Members of the Brookfield-Elm Grove Interfaith Network are coming to the defense of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee’s proposal to build a mosque in Brookfield, the Journal Sentinel reported as the religious leaders started a letter of support.
“This is about the rights of decent human beings to have a place to worship,” Rabbi Steven Adams of Congregation Emanu-El in Waukesha, who was drafting the letter on behalf of the group, told the Journal Sentinel.
The offensive actions of a Gainsborough man were blasted by a judge as he was jailed for displaying inflammatory racist posters in the front window of his flat.
Darren J Conway covered the window of his Heaton Street flat with posters, literature and photographs which attacked the Prophet Mohammed and the Muslim religion. Conway, a former BNP member and supporter of the English Defence League, attracted comments from passers-by and workers at nearby businesses with his offensive display.
Among the slogans on show from his ground-floor window were “Jihad works both ways”, “no surrender”, “Muslims are the most hateful of them all” and a letter confirming that he was a member of the BNP. A passer-by reported Conway after being disturbed by the pictures of mutilated Muslims with graphic and obscene messages and imagery.
Ukip is not a rightwing extremist party, but on the doorsteps of voters it is often pushing the same message as the extreme right, and this is reflected in our results. Almost half of the Ukip affiliates in our survey ranked either immigration or Muslims in Britain as the most important issues facing Britain today. Over half (51%) rejected the suggestion that Britain has benefited from diversity. Almost two-fifths (37%) backed the idea of repatriating immigrants back to their country of origin, and irrespective of whether they had broken the law. Over three-fifths (64%) would feel “bothered a lot” by the presence of an Islamic institution in their community, which is over twice the national average (31%). And 85% of them disagreed with the suggestion that Islam does not pose a danger to the west, while the equivalent figure among the BNP group was only three points higher.
Nor does this perception of Islam as a threatening religion appear confined to our sample of self-identified Ukippers, as Farage might suggest. At various points, Ukip elites have voiced concern over Muslim “breeding”, party organisers have referred to “Muslim nutters”; UKIP candidates have described Islam as “degenerate”, suggested Britain forcibly repatriate Muslims and endorsed Wilders’ description of Islam as a “retarded ideology”.
Matthew Goodwin, co-author of the new study From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, replies to critics.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the English Defence League has sacked Kasper Mortensen (pictured), spokesman for the Danish Defence League, after he was jailed for assaulting a bouncer with a large metal torch and a taser gun.
“For someone in a responsible position such as heading up a Defence League to get himself involved in a brawl is not the best thing to have happened,” Steve Simmons, who is in charge of the EDL’s European organisation, told the Telegraph. “When he comes out, certainly he will no longer be the spokesman for the Danish Defence League.”
The sacking takes place only a few weeks before the EDL’s Danish wing will host a European “counter-jihad” rally in Aarhus. Philip Traulsen, a 34-year-old veteran of Denmark’s far right, is organising the demo in Mortensen’s absence.
“I’ve looked at about a dozen right wing sites this morning to see how they’d react to the news from Afghanistan, and the comments at every single one of them were full of people celebrating the killings, praising the soldier who allegedly committed them, and denying there was any crime, while at the same time frantically trying to blame the crime on President Obama. But the worst site by far is the right wing’s premier news channel, Fox News.”
Charles Johnson provides the details.
Little Green Footballs, 11 March 2012
Via LoonWatch
A Norwegian group called “Stop Islamisation of Norway” (SIAN) has doubled membership levels in the last two years, its representatives claim.
The group, whose most active membership is located in Rogaland, has also been awarded a government concession to transmit on Radio Kos in Sandnes, western Norway. It alleges Internet radio capacity had to be increased from 25,000 to 200,000 listeners recently because of popularity.
Merete Hodne and Kjersti Margrethe Addehaid Gilje told NRK from Bryne, a small town in Rogaland County, “We have a duty to our country to preserve our Christian values, and not least to protect our children against the terrible, evil forces of Islam.”
Kim Willsher reports from Paris.
An outreach effort to Muslims initiated by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest has sparked a national uproar among evangelical Christians, with some accusing the Rev. Rick Warren, Saddleback’s pastor, of betraying core Christian principles and Warren responding that his beliefs and intentions have been misrepresented.
Since an Orange County Register article published Feb. 26 detailed the outreach effort, evangelicals across the country have taken to blogs, social media and Christian news outlets to debate whether and how Christians should forge relationships with people of other faiths. Longtime critics of Warren have published lengthy online accusations that the influential pastor, who delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, has gone too far in seeking theological common ground with Muslims.
Chris Rosebrough, a religious studies graduate of Concordia University in Irvine who hosts an online Christian radio talk show in Indianapolis, said that response to Saddleback’s outreach “has created a national, even an international uproar…. Looking at the Christian blogosphere, this is the number one viral story.”
The Government is giving £200,000 to a charity that uses football stars to fight racism and intolerance, it has been revealed. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the money would help ensure the national game was not “perverted” by the “insidious influence of the far right”.
Show Racism the Red Card organises professional footballers to run workshops, tackling the views of extremists. The state funding, from the Communities and Local Government budget, will cover lessons for 9,000 young people, resources for teachers and research into racism.
Daniel Trilling has an interesting article in today’s Guardian. Responding to the findings in the new report From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, Trilling asks: “Is Britain’s far right preparing for armed conflict? And could a catastrophe of the kind that struck Norway last summer be on its way here?” He writes:
As electoral success has melted away since the BNP’s collapse at the 2010 general election, the hardcore is now left exposed. At the same time, a younger generation has been attracted to the adrenaline-pumping street politics of the English Defence League, which adapts its language to better suit the realities of multicultural modern Britain. It claims merely to oppose “militant Islam”, but its supporters have carried out numerous violent attacks on Asian Britons, on their shops, homes and places of worship. Shut out from mainstream politics, some far-right supporters may well turn to violence, seeing it as the only way to achieve their goals. Indeed, it has happened in this country before – most recently in 1999, when David Copeland, a neo-Nazi who had drifted through the BNP, set off a series of nail bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, killing three people and maiming 129.
However, Trilling argues that the main threat from the far right is not political violence and terrorism but rather the impact of its ideas on wider society:
The greater danger remains where it always has done: in the elements of far-right propaganda that overlap with mainstream political sentiment. Few people in Britain would agree that race war is on its way, but how many would agree that immigration has gone “too far”; that multiculturalism has failed or that the west is locked in a “clash of civilisations” with Islam?
By his murderous actions in Norway last summer, Anders Breivik has become the new face of far-right terror. Yet he did not tear Norway’s society apart in the way that, say, the rhetoric of Geert Wilders threatens to do in Holland. There, his nonviolent Freedom party has been able to extract reactionary anti-Muslim concessions from the Dutch coalition government in return for support on economic policies. In France, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen has made halal meat a major issue in the presidential election, and encouraged Nicolas Sarkozy to compete with her furiously in the immigrant-bashing stakes.