Hijab ban driving women away from soccer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Iranian women's soccer team
Iranian women’s team after being excluded from Olympic qualifying match against Jordan

Muslim women are being driven away from soccer by FIFA’s ban of the hijab, with more likely to follow if rulemakers fail to reverse the decision at a meeting next month, Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein of Jordan told Reuters.

While physical Olympic sports such as rugby and taekwondo allow Muslim women to wear the headscarf in competition, soccer, the world’s most popular sport, remains against its use, citing safety concerns.

Last year the Iranian women’s soccer team were prevented from playing their 2012 Olympic second round qualifying match against Jordan because they refused to remove their hijabs before kick-off.

Continue reading →

Anti-Muslim graffiti scrawled on Brooklyn shop

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Brooklyn anti-Muslim graffiti

Bangladeshis in Kensington said they are living in fear after Muslim hate graffiti was found on a storefront in the neighborhood’s bustling shopping strip.

The manager of TDS Insurance on Beverly Road near McDonald Avenue, came to work Monday and spotted a nauseating sight: “It was written on the outside – ‘Allah is s–t’,” said Abu Chowdhury, 51, who immediately called the cops. “I have no enemies,” he said. “We are not a religious business.”

Although the hateful message was erased hours later, Bangladeshis said the sight left them emotionally scarred. “It is just shocking,” said Mamnunul Haq, a Bangladeshi community leader. “No one wants to see anything like that.” “We are a very peaceful people,” Haq added.

Continue reading →

Posted in USA

Taj Hargey renews attack on Tablighi Jamaat over Newham ‘mega-mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim scholar who has courted controversy in Islamic circles for his progressive views on women has stepped into the equally fiery territory of contemporary architecture.

Taj Hargey is an imam and the director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford who is best known for allowing men and women to pray together and for discouraging veils. He describes himself as a “thorn in the side of Muslim hierarchy”. Now he is risking a similar status in architecture after weighing into the long-running row over plans for a giant mosque on the Olympic fringes.

Continue reading →

Posted in UK

One year on – still no arrests over Shotton arson attack

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Story - Kate. Shotton Lane Social Club fire on Friday Feb 4th 2011.A businessman who planned to turn a social club into a Muslim centre says he is unable to find a new site for his project – a year on from a suspected arson attack.

The spot where Shotton Lane Social Club once stood still lies empty and no-one has ever been prosecuted for the blaze that destroyed the community building on February 4 last year.

The shocking incident, which saw more than 100 people evacuated from their homes, happened just weeks after Monchab Ali – chairman of the Flintshire Muslim Cultural Society – announced his plan to turn the empty venue into an Islamic cultural centre.

Continue reading →

Michigan gurdwara vandalised with anti-Muslim graffiti

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Detroit gurdwara graffiti

A Sikh house of worship in Sterling Heights under construction was vandalized with what appears to be anti-Muslim graffiti.

The Sikh building, known as a gurdwara, was defaced sometime between Sunday evening and Monday morning, a Sikh advocacy group said today. Some of the graffiti reads: “Don’t Builed” and “Mohmed”, which seems to refer to Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. The graffiti also included a Christian cross, a pistol, and the letters R and A. It’s unclear what the letters refer to.

In the West, Sikh men are sometimes confused for being Muslim because they wear full beards and turbans. Over the past ten years, some Sikhs in the U.S. have been victims of violent bias attacks because they’re wrongly perceived to be Muslim.

Detroit Free Press, 7 February 2012

Posted in USA

French cabinet walks out of parliament over Nazi claim

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The French prime minister and his cabinet have stormed out of parliament after an opposition MP accused the rightwing interior minister of flirting with Nazi ideology.

The Socialist Serge Letchimy, from Martinique, questioned the interior minister and close Sarkozy ally, Claude Guéant, over his controversial comments this weekend that “not all civilisations are of equal value”, and his assertion that some civilisations, namely France’s, are worth more than others.

Letchimy said Guéant was “day by day leading us back to these European ideologies that gave birth to concentration camps”. After a loud interruption of protests, he added: “Mr Guéant, the Nazi regime, which was so concerned about purity, was that a civilization?”

In a rare move, the entire French government stormed out of the question-time session.

Continue reading →

Police chief thinks EDL’s Facebook messages are merely ‘inappropriate, brash or insensitive’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Norman BettisonThe Yorkshire Post has an interesting interview with Sir Norman Bettison, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, in connection with the specialist unit he has set up to monitor violent extremism on the internet.

Bettison is one of the few leading police officers to have taken the threat from the English Defence League seriously, and he has readily used his powers under the Public Order Act to restrict the EDL’s attempts to mount intimidatory protests against the Muslim community. When the EDL demonstrated in Dewsbury last June, for example, West Yorkshire Police refused to let them enter the town centre to hold their intended rally outside the town hall and confined them to the station car park where they couldn’t do any harm.

Continue reading →

CAIR asks Justice Department to probe Oregon FBI’s ‘coercion’ of Muslim citizens

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim civil rights group wants the Justice Department to investigate the tactics of FBI agents in Portland, Oregon, after two Libyan-Americans from the area recently were barred from returning to the United States.

The two men – Jamal Tarhuni, 55, and Mustafa Elogbi, 60 – traveled separately to Libya after the overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Tarhuni delivered humanitarian supplies with the group Medical Teams International, while Elogbi went to visit family.

Last month, though, both Libyan-born U.S. citizens were barred from return flights to the U.S. and told the FBI wanted to question them.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said that it has now received three reports of Portland FBI agents’ involvement in travel restrictions for Muslim U.S. citizens in the last six months. The other case involved a man who made headlines last year when he was detained in Britain as he tried to travel to Italy.

Continue reading →