Among other hostile statements, the anonymous caller said, “I’m going to throw a bomb in your (expletive) school,” according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which reported the incident to the FBI and the San Diego Police Department.

Civil rights leaders slammed an amendment added to the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill that would subject immigrants from Muslim countries for extra scrutiny.

WASHINGTON – While Muslim teams have been deployed to help those in need, US Muslim leaders have appealed to the sizable minority to join efforts to aid victims of a devastating tornado in Oklahoma that wiped whole blocks of homes and killed scores.

After growing religious tensions between some Christian missionaries and local Muslims, the annual Arab International Festival in Dearborn has been canceled for this year, organizers said Friday.

AFP, Athens -

Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn has threatened to mobilize 100,000 people against plans to build a mosque in Athens, state television reported on Monday.

Next time Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent Erick Stakelbeck talks about religious liberty, just remember that he doesn’t seem to extend that freedom to Muslims.

Yet another Islamophobic ad from a group linked to Pamela Geller has appeared in the Washington, DC Metrorail system, this one lamenting what it claims to be “apartheid” against non-Muslims and calling for the U.S. to cut off all funding to “Islamic” states.

The Cambridge University theologian Dr Tim Winter, one of the UK’s leading Islamic scholars, apologised on 2 May after footage emerged showing him calling homosexuality the “ultimate inversion” and an “inexplicable aberration”.

Legendary rock legend Gene Simmons sparked outrage in Australia earlier this month when he made anti-Muslim comments on a Melbourne radio station. “This is a vile culture and if you think for a second that it’s willing to just live in the sands of God’s armpit, you’ve got another thing coming,” the Israeli-born musician said on Melbourne’s 3AW radio.

Several commenters pointed out to us that the site we linked the previous story to has indulged in bizarre conspiracy theories. We instead link you directly to the research conducted by the Cancer & Birth Defects Foundation that concluded that genetic damage in Falluja, Iraq was worse than Hiroshima.)

FOX News Channel (FNC) has hired former U.S. Representative Allen West (R-FL) as a contributor, announced Bill Shine, Executive Vice President of Programming for the network.

A Muslim doctor has applied for permits to open a hospital in an area of Chicago with a large Muslim population. The hospital would be for the entire community, no matter what their religion, but would accommodate Muslim religious and cultural customs to make Muslim patients more comfortable.

Talk about irony, in the same state in which politicians wanted to make Christianity the state religion you have a move to ban the non-existent threat of ‘Shariah,’ if they had their way they would probably really like to ban Islam altogether (their real intent).

Helping their players to fulfil their religious duties, German football giants Bayern Munich have decided to build a mosque to help Muslim footballers to perform their prayers. The German football club agreed to a request to build a mosque in the Allianz Arena stadium to serve its Muslim players and fans.

(Via Huffingtonpost)

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) opened the door to a comeback for former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) Friday, saying he’d be a “great” pick for his second in command.

An Electronic Intifada investigation uncovers evidence that Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, receives significant funding from the same financiers who support the Islamophobes who inspired anti-Muslim Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik.

One small issue I have is with describing Geller’s activities as “criticism.” Criticism is not the right word but understandably the more accurate “batsh** crazy rants” to describe Geller’s activities wouldn’t fit the professional language required of an official press release.

By Cavan Sieczkowski

A Saudi Arabian student living in Michigan says he was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after neighbors saw him with a pressure cooker and alerted authorities.

by Rondrell Moore

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) – A military man’s beliefs have been changed for the better, thanks to a new addition to his family.

A UKIP councillor has announced he will probably have to step down after less than two weeks because he posted a series of offensive messages about Jews and Muslims online.

AlJazeera

Are we witnessing a slow genocide?

Will the genocide be accelerated if powerful nationalist groups get elected? The humanitarian crisis continues in Myanmar.

By Lisa Wangsness (Boston Globe)

On a rainy afternoon in early April at Boston’s largest mosque, the sheikh in the seersucker suit was in his office, offering comfort and advice.

This nine minute exchange between Bill Maher and his guests: Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian,Joy Reid of the Miami Herald and Charles Cooke of the National Review Online is very telling.

