Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? The former supporter of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is Alan Johnson, the right-wing Islamophobe is Andrew Bostom, and the interview – in which Johnson helps Bostom set out his case that antisemitism is rooted in Islam – appears in the current issue of Democratiya.
Mad mullah rants: Ban evil Christmas
Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has launched his sickest rant yet as he branded Christmas “evil”. The Muslim fanatic shocked Christians and even those of his own faith by slamming the festival as “the pathway to hellfire”. And the hardline nut, 41, who recently praised the Mumbai terror massacre, urged all Muslims to reject traditional yuletide fun.
In an internet sermon on an Islamic website, demented Choudary raged:
“In the world today many Muslims, especially those residing in western countries, are exposed to the evil celebration Christmas. Many take part in the festival celebrations by having Christmas turkey dinners. Decorating the house, purchasing Christmas trees or having Christmas turkey meals are completely prohibited by Allah.”
Shocked “even those of his own faith”! Yes, even Muslims were taken aback by Choudary’s attack on Christmas. Who’d have thought it?
See also ENGAGE, 10 December 2008
No end to nightmare for ‘terror’ detainees
No end to nightmare for ‘terror’ detainees
By Tom Mellen
Morning Star, 10 December 2007
CIVIL rights campaigners and the British Muslim Initiative slammed the Home Office on Sunday after reports that three innocent British residents who have languished in Guantanamo Bay for five years may be hit with control orders when they return.
The Home Office has confirmed that it may impose the repressive orders on Jamil el-Banna, Omar Deghayes and Abdenour Samuer, who are expected to be home by the end of the year.
It has also been reported that MI5 will spy on them as part of a deal negotiated with the US.
Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who represents the detainees, said: “I am sure they will be briefly questioned on arrival but equally sure they will be released. There is no reason to detain them.”
Human rights group Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti deplored the fact that former Guantanamo detainees returned to Britain had been held in Paddington Green high-security prison in London.
She insisted that “these people should be treated as kidnap victims, given trauma counselling and helped with resettlement.”
“They have been held for years. If you can’t come up with anything to charge them with by now, the basis for making a control order is poor, to say the least.”
Prison cops in 5hr ‘Muslim riot’
A five-hour rampage by young Muslim prisoners armed with hammers and chisels was broken up by a riot squad yesterday. Dozens of inmates barricaded themselves into a workshop and grabbed tools including saws.
Riot police and 100 specially-trained prison officers – kitted out with body armour, shields and helmets – were called in.
It is believed the rampage at Aylesbury Young Offenders’ Institution started after inmates celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid which marks the end of Ramadan.
Update: See the analysis of this story at Five Chinese Crackers.
Vandals hit French Muslim graves
The graves of as many as 500 Muslim war veterans have been vandalised in northern France, in an attack President Nicolas Sarkozy said was “repugnant”.
Gravestones were daubed with swastikas and letters spelling out anti-Islamic slogans at France’s biggest military graveyard near Arras in the north-east.
The attack took place on the eve of Islam’s Eid al-Adha festival, when Muslims visit the graves of loved ones. Dozens of police searched the graveyard on Monday as an investigation began. It is the third time the Muslim sector of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery has been attacked.
President Sarkozy called the latest incident “abject and revolting” and said it was “the expression of a repugnant racism directed against the Muslim community of France”.
The cemetery holds the graves of tens of thousands of soldiers killed in World War I, including those of 576 Muslims.
The authorities estimated that about 500 graves were damaged. Vandals had sprayed letters on the tombstones which, when linked together, formed anti-Islamic insults, the French news agency AFP said.
The local prosecutor says the damage resembles another act of vandalism in April, for which two young men with neo-Nazi sympathies were later jailed. One of them had already been jailed for a previous attack on Muslim graves at the cemetery.
Police say security has been reinforced but the site remains difficult to guard.
Don’t deny campus radicalisation
“June Edmunds’ research doesn’t tell the real story: radical Islam is alive and well in UK universities.”
Comment is Free, 6 December 2008
Now, who do you suppose was responsible for this post on CiF? Well, if it wasn’t Anthony Glees it would have to be a member of Ed Husain’s Quilliam Foundation, wouldn’t it?
Update: See ENGAGE, 8 December 2008
ECHR backs French headscarf ban
Europe’s top rights court ruled Thursday that a French school ban on headscarves was not a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In a case involving two French Muslim girls who had been expelled from school after refusing to remove their scarves during sports classes, the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the decision did not discriminate.
