Surprise, surprise – Wilders is acquitted of inciting hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Geert Wilders extremistAn Amsterdam court Thursday acquitted Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders on charges of hate speech and discrimination for statements he made attacking Islam.

“You are being acquitted on all the charges that were put against you,” Judge Marcel van Oosten said, reiterating an argument last month by the prosecution that charges against Wilders should be dropped.

“The bench finds that your statements are acceptable within the context of the public debate,” the judge told Wilders, 47, who has been on trial in the Amsterdam regional court since last October.

The flamboyant MP faced five counts of hate speech and discrimination for his anti-Islamic remarks on websites, Internet forums and in Dutch newspapers between October 2006 and March 2008, and in his controversial 17-minute movie “Fitna”.

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New CAIR, UC Berkeley report documents growing Islamophobia in U.S.

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Same Hate New TargetThe Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender today released a report based on available data and interviews with experts that documents growing Islamophobia in the United States and offers recommendations about how to challenge the troubling phenomenon.

The groundbreaking report – titled “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States 2009-2010” – offers a definition of Islamophobia as a “close-minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims” and an overview of its growing negative impact in the United States. After defining the term, the report states: “It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority of those, who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobes.”

Special sections in the report focus on the manufactured controversy over the Park 51 Islamic community center in Manhattan, the 2010 Oklahoma ballot initiative targeting Islamic principles (Sharia) and Islamophobia in the 2010 elections.

“This report shows that Americans who embrace pluralism must act together to prevent Islamophobia from being accepted in mainstream society,” said CAIR National Legislative Director Corey Saylor, one of the report’s co-authors. “Islamophobia is the new face of an old hate that has targeted minorities throughout our nation’s history.”

CAIR press release, 23 June 2011

Download the report here.

More information on the Center for Race and Gender’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project here.

Update:  Or, for an alternative view, see Robert Spencer, “Hamas-linked CAIR teams up with UC Berkeley prof who called for ‘intifada’ in U.S. for defamatory ‘Islamophobia’ report”, Jihad Watch, 23 June 2011

That’s the same Robert Spencer who is described in the report as promoting “an intellectualized Islamophobia through ‘selectively ignoring’ Islamic texts and principles that do not fit his view of Islam as the enemy”.

The report also notes: “In 2006, Spencer participated in a conference honoring anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who sought to legalize government discrimination in the Netherlands. Spencer proudly highlights his participation in this conference among his ‘Notable Speaking Engagements’. Fortuyn’s anti-Muslim views and the resulting backlash against Muslims living in the Netherlands are noted in the Department of State’s International Religious Freedom Reports for 2002 and 2005.”

Discrimination against Muslims at all-time high in Belgium

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A total of 166 out of 1,466 cases launched in connection with discrimination and racism-related offenses involve faith, according to the 2010 report prepared by Belgium’s Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR).

Eighty-four percent of these cases are connected to Islam while only 2 percent concern Christianity and Judaism. The high number of cases of discrimination against Muslims is likely to bring more debates on Islamophobia back to the agenda. Eighty percent of the complaints filed with the CEOOR involve racism.

About two-thirds of the cases involving Islam stem from Islamophobia, the report says. These incidents of Islamophobia are mostly characterized by propaganda being disseminated through email and pressure in the workplace. The workplace-related cases of discrimination include exclusion and verbal provocation of Muslims. The report notes these instances are a result of workplace administrations believing that “religion has no place in the workplace”. The tension arising from Islamophobic attitudes in the workplace is mostly eliminated “by transferring the Muslim employee involved to another department or laying her/him off”.

Furthermore, 50 percent of cases of discrimination involving faith are linked to media organizations that publish or air unfair accusations or generalizations about members of a specific religion. Twenty-five percent of these cases concern recruitment or promotion while 8 percent involve services provided. The cases of discrimination in the latter category are mostly visible in real estate purchases or rentals. Some real estate agents and home owners are not inclined to rent out their properties to people who they believe are of a different faith.

Additionally, the number of cases of discrimination reported to the CEOOR in 2010 increased by 25 percent compared to the previous year. A list of companies allegedly reluctant to employ foreign employees was recently posted on the Internet.

Today’s Zaman, 23 June 2011

Ham at Bristol mosque was ‘revenge’ for poppy burning

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David FosterA man who was high on drugs defiled a mosque and insulted its members by hanging slices of ham on the railings and in the shoes of worshippers while they prayed in an act of “religious revenge”. David Foster told a court that he carried out the highly offensive act to give Muslims a “taste of their own medicine” as retaliation for extremists burning poppies.

Foster, 22, and Jamie Knowlson, 30, were caught on CCTV hanging the ham on the railings of the Al-Basera mosque in Wade Street, St Jude’s in the early hours of January 9. The CCTV showed them returning to Redwood House at about 6.30am, a homeless hostel opposite, and the mosque’s caretaker, Abdi Djmaa followed to complain. As Mr Djmaa returned to the mosque he heard someone shouting “bad meat”, “girls” and “the next visit will be harder”.

Foster was due to face trial, but changed his mind and pleaded guilty at Bristol Magistrates’ Court via video link from Bristol Prison to causing racial or religiously aggravated harassment.

Prosecuting, May Li said: “At 6.30am two men were seen skewering slices of ham on the railings outside the Al-Baseera mosque. The clerk of the mosque went to the Little George Street entrance, where people leave shoes for prayer. There were 12 slices of ham on the floor, and some of it was in people’s shoes, and pork inside a takeaway box was left in the vicinity.”

CCTV footage showed Foster and Knowlson running off to Redwood House. Police first arrested Knowlson at the house, and later Foster. In interview, he said: “I haven’t got a clue what happened, I was out of my mind on drugs. I woke up to find police were there saying I put ham in the mosque.”

But he then told officers he put the ham in the mosque in retaliation for Muslims publicly burning poppies, something which has not been done at this mosque. He said: “It is not acceptable that they can go around burning our poppies. They can have a bit of their own medicine if they want to go around burning poppies.”

Foster will be sentenced at Bristol Crown Court next month. Earlier this month Knowlson was given a six-month suspended prison sentence and 150 hours’ unpaid work.

Mubarak Mohamud, one of the three imams, or teachers, at the mosque, said the mosque was against poppy burning. “We want to respect others and expect others to respect us in return. It is sad that our community is carrying on with its own faith and minding its own business, yet suffers when someone does something like this in retaliation for something we didn’t do,” he said.

Bristol Evening Post, 22 June 2011

Posted in UK

‘Muslim intimidation’ has struck fear in the ‘British Christian majority’, claims Benny Morris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Benny MorrisIsraeli historian Benny Morris has written an account of last week’s visit to the London School of Economics where he addressed a meeting on the subject of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The visit understandably provoked some controversy, given Morris’s support for ethnic cleansing and his bigoted comments about Muslims, and he complains that he was harangued by demonstrators on his way to the lecture theatre. (“Several spoke in broken, obviously newly acquired, English.”)

And what conclusion does Morris draw from this experience of political opponents exercising their legitimate right to protest against him? He writes: “Uncurbed, Muslim intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence. One senses real fear….”

Of course, such comments are hardly unexpected, coming from a man who is on record as stating that “the phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat”.

However, imagine the outrage that would result if a Palestinian speaker at the LSE had been harangued by Zionist students and responded by writing: “Uncurbed, Jewish intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence. One senses real fear….”

One thing is certain, that individual would never again be invited to speak at the LSE.

Illinois: ex-court worker was harassed for being Muslim

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A former child care attendant for the Cook County Circuit Court has sued the court, its chief judge and her former supervisor, alleging they harassed her because she’s Muslim.

In a suit filed last month, Fozyia Huri, a Muslim of Saudi Arabian origin, alleges that Sylvia McCullum, executive director of Cook County court’s child advocacy rooms, bullied her because she was not a “good Christian.”

Huri said she complained to the office of Chief Judge Timothy Evans numerous times. When the harassment continued, she filed a religious discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May 2010, the suit says. Once granted permission, she filed the suit a year later.

Chicago Tribune, 22 June 2011