The OIC Observatory on Islamophobia released its Fourth Annual Report covering the period from May 2010 to April 2011 today at the commencement of the 38th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Kazakhstan. The Report has dwelt extensively on the worrying trend of Islamophobia as a clear and present danger to global peace and security.
OIC press release, 29 June 2011
Download the report here.
A member of the English Defence League (EDL) in Notts has pleaded guilty to being involved in an anti-Muslim “hate crime”. Christopher Payne helped a group of EDL members put a pig’s head sprayed with an anti-Muslim message on a 4ft yellow pole in Collington Way, West Bridgford. Payne, 25, of Beardsmore Grove, Hucknall, also spray-painted “No mosque here EDL Notts” on the pavement.
Payne appeared at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court yesterday where he pleaded guilty to two charges of racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage and causing racially or religiously aggravated alarm, harassment or distress by words or writing.
Daniel Pietryka, prosecuting, said: “Payne had been in a pub in Clifton with other EDL members when he received a text message from a friend who had the pig’s head. It was brought to the pub in a bin liner.”
The court heard there are plans to build a mosque on the site in Collington Way, off Rugby Road.
Payne was arrested on Saturday and told police under interview that he was a member of the EDL who had responsibility for arranging meetings and events in Notts.
District Judge Morris Cooper warned Payne that “all sentencing options are open at this stage” before adjourning the case for a pre-sentence probation report. He said: “You were involved in a course of conduct with others which involved the display of this pig’s head on a stake with grossly offensive comments written on it.”
Payne was granted bail despite police concerns about his involvement with the EDL. The bail conditions include a curfew between 10pm and 5am, that he stays away from West Bridgford and doesn’t go within 200 metres of a mosque. Payne also must not meet with other EDL members.
Payne is next due to appear at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court on July 21.
Three other men are due to appear at Nottingham Magistrates Court today in connection with the incident. Wayne Havercroft, 41, of Bestwood Village, Nicholas Long, 21, of Arnold, and Robert Joseph Parnham, 19, of Clifton, are each charged with causing religiously aggravated alarm, harassment or distress by words/writing and religiously aggravated criminal damage.
Wayne Havercroft is also charged with causing religiously aggravated alarm, harassment or distress by words/writing in Nottingham city centre on Saturday 25 June.
Update: See “Pig’s head on pole: Three plead guilty to hate crime”,Nottingham Post, 29 June 2011
A new survey documenting ethnic and religious attitudes in Britain has discovered a startlingly liberal approach to gay rights in the Muslim community.
The poll, conducted by think tank Demos in preparation for a forthcoming essay collection, shows that Muslims are more likely to strongly agree with the statement “I am proud of how Britain treats gay people” than people of no religion. Only Sikhs were more likely to strongly agree.
“British Muslims are far more enlightened and proud of our liberal values than they are often given credit for,” Max Wind-Cowie, head of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos, commented.
Overall, fewer than one in four British Muslims disagreed with the statement.
The poll found a high degree of pride in being British among Muslims, with four in five saying they were proud to be a British citizen and two-thirds saying they were proud of Britain’s culture. Only one in five said they were not proud of Britain’s role in the world.
The findings mark a significant change since a Gallup poll in 2009 found that zero per cent of British Muslims were tolerant towards homosexuality.
However, as Sunny Hundal points out at Liberal Conspiracy, the findings in the Demos poll are not necessarily in conflict with the 2009 Gallup poll. It is possible to believe that homosexuality is morally wrong according to the tenets of one’s faith while at the same time opposing oppression and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This is a distinction that was lost in at least one report of the Gallup poll results, which asserted that “Muslims in Britain have zero tolerance of homosexuality”.
The details of the Demos poll can be found here.
A man has been ordered to pay compensation after graffiting racist abuse on the doors of Hebden Bridge train station.
James Allen, 62, of Wood Villas, Hebden Bridge, appeared unrepresented at Calderdale Magistrates’ Court. He admitted causing £700 damage and possessing two bags of cannabis.
On seven different occasions between April 23 and June 7, station staff found graffiti supporting the English Defence League daubed on the back of doors in the male toilets.
He was given a 12-month community order and told to complete 60 hours of unpaid work, pay compensation of £100 and £85 towards costs.
The Swiss news agency ATS reports that the Islamic Youth Association of Switzerland (AJIS) demonstrated on Sunday in Lucerne against the Islamophobia to which they had been subjected.
After being refused premises for a planned seminar in Lucerne and Emmen, the AJIS booked a room above the Lucerne station buffet. But when they arrived there they were told that the room was unavailable because it was being set up for an event the next day.
So between 100 and 150 participants went down to the floor below and occupied the station buffet, where they unfurled banners reading “No to Islamophobia” or “We won’t be silenced”.