The applicants, Belgin Dogru and Esma-Nur Kervanci, are French nationals who were born in 1987 and 1986 respectively and live in the northwestern town of Flers.
Dogru, then aged 11, and Kervanci, aged 12, went to physical education and sports classes wearing their headscarves on numerous occasions in January 1999 and refused to take them off despite repeated requests to do so by their teacher. The teacher had said that wearing a headscarf was incompatible with physical education classes.
A month later the school’s discipline committee decided to expel the two from the school for failing to participate actively in physical education and sports classes.
The court observed that the purpose of the restriction on the applicants’ right to manifest their religious convictions was to adhere to the requirements of secularism in French state schools. The court also said that the penalty of expulsion did not appear disproportionate, and noted that the applicants had been able to continue their schooling by correspondence classes.
“It was clear that the applicants’ religious convictions were fully taken into account in relation to the requirements of protecting the rights and freedoms of others and public order,” the court said in a press release. It was also clear that the decision was based on those requirements and not on any objections to the applicants’ religious beliefs.
See also ECHR press release, 4 December 2008
‘Dr. Rice played piano for the Queen, while Islam destroys Western Civilization’
Ellis Washington at World Net Daily, 6 December 2008
Mosques are ‘land grab, not a place of prayer’, says Giordano
The building of huge mosques throughout Germany is nothing short of a “a bid for power and influence, a land grab”, according to Ralph Giordano, 85, the German Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, in an interview with The Times that is likely to stir Muslim anger.
The comments from Mr Giordano came as the Muslim community of Cologne – about 120,000 strong – prepared to lay the foundation stone for yet another giant mosque, one of more than a hundred that are being planned or built across the country. Barely six weeks ago another mosque, capable of accommodating 1,200 worshippers, was opened in Duisburg in the nearby Ruhr region of northwest Germany. Spiky minarets are starting to punctuate the German urban skyscape – and the rumble of discontent from non-Muslim Germans is growing louder. One result is that the issue of immigration seems sets to be on the agenda in the general election next year.
“When I first saw the blueprints for the grand mosque in Cologne, I was shocked,” said Mr Giordano, who is now very active in the campaign against Turkish mosque-building. “It sent a completely wrong signal, it was a bid for power and influence, a land grab, not a place of prayer, so I told the mayor: Stop this mosque now!” That was in a public discussion that was filmed and placed online. The result was, he says, an avalanche of many hundred of supportive letters. “They all struck the same note: Mr Giordano we are afraid as you are of this creeping Islamification but we can’t say anything in public because we will end up being branded as neo-Nazis.”
Fritz Schramma, the Mayor of Cologne, argues that the mosque will become a tourist attraction and that it will be integrated into the urban culture. “It’s not right that Muslims should have to pray in old factory warehouses,” he said.
Muslim barrister called ‘tent head’ wins £75,000
Saleca Faisal-Parkar, 31, was harassed, overlooked for jobs and training and was even branded “lazy” after she became seriously ill while pregnant.
The abuse was led by Stephen Jones, then head of litigation at the leading law firm Shakespeares, who also referred to her as a “flipping nun”. He was also a deputy district judge and a member of the Solicitors Disciplinary Panel, but has resigned both positions in the light of the scandal.
Mrs Faisal-Parkar, who has a young daughter, joined Shakespeares in 2002 as a legal assistant. Not long after she started, she found out from a fellow worker that she had been nicknamed “Mother Teresa” because she wore a hijab, which covers her head.
Over the course of the following months, she said Mr Jones – who made the derogatory comments in emails – harassed her, refused her training requests and potentially reduced her annual salary increase by the type of work he gave her. In one email he says to a colleague: “From where I sit tent ‘ead looks like a flipping nun today unless there are auditions for the Sound of Music on somewhere?”
Mrs Faisal-Parkar told The Daily Telegraph: “It was the worst experience of my life; it was just one thing after another. It had a terrible effect on my life at a time that should have been my happiest, getting married and having a baby. To this day I don’t know what motivated Mr Jones to treat me like he did, but I’m glad now he’s been shown up to be the sort of man he was.”
Mrs Faisal-Parkar, from Great Barr, West Mids, accepted an out of court settlement at the beginning of a three-day tribunal in Birmingham. Mr Jones has been demoted and fined a five-figure sum by the company.