RALEIGH – Sgt. 1st Class Naida Hosan is not a Muslim – she’s a Catholic. But her name sounded Islamic to fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and they would taunt her, calling her “Sgt. Hussein” and asking what God she prayed to.

COLLEGE PARK, Md., May 7 (Reuters) – Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday decried Buddhist monks’ attacks on Muslims in Myanmar, saying killing in the name of religion was “unthinkable.”

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Fresno police say they’re disturbed by the brutal attack on an 81-year-old Sikh man. They upgraded the charges against 29-year-old Gilbert Garcia. He now faces attempted murder and will likely be charged with hate crime and elder abuse.

After the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were revealed to be Muslims who investigators said were motivated in part by radical Islam, American Muslims were quick to condemn the bombings and plea for Americans to not retaliate against the peaceful majority.

A member of a Chicago-area civil rights group made a disturbing discovering when she found a neighborhood card and novelty shop selling a card that depicted a young hijab-wearing Muslim girl — as a terrorist.

Inside Washington, the battle line is between a small coalition of peace and security, non-proliferation and religious groups opposing war and favouring a peaceful solution to the standoff with Iran, and a well-funded war machine comprising of neoconservative organisations who believe war with Iran should have started years ago.

An Algerian-American from Cambridge was attacked outside a Back Bay restaurant Saturday night, say police and a Muslim advocacy group,the latest of several assaults on Muslims since the Boston Marathon bombings three weeks ago.

On 18 April, three days after a bombing killed three and left many more wounded at the Boston marathon, a figure unknown to most Americans stepped suddenly into the national spotlight.

ELKADER, Iowa — Amid an expanse of undulating farmland, deep in the steep valley carved by the Turkey River, the town of Elkader sits most of the year in remote obscurity. Population 1,200 and gradually shrinking, it is the seat of a county without a single traffic light.

Farea al-Muslimi, stated that he came to the USA as an ambassador for Yemen to America and that he left the USA as an ambassador for America to Yemen. Below Muslimi speaks passionately at a Senate subcommittee hearing on so-called “targeted drone strikes” which are in fact terrorizing Yemenis.

While York Regional Police supports Ms. Geller’s right to free speech, there is an expectation of all members of our organization to act in accordance with our values and the expectations of our community.

As advocates condemn “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya, officials say no such group exists. YANGON, Myanmar — From the depths of obscurity, Myanmar’s highly beleaguered Muslim Rohingya ethnicity has become something of a global cause célèbre.

by Martin Robbins (Guardian)

Sam Harris is about as consistent as Glenn Greenwald is concise, which made their exchange of multi-thousand word cowpats last month particularly grueling reading.

An Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a cabdriver says a passenger he picked up early Friday at a Northern Virginia country club accused him of being a terrorist because he is Muslim, then fractured his jaw in an attack being described by Islamic activists as a hate crime.

“This may just be a picture to him, but for us it is very threatening,” said Kokoye, an Antioch resident who has lived in Tennessee for 17 years. “Muslims in Coffee County should not feel safe to walk outside their homes.”

There have been several stories over the past month of violence directed at Muslims that we have not covered but suffice it to say the perpetuation of hate and violence continues in Burma.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he still wants to close the military prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that he’s renewing efforts to work with Congress to shut it down.

The Anti-Defamation League turned 100 this week. Renowned for its early anti-racism efforts, the group can, and should, boast of its role in American Jewry’s unabashed and unqualified rise into the nation’s establishment.

Former Fox News contributor Jane Hall says that her ex-colleagues at the conservative network have been “waging a campaign” to link the words “radical” and “Islam” following the bombings at the Boston Marathon earlier this month.

The FBI said it is hoping surveillance video will help lead them to a pair of vandals who targeted an Oklahoma City mosque last weekend. The American Muslim Association on the 3200 block of N.W. 48th St. was damaged when the suspects spray painted racial slurs and other graffiti on the walls.