The president of the Central Islamic Council of Switzerland (CCIS), Nicolas Blancho Abdullah, complained of growing restrictions on the rights of Muslims. The planned seminar in Lucerne was a gathering of mainstream Islam, he said.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich urged the country’s Muslim community on Friday to do more to prevent the spread of radicalization among its youth.
He told Muslim leaders at a meeting in Berlin that families must act early to prevent young boys from turning into jihadists.
“Neither the security authorities nor ordinary Muslim citizens can do much to help,” when youths radicalize, he said. “It is up to the parents and the rest of the family to be observant about what their children are up to and how they are changing.”
Friedrich, a member of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), had summoned the meeting to discuss the risks of homegrown terrorism.
Germany’s political opposition denounced the meeting, saying the government ran the risk of stigmatizing all Muslims. “If we want to isolate extremists who are prone to violence, we must support moderate Muslims and make them feel welcome in Germany,” said the center-left Social Democrats parliamentary leader Thomas Oppermann.
The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, attended the meeting, but said he thought it had the wrong focus. “We have over 2,500 mosques and there aren’t even a dozen fringe groups,” he said. “We have to make it clear they are a small and dwindling group and that by talking about them and hyping them, we just strengthen them. That should not be the aim of a conference like this.”
Mazyek said the government needed to work harder on making Muslims feel at home in Germany and to campaign against Islamophobia. He said lack of integration into society was the main cause for radicalization of Muslim youths. Mazyek added that Muslim groups had already been cooperative in the government’s bid to prevent terrorism. He said that the effort should not be a “one-way street.”
The English Defence League’s protest in Tower Hamlets, provisionally set for 27 August, has now been rescheduled for 3 September.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s 19-year-old son posted disparaging comments about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page, an Israeli paper reported yesterday.
Earlier this year, Yair Netanyahu posted that Muslims “celebrate hate and death,” the Haaretz daily said. After Palestinian assailants entered a West Bank settlement and stabbed five members of an Israeli family to death, he wrote that “terror has a religion and it is Islam”.
Yair Netanyahu, the eldest of Benjamin Netanyahu’s two sons, is currently a soldier in the Israeli military’s media liaison unit. A lawyer for the Netanyahu family, David Shimron, said the comments were those of a “teenager” and were “taken out of context in an attempt to defame the Prime Minister and his family”.
The Prime Minister’s son also ran a Facebook group that called for a boycott of Arab businesses, and used obscenities to describe Arabs.Haaretz said the comments were removed within hours of the paper’s request for a response from the Prime Minister’s representatives.
A Virginia woman accused Air France of getting her terminated from the job she held briefly at Dulles International Airport because of her religion. “The hijab, to me, it’s empowerment,” 19-year-old Riham Osman said. “When people, men and women, talk to me, they’re looking at my personality, they’re listening to what I’m saying, they know that I stand for something.”
Osman is a proud Muslim from Herndon who wears a head scarf, or hijab, as a sign of her faith – a sign of her faith that she says got her fired from Air France. According to the copy of her contract she was hired by the staffing agency Aerotek to be a passenger service agent for Air France at Dulles. “I think the fact that I was hired at first with my scarf on shows that Aerotek hired me according to my [qualifications],” Osman said.
On June 2, Osman’s first day of work, an Air France supervisor pulled her from her training session demanding she speak with the person who hired her at Aerotek, Osman said. “He said that apparently Air France has an issue with the scarf that they will not allow me to work because it violates their uniform policy,” Osman said.
Refusing to take it off, Osman left the airport in tears. Soon after, she contacted the Council on American-Islamic Relations for help. Noting the ongoing controversy in France about the legality of wearing a hijab, CAIR filed a complaint and sent a letter to Air France saying in part, “It is clear that a discriminatory dress code implemented in France would not supersede American laws protecting the religious rights of employees. Air France must follow American law and grant reasonable religious accommodations for its employees.”
A spokesperson for Air France acknowledged the company received a letter from CAIR but would say only that Air France is investigating.
After being notified about the situation, Aerotek said it asked Air France to make an exception to the dress code policy for Osman. “Air France declined to make this accommodation and instructed us to end her assignment at Air France,”read a statement from Aerotek.
Osman hopes travelers will boycott Air France until she gets an apology.
Sayeeda Warsi rolls back in her chair and bursts out laughing. “I don’t read her, actually. I call her Mad Mel,” Lady Warsi says of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who has denounced her as “stupid”.
Warsi, a proud Yorkshirewoman, rarely pulls her punches. As the first Muslim to sit as a full member of the British cabinet, she fell foul of Phillips in January after she declared in the Sternberg lecture that Islamophobia had “crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability”.
Phillips’ barbed response was to describe Warsi, the Tory co-chair, on her Spectator blog as “at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process”.