Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives urged her on Tuesday to step up the fight against right-wing extremists following the chance discovery that a group of neo-Nazis had been murdering immigrants for years.
Merkel has described as a national disgrace the existence of a cell, called the National Socialist Underground, whose members are now suspected of killing between 2000 and 2007 at least nine immigrants, eight Turks and a Greek, and a police woman.
Norwegian anti-immigration militant Anders Behring Breivik spoke in open court for the first time on Monday and admitted killing 77 people in attacks in July, but he denied any guilt, saying he was a military commander in a far-right resistance movement.
Wearing a black suit, white shirt and silvery tie, a tense Breivik sat with his eyes mostly downcast and occasionally bit his lip in a packed hearing to extend his custody before trial.
At one point Breivik attempted to address survivors of Norway’s biggest modern-day massacre, but the judge cut him off.
“I am a military commander in the Norwegian resistance movement and Knights Templar Norway,” Breivik told the court.
It was the 32-year-old’s first public utterance since he planted a car bomb on July 22 that killed eight people at an Oslo government building, then went on to shoot dead 69 more, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party summer camp on the island of Utoeya.
“I acknowledge the acts, but I do not plead guilty,” Breivik said, adding that he rejected the jurisdiction of the court because it “supports multiculturalism.”
Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50% last year, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the vicious rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York City.
Although the national statistics compiled by the FBI each year are known to dramatically understate the real level of reported and unreported hate crimes, they do offer telling indications of some trends. The latest statistics, showing a jump from 107 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2009 to 160 in 2010, seem to reflect a clear rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric from groups like Stop Islamization of America. Much of that rhetoric was aimed at stopping an Islamic center in lower Manhattan.
The Masjid-E-Umar in Darlaston, West Midlands was vandalised on the morning of Remembrance Day in what is suspected to be a hate crime in retaliation against the fifty Muslim individuals who took part in burning poppies on Remembrance Day 2010.
The attack occurred between the hours of 7:30am and 11:00am. The suspects were said to have jumped over the locked gates and spray painted a graffiti image of a poppy on the mosque door with the text “Burn this one” to signal the mosque as an adherent to the poppy burning incident.
In 2010, to commemorate Remembrance Day, fifty individuals under a now banned extremist group Muslim Against Crusades, took part in burning poppies near Albert Hall in London clashing with far-right extremist group, the English Defence League (EDL).
CCTV was in operation outside the mosque but no footage of the perpetrators had been captured.
Police arrived on the scene shortly after 12pm and patrolled the area for the remainder of the day. The graffiti was removed but the mosque door was damaged.
Reyhana Patel reports at Suite 101, 15 November 2011
Anti-Muslim comments made by a PUC professor on his public Facebook page and during his class lectures have led to campus-wide outrage and student protests.
Energetic chants such as “No more Eisenstein, Eisenstein must go!” and “They say get back, we say fight back!” echoed throughout the courtyard between the Gyte and SUL buildings on Nov. 9 and 10. Students held signs and handed out transcripts of Eisenstein’s Facebook comments while expressing their opinions as others came and went between classes. Approximately 50 to 70 students took part in the protest.
Associate Professor of Political Science, Maurice Moshe Eisenstein posted comments attached with a link to a YouTube video on his Facebook page on Nov. 6, where he asked for justice for the killings of black Christians in Nigeria while lashing out towards Muslims. The video link was found by another PUC professor, which then started a heated debate between Eisenstein and PUC students via Facebook. On one of Facebook comments, Eisenstein wrote that “Muslims are barbarians and that they are nothing more to me than dogs.”
PUC Chronicle, 14 November 2011
Update: See “Nutty Professor Maurice Moshe Eisenstein: Racism and Anti-Muslim Hate”, LoonWatch, 16 November 2011
Local Muslims are calling for action against a Tennessee State Representative Rick Womick after he said Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the U.S. military.
In an interview with thinkprogress.org, Womick said, “Personally, I don’t trust one Muslim in our military, because they are commanded to lie to us through a term called taqiyya, and if they truly are a devout Muslim and follow the Quoran, then I feel threatened, because they are commanded to kill me.”
Those comments came during a conference of conservative activists that focused on the threat of Islamic extremism in America.
Herman Cain said that he believes a majority of American Muslims share extremist views in an interview published on Monday.
In an interview that included a few eyebrow-raising comments, Cain’s exchange about American Muslims may get the most attention. “I have had one very well-known Muslim voice say to me directly that a majority of Muslims share the extremist views,” Cain said in an interview with GQ.
The BNP reports that it held a demonstration in Wakefield on Saturday against halal chicken being sold at KFC restaurants.
The protest was attended by “members and officials from across Yorkshire”, we’re told – which, judging from the photographs accompanying the article, amounted to no more than seven people.
The BNP might also like to reconsider posting this picture from the protest, which appears to be encouraging motorists to drive through one of the BNP demonstrators. Excellent advice, it must be said.
A mosque in eastern France was damaged after unknown attackers set fire to the building using a burning rubbish bin early Thursday, France 3 television reported.
The head of the mosque in Montbeliard, located about 170 kilometres south of Strasbourg, near the German border, discovered the fire when he arrived to open the building for morning prayers, the report said. One wall was badly damaged. The attack on the mosque is the second in a month, according to France 3.
A group calling itself Les Echappees Belles (The Lucky Escapes) claimed responsibility for the incident in tracts left near the mosque. The group – believed to be a group of women loosely influenced by right-wing extremists, according to France 3 – had claimed responsibility for setting fire to the mosque’s van in October.
Police were investigating the incident.
Muslim groups say the number of attacks on Muslims and Muslim institutions is on the increase. The Collective Against Islamophobia in France recorded 188 Islamophobic acts in 2010, mostly against institutions such as mosques.
See also La Pèche, 11 November 2011 and Le Pays, 14 November 2011
Arrels reports on an anti-mosque demonstration by the far-right group España 2000 in the town of Onda in eastern Spain, which the organisers claim drew 400 participants. They carried banners with slogans such as “Stop the Islamist invasion” while chanting “Onda is Christian, never Muslim” and “throw them out”.