Though the vast majority of his speech focused on the ADL’s importance in fighting hate crimes, some conservatives have become outraged that Holder denounced “misguided acts of retaliation” against Muslims. Kelly addressed the issue during a segment on Monday.

Weeks after bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s alleged attack on the Boston Marathon that left three dead, local Yemeni woman and fervent jihadist Adila Nasser told reporters Monday that she wished her sons could be as dedicated…

By Hayes Brown on Apr 25, 2013 at 12:11 pm

Fox News is sounding the alarm about Muslim extremists in the aftermath of the Boston bombings and is using the tragedy to argue that President Obama is too weak or afraid to confront the threat.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) during a hearing on Friday said that he believes that Islam as a whole is a threat to the United States, labeling it as a religion that will “motivate people to murder children.”

Introduction

This is the first in a series of articles that will discuss the relationship between Zionism and Islamophobia. The impetus for this series is what many have already observed:

Update: We just received a statement from Hunter Todd about the event in which he confirms that he did search the backpack of a woman because she was wearing a hijab and says he had to do it to protect his audience.

More than a week before three people were killed and more than 260 people were injured in the Boston Marathon bombings, a Jersey City man carried two homemade explosives on an NJ Transit train, authorities say.

It is heart-warming and inspiring to see the evidently deep friendship between satirists Jon Stewart and Bassem Youssef, two popular comedians in their respective nations who have a finger on the pulse, not only of their own culture but global culture.

In the days following the Boston Marathon bombings, Fox News has become a haven for talk about the extreme threats posed to the United States by Muslims. Day after day, the network’s hosts and pundits have warned about an Islamic menace which is poised to take down the country.

After the September 11th attacks, many Americans wondered, “why do they hate us?” President George Bush gave his now famous explanation: “They hate our freedoms.” Radical Islam, we are told, is to blame.

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

So let me start with the standard roll call: As an American Muslim, I condemn all violence in the name of religion. Terrorism has no religion and Islam is no exception. If the Tsarnaev brothers are guilty of the Boston bombings, then I hope they are brought to justice.

Controversial televangelist Pat Robertson is known for many things, especially for building a lucrative Christian media organization and leading a cohort of conservative evangelists.

Appearing on Fox News Republican talk show “Hannity” Monday night, right-wing columnist Ann Coulter said she’s sad that not only does she think the Boston bombing should shut down the nation’s immigration reform debate, she would like to see the alleged bomber’s widow in jail too, not for committing a crime but for “wearing a hijab.”

On his radio broadcast today, Bryan Fischer renewed his call for a ban on immigration from majority Muslim nations, claiming that our immigration policy should simply consist of the question “do you believe that the Quran is the holy book of God”?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) smacked down Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) attempt to link Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Islamic extremists based in the American Muslim community with no evidence, an allegation that emerged as part of a theme among House Republicans on Sunday morning.

Were you one of the pundits or newspapers who too quickly jumped on the Saudi “person of interest” story, only to have some egg on your face when authorities later cleared him of wrongdoing? Well, thankfully, Fox News’ favorite “terrorism expert”Steve Emerson has found an escape clause.

Predictably, the Boston Marathon bombings have spawned a renewed interest in “jihadist” (why is this in quotes?) terrorist activity. We are once again reminded of the “looming threat of radical Islam.” We are told that this is the existential struggle of our generation.

Muslim, Muslim-Americans, Tamerlan, Dzhokhar Tsarnev, Nevertheless, stereotypes of Muslims appear to be an important ingredient in how Americans think about policies targeted at terrorism. The Boston marathon bombing is likely only to reinforce this.

Boston marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was thrown out of his local mosque for ‘crazy’ behavior after getting involved a ‘shouting match’ with his imam according to one member of the congregation.

by Wajahat Ali

The twin bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, which killed two and injured at least 176, inspired divergent responses to a sudden, senseless tragedy.

Aliyah Frumin (MSNBC)

President Obama cautioned the nation not to rush to judgment about the Boston Marathon bombers. But that’s not stopping Republican Rep. Peter King.

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R) on Wednesday connected the Monday bombings in Boston to the immigration debate and warned that “radical Islamists” were “being trained to come in and act like Hispanics.”

