“The US Treasury Department is submitting to Shariah – the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.”
Frank Gaffney warns against the latest threatening development in the creeping Islamisation of western civilisation.
Despite years of relentless efforts, the construction of a stately mosque remains a costly dream for Muslims in the southern city of Seville, the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia.
“We are still negotiating with city officials to find a solution for the mosque issue,” Muslim community leader Malik Roueth told IslamOnline.net.
After municipal officials reneged on several promises to allocate a plot of land for the mosque, the sizable Muslim community is left with no other option but buy one. “We need no less than 6 million euros,” said Roueth, citing rocketing land prices in the area.
Plans to build a purpose-based mosque in Seville have been met with fierce oppositions from some locals. A few months ago, authorities froze plans to allocate a plot of land for Muslims to build their mosque after protests. Opponents has left slaughtered pig heads at the location, believing such a move would push Muslims to drop the plans.
In reaction to the protests, the authorities withdraw the land even though by that time Muslims had spent more than 200,000 euros to prepare the land for the mosque construction.
“The Islamisation of the west is proceeding according to plan…. Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson are delivering Britain and the west into dhimmitude.”
Melanie Phillips offers her take on the meeting with the Saudi monarchy.
Engage reveals that a speech delivered by notorious Islamophobe Douglas Murray at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in The Hague in February 2006, entitled “What are we to do about Islam?“, has been removed from the website of Murray’s former employers, the Social Affairs Unit, who presumably now find it embarrassing to be associated with such an extremist rant.
Dave Crouch of Media Workers Against the War replies to an article in the Times which seems to suggest that Muslims might be inclined to engage in terrorist actions during the 2012 Olympics because they will be hungry due to fasting over Ramadan. He concludes: “It is because of reporting of this kind that MWAW is holding its conference this year on Islamophobia.”
Police are warned of Ramadan tensions during Games
Richard Kerbaj and Ruth Gledhill
Times, 27 October 2008
Specialist advice is being given to Scotland Yard on how to reduce tensions between police and Muslims during the London Olympics because of growing concerns about the Games clashing with the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day, The Times has learnt.
Experts will also warn the Metropolitan Police to ensure that the planned commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Games does not offend local and travelling Muslims.
The recommendations have been made by inter-faith advisers to Scotland Yard, where antiterrorism police are preparing to combat any possible Islamic terrorist threat to the Games.
Community tensions in the lead-up to the games have already been raised by a controversial Muslim movement, Tablighi Jamaat, which plans to build Britain’s largest mosque and Islamic complex near the 2012 Olympic stadium site.
Michael Mumisa, an Islamic scholar, and one of four experts hired by Scotland Yard who began training the police this week on inter-faith issues, said that the commemoration of the 11 Israeli athletes, killed by Palestinian militants from the Black September Organisation at the 1972 Munich Games, could become a national security threat if it was not managed properly and was perceived by Muslims to be “hijacking” the Games.
Edward Kessler, executive director of the Woolfe Institute, which deals with inter-faith dialogue, teaching and research, said that police needed to have a “minimum level of faith literacy” to help them deal with religious issues during the London Games. Dr Kessler said: “During Ramadan you’re going to have a lot of tired, hungry, less evenly tempered people because they haven’t eaten for 18 hours.”
London’s proposed ‘mega-mosque’ has been allowed to complete its application for planning permission, despite calls from one councillor to remove the “illegal and irresponsible” mosque.
At Newham Council meeting last Monday night, Cllr Alan Craig asked the Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, to enforce a compulsory purchase order (CPO) to reclaim the site from the Abbey Mills Mosque Trust, members of Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat.
Cllr Craig said: “Tablighi Jamaat intend that the mega-mosque will be their new international headquarters, yet the current temporary mosque on the Abbey Mills site has now been operating illegally and irresponsibly without planning permission for two years.”
A spokesperson for the Abbey Mills Mosque Trust said: “I don’t know how it is illegal. We’ve owned the site since 1996, and we’ve been regularly meeting with the authorities, and they’re happy so long as we continue to make progress on the project.”
