A 28-year-old has been arrested and bailed in relation to protest marches in Peterborough.
The English Defence League (EDL), which says it opposes Islamic extremism, Unite Against Fascism and the TUC, demonstrated on 11 December.
The man, from Nottingham, was arrested over the offence of intentionally causing religiously-aggravated harassment, alarm or distress. He has been bailed to return to police in Cambridgeshire in February.
A 20-year-old immigrant from Somalia said someone assaulted her with pepper spray outside an Ohio mosque and told her to leave the country, spurring investigations by police and likely the FBI.
Saida Said said she was in her car running errands when a man in a car followed her to the mosque’s parking lot on the west side of Columbus on Monday afternoon. Said told reporters the man harassed her, swore at her, said she should leave the country and threatened to kill her. He then attacked her with pepper spray, she said.
Mosque officials called police, who took a report and turned it over to the prosecutor’s office. The FBI said Tuesday it will likely open a civil rights investigation, the results of which would be turned over to federal prosecutors for any possible charges.
Republican Rep. Peter King of New York says he wants to hold investigations into the “radicalization” of American Muslims in his new position as chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but Rep. Keith Ellison said on Monday that targeting one community would hamper homeland security efforts.
“I believe it’s important to have this investigation into the radicalization of the Muslim community,” King said in an interview with Fox News this week. “We have to break through this politically correct nonsense which keeps us from debating and discussing what I think is one of the most vitally important issues in this country. We are under siege by Muslim terrorists and yet there are Muslim leaders in this country who do not cooperate with law enforcement.”
Ellison, who became America’s first Muslim member of Congress in 2006, said that investigations like the one proposed by King will not cause members of the community to cooperate with law enforcement. He said it might have the opposite effect. Ellison said he confronted King on the House floor on the issue.
“I got so concerned that when I heard about it I actually approached Congressman King on the House floor and told him that, you know, look, we all need to be concerned about violent radicalization, but not just against Muslims, against anybody,” he said on the Ed Show on MSNBC on Monday. “What about the guy who flew a plane into the IRS or what about the guy who killed a guard at the holocaust museum?”
He said the proposed investigations should include all Americans. “You know it is worthwhile to find out what turns somebody from a normal citizen into a violent radical, but to say that we’re only going to do it against this community and we’re about to change the debate to vilify this community is very scary and clearly has McCarthyistic implications.”
Minnesota Independent, 21 December 2010
See also “Peter King’s terror hearing test: If he’s his old demagogic self, radicalism inquiry will backfire”, New York Daily News, 21 December 2010
“Kill them…including the children.”
That’s how to solve the threat of militant Muslims?
This quote is from what one official involved in homeland security said was the theme of a speech by Walid Shoebat at an anti-terrorism training in Las Vegas in October 2010.
Our source had turned around after Shoebat’s speech and asked the woman in the chair behind them at the conference what she thought was the solution offered by Shoebat. “Kill them…including the children…you heard him,” was the full response.
Shoebat’s Las Vegas speech was described by our source as “frightening.”
Chip Berlet reveals some of the findings in a forthcoming report from Political Research Associates, Right-Wing Firms Train Public Servants on Terror Threats.
Huffington Post, 20 December 2010
See also “CAIR asks DOJ to review use of Muslim-bashers as terror trainers”, CAIR press release, 20 December 2010
Update: See “WaPo Notes ‘self-described experts’ advising law enforcement on Islam”, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, 21 December 2010
Further update: See Chip Berlet, “Three anti-Islamic security and training companies”, Huffington Post, 22 December 2010
Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.
Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.
Max Blumenthal at TomDispatch, 19 December 2010
We know that Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center was originally invited to speak at the English Defence League’s Luton demonstration on 5 February, then disinvited when the EDL leadership belatedly woke up to his record of racism and homophobia, and that the National Front promptly stepped into the breach, denouncing the “utter cave in” by the “pro multi-cult EDL” and inviting Jones to speak at one of their own events. Meanwhile, home secretary Theresa May was reported to be “actively looking at” imposing a ban on Jones entering the UK.