France’s national railway company banned its black and North African employees from working during President Shimon Peres’ visit last month over fears they “might be Muslim,” newspapers in Britain reported overnight Monday.

Right-wing Christian evangelist and famed Skeletor impersonator Pat Robertson is at it again, implying that the Boston Bombings were committed by Muslim terrorists. To be clear for the hundredth time, no one knows who committed this horrible act, or why.

Guardian

Nigeria could face a battle between rival terrorist groups after Christian militants threatened to attack Muslim targets in response to bombings carried out by the Islamist group Boko Haram.

The building site of a future mosque in the city of Coulommiers, east of Paris, was defaced with racist graffiti – including Nazi swastikas – over the weekend. “A pig’s head and Nazi tags were found inside the site,” Abdallah Zekri, president of France’s Observatory of Islamophobia told the AFP news agency.

A MAN racially abused a Muslim woman and demanded she took off her hijab before putting a kitchen knife to her throat.

David Norris, 39, approached Farduja Jama who was with her eight-year-old son in Morton Street, Barton Hill at 9am.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Police are asking for the public’s help in finding a suspect who allegedly menaced a man as he left a Queens mosque. The incident occurred after the victim left a mosque on Kissena Boulevard around 8 p.m. last Friday.

BY NATASHA LENNARD

A lengthy independent review found that the country’s highest officials and president condoned torture

Sen. Alan Hays, sponsor of an anti-Sharia bill, told constituents that supporting the bill meant they were standing up for Jesus Christ. Doesn’t that imply that Christians hate Muslims?

In an essay at Salon, Chris Stedman, an interfaith leader, assistant chaplain at Harvard, and author of the memoir “Faitheist,” urged the company to reconsider its support for provocative AFDI ads that pitted Muslims and gays against each other.

By Townsquare News Network

American Muslim organizations are condemning the Boston Marathon bombings and urging Americans of all faiths to join them in praying for the victims and their families.

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD

Going beyond even Pamela Geller, Fox News regular Erik Rush responded to the Boston Marathon bombing today by suggesting that we round up Saudis and then kill them — but don’t worry, he was mostly joking.

BY JILLIAN RAYFIELD

As information continues to unfold about the attacks, pundits continue to react badly [UPDATED]

Calls from some legislators to ban American Muslims from following Islamic law are born of a “bogeyman fear” that Muslims will try to impose their way of life on others of different faiths, an imam and author of books on Islam said Sunday at Congregation Beth El in Voorhees.

By SAMIR NAJI al HASAN MOQBEL

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago. I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

Recently, a friend forwarded me a link to a web blog. The link points to a 400-page document, titled “Islam Virus”, which is a collection of misinformation about Islam – how cruel, inhumane and scary Muslims are.

It is an adage of war that if you want to emerge victorious, you must ‘know your enemy,’ but Akbar Ahmed’s The Thistle and The Drone proposes that the Western combatants of the ‘war on terror’ have completely failed to understand who they’ve been fighting for the last decade.

As names can be an indicator of how a civilization views itself and the outside world, names parents choose to give their children are at least something of a guide to what they hold in high regard and what they wish for their children. And as Muslims often choose names related to war and violence, could those possibly be indicative of their values?

by Jai Singh

There is currently increasing journalistic scrutiny of the atheist British scientist Richard Dawkins and his ally Sam Harris’ statements about Islam and Muslims.

(via LGF)

The founder of Rabbis for Romney says he won’t divulge the names of its members because he fears they will be criticized for breaking with the majority of Jews who support President Barack Obama.

A Long Island synagogue has canceled a controversial speech by conservative firebrand Pamela Geller. Geller was set to speak Sunday at the Great Neck Synagogue. She had been invited by the men’s club at the synagogue to give a speech on Sharia, the religious and moral code of Islam.

“They are always apprehensive about the drones, about their lives,” said Pehshawar psychiatrist. A report from the AFP this week finds that the psychological trauma suffered by Pakistanis living under the threat of U.S. drone strikes and Taliban fighting is “unprecedented.”

