Joel Titus banned from attending EDL protests and loitering outside mosques

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joel Titus Harrow
Titus punching photographer Marc Vallée at a Stop Islamisation of Europe protest outside Harrow Central Mosque in December 2009 (Photo: Jonathan Warren)

An Eastcote teenager has been banned from attending protests by far-right group the English Defence League.

Joel Titus, 19, of North View, who has been violent at EDL protests, was slapped with an antisocial behaviour order (ASBO) at Uxbridge Magistrates Court on Friday. The court heard about the teenager’s involvement in a string of incidents between 2009 and 2010, which police say were overwhelmingly related to EDL protests.

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Dawkins ponders anti-Islam alliance with evangelical Christians

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bakke anti-Islam mapRichard Dawkins is often described as a “militant atheist”. However, if this term is meant to convey that Dawkins maintains a uniform hostility to all varieties of religious belief then it is misapplied.

Dawkins makes no attempt to hide the fact that he is discriminatory in his opposition to different faiths. He happily describes himself as a “cultural Christian” – by which he means a cultural Anglican. After all, according to Dawkins, Roman Catholicism is “the world’s second most evil religion”. No prizes for guessing which faith is the most evil. Indeed, Dawkins holds the view that Islam is not only by far the worst of all the major faiths but is also arguably “the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today”.

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Another Wilders critic is denounced by the PVV

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Far-right Freedom Party (PVV) local councillors in The Hague have demanded an apology from writer Karel Kanits for comparing their party’s leader Geert Wilders to Adolf Hitler.

During Thursday’s Liberation Day festivities Mr Kanits described Mr Wilders as a “bleached Führer” – a reference to the anti-Islam MP’s trademark bleached hair.

“We are firm advocates of free speech,” said Freedom Party councillor Richard de Mos on Sunday. “But this sort of comparison, paid for out of Freedom Party voters’ taxes, is unwarranted. Of all days, on the day we celebrate the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in 1945, The Hague city council programmes a loudmouth who comes with this filthy and lowdown comparison.”

The Freedom Party councillors are demanding that Mr Kanits make a public apology and pay back his engagement fee.

In April, the annual Willem Arondéus lecture was scrapped because historian and writer Thomas von der Dunk planned to compare the rise of the Freedom Party to the rise of Nazism. The lecture is named after an openly gay Dutch World War II liberation hero and is supposed to tackle controversial topics.

The selection committee said the planned lecture was too party political, and Mr Von der Dunk refused to tone down the content. He went on to deliver the address anyway outside the provincial government building.

There were claims that provincial councillors from the ruling VVD and Christian Democrat parties had the lecture banned under pressure from the Freedom Party. The minority coalition relies on the support of Freedom Party MPs in parliament.

At a Liberation Day festival on Thursday, the organisers banned a band from performing a song describing Geert Wilders as the “Mussolini of the Low Countries”.

RNW, 8 May 2011

In addition, Utrecht University capitulated to pressure from the PVV and banned philosopher Rob Riemen from criticising Wilders in a Remembrance Day speech. And earlier this year the PVV bullied a public broadcaster into removing a cartoon that Wilders found offensive. Wilders himself, of course, demands the right to incite hatred against Mulims by comparing the Qur’an to Hitler’s Mein Kampf – but any attempt by his opponents to draw a parallel between Wilders and the Nazis is a “filthy and lowdown comparison” which the PVV insists should be suppressed.

Anti-Muslim incidents in the US follow the death of Osama bin Laden

Posted on by Bob Pitt

When he announced the death of Osama bin Laden, President Obama acknowledged and echoed his predecessor, telling the nation, “I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam.” Not everybody listened. While the incidents are for the most part isolated, several public expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment have occurred around the country.

ABC, 6 May 2011

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‘Hundreds’ of MAC supporters demonstrate for Osama bin Laden

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MAC bin Laden demoWell, that’s the figure given by the tabloid press for the number of participants at the demonstration by Anjem Choudary’s Muslims Against Crusades group yesterday.

The Mail reported: “A protest by hundreds of Osama Bin Laden supporters sparked fury outside the US Embassy in London today as they staged a mock ‘funeral service’ for the terror leader…. Radicals carrying placards proclaiming ‘Islam will dominate the world’ branded US leaders ‘murderers’ and warned vengeance attacks were ‘guaranteed’.”

The Sun and the Express agreed that “hundreds” of Choudary’s supporters joined the embassy protest.

Even allowing for the fact that an event like Bin Laden’s death would bring a larger than normal turnout, this seems highly unlikely, given that the supporters Choudary is able to attract to his provocative stunts are usually numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds. Indeed, Associated Press reported that “dozens of people” attended yesterday’s demonstration, while Reuters puts the figure at no more than “about a hundred”. Photos of the protest would appear to confirm that the “hundreds” of MAC demonstrators were a figment of the press’s imagination.

