Illinois: Muslim family claims bias at public pool
The Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed two complaints Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court claiming employees at a public pool discriminated against a Muslim family from Lyons based on their attire.
The family was barred from entering the Cermak Family Aquatic Center in Lyons, owned by the Cook County Forest Preserve District, in 2009 because of their clothing, said attorney Christina Abraham, the organization’s civil rights director.
A manager stopped the mother because she was wearing a long dress and head scarf, Abraham said. After she agreed to leave, the manager denied entry to the father and children, saying their swimming trunks were made of the wrong material. “They were wearing T-shirts and would have taken the T-shirts off once they were inside,” Abraham said.
In October, CAIR-Chicago filed a discrimination claim and received a favorable ruling from the Illinois Department of Human Rights. “People go into the aquatic center all the time in plain clothes,” Abraham said. One complaint asks the court to force the county to take action. The other seeks monetary compensation.
Right-wing blogosphere froths at the mouth over Muslim ‘Batman of Paris’
So the Batman franchise runner in Paris, France is an young man of Algerian Muslim descent. How did DC expect the blogosphere to react?
Unfortunately, readers of Batman will not be helped to understand what troubles are really besetting France. In this age when Muslim youths are terrorizing the entire country, heck in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman’s readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world. Through it all DC makes a Muslim in France a hero when French Muslims are at the center of some of the worst violence in the country’s recent memory.
It’s PCism run amuck, for sure.
How about that, Bruce Wayne goes to France where he hires not a genuine French boy or girl with a real sense of justice, but rather, an “oppressed” minority who adheres to the Religion of Peace. And this is a guy whose very parents were murdered at the hands of a common street thug!
I’m guessing that the writer, David Hine, is taking out his leftist anger on France for finally taking steps to fight back against creeping shariah and Islamic supremacism, by banning the niqab for starters.
While Angry White Dude told us:
Nightrunner? I thought it was written in the Koran that every Muslim’s name has to be Muhammad … including women. Or is that just the savage terrorists? Or is that redundant? Nightrunner the Muslim sidekick will have strange new powers to bury women to their waists and bash their heads in with large rocks. Batman has been needing that skill for a while ever since Catwoman went out to check the mail without wearing her cat burqa. Well, I guess AWD will have to go another 49 years without reading Batman comic books to protest!
And now comic book creator Bosch Fawstin has responded with his own comic book take on the situation.
I personally don’t think Batman is built to take on butchers like al Qaeda, since DC Comics thinks having Batman kill would kill the character. (Heroes don’t kill? What of our heroic soldiers?) But I sure as hell don’t think Batman should be used to sell the Big Lie that “Islam means peace.” And, believe it or not, this is the second time in two months that Batman has been used in Islamic propaganda, the first being in the unreadable JLA/the 99 #1. At this rate, Superman converting to Islam is inevitable.
Rich Johnson at Bleeding Cool, 30 December 2010
collaboration between DC Comics and Teshkeel Comics of Kuwait, in which the Justice League of America joins forces with a group of Islamic superheroes called The 99.
See also Ology, 29 December 2010
Muslim Safety Forum responds to reports that police seek replacement for Section 44
Concern over reports on replacement to Section 44
MSF is concerned over reports that senior police officers are seeking a replacement power to Section 44.
According to a report in the Guardian Newspaper, senior police officers are seeking a stop and search power to enhance counter terrorism street policing similar to Section 44. This power seems to be seeking what Section 44 was originally meant to entail: a time constrained, geographically limited and exceptional police power to stop and search people.
However, the MSF feels in light of the huge damage Section 44 has done to community-police relations without any apparent successes and the inability of UK police forces to, on their own accord, address this disproportionate use of it, we remain sceptical and concerned about this alleged recall of the power in a different guise by the police.
Shamiul Joarder, MSF’s lead on Counter Terrorism said:
“If true then we would find this development a major concern to us. We have contacted the police requesting an urgent meeting to explain this media report.”
He further added:
“The MSF has deep concerns over the reduction of police accountability through the proposed changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) which will, either directly or indirectly, increase police powers of all terrorism and general stop and searches/accounts whilst simultaneously reducing police accountability.
In this new context to allow for the draconian power such as s.44 in whatever guise will simply alienate vast swathes of communities who we have only just managed to build a working relationship with.”
Muslim Safety Forum press release, 30 December 2010
See also ENGAGE, 30 December 2010
Update: And see Salma Yaqoob‘s comments.
Have Berlin mosques become a target?
Several Muslim centers in Berlin have been the target of arson attacks in recent months. Police have made little progress in their investigation, but many suspect that the series of incidents has its roots in the raw rhetoric surrounding Germany’s integration debate.
Non-storm over Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘burka’ stunt
The pathetic decision by Jeremy Clarkson and his co-host Richard Hammond to dress in niqabs during a Top Gear programme from Syria (this is what passes for humour in such circles) has provoked an outbreak of mass Muslim outrage, if the right-wing populist press is to be believed.
Yesterday’s Daily Mail featured a lengthy article headlined “Top Gear stars cause religious row after dressing up in burkas on Boxing Day special” and the Daily Star went with “Clarkson in Burka gear storm”, while the Daily Express warned of “Protest fears over Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear stars in burkhas”.
Today the story has been taken up across the world, in countries where Top Gear presumably (if inexplicably) enjoys an audience. A report in Australia’s Herald Sun is headed “Top Gear burka sketch sparks outrage” and the Sydney Morning Herald has “Top Gear stars cause row after burqa-style stunt”. In South Africa the Independent Online covers the story as “Top Gear slammed for burka stunt”, while the Hindustan Times opts for “Top Gear stars spark religious row”.