Members of Alif Laam Meem held signs that said “Muslims Say No to Domestic Violence” and “Muslims Say Yes to Women’s Rights” at the Men’s Rally Against Domestic Violence in Dallas on March 24 to protest the abuse of women and to put a positive face on a religion they say is often misunderstood.

Are there some extremist Muslim scholars, and some who have issued fatwas that require a response from mainstream Muslim scholars. Absolutely! Are mainstream Muslim scholars attempting to counter these extremists with clarifying fatwas and statements? Absolutely!

The Oklahoma legislature passed a bill Monday to prevent the use of religious or foreign law in state courts. Between 2010 and 2012, lawmakers in 32 states introduced similar bills, and six states – Oklahoma, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and Tennessee – enacted such bills into law.

FEMEN “International Topless Jihad” protests seemed to have been a good way for Eurocentric feminists to ignore Muslim feminists while at the same time gaining significant media attention.

A police spokesman Sunday said that it is almost certain that the fire Saturday morning in a mosque in Enkhuizen was lit. How the arson was carried out, the police did not disclose. It is not yet clear in which way the perpetrators must be sought.

It’s important to highlight that there are conflicting reports on what caused this tragic fire and that it is not established that it was the result of arsonists. The persecution that Muslims have faced in Myanmar has been on a horrific scale and does not engender trust in the authorities.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A fierce battle between U.S.-backed Afghan forces and Taliban militants in a remote corner of eastern Afghanistan left nearly 20 people dead, including 11 Afghan children killed in an airstrike and an American civilian adviser, officials said Sunday.

A mosque was vandalized in a Palestinian village south of Bethlehem in an apparent “price tag” attack retaliating for the serious injury of an Israeli girl. Graffiti spray-painted Sunday on the mosque read “revenge for Adele Biton,” “regards from Adele” and “price tag.” The tires of a car parked nearby also were slashed.

New York City,Kelly is asked how the department’s surveillance methods have changed in the wake of a Pultizer Prize-winning investigative series and the revelation that the very same surveillance program has generated zero leads. His reply: “Nothing…”

by Clint Cooper

On Friday, about 75 young people — Muslims, Christians and Jews — will gather at the DuBose Conference Center in Monteagle, Tenn., and talk about all that supposedly weird stuff they do in their particular faith.

A month ago vandals spray-painted racial slurs onto the exterior walls of the Guelph Muslim Society Community Centre. Police labelled it a hate crime. “We’d never felt any sort of hate crime so to see that happen was kind of a shock”, says Muslim Society member Noorie Nash.

Western feminists seem to have a love-hate relationship with Muslim women. On the one hand, they want to “save” them from what they perceive as their cultural and religious bondage. On the other hand, they seem rather quick to stereotype and dismiss them as brainwashed idiots.

The Family Research Council’s President Jerry Boykin said this week that U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Louis Gohmert (R-TX) are “standing on the word of God” in their mission to find and punish Muslims and Muslim supporters in the U.S. government.

Leftist Jewish groups are calling on a Long Island synagogue to cancel a speech by an outspoken Jewish blogger known for her anti-Muslim views — raising questions about a double standard on free expression.

Revelations on the sexual abuses by the Tuzla bishop – Karadžić and Mladić’s spiritual guide – have dragged the Serbian Orthodox church through one of the major scandals of the latest years.

BY CHRIS STEDMAN

Anti-Islam crusader Pam Geller’s effort to foment hate between the two groups is based on lies and doomed to fail. I have an earnest and sincere question for the LGBT community: Do you support Pamela Geller?

By Adam Peck

Tennessee is not the first state to try and carve out exemptions to education funding that target only Muslims.

Buoyed by its meteoric domestic success, the far right party is planning to expand ‘wherever there are Greeks’ Emboldened by its meteoric rise in Greece, the far-right Golden Dawn party is spreading its tentacles abroad, amid fears it is acting on its pledge to “create cells in every corner of the world”.

Two columns have been published in the past week harshly criticizing the so-called “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: this one by Nathan Lean in Salon, and this one by Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera.

