Inayat Bunglawala casts a critical eye over “Tell MAMA”, a new government-funded initiative by Faith Matters which aims to measure anti-Muslim attacks in the UK
Fascist graffiti and ‘Stop Islamisation’ sticker on French mosque
A swastika, Nazi symbols and an Islamophobic sticker were found on Sunday morning on the wall of the mosque in Escaudain, in northern France, AFP reports. The discovery was made by children who had come to take part in activities during school holidays.
According to spokesperson Soufiane Iquioussen, the mosque had been desecrated with graffiti in 2004 and shots were fired at the building.
Political Islam and the Arab Spring: Human Rights Watch responds to secularist critics
Last month in his introduction to the Human Rights Watch annual report, Kenneth Rothurged western governments to accept that the successes of Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt reflected the will of the people and to engage constructively with the elected governments.
This entirely reasonable proposal met with a fierce reaction from an alliance of secularists. The Centre for Secular Space published anopen letter to Roth denouncing his supposed capitulation to Islamist reaction. (UK readers will recognise some of the usual suspects here: One Law For All, Maryam Namazie, Gita Saghal.) Roth’s opponents have even organised an online petition calling on HRW to “support separation between religion and state”.
HRW has now sent a reply to its critics, which we reproduce here along with the original open letter.
EDL and BNP protest in Manchester
Police arrested eleven people for minor public order offences as a march by the English Defence League today passed off without major incident.
About 600 people who had come from all over England marched through Hyde in protest over the alleged attack on trainee baker Daniel Stringer-Prince. The 17-year-old suffered a fractured skull in an alleged attack by up to eight Asian men. His family pleaded with the EDL to abandon the march but it went ahead anyway.
The march began shortly after 1pm when about 600 EDL supporters marched from the town’s train station to a car park, where they held a mini rally. The British National Party also had about 50 supporters in the town.
Greater Manchester Police mounted a huge security operation with dozens of officers on the ground, on horse-back as well as India 99, the force helicopter, overhead, while dog handlers were also on hand.
Manchester Evening News, 25 February 2012
See also “Local people protect mosque as fascists try to stir racism in Hyde”, UAF news report, 25 February 2012
Bloomberg defends intelligence-gathering on Muslim communities
New York’s mayor served notice Friday that his police department will do everything in its power to root out terrorists in the U.S., even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law-abiding Muslims under scrutiny. “We just cannot let our guard down again,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned.
The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show following a week of criticism of a secret police department effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student groups at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
‘200 police officers’ patrol Scottish Defence League rally in Glasgow
Around “200 officers” were on hand to police an unauthorised demonstration by an extremist group on Saturday, an MSP claimed.
Police and riot vans gathered at Glasgow’s St Enoch Square to meet demonstrators from the Scottish Defence League (SDL), an anti-Islamic organisation which claims to campaign against radical Islam and Sharia.
The SDL had applied to Glasgow City Council to hold a parade through the city, but their application was withdrawn after a civic coalition of political party leaders, trade unions, religious groups and campaigners signed an open letter in protest at the march. The SDL indicated that they intended to hold a “static demonstration” instead.
Some SDL demonstrators are understood to have gathered in St Enoch subway station beneath the square shortly before 12pm. One entrance to the station was sealed off. A counter-demonstration by anti-fascist groups, trade unions and political parties also took place in nearby George Square.
Rochdale rioters shouted ‘EDL’
Police have stepped up patrols in the Heywood area of Rochdale following violent disturbances which saw officers pelted with bricks and other missiles.
A Greater Manchester Police officer suffered bruising to his legs and arms during the trouble which erupted on Thursday. No other injuries were reported.
Windows were damaged at a fast food outlet, believed to be an Asian takeaway business, in Bridge Street, while three police vehicles and a car belonging to a member of the public were also damaged.
A global war on Christians in the Muslim world?
John Esposito thinks not. He writes:
In the 21st century, Muslims are strongly challenged to move beyond older notions of “tolerance” or “co-existence” to a higher level of religious pluralism based on mutual understanding and respect. Regrettably, a significant number of Muslims, like many ultra conservative and fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Hindus are not pluralistic but rather strongly exclusivist in their attitudes toward other faiths and even co-believers with whom they disagree.
Reform will not, however, result from exaggerated claims and alarmist and incendiary language such as that of Ayan Hirsi Ali in in a recent Newsweek cover story, reprinted in The Daily Beast.
With cameras, informants, NYPD eyed mosques
When a Danish newspaper published inflammatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in September 2005, Muslim communities around the world erupted in outrage. Violent mobs took to the streets in the Middle East. A Somali man even broke into the cartoonist’s house in Denmark with an ax.
In New York, thousands of miles away, it was a different story. At the Masjid Al-Falah in Queens, one leader condemned the cartoons but said Muslims should not resort to violence. Speaking at the Masjid Dawudi mosque in Brooklyn, another called on Muslims to speak out against the cartoons, but peacefully.
The sermons, all protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, were reported back to the NYPD by the department’s network of mosque informants. They were compiled in police intelligence reports and summarized for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Those documents offer the first glimpse of what the NYPD’s informants – known informally as “mosque crawlers” – gleaned from inside the houses of worship. And, along with hundreds of pages of other secret NYPD documents obtained by The Associated Press, they show police targeting mosques and their congregations with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations.
They did so in ways that brushed against – and civil rights lawyers say at times violated – a federal court order restricting how police can gather intelligence.
The NYPD Intelligence Division snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived to pray. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. Plainclothes detectives mapped and photographed mosques and listed the ethnic makeup of those who prayed there.
“It seems horrible to me that the NYPD is treating an entire religious community as potential terrorists,” said civil rights lawyer Jethro Eisenstein, who reviewed some of the documents and is involved in a decades-old, class-action lawsuit against the police department for spying on protesters and political dissidents.
Associated Press, 23 February 2012
See “NYPD intelligence chief wanted sources in every mosque within 250 miles”, Guardian, 24 February 2012
Also “NYPD spying on N.J. Muslims leads to calls for state Attorney General investigation”, NJ.com, 23 February 2012
And “NYPD spied on Paterson mosque, report reveals”, NorthJersey.com, 23 February 2012
A group to counter anti-Islam sentiment
As anti-Muslim rhetoric rises locally and nationally – some of it fueled by the presidential campaign – a group of Chicago-area Muslims is battling back, using tactics including a television ad campaign and public forums against bigotry.
Gain Peace, an Islamic outreach organization based in Chicago, spent $40,000 in December to counter negative portrayals and produce two television ads intended to promote Islam as a just faith. The spots, which will run through March in the Chicago area on Fox, CNN and TNT, depict friendly Muslim students and professionals and display a phone number and a Web site for more information.
“This is an election year and in the Republican primaries and elsewhere, generally we have seen more discrimination, hate and misunderstanding about Muslims,” said Sabeel Ahmed, director of Gain Peace. “We wanted to take it up a notch.”