But even a cursory examination of the Mail and Star reports reveals that this is an entirely confected controversy. Not a single leading Muslim organisation or individual in the UK has even bothered to comment on the issue, still less express outrage. The papers were reduced to approaching Anjem Choudary, the head of a tiny group of nutters who are repudiated by the entire British Muslim community, to ask for a quote. Needless to say, he obliged: “The burka is a symbol of our religion and people should not make jokes about it in any way.” And the story is padded out by citing a handful of comments culled from Twitter and internet discussion forums.
We had the same nonsense inflicted on us last July when the Mail carried a story headlined “Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson sparks fury over ‘burka babes’ underwear joke” (now amended to “Jeremy Clarkson outrages viewers by announcing on Top Gear he’d seen saucy underwear beneath Muslim woman’s burka”). In that case the “outrage” consisted of seven complaints to the BBC and a tweet by Lily Allen.
This is of course all part of a right-wing narrative about intolerant Muslims reacting with “fury” to any slight against their faith. In reality, it seems clear that the Muslim community, like the writer of this post, find it difficult to work themselves up into a state of indignation over the puerile antics of a man widely dismissed as a reactionary sexist bore.
Islamophobia explained
The Public Record interviews Alejandro Beutel of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
German government’s crackdown on non-violent Salafism
Germany’s stepped-up efforts to ban some Islamic groups for promoting radical views have sparked a national debate over whether the government is violating the free-speech protections of the constitution it says it is aiming to protect.
The German government’s latest move to crack down on groups that promote extremist Muslim teaching came earlier this month, as dozens of police raided homes, offices and religious schools in the western German cities of Bremen, Braunschweig and Mönchengladbach. The security forces were seeking evidence that could lead to the banning of two organizations that officials say are calling for imposing Islamic law in place of German law.
Interior ministry officials allege that the groups, called Invitation to Paradise and the Islamic Culture Center Bremen, seek to undermine Germany’s parliamentary democracy by supporting the establishment of an Islamic theocracy within the country. A security official said the groups also allegedly support a strict form of Islamic justice, such as the execution of Muslims who convert to other religions or the amputation of a hand as a punishment for theft.
Sven Lau, deputy chairman of Invitation to Paradise, rejected the allegations, saying that his group hadn’t done anything illegal and that it calls on its members living in Germany to abide by German law. He described the group as a peaceful fundamentalist organization that believes in a strict interpretation of Islamic law, but said it advises members who want to live by its more extreme forms to live in Muslim-governed countries.
The latest investigation marks a departure from previous crackdowns by German security and justice officials. German security officials are pursuing a ban of these two Islamic groups primarily because of the principles they espouse, rather than a suspicion of a link to terrorism.
Germany’s constitution, written after World War II and the fall of the Third Reich, makes allowances for restricting some forms of speech considered hostile to the country’s democratic order. German statutes, for instance, ban symbols such as Nazi swastikas as a violation of the constitution, and make Holocaust denial illegal. Until now, such laws have mainly been used to curtail neo-Nazi activism.
In announcing the raids, Germany’s Interior Ministry said “a democracy shouldn’t wait until faced with a violent form of holy war before it takes action against organizations that oppose the German constitution.”
Dieter Wiefelspütz, a member of Germany’s opposition Social Democratic Party and a parliament representative, said the Interior Ministry had the duty to investigate allegations that a group was teaching intolerance or hatred. “In Germany, the tendency is to close too few rather than too many organizations,” he said.
‘David Cameron must face the challenge of Islamisation’ says Torygraph
The Daily Telegraph follows up yesterday’s interview with Marine Le Pen with a leader opining that the Front National is “not an appropriate model for a political party” in Britain (though presumably far-right racist parties are OK in France). However, there is the prospect of “Right-wing populism” winning support in the UK on the basis of anti-Muslim sentiment.
Such sentiment has a firm basis in reality, according to the Torygraph: “Muslims have migrated to Britain in enormous numbers over the past 40 years; one of the heaviest waves of immigration was encouraged by the last government”, “fears of social fracture are understandable” given that “around 40 per cent of the Muslim community support the establishment of Sharia”, and the government’s empowering of “unelected ‘community leaders'” has “caused huge resentment”.
And the Torygraph’s solution? – “the Government needs to start dismantling an Islamisation that threatens the freedoms of ordinary Britons”.
Update: See Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 29 December 2010
The dodgy demographics that Yusuf challenges are also the subject of a scaremongering post by Torygraph leader writer and Catholic Herald editor Damian Thompson, who asks: “What does this mean for liberal Britain?” To which you might be inclined to respond: since when has the Daily Telegraph been a defender of liberalvalues?
Further update: See also ENGAGE, 30 December 2010
Call for racial and religious profiling at German airports
The incoming head of Germany’s main airport lobby group is demanding the nation’s transit authorities use racial profiling to weed out terrorists at security checks.
Christoph Blume, the head of Düsseldorf Airport, told daily Rheinische Post on Tuesday that air passengers should be divided into different risk categories, meaning they would be subject varying degrees of scrutiny by airport security.
“That way, the security system could become more effective to everyone’s benefit,” said Blume, who will take the helm of the ADV airport association next month. He said profiling passengers according to characteristics such as race, religion and country of origin would allow German airports to avert a further tightening of security.
While highly controversial because of its discriminatory nature, racial profiling has also found growing support in some quarters. However, critics fear it would stigmatize entire groups of passengers simply on their looks, faith or from where their trip originated.