A dad-of-two was jailed for posting racist remarks on the internet. Anthony Buck wrote anti-Muslim comments on social networking site Facebook. He was sentenced to a total of four months after breaching a suspended sentence for a previous crime.
Sefton Magistrates Court heard Buck, 40, of Sussex Road, Southport, wrote the comments between May 1 and July 19 last year. They were discovered during a police investigation into racist graffiti on a public footbridge.
Assed Baig defends the record of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies.
Huffington Post, 16 February 2012
See also Reyhana Patel, “University Islamic Societies are not ‘hotbeds’ for radicalisation”, Huffington Post, 14 February 2012
Ireland’s failure to gather statistics on hate crime and discrimination against Muslims amounts to institutional racism, according to a pioneering research project which will be unveiled at University College Cork on Saturday.
The failure, in particular, by the gardaí to use its Pulse electronic system to monitor crimes against ethic and religious minorities facilitates Islamophobia in Ireland, argues James Carr of University of Limerick.
He said: “The Garda Pulse system still does not capture if religion was an aggravating factor in a crime; thus, we cannot tell the extent of incidents Islamophobic behaviour from Garda recorded crime statistics.”
He said this flies in the face of the National Action Plan Against Racism, which had prioritised the gathering of comprehensive date on offences tainted by racism.
Mr Carr’s paper, ‘Measuring Islamophobia’, forms part of a research project contained in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs which will be presented to the public at UCC.
He describes the phenomenon as a form of racism specific to members of Muslim communities and reinforced by stereotypical negative images of Muslims.
“Hirsi Ali pleads with readers that we must ‘please get our priorities straight…. Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world’.
“It’s hard to know what she means; is there really some great danger that the West is doing too much to protect Muslims? The real implication here is that there is a genocide that must be stopped. That is an extremely serious charge. She fails to provide evidence to support that case, and manages to smear a major American Islamic advocacy group in the process.”
Peter Hart replies to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Newsweek article “The global war on Christians in the Muslim world”
TAMPA — If members of the Hillsborough County School Board thought they had put controversy over a Muslim speaker behind them, they were wrong.
More than a dozen who oppose school appearances from the Council on American-Islamic Relations attended Tuesday’s board meeting, some asking the board to call for a workshop and others displaying signs on the sidewalk outside that said, “Welcome to Tampastan.”
The group included Kristina Gionet of the Pinellas Patriots, who said, “I guarantee that if CAIR comes across the bay, we will stop them at the Howard Frankland Bridge.”
The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is urging houses of worship in metro Detroit to take extra precautions following several cases of vandalism.
Dearborn police are investigating several incidents of possible anti-Muslim vandalism in the city, according to a press release sent out Tuesday by the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
According to CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid, the American Moslem Bekaa Center, located on Chase Road north of Ford Road, was targeted in the spray-painting, as well as a building nearby on Chase that is soon to be opened as a restaurant.
Jamal Tarhuni arrives at Oregon International Airport
A Libyan-American who says he was forbidden from returning to the United States and questioned by FBI agents in Tunisia after visiting neighboring Libya insists he has done nothing wrong.
“I do intend to protect my rights. I do intend to clear my name,” 55-year-old Jamal Tarhuni said after arriving at Portland International Airport Tuesday morning from Amsterdam.
A long list of S.C. lawmakers plan to send a message to Palmetto State courts: Don’t apply foreign laws here. A proposed law, which a House panel will consider later this month, is part of a growing movement in legislatures around the country.
Twenty other states are considering similar measures to ban judges from applying the laws of others nations, particularly in custody and marriage cases. Three states – Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona – already have added the laws to their books. Oklahoma put it in its state Constitution in 2010, a move now being challenged in federal court.
Proponents say the S.C. measure will ensure only U.S. and S.C. laws are applied in Palmetto State courtrooms, and foreign laws do not trump constitutional rights guaranteed to Americans.
Opponents say the proposal addresses a nonexistent issue and, while not specifically naming Islamic Sharia law, smacks of anti-Islamic sentiment. They say such bills target the practice of Sharia, a wide-ranging group of Islamic religious codes and customs that, in some countries, are enforced as law.
Amandla Thomas-Johnson of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies argues that the recent Home Affairs Committee’s report on the Roots of Violent Radicalisation debunks claims by the Centre for Social Cohesion/Henry Jackson Society and others that the UK’s universities are breeding grounds for extremism among Muslim students.
A Colorado high school student quit the school choir after an Islamic song containing the lyric “there is no other truth except Allah” made it into the repertoire.
James Harper, a senior at Grand Junction High School in Grand Junction, put his objection to singing “Zikr,” a song written by Indian composer A.R. Rahman, in an email to Mesa County School District 51 officials. When the school stood by choir director Marcia Wieland’s selection, Harper quit.
“I don’t want to come across as a bigot or a racist, but I really don’t feel it is appropriate for students in a public high school to be singing an Islamic worship song,” Harper told KREX-TV. “This is worshipping another God, and even worshipping another prophet … I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir say Jesus Christ is the only truth.”