Muslim bride sues mayor of Lyon over order to remove headscarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A newly-wed Muslim couple are suing the mayor of Lyon after a local official insisted the bride remove her veil at the town hall wedding ceremony.

The bride, identified only as Nassima A., was asked to remove a veil which was covering her hair during her wedding ceremony at a town hall in Lyon in June.

“Nassima thought it was an order and did not think twice about removing her veil. She thought she had to do it to get married and took it off in front of everybody,” says her lawyer Gilles Devers in an interview with the French daily Libération. He says she felt humuliated during the ceremony.

The deputy mayor of Lyon’s 9th district, Fatiha Ben Ahmed, who asked the bride to bare her hair, told the bride that she looked “very pretty” without a veil.

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California: man get five years for vandalising mosque and firebombing clinic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Madera man who pleaded guilty to federal charges of arson at a Planned Parenthood clinic and vandalism of a mosque was sentenced in U.S. District Court today to five years in prison. Donny Eugene Mower, 38, also was ordered to pay more than $26,000 in restitution.

Mower pleaded guilty in October to placing signs in front of Masjid Madera – one said “Wake up America, the enemy is here” – and throwing a brick at the mosque, over three days in August 2010.

Mower also pleaded guilty to throwing a Molotov cocktail through a window at the Madera Planned Parenthood Clinic on Sept. 2, 2010. A fire caused $26,000 damage to the clinic, which closed for two days.

Fresno Bee, 9 January 2012

Nick Cohen smears Stieg Larsson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nick Cohen4Nick Cohen devoted his column in yesterday’s Observer to attacking Stieg Larsson, using the Swedish novelist and anti-fascist campaigner’s views on honour based violence to reinforce the thesis that “The far left’s record on women’s rights would make the Vatican blush with shame. Its alliances with radical Islam make it, at best, a misogynist force and, at worst, an active agent of oppression.”

Cohen asserts: “Larsson wasn’t a feminist – or not a consistent one. He wrote with real anger about the oppression of women with white skins. When others tried to do the same about the oppression of women with brown skins, he denounced them as racists.” As evidence of this, Cohen offers Larsson’s intervention in “the debate about the ‘honour killings’ of two Kurdish women in Sweden”.

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Anti-Muslim slurs aimed at second Gatineau mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A second Gatineau, Que., mosque was the target of anti-Muslim slurs last week just hours after vandalism at another mosque. Hicham Ouhaid, president of the Mosque of Aylmer, said he received an email early last Monday urging Muslims to get out of Canada. The message, he said, included a photo of a 2010 Time magazine cover depicting a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off.

This is not the first time the Aylmer mosque, located at the corner of Park Street and Chemin Eardley, has been targeted, he added, as a hateful letter was dropped in the mailbox last spring. “We felt very concerned. We felt our community is somehow targeted,” Ouhaid told the CBC’s Alistair Steele. “Although we don’t really understand why, because we have been there for quite some time and everything was fine.”

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PVV attacks Queen Beatrix for wearing headscarf during visit to Abu Dhabi mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who is in Abu Dhabi, wore a headscarf when she visited the Sheikh Zayed Mosque this morning out of respect for the customs, traditions and conventions of Islam, says Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal. The queen is on a two-day state visit to the United Arab Emirates.

“Not to have worn one during a visit to a mosque wasn’t an option. In that case, the invitation to visit to the mosque, one of the most important in the United Arab Emirates, would’ve had to have been refused,” explained Mr Rosenthal.

His comments come in response to criticism from the Freedom Party (PVV) about the clothing worn by Queen Beatrix and Crown Princess Máxima who, with her husband Prince Willem-Alexander, is part of the royal party visiting the UAE. The PVV had complained that, by wearing a headscarf, the queen was lending legitimacy to the oppression of women under Islam.

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EDL leader says Jeremy Clarkson posed for photo and discussed Islam with him

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Clarkson and LennonGobby Jeremy Clarkson stormed into another race row last night after making fun of drowned Chinese cockle pickers. And his latest outburst came after the Daily Star Sunday discovered he had posed for a snap with the leader of the racist English Defence League.

The 51-year-old was slammed after joking about dead Chinese immigrants in his regular newspaper column. He tastelessly compared synchronised swimmers to the 21 cockle pickers who were killed in rising tides in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, in 2004. The Top Gear presenter was last night branded “out of touch” by anti-racism groups.

The latest outrage came as a picture of Clarkson and far-right English Defence League head Stephen Lennon emerged. Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, claims he talked about Islam with Clarkson.

The 28-year-old convicted thug, who also founded the anti-Islamic movement, said: “He knew who I was. We talked about Islam. I don’t want to say anything else because he will just get stitched up. But I’m a big fan of him.”

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Stopping the spread of sharia should be central to British foreign policy (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Last week ConservativeHome posted a lengthy piece by Martin Parsons urging that “combatting [sic] the spread of sharia enforcement across the world” should become “a central feature of British foreign policy”.

With articles like this it’s difficult to identify where ignorance ends and conscious misrepresentation begins. For example, Parsons tells us that in Egypt “the Muslim Brotherhood (al Ikhwan al Muslimun) and the radical Salafist Jama’a al-Islamiyya [Islamic Group] formed a political alliance to fight October’s parliamentary elections”.

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Norwegian black metal band nominated for music prize despite anti-Islam lyrics

Posted on by Bob Pitt

TaakeA black metal band nominated for Norway’s top music prize has rejected claims that lyrics on its latest album go too far in their criticism of Islam.

Taake’s nomination for the Spellemann Prize in the Best Metal Album category has sparked a strong reaction from listeners who find some of the band’s lyrics objectionable, newspaper Aftenposten reports. In the song Orkan (“Hurricane”) on its latest album, Noregs Vaapen, the band sings: “To hell with Muhammad and the Mohammedans” and their “unforgivable customs”. It ends with the line: “Norway will soon awaken”.

Marte Thorsby, chairman of the prize committee’s board, denied any assertion that the jury must not have listened to the album properly before announcing the nomination. “We enjoy full freedom of expression in Norway and a Spellemann jury is not going to censor content in any way,” she told Aftenposten.

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EDL uses Douglas Murray to deny accusations of racism and boost recruitment

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Douglas Murray (3)

The English Defence League have posted an article on their website urging support for their fight against “Islamic extremism”. It begins with the usual whinge about how they are falsely accused of being far-right racists: “The eagerness of some in the media to paint a group of patriotic people as some kind of extremists (when they’d never make such an offensive and blatantly untrue generalisations about more ‘sensitive’ groups of people) illustrates the application of a double standard reflective of what we’ve regularly referred to as a growing two tier system.”

However, not all the news is bad: “Luckily there are a few members of the middle and establishment classes who believe that the EDL at least deserve a fair hearing. One of these is the British writer and former director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, Douglas Murray.” This is followed by a video of Murray speaking at the One Law For All seminar last year where he welcomed the EDL as “a grassroots response from non-Muslims to Islamism”. The EDL applauds the fact that Murray “identifies ‘decent ordinary people’ with the EDL. Whilst he’s cautious of the need to ensure that the EDL is not hijacked by undesirable elements (so are we!), he recognises that most EDL supporters simply care about their communities and their countries”.

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