ACCORDING TO BARRON, the first Jewish-Arab Seder in D.C. was held 25 years ago, bringing people together to work toward peace in the Middle East. “We are still working,” said Barron, “but look how far we’ve come and how many friendships we have built together.”

A reputed member of a white supremacist group has pleaded guilty to hate crime charges in the beating of 2 Middle Eastern men in New Jersey. U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman says 28-year-old Michal Gunar pleaded guilty Tuesday to hate crime conspiracy and assault charges. He faces up to 15 years in prison when he’s sentenced.

Remember Daniel Pipes, the guy who former President George W. Bush nominated to lead the “US Institute of Peace,” and who was supported in that endeavor by the AJC, ADL and Neo-Con outfits such as his buddy Johnathan Schanzer‘s Foundation for the Defense of Democracies?

by Glenn Greenwald

As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression

By Janice Neumann, Special to the Tribune

Christianity, Islam and Judaism may seem like totally different religions, but participants at an interfaith forum in Frankfort learned they all share some basic principles.

Sometimes expressions of community manifest at unexpected yet necessary moments. Illustrative is the American response to the recent proliferation of anti-Muslim hate advertisements on government owned public transit systems in cities around the country.

Self-identified as Muslim by religion, Arab by race and American by culture, an OU alumna cleared misconceptions about Islamic women’s rights at a question and answer session Monday.

RANGOON—Satellite images released by Human Rights Watch on Monday revealed that during the recent unrest between Buddhists and the Muslim minority in Meikhtila town, mobs burned down three neighborhoods covering 60.5 acres and containing at least 828 homes.

A Madison, Wis., gas station sign board known for its quirky messages is causing a stir for its latest posting. As CBS affiliate WISC-TV reports, a sign posted outside of the BP in the Willy Street neighborhood Thursday morning read: “DONT DIE A VIRGIN TERRORISTS ARE UP THERE WAITING FOR YOU.”

As I reported in a piece for the print magazine last summer, Florida has emerged as sort of the Thunderdome of the anti-Shariah movement, with a host of lawmakers at the municipal, state, and federal level working hand-in-hand with a dedicated group of activists to combat the invisble spectre of Islamic law.

The Western press and social media often seem to exercise two options for dealing with the Muslim population of the world: overt, unabashed Islamophobia or slightly subtler Islamophobia.

ROME – Pope Francis reached out in friendship to “so many Muslim brothers and sisters” during a Good Friday procession dedicated to the suffering of Christians from terrorism, war and religious fanaticism in the Middle East.

Pamela Geller has published Islamic ruling encouraging “Sexual Jihad”: Prostitution for the holiest in which she introduces an article from Al Monitor Tunisians Raise Alarm on Possible Fatwa Encouraging ‘Sexual Jihad’

BY NATHAN LEAN

How the New Atheists’ anti-Muslim hate advances their belief that God does not exist is not exactly clear. In this climate of increased anti-Muslim sentiment, it’s a convenient digression, though.

by Juan Cole

The pope washed and kissed the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women and two of them Muslim (one of the women was Muslim).

Hatef Mokhtar of The Oslo Times had a very interesting interview on a wide range of subjects with Tarja Cronberg, a member of the European Parliament, the whole interview is well worth the read if you are interested in European issues that effect the whole world.

Christians face discrimination in many places in the Muslim world, including in Egypt, however it certainly doesn’t help when Fox News, a bastion of Right-Wing fundamentalism (of both the political and religious variety) pushes misleading stories.

JERUSALEM — Every Christian knows the holiest places in Christendom are in Jerusalem. The holiest of all, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was erected in 325, over the site where it is believed Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead.

Muslims are trying to do their part to help others. The Islamic Society of Michiana held a blood drive Friday organized by the South Bend Medical Foundation.The drive was open to the public and held immediately after the Friday prayer service which over 250 people attend.

Police officers in Russia forced three men in a Muslim cafe to cut their beards at gunpoint, it has been claimed. During an inspection of a Muslim cafe in the Russian city of Surgut police officers apparently threatened some visitors with automatic weