Lerida bans veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Spanish town of Lerida has become the first in the country to ban the Burka in municipal buildings.

The town council voted to prohibit the “use of the veil and other clothes and accessories which cover the face and prevent identification in buildings and installations of the town hall.”

The vote, by 23 to one with two abstentions, is the first of its kind in Spain, a country where Islamic veils and the body-covering burqas are little in evidence despite a large Muslim population.

The move is aimed at promoting “respect for the dignity of women and values of equality and tolerance,” the town hall said in a statement.

Daily Telegraph, 29 May 2010

Muslim brutally beaten in Brooklyn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Kamal UddinA Brooklyn man was savagely beaten in broad daylight last weekend.

“They used the bad word. ‘The mother bleeping Muslim, go back to you country.’ They started beating him and after that he don’t know what happened,” the victim’s nephew Abul Kashem said.

Kamal Uddin is in and out of consciousness at Brookdale Hospital after being savagely attacked by four young men.

It didn’t happen under the guise of nightfall or in a secluded area. He was beaten to a pulp at 3:00 Saturday afternoon on the sidewalk at the corner of Barbey and Worthman in East New York.

Why? His family says because he’s a Muslim from Bangladesh. “He has the money. He has the wallet. He was the watch and the cell phone. Nothing taken. Everything is there with him. It seems to me it’s a hate crime,” the victim’s uncle Mohammed Abul Hashem said.

WABC-TV, 26 May 2010

‘Is Labour handing Tower Hamlets back to the Islamists?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Andrew Gilligan poses the question. He’s outraged at the report that “Labour’s candidate for the directly-elected mayoralty of Tower Hamlets will be selected by the entire local membership”. Doesn’t the Labour hierarchy realise that supporters of the Islamic Forum of Europe are members of the party in Tower Hamlets? Are they really going to be allowed to vote on who their mayoral candidate will be? It is clearly intolerable that IFE supporters should be allowed to exercise their democratic rights in this way.

EDL cancels protest against Walsall mosque … because Muslims are against it too

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Manchester5The controversial English Defence League have called off a planned demonstration against a proposed mosque in Walsall after learning that the biggest single group opposed to the scheme are Muslims. George Makin reports.

The anti-Islamic EDL had announced they would hold a demonstration on June 19 against a scheme to build a new place of worship in Vicarage Close which had previously been denied planning permission by the Walsall council.

Proposers of the development have announced their intention to appeal the decision.

The EDL’s proposed demonstration led to a joint statement by the leaders of all three party leaders on Walsall council, fearful of a repeat of violent clashes which have occurred at other EDL events, that the rightwing group was not wanted in the town.

During negotiations with police EDL organiser were surprised to learn the original planning application had been opposed by many Muslims in Walsall who claim there are enough mosques in the borough already.

The EDL are now planning for a demonstration in Dudley on June 19 and for another in Alum Rock in Birmingham at a later date.

The Stirrer, 27 May 2010

The mosque the EDL were intending to protest against is the one the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association is hoping to build, planning permission for which was denied by Walsall Council last December. The Ahmadis have appealed to the Planning Inspectorate and a decision is expected in the summer.

The Muslims who campaigned for the council to reject the Ahmadis’ application did indeed do so on the formal grounds that there are “enough places of worship in the area”, along with complaints about potential traffic congestion. However, as Inayat Bunglawala pointed out at the time, the real reason was obviously orthodox Muslim hostility to the Ahmadis, who are regarded as a heretical sect.

I have to say, the paranoid thought did cross my mind that the EDL might be able to find one or two Muslim opponents of the mosque whose hatred of the Ahmadis might lead them to ignore the EDL’s racist ideology and support the protest. But that was giving too much credit to the intelligence of the EDL. They are, after all, a gang of mindless Islamophobic bigots who can’t tell an Ahmadi from a Sunni, or a Sunni from a Shia.

Geller’s ‘Leaving Islam?’ bus ad arrives in New York

Posted on by Bob Pitt

*May 25 - 00:05*

NEW YORK — The questions on the ads aren’t subtle: Leaving Islam? Fatwa on your head? Is your family threatening you?

A conservative activist and the organizations she leads have paid several thousand dollars for the ads to run on at least 30 city buses for a month. The ads point to a website called RefugefromIslam.com, which offers information to those wishing to leave Islam, but some Muslims are calling the ads a smoke screen for an anti-Muslim agenda.

Pamela Geller, who leads an organization called Stop Islamization of America, said the ads were meant to help provide resources for Muslims who are fearful of leaving the faith. Geller said the ad buy cost about $8,000, contributed by the readers of her blog, Atlas Shrugs, and other websites. Similar ads have run on buses in Miami, and she said ad buys were planned for other cities.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Geller’s ad was reviewed and did not violate the agency’s guidelines. “The religion in question would not change the determination that the language in the ad does not violate guidelines,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said Wednesday.

Faiza Ali, of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the ads were based on a false premise that people face coercion to remain with Islam. She said Muslims believe faith that is forced is not true belief. Geller has a history of speaking out against Muslims, and the ads are “a smoke screen to advance her long-standing history of anti-Muslim bigotry,” Ali said.

Huffington Post, 26 May 2010

Update:  Robert Spencer is not happy.

New York: community board approves ‘Ground Zero mosque’ plan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

'Ground Zero mosque' protest

LOWER MANHATTAN — Community Board 1 approved a plan to build a mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center after a four-hour meeting that drew hundreds of people and emotions ranging from fear and hatred to grief and hope at a public forum in lower Manhattan Tuesday night.

“I’m so proud of the community board,” said Imam Feisal AbdulRauf, shortly after the vote, which was 29 in favor, 1 against, with 9 abstentions. “They recognize us as neighbors.”

The community board’s vote is solely advisory, and the project could have gone forward regardless of the board’s opinion.

Still, supporters and opponents of the plan packed into CB1’s monthly meeting at 3-Legged Dog’s theater Tuesday night. Both uniformed and undercover NYPD officers were present at the meeting to keep the crowd under control.

When Rauf stood to address the crowd, he was shouted down by people yelling, “Murderer!” Dr. Rudina Odeh-Ramadan, who was temporarily buried under rubble twice while she worked to rescue people on 9/11, was booed when she revealed that she was a Muslim.

DNAinfo, 25 May 2010

Baroness Neville-Jones – pawn of Islamism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pauline Neville-Jones on Islam Channel

Guess who Pauline Neville-Jones, the new security minister, chose for her first post-election interview? The BBC? The Telegraph? The Guardian? No: bizarrely, it was the Islam Channel, the Islamist-linked satellite broadcaster whose chief executive, Mohammed Ali Harrath, is the subject of an Interpol “red notice” for terrorist offences. Only eighteen months ago, Neville-Jones was demanding that Harrath be sacked.

The Islam Channel also has a programme presented by a senior officer of Hizb ut Tahrir, the group the Tories wanted to ban. Talk about outreach, Pauline! No wonder the presenter told her they were “honoured to be the recipients of your generosity.”

Andrew Gilligan is shocked that Neville-Jones should discuss government security policy affecting Muslims on the Islam Channel – which is watched by 57% of British Muslims.

See also “BBC 5 Live – Unfair to Islam”, Radio Today, 25 May 2010

Catalan town council to vote Friday on veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spain’s northeastern town of Lerida is to vote Friday to ban the wearing of the burqa in municipal buildings, the mayor’s office said, in an apparent first for the country.

A proposal was being drawn up and the majority socialists were behind the push to ban the face-covering Islamic veil in the municipality’s buildings, a spokesman for the mayor’s office said Wednesday.

The town had asked its legal services to look into the possibility of banning the garment in all public spaces in the name of the fundamental rights of women, the official said.

“We cannot regulate the usage of the burqa in the road, but we can do that in municipal buildings,” he said.

Few women wear the full veil in Lerida, a town in the Catalonia region that has about 140,000 residents, one-fifth of whom are immigrants including from North Africa.

AFP, 26 May 2010

BNP ‘given a licence to promote religious and racial hatred in schools’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP Islam Out of BritainA teacher who posted comments on the internet describing some immigrants as “savage animals” and “filth” was cleared of racial and religious intolerance today. Adam Walker, a British National Party (BNP) activist, used a school laptop to claim in an online forum that Britain was a “dumping ground for the filth of the third world”.

Walker was a technology teacher at Houghton Kepier Sports College in Houghton-le-Spring, near Sunderland, at the time. He is the first teacher to be brought before the teaching profession’s watchdog – the General Teaching Council (GTC) – accused of racial intolerance.

The disciplinary panel, made up of three people, said it was “troubled” by Walker’s postings but was not satisfied that the “intemperate” views suggested intolerance.

Walker, a former soldier, had posted the comments on a forum of Teesside online about the popularity of the BNP in February and March 2007. Under the pseudonym Corporal Fox, Walker wrote that the BNP had risen in popularity because “they are the only party who are making a stand and are prepared to protect the rights of citizens against the savage animals New Labour and Bliar [sic] are filling our communities with”.

The same day he added: “By following recent media coverage of illegal animals and how they are allowed to stay here despite committing heinous crimes, I am, to say the very least, disgusted.”

Delivering the committee’s verdict, its chair, Angela Stones, said some of Walker’s postings contained offensive terms and demonstrated views or an attitude that might be considered racist.

But she said: “The committee does not accept that references to ‘immigrants’ are of themselves suggestive of any particular views on race. The committee accepts that immigrants to this country come from all over the world. A negative comment about immigration to the UK of itself need not be indicative of racist views or racial intolerance since the race of immigrants is extremely varied.”

Responding to the news that Walker had been cleared, Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union, said:

“This is an absolutely staggering judgment from the GTC. The GTC’s code of conduct requires teachers to ‘demonstrate respect for diversity and promote equality’ but the decision today makes a mockery of the code. The GTC panel described Walker’s comments as ‘troubling’. This must go down as a gross understatement. With this decision, the GTC has effectively given a licence to promote religious and racial hatred in schools.”

Guardian, 25 May 2010

Still, the panel’s decision will find favour in some quarters. Over at Spiked, for example, Nathalie Rothschild has indignantly opposed “the campaign, spearheaded by the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), to prevent BNP members from working in British schools. This is about banning certain individuals from taking up teaching, not because they lack relevant skills or training, but because their private views are deemed unacceptable and because they are seen as a potentially poisonous influence on children and on society at large”.

Rothschild demands: “What gives certain individuals the right to deem certain beliefs, opinions and outlooks as being beyond the pale, dangerous, illegal? And who is to say that your opinions or mine won’t be seen as unacceptable in the future? Accepting the GTC’s charge against Walker – no matter what you make of his views on Muslims and migrants – is to agree that the powers-that-be should have the authority to exclude people from public positions on the basis of their beliefs and thoughts.”