Yasmin Qureshi calls on police to drop charges against anti-EDL demonstrators

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yasmin_QureshiBolton’s newest MP has accused Greater Manchester Police of heavy-handed tactics during March’s English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism rallies.

Now Yasmin Qureshi, who was elected as Bolton South East MP last month, is calling on GMP to drop charges against anti-fascist activists arrested on the day.

Ms Qureshi was on the UAF front line at the protest against the EDL’s rally in Victoria Square on March 20 and is leading the new national campaign calling on police not to prosecute left-wing protesters.

The newly formed Justice4Bolton campaign is arguing the use of conspiracy laws, rather than charges relating to specific incidents which would require greater evidence, “indicates a move towards de-legitimatising protests against the rise of fascism in the UK”.

Ms Qureshi said: “I did not see or hear any activity amongst the protesters that I would have described as violent disorder, though there were some police officers who, in my view, were being heavy-handed in some cases. I supported the aims of the protest against the English Defence League in Bolton and I was there.”

Justice4Bolton has already won the support of trade unions, anti-fascist organisations and influential MPs including former Northern Ireland and Wales Secretary Peter Hain.

Thousands of UAF and EDL demonstrators held counter-demonstrations in Victoria Square on March 20. Police made more than 70 arrests, with more than 50 of those UAF supporters. Among those arrested on the day were Weyman Bennett, joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism, and Rhetta Moran, joint secretary of Greater Manchester UAF.

Mr Hain said: “The UAF has worked very hard to get rid of the British National Party and the fascist threat and should be congratulated, not prosecuted.”

Bolton News, 16 June 2010

Update:  Cf. “Police deny claims of EDL support”, Bolton News, 17 June 2010

Gang members admit killing Ekram Haque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ekram HaqueTwo teenage members of a “happy slapping” gang have pleaded guilty to killing a pensioner in front of his granddaughter in south London.

Ekram Haque, 67, a retired care worker, was attacked in August 2009 in Church Lane, Tooting, as he left a mosque. He died a week later from injuries which included a wound to the head.

The boys, aged 15 and 16, pleaded guilty to manslaughter at the Old Bailey. Another 15-year-old youth admitted causing actual bodily harm. So-called “happy slapping” attacks refer to violence which is recorded by the perpetrators on mobile phones.

The attack on Mr Haque on 31 August was witnessed by his three-year-old granddaughter.

The boys were charged with his murder but the lesser charges of manslaughter and assault occasioning actual bodily harm were accepted by prosecutors.

All three teenagers also pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm to two other men, Atta-ul Hassan Mir and Imdad Bukari, on the same day as the attack on Mr Haque, as they too left the mosque during the Muslim festival of Ramadan.

The court heard that the teenagers were in a gang which called themselves Lane Gang Productions.

BBC News, 16 June 2010

See also Wandsworth Guardian, 16 June 2010

Civil rights groups decry US Muslim’s no-fly plight

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yahya WehelieU.S. civil liberties groups are protesting the case of a 26-year-old Muslim-American man who was placed on the no-fly list and barred from returning to the States after spending 18 months in Yemen.

Yahya Wehelie, an American citizen, remains stranded in Cairo after being stopped there by FBI agents while en route back to his Virginia home six weeks ago, The New York Times reports. The agents questioned Wehelie about his contact with other Americans in Yemen, including a New Jersey man suspected of joining al-Qaida and killing a hospital guard in Yemen.

Yehelie and his family, who live in Burke, Va., told the Times he despises al-Qaida and went to Yemen to study and meet a wife. Though issued a temporary passport and cleared by the FBI to return to the U.S., he remains on the federal no-fly list, unable to travel home by plane and fresh out of other options.

“How can he travel home if he can’t fly?” Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in an interview with AOL News. “We’re just concerned that this is part of a pattern of government officials stopping Muslim travelers, American Muslim citizens, to pressure them to give up the constitutional rights that they would normally have if they were on American soil.”

Hooper said Wehelie was interrogated several times, subjected to “psychological pressure” and denied access to an attorney. He told AOL News he emphatically objects to allowing anyone who is a danger to America to board a flight here, but said that does not seem to be the case with Wehelie. “These no-fly lists are vast,” he said. “There needs to be some legal type of oversight on who should really be on it.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has also decried Wehelie’s case and those like it, saying the “vast majority” involve American Muslims. “There is absolutely no legal basis for placing a U.S. citizen into effective exile. There’s no question that it’s illegal to do so,” Ben Wizner, an ACLU senior staff attorney, told AOL News. “If the U.S. wants to investigate [Wehelie], there is unquestionably a safe way to bring him home to do so.”

AOL News, 16 June 2010

See also CAIR press release, 16 June 2010

Wilders and the US Israel lobby

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the last televised debate before the Dutch elections on 9 June, the party leaders were asked which country they would fly to if there was a plane ready to go. Geert Wilders, as ever setting out his own path, said Israel, because it was a country that deserved support. In the context of the recent mayhem surrounding the Gaza convoys, this answer stood out.

But Wilders has good contacts in Israel who support his political movement. Likewise in the United States.

A crucial detail about Wilders’ party, the PVV, is that it only has two official members: himself, and the Friends of the PVV Foundation which he formed as a finance-gathering apparatus.

Dutch law states that every party with a membership of 100,000 or more can receive state subsidy. Wilders’ decision to keep his party in his own hands therefore also has severe financial consequences.

Someone else aside from the Dutch state has to provide the money. Much of it comes from the US, where Wilders travels regularly. According to the Volkskrant, in 2008 Wilders even changed the statutes of the Foundation to ensure that it could be used to accept donations for legal cases – the grounds of which remain unspecified in the document – that he might be faced with.

The Dutch press has tracked down several of the principal financial sources for the PVV in the US. Two figures stand out: David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. Horowitz runs the online FrontPage Magazine and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which with an annual budget of around 5 million dollars is an important financier of outlets such as Jihad Watch and Islam critic Robert Spencer.

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Far-right Danish MP faces charges over anti-Muslim comments

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jesper LangballeThe Danish parliament voted on Wednesday to remove a far-right politician’s immunity from prosecution so he can face charges over anti-Muslim comments, parliamentary sources said.

Jesper Langballe, a veteran member of the Danish People’s Party (PPD), a crucial ally of the centre-right government, wrote in a newspaper column published in January that “Muslims kill their daughters (over crimes of honour) and turn a blind eye while they are raped by their uncles”.

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Paris police ban pork street party in Muslim area

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French police are banning a street party whose organizers planned to serve alcohol and pork-based sausage in a heavily Muslim Paris neighborhood.

Police said Tuesday that the party, called “Sausage and booze,” was banned because it could have been viewed as a provocation in the Goutte-d’Or neighborhood of northern Paris, where Muslims pray on the streets on Fridays because there are not enough mosques. Alcohol and pork are banned in Islam.

Organizers said they were organizing Friday’s party to protest Islam’s encroachment on traditional French values in the neighborhood. The party was backed by several extreme-right associations. Muslim groups had announced a counterparty serving halal food.

Associated Press, 15 June 2010

See also AFP, 15 June 2012

Update:  See also Reuters, which reports that after the ban was announced supporters of the event wrote on the Facebook page that they would still gather in Goutte d’Or on Friday. “It’s official – Muslims can pray in the street but we don’t have the right to eat pork there. France is now ruled by sharia,” one supporter wrote. The Reuters report adds: “The Paris event page also carried announcements of similar ‘sausage and wine’ parties in Lyon, Toulouse, Brussels and London, where the event is called a ‘bacon and beer‘ party.”

EDL leaders drop plans for ‘suicide’ demonstration in Tower Hamlets

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Leaders of the English Defence league have issued a pledge today that they won’t be marching into London’s East End on Sunday.

Plans were dropped after talks with Scotland Yard advising them that a Muslim meeting they were objecting to was not going ahead at Stepney’s Troxy venue after all. “It would be a suicide mission if we walked into East London,” their leader Tommy Robinson told the East London Advertiser.

“The Met Police told us there would be a hostile scene with thousands of protesters coming from all over if we turned up. We’ve won our victory just getting the Islamic meeting with its extremist speakers cancelled.”

But even cancelling Sunday’s EDA march won’t stop a counter demo by anti-fascist campaigners who plan to march at 2.30pm from Stepney Green Park to Whitechapel’s Altab Ali Park for a rally to show ‘East End solidarity’ against the Far Right.

East London Advertiser, 15 June 2010

Stop these exclusion orders against Muslim preachers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sources tell me that the Home Office is currently considering issuing two exclusion orders. One would be against a Jamaican-born Muslim preacher called Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips and the other against Zakir Naik, who is due to arrive in the UK on Friday to begin a speaking tour to huge audiences at the Sheffield Arena, London’s Wembley Arena and the LG Arena in Birmingham’s NEC. Naik is based in Mumbai, India and has in recent years built up a huge international following among Muslims. His lectures and debates on the topic of comparative religion are played continuously on Peace TV – the satellite channel that he founded.

This is just the latest in a series of “naming and shaming” exclusion orders that began a couple of years ago when the former Labour government said that it would introduce a policy of banning “preachers of hate” from visiting the UK. At the end of last month the Sunday Times ran an article about Zakir Naik that seems to have panicked some people in the government. For his part Naik has since issued a press statement saying that he “unequivocally condemns acts of violence including 9/11, 7/7 and 7/11 [the serial train bombing in Mumbai], which are completely and absolutely unjustifiable on any basis.”

We already have a sufficient number of laws on the statute books to deal with incitement to hatred and violence, and the fact is that both Bilal Philips and Zakir Naik have visited the UK on several occasions in the past – and their speaking tours have passed by without incident. Neither speaker has said anything that has got them in trouble with the law, so why not just uphold our existing laws rather than seek to pre-emptively ban them? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the exclusion order policy is yet another government PR gimmick designed to show that it is getting tough on those it regards as being extremists.

Inayat Bunglawala at Comment is Free, 15 June 2010

EDL ‘not welcome’ in Wembley says council leader

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDLdemonstrationThe top councillor in Brent has said a protest against a Muslim peace conference in Wembley is “not welcome”.

Councillor Ann John, Labour’s leader of Brent Council, hit out at the English Defence League (EDL), which is targeting the Al-Khair Peace Conference due to be held on Saturday, June 26, at Wembley Arena.

She said in a letter: “Brent is Britain’s most diverse multi-cultural and multi-faith borough and our diversity is our strength. The planned demonstration is a deliberate provocation aimed at creating fear amongst the Muslim community and undermining community relations. The EDL is not welcome here.”

Cllr John was writing on behalf of the 40 Labour councillors in the borough, and backed the move by Unite Against Fascism (UAF) to hold a counter-demonstration on the same day in opposition to EDL.

Harrow Times, 15 June 2010