Since then the NF have suggested that Jones may have pulled out of their event. But the “Stand Up America with Dr Terry Jones”Facebook page and the Dove World Outreach Center website state that Jones will address a National Front rally on 5 February, where he will “speak against the evils and destructiveness of Islam in support of the continued fight against the Islamification of England and Europe”. This would presumably be the NF’s Forty-fourth Anniversary Rally, which is to be held on 5 February somewhere in West Yorksire and is advertised as featuring “a surprise speaker from overseas”. And still no word from Theresa May on whether Jones will be allowed into the country.
Two English Defence League (EDL) thugs have been banned from joining protests outside Birmingham for 10 years.
Richard Price, 41, and Collum Keyes, 23, were the first members of the EDL to be issued with Asbos. The right-wing group, which says it is opposed to Islamic extremism, has sparked riots across the Midlands.
The Brummie pair previously pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct at a march and admitted threatening behaviour.
Sunday Mercury, 19 December 2010
See also BBC News, 17 December 2010 and Bucks Herald, 17 December 2010
Still, if they ever make it to New York for an SIOA protest, they can rely on Pamela Geller giving them a warm welcome.
And see “EDL protesters fined for threats to police”, Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 18 December 2010
Nicolas Sarkozy will take another lurch to the Right with a speech on New Year’s Eve calling Muslim prayers in the street “unacceptable”.
After his expulsions of gypsies and a crackdown on immigrant crime, the French President will warn that the overflow of Muslim faithful on to the streets at prayer time when mosques are packed to capacity risks undermining the French secular tradition separating state and religion.
He will doubtless be accused of pandering to the far Right: the issue of Muslim prayers in the street has been brought to the fore by Marine Le Pen, the charismatic new figurehead of the National Front, who compared it to the wartime occupation of France.
Her words provoked uproar on the Left, whose commentators took them as evidence that far from being the gentler face of the far Right, Ms Le Pen, 42, is no different from Jean-Marie, 82, her father, who has been accused of racism and Holocaust denial.
According to his aide, Mr Sarkozy agrees with the junior Le Pen that the street cannot be allowed to become “an extension of the mosque” as it does in some parts of Paris, which are closed to traffic because of the overflow of the faithful.
“People overreacted to Marine Le Pen’s comments,” said the aide, referring to the furore in which she was accused of rabble-rousing racism. “She is right: this phenomenon is unacceptable.”
About 150 people protested Saturday outside the site of a conference in Paris organized to criticize the “Islamization” of Europe.
Protesters held banners reading “United Against Islamophobia” and “Fascists, get out of our neighborhoods.” Socialist Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe had asked police to ban the conference, but police allowed it to go forward under surveillance.
The conference was organized by several French groups, including nationalist political group Bloc Identitaire, that frequently complain about what they see as Islam’s growing influence over traditional French values. Several hundred people attended the conference, which also was broadcast over the Internet.
Muslims are excluded from present-day Dutch society, as also happened with Jews in the 1930s, in the view of Labour (PvdA) leader Job Cohen.
Cohen drew the controversial comparison in an interview withVrij Nederlands weekly. He links his views to the rise of Geert Wilders. In reaction, the Party for Freedom (PVV) leader rejected Cohen’s criticism as “disgusting.”
Cohen, himself Jewish, recounts how his mother experienced around the time of the outbreak of the Second World War that Jews were slowly being excluded. He also sees this alienation now in society.
“The PVV simply says to the Muslims: we would prefer for you to go away. But you cannot blame Islam for the extremism. There are so many Muslims that just want suburban contentment and nothing else. These people are now afraid of the fact that Wilders is part of the power structure.”
Cohen’s comparison of Muslims now with the Jews in the 1930s is “too disgusting and abject for words,” according to Wilders. “Combating Islamisation and harsh tackling of criminal Moroccans, for example, is cleaning up the mess that was actually caused by Cohen’s PvdA of poultices and palliatives, tea-drinking and keeping things together. Cohen has now really lost the plot, hitting out around him in a panic.”