But this is what we have come to expect from the tabloid press. They repeatedly boost the importance and significance of Anjem Choudary and his tiny group, suggesting to their readers that he represents substantial forces within Britain’s Muslim communities, when in reality he represents next to nothing. This in turn feeds the paranoid far-right fantasies of the English Defence League, who organised a counter-protest against MAC yesterday. EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon recently predicted, with an entirely straight face, that “there’s going to be a hundred thousand Anjem Choudarys”.

Race attack on train after EDL rally

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police are appealing for information about a racist attack on a train. Officers say a man launched a torrent of racial abuse and attacked a passenger travelling alone from Halifax to Bradford. The assault happened on Saturday, April 16, and followed a march by the far-right group in Halifax town centre.

PC Alan Dean, the investigating officer from British Transport Police, said: “A group of men all boarded the 3.29pm Blackpool North to York service. During the journey, two of the group sat next to the victim – a 24-year-old who was travelling alone – and began to make racial comments. It is believed that one of the men then assaulted him, causing bruising and cuts to the victim’s face.”

Officers went to Bradford Interchange to meet the train and a 43-year-old man from Barnsley was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated assault. He has since been bailed until June 16 pending further police inquiries.

PC Dean said: “The behaviour of some of this group was outrageous and has no place on the railway – or in the wider community. Everyone has the right to travel without fear of abuse or threatening behaviour, and when that behaviour is further exacerbated by racist undertones, our stance becomes firmer still.

“British Transport Police and the wider rail industry will not tolerate any form of racism on the rail network and we will do everything in our power to take action against those responsible.”

If you have information about the attack contact British Transport Police on 0800 405040 quoting background reference B8/NEA of May 5, 2011 or call the independent charity CrimeStoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

Halifax Courier, 7 May 2011

Investigation into border harassment of US Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The U.S. government has launched an investigation into allegations that federal agents at several U.S.-Canada border crossings in Michigan repeatedly harassed, jailed and body searched Muslims because of their background or appearance.

In a letter sent this week to a local Muslim group, Margo Schlanger, the head of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Department of Homeland Security, said her office has received accounts of “repeated handcuffing, brandishing of weapons, prolonged detentions, invasive and humiliating body searches at the border, and inappropriate questioning that pertains to religion and religious practices.”

The complaints include incidents at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron.

The investigation comes in response to complaints filed in March by the Council on American-Islamic Relations with the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

Detroit Free Press, 7 May 2011

Muslims travelling to Islamophobia conference removed from plane

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mohamed Zaghloul and Masadur Rahman

Two Muslim religious leaders on their way to a Charlotte conference on “Islamophobia” said they were removed from a commercial flight Friday because the pilot refused to fly with them on board.

Imams Masudur Rahman, an adjunct professor of Arabic at the University of Memphis, and Mohamed Zaghloul said they and their bags were checked twice by security agents at the Memphis airport before boarding the 8:40 a.m. Delta connection Flight 5452 to Charlotte.

Rahman said the plane left the gate and was taxiing to the runway when the pilot came over the intercom. “The pilot said: ‘There is an issue. We need to return to the gate,'” Rahman said.

“They were screened and cleared to fly,” said TSA spokesman Jon Allen in Atlanta. “The decision to deny boarding was made by the airline, not TSA.”

The imams were flying to Charlotte to attend the North American Imams Federation 2011 Conference this weekend. Organizers said more than 150 religious leaders from across the country will meet through Sunday to discuss prejudice and fear of Islam or Muslims.

“The conference is about ‘Islamophobia,’ so it’s ironic that these guys were stopped on their way here because of this same issue,” said Jibril Hough of the Islamic Center of Charlotte. “These guys definitely have something to talk about.”

Herald, 7 May 2011

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EDL has nothing to do with BNP, claims Guramit Singh

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stephen Lennon with Richard Edmonds
EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (standing, left) at a BNP meeting in 2007

The English Defence League’s token Sikh, Guramit Singh, has written a long, rambling letter addressed to members and supporters of the Turban Campaign. It is Singh’s belated response to the statement issued last December by representatives of Britain’s Asian communities opposing the EDL and the British National Party.

Singh takes particular exception to the statement’s bracketing of the EDL with the BNP: “I’d like to state now, the English Defence League denounces the British National Party! … Its current leader was a member of the National Front and one of the founders, John Tyndall was a Neo Nazi. Why would the EDL want to be linked to the BNP? We don’t, but our opponents want us to be!”

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