The controversial sale of the Drill Hall site in High Town to a Muslim group has been axed, with Luton Borough Council announcing yesterday (Dec 21) that homes will be built there instead.
At a secret meeting last week, members of the council’s executive decided that the site should be used for housing, rather than be sold to the Shia Muslim Masjid-e-Ali group for £1.5 million.
A spokesman for the group said its members were “extremely disappointed” by the decision.
Dearborn — The local office of a national Muslim civil rights group says they have met with postal investigators about several anti-Muslim hate mailings that were sent recently to area mosques, Islamic centers and Muslim organizations.
Officials for the Michigan office of Council on American-Islamic Relations, located in Southfield, say they were investigating mail received by a local mosque that contained pornographic references to Islam.
Lena Masri, the staff attorney for CAIR-MI, said the organization has turned over several pieces of obscene mailings. Masri said the correspondence they received from a local mosque was pornographic material making reference to Islamic religious symbols.
“Unfortunately, given the rise in Islamaphobia, we’ve seen a rise in hate mail mailed to mosques as well as to our offices,” said Masri on Monday.
Masri said she was informed by local officials with the U.S. Postal Inspector’s Office that a Dearborn mosque was mailed a letter containing a page from the Quran that was smeared with feces.
Masri said CAIR has issued an advisory for local mosques and Islamic organizations and others to be cautious when opening their mail. She urged people not to open mail without a return address and to report suspicious letters and packages to the U.S. postal inspector or to CAIR’s office.
The Quebec government, which said Tuesday it will allow Muslim women working in provincial jails to wear a head scarf, has been accused by the Opposition of caving in to an “excessive” demand.
The Quebec Public Security Department passed the new rule after reaching a deal with Quebec’s human rights commission, following a complaint made four years ago. The ministry chose to enforce what it calls an “accommodation” rather than take the matter to the provincial human rights tribunal.
The Parti Québécois lambasted the government Tuesday for caving in to this “excessive” demand. “This is completely unacceptable,” said PQ critic for secularism issues Carole Poirier. “The guards are state employees and should not wear any conspicuous religious symbols, especially not in a jail where the neutrality of the state should be obvious.”
The Daily Mail reports: “A courageous housewife stabbed a machete-wielding burglar when he threatened to cut off her son’s finger, a court was told yesterday. Gillian Wilson, 55, was praised by a judge after she rushed at violent burglar Nigel Greenwood, 29, and plunged a knife into his arm, causing him and his accomplices to flee.”
What a sharp contrast this report presents to the Mail‘s coverage of Inayat Bunglawala’s resistance to a violent intruder at his own home in 2009 (see here and here), for which the paper was subsequently obliged to issue an apology and pay damages.
Yesterday’s Guardian interview with UKIP leader Nigel Farage, in which he stated that he intended to re-examine his party’s manifesto commitment to “tackle extremist Islam by banning the burqa or veiled niqab in public buildings and certain private buildings”, and didn’t personally support such a ban, hasn’t gone down too well with some people.
Over at the Mail‘s Right Minds blog (edited by Simon Heffer) we find former prominent UKIP member Abhijit Pandya upholding the view that a ban is justified because the veil is “a deliberate political statement whose meanings any free democratic society, least of all one that pretends to believe in women’s freedom, should consistently and unapologetically challenge”. Pandya continues:
That the one time UKIP leader Lord Pearson had the courage to recognise the political necessity of confronting this political issue, was a break from the normal political apathy towards protecting our culture. That Nigel Farage is considering abandoning this commitment ought to force us to ask whether there is any courage left amongst our politicians to fight for our cultural heritage and gender equality.
This criticism of Farage as having gone “soft on Islam” echoes recent comments by another ex-UKIP member, Paul Weston of the British Freedom Party.
Whether the Islamic Center of Naperville‘s next mosque is built five years from now or 20, it will be built according to the same rules and conditions as each of the city’s other religious institutions.
City council members Monday unanimously approved the residential zoning and annexation of the center’s 14-acre lot at 9931 S. 248th Ave. on the city’s far southwest side in Will County. In doing so, they also rejected demands of neighboring homeowners to insert conditional restrictions on lighting, traffic and parking and the installation of berming and landscaping.
Whether the Islamic Center of Naperville‘s next mosque is built five years from now or 20, it will be built according to the same rules and conditions as each of the city’s other religious institutions.
City council members Monday unanimously approved the residential zoning and annexation of the center’s 14-acre lot at 9931 S. 248th Ave. on the city’s far southwest side in Will County. In doing so, they also rejected demands of neighboring homeowners to insert conditional restrictions on lighting, traffic and parking and the installation of berming and landscaping.
BAY CITY — A Bangor Township man was charged with ethnic intimidation after Bay City police alleged he shouted “Osama bin Laden” and “jihad” at two men outside a bar in Bay City’s Midland Street Historic District.
Delane D. Bell is scheduled to appear Thursday for a preliminary evidence hearing before District Judge Timothy J. Kelly.
Bell, 25, is charged with single counts of ethnic intimidation, a two-year felony, malicious destruction of property, a one-year misdemeanor, and assault or assault and battery, a 93-day misdemeanor.
A Bracknell man who admitted urinating in a Muslim man’s trainers, during a racist “happy slapping” incident, will be sentenced for the “vile and disgraceful” act in January.
IT worker Darren Scott and his friend Aidan Ostintelli, of Camberley, were drunk and high on cannabis when they abused and attacked Mustapha Himedean after a trip to Amsterdam in July.
Scott, of Northbrook Copse, Forest Park, admitted religiously aggravated common assault, religiously aggravated harassment and aggravated harassment. Ostinelli, who denied the charges, was jailed for six months at Maidstone Crown Court on Tuesday, December 12, for his part in the attack.
World soccer body FIFA has endorsed a proposal to lift a controversial ban on women wearing a hijab in a move that brings closer a resolution to demands by religious female Islamic soccer players that they be allowed to wear a headdress in line with their interpretation of their faith.
At its executive committee meeting in Tokyo this weekend, FIFA decided to submit to the International Football Association Board (IFAB), which governs the rules of association soccer, the proposal put forward by Asian Football Confederation (AFC) vice president Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, a half-brother of Jordanian King Abdullah.
IFAB is expected to discuss the proposal that calls for the sanctioning of a safe, velcro-opening headscarf for players and officials at its next scheduled meeting on March 3.
The FIFA executive committee’s endorsement follows an earlier approval of the AFC proposal that resulted from a workshop convened in October in Amman by Prince Ali that was attended by prominent soccer executives, women players and coaches, including head of FIFA’s medical committee Michel D’Hooghe, AFC vice president Moya Dodd, members of FIFA’s women committee and representatives of the soccer bodies of Jordan, Bahrain, Iran and England.