A Belgian politician has risked causing uproar among Muslims after starting a “Women Against Islamization” campaign featuring his 19-year-old daughter wearing a burka and a bikini.
Filip Dewinter, leader of the far-right Vlaams Belang party, uses a shot of his daughter An-Sofie Dewinter in the dark blue bikini for the political campaign.
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France draws our attention to the controversy over racist and Islamophobic cartoons posted on the Villeurbanne Front National blog by Stéphane Poncet, who is an FN candidate in the forthcoming elections to the National Assembly.
Marine Le Pen, who is struggling to get the 500 nominations she requires to stand in the presidential election and consequently needs to project a moderate image, has dissociated herself from Poncet, stating that she “deeply regrets” the publication of the drawings on an FN website. The party’s vice-president Louis Aliot has said that disciplinary action will be taken against Poncet.
The CCIF wonders how the FN is in a position to take such action “when Marine Le Pen herself adopts this hatred of Islam and foreigners as a founding principle of her political programme”.
Four of Scotland’s highest profile politicians have urged councillors to block moves by the far-right Scottish Defence League to march in Glasgow.
SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon, and Scots Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem leaders, Johann Lamont, Ruth Davidson and Willie Rennie are backing the move. In an open letter, they say such a march would bring “vile, toxic hate”.
This report on the BNP website probably looks familiar. That’s because it’s lifted directly from an earlier report in the Daily Mail. Yet again we find the Mail providing the far right with material to stoke anti-Muslim hatred. The English Defence League’s protest in Leicester on Saturday has similarly been inspired by the paper’s irresponsible and inaccurate reporting (see here and here). Perhaps the Mail‘s editor Paul Dacre might be asked to explain himself when he appears at the Leveson Inquiry next week.
Hungry Jack’s is being targeted by angry customers who allege the fast-food company pressured a Melbourne franchisee to stop serving halal food.
The social media campaign against Hungry Jack’s stems from claims that the chain’s Tullamarine store was issued with a halal certificate by the Islamic Coordinating Council of Victoria in December that sanctioned a number of its chicken and beef burgers as halal.
News of the halal Hungry Jack’s spread across the internet and through text messages to Muslim fans who had been pleading with the restaurant to consider serving halal food. “Woo hoo! I’ve been hoping for ages that a hungry jacks becomes halal! How excitement,” one fan posted on an internet forum. Another eager customer posted a photograph of what appeared to be the genuine halal certificate.
But then last week Hungry Jack’s tweeted that none of its stores were halal and apologised “to customers led to believe otherwise by the Tullamarine franchisee”. Signs were put up at the Tullamarine store notifying customers that it did not offer halal food.
Heba El-Hosseiny passes out candles at a unity vigil outside the Hilliard home of Mohamed Soltan, who escaped with his roommate from a fire set there before dawn on Jan. 16. The Council on American-Islamic Relations-Ohio sponsored the event in response to what it views as a hate crime. The house had been painted with anti-Arab and anti-Islamic slurs months earlier. Hilliard police and the FBI are investigating.
The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document.
The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies.
The National Islamic Center in Washington DC is an imposing building with a towering minaret. One of America’s iconic mosques, it is surrounded by the flags of the Islamic countries which helped pay for its construction in the 1950s.
Its design was influenced by classical and traditional architecture in Egypt. Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC and one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary Islam, says it would be impossible to build such a national mosque today because of the controversy it would arouse.
“It’s a bad time for Islamic architecture,” says Mr Ahmed, former Pakistani ambassador to the UK. “If there was some visionary with money who wanted to build the Taj Mahal in the US, he’d be attacked as a stealth Jihadist.”
An October incident that has just come to light is casting a cloud over a Boca Raton Chevron station for what one woman claims is discrimination.
Wednesday, La-Fleur Mohammed talked about her experience at the Boca Raton station where she said she was refused service because she was wearing a traditional Muslim headdress that covered almost all of her face.
“She took my money and said ‘you can’t come in here dressed like that’,” said La-Fleur Mohammed. “I said, ‘excuse me but this is my religious right’.”
Mohammed continued, “She said, ‘well, I need to see you’. I said, ‘no, you don’t. Please just give me $20 on pump number one’ and that’s when she just threw my money back at me.”
“It seems that not a week goes by without a new mosque desecration”, the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France observes.
Yesterday a mosque in the Glonnières district of Le Mans was found covered with graffiti reading “Islam out of Europe”, “No Islam” and “France for the French”.
On Saturday a mosque in Miramas was also daubed with Islamophobic slogans along with the name of Front National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. It was the second time in four months that the mosque had experienced such an attack.