Sir Robin said: “The Trust have advised that they are currently preparing another application so that they can continue using the site for a further temporary period. Development of the area will have to be resident-friendly and the facilities must serve everyone in the local community. There is currently no evidence that the Trust will not do [this] and therefore we are unable to CPO the site until they submit their masterplan for the site.”
A group of Muslims in Reading feel victimised by a Government initiative designed to tackle violent extremism and feel it could cause more harm than good. A crisis group has been set up with the support of more than 1,000 Muslims in Reading who object to the local steps being taken under the Government’s Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) strategy launched this year.
Reading Borough Council was picked as a pilot area for the Department for Communities and local Government’s counter-terrorism strategy which aims to challenge violent extremist ideology, support vulnerable individuals being targeted and recruited to extreme causes and increase the resilience of the community towards violent extremism.
But Reading Muslim Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) Crisis Group said since it started, Muslim groups in the town have become disillusioned with the project which started off as a collaborative effort between organisations and community groups in Reading. It is concerned about a new PVE toolkit which will be provided to school teachers to look out for signs of “radicalisation” in pupils – a move which the group labels “absurd and disturbing”.
A statement from the group to Michael Coughlin, chief executive of Reading Borough Council, and Superintendent Steve Kirk said: “The PVE work relies on a number of volatile terms such as ‘extremism’, ‘violent extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’. These terms are undefined but have been used by members of the Government to demonise the Muslim community by equating Islamic values such as the desire for Muslim unity and adherence to Sharia law with ‘extremism’ or ‘violent extremism’.
“Communities don’t commit crimes, individuals do. However, the Government narrative on the causes of the cycle of violence we see occurring in the context of PVE blames an ‘ideology’ as the overriding cause for people’s radicalisation. This is in stark contrast to the way that the political troubles in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka was identified. This narrative firmly puts the blame for the cycle of violence at the door of Islam and the Muslim community.”
The Muslim-born journalist baptized by Pope Benedict XVI at Easter asked the pope to tell his top aide for relations with Muslims that Islam is not an intrinsically good religion and that Islamic terrorism is not the result of a minority gone astray.
As the Vatican was preparing to host the first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum Nov. 4-6, Magdi Allam, a longtime critic of the Muslim faith of his parents, issued an open letter to Pope Benedict that included criticism of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
He told the pope that it “is vital for the common good of the Catholic Church, the general interest of Christianity and of Western civilization itself” that the pope make a pronouncement in “a clear and binding way” on the question of whether Islam is a valid religion.
Allam told Pope Benedict he specifically objected to Cardinal Tauran telling a conference in August that Islam itself promotes peace but that “‘some believers’ have ‘betrayed their faith’,” using it as a pretext for violence.
“The objective reality, I tell you with all sincerity and animated by a constructive intent, is exactly the opposite of what Cardinal Tauran imagines,” Allam told the pope. “Islamic extremism and terrorism are the mature fruit” of following “the sayings of the Quran and the thought and action of Mohammed.”
Catholic News Service, 29 October 2008
Damian Thompson, editor of the Catholic Herald, broadly agrees. He demands: “will anyone dare discuss the hate-filled rhetoric ofmainstream Islam when the Vatican hosts its first Catholic-Muslim Forum next week? Or will both sides maintain the doctrine – promulgated by every public institution in Britain – that the jihadist and anti-semitic sentiments encouraged by Arab governments and Muslim community leaders are a distortion of Islam?”
Two Muslim women who worked as brokers in the City of London have accused their former employer of religious discrimination by transferring Jewish clients to non-Muslim colleagues. Lawyers for the co-workers will outline a series of allegations, including racial, sexual and religious discrimination, against broker Tradition Securities & Futures at the opening of the employment tribunal on Wednesday.
The women, Muslims of North African descent in their thirties, joined Tradition – a French company – in Paris six years ago. They moved with the trading desk to London in 2004 and quit two years later after deciding they could no longer work in the environment. Documents allege they suffered “complex and multi-faceted” discrimination while working for Tradition.
For all the state rhetoric, the path of politicised British Muslims is rarely extremist but progressive, argues David Edgar.