oxford, Rowan Williams questioned the view that women hid behind veils and warned against “what we sometimes think of wrongly as stereotypes”.
French Muslim women defy veil ban
The Toronto Star reports.
EDL leader accuses Muslims of being rapists … then BBC programme makers pay his air fare back to UK
The Sunday Telegraph reports that English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon told a far-right rally in Aarhus, Denmark, that Muslims were responsible for an epidemic of rape in Malmö. “It’s like a foreign ideology has come into Sweden and started raping the women,” he said. “Malmö’s now the rape capital of Europe. It’s Swedish women being raped by Muslim men.”
Lennon went on to to apologise for having to leave early, because he was booked to appear on the BBC Sunday morning talk show The Big Questions. “I’d love to stay longer,” he said, explaining that he had to leave at 7pm. “They’re paying for my flight.”
Why Galloway won (according to a Daily Mail blogger)
Galloway’s victory is a vindication for, above all people, Enoch Powell.
Powell warned of the dangers that mass immigration would have. Ted Heath failed to listen, what we have is Galloway – a product of classic third world, unassimilated, rabble-rousing, engineering of election results.
Galloway’s victory shows that we now have our ghettos. We have segregation. We have a divided land with the consequences of not assimilating failed third-world backward cultures within us. These are growing and multiplying generation after generation.
Respect has a future, and provided the Islamic population continues to grow at its present rate, and is not fully assimilated, it is an Islamist one. Be warned.
Without the reason of modern Western Democractic peoples that acquired democracy over time and sacrifice – the people who voted for Galloway might as well be going for any demagogue in Islamabad or Pyongyang.
Galloway’s victory is dangerous and demonstrates the ugly alliance between the far left and Islamists….
He promotes multiculturalism, or cultural egalitarianism – the idea that all cultures are equal – the absurd idea that Sharia and the common-law are the same. He and his radical Islamist followers do this with contempt for British people on their own soil.
George Galloway’s victory in the Bradford West election was remarkable. It was also a dangerous illustration of the foothold Islamist extremism now has in our political life thanks to multiculturalism.
Former UKIP parliamentary candidate Abhijit Pandya assesses the Bradford West by-election.
A runaway victory for George Galloway – and all praise to Allah
That is the headline to Andrew Gilligan’s report for the Daily Telegraph on George Galloway’s stunning victory in the Bradford West by-election.
Predictably, Gilligan presents his readers with the familiar right-wing narrative about Galloway’s campaign being based on a communalist appeal to Muslim voters. This was, Gilligan asserts, “the first election for a generation or more so nakedly fought through the invocation of race and faith”.
Given that Muslims make up only 38% of the electorate in Bradford West, you might wonder how Galloway managed to gain 56% of the vote on that basis. Indeed, as Gilligan himself concedes, Galloway “won across the seat, in the mixed and mainly white wards of Thornton & Allerton, Heaton, and Clayton & Fairweather Green as well as in the inner-city wards”. In other words, far from running a sectarian campaign that pitted Muslims against non-Muslims, Galloway managed to unite voters from all communities behind his candidacy.
But then, as the Hutton Inquiry found many years ago, Gilligan’s malicious and biased journalism has never had more than the most distant relationship with the facts.
Muslim councillor deselected after prayer row
A Muslim councillor who asked for Christian prayers to be separated from full council meetings is to lose his seat. Imran Khan, who has not been reselected by the Tories to contest any seats at the upcoming Reigate and Banstead Borough Council elections, said he thinks the prayer row has had “a big influence”.
Councillor Khan, 36, has held one of the three Horley West seats on Reigate and Banstead Borough Council for four years. But he has not been selected to stand when one third of the council’s seats are contested on May 3, and he received little support in Earlswood and Whitebushes when he previously stood in the ward as the Conservative candidate.
Dutch design challenges Fifa’s football hijab ban
A Dutch designer has created a hijab aimed at convincing the world football governing body Fifa to overturn its ban on women wearing headscarves on the pitch.
Players were prevented from wearing the hijab at top levels of the game for safety reasons, and because of rules stating that religious symbols were not allowed.
Critics say the ban promotes inequality at the highest level of the world’s most popular game.
A Facebook page called “Let Us Play“, which supports players’ rights to wear a headscarf has already generated more than 60,000 likes.
And speculation is growing that the ban could be lifted this summer if the Dutch-designed hijab is given Fifa’s seal of approval.
Toronto: Islamic bookshop sells Maududi’s writings shock
An Islamic bookstore in east Toronto is selling books that urge Muslims to usurp the Western world and install an Islamic State in its place. The books, written by deceased Islamic scholar Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, are available at the Islamic Circle of North America bookstore in Scarborough.
“Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation that rules it,” Maududi wrote in Jihad in Islam. “Islam requires the earth – not just a portion – but the whole planet.”
EDL brings together European far-right groups for anti-Islam rally in Denmark
Far-right groups from across Europe are due to hold a rally in Denmark aimed at setting up what they term an anti-Islamic alliance across the continent.
The demonstration has been organised by the English Defence League (EDL) which says it wants to halt what it calls the “Islamification of Europe”. The EDL said it hoped it would be the start of a Europe-wide movement.
Nottingham University’s Matthew Goodwin, an expert on far-right groups in Britain, said the meeting would be strategically significant even if the numbers were not. “What we are seeing here for the first time in British political history is an anti-Muslim far-right organisation taking the lead in trying to mobilise pan-European opposition to Islam,” he said.
EDL summit in Denmark humiliated by low attendance
Anti-fascist demonstrators outnumbered far-right supporters more than 20 to one in Denmark as an English Defence League-led attempt to form a pan-European movement was humiliated.
Estimates suggested as few as 160 defence league members from several countries gathered at the inaugural far-right summit in Aarhus for the European counter-jihad meeting, devised to “send a clear message to the leaders of Europe” that Islamism would not be tolerated.
EDL leader Tommy Robinson admitted only 15 supporters from England made the trip, despite earlier speculation that hundreds might attend. In comparison, an anti-fascist demonstration in the same city to protest against the arrival of the EDL attracted up to 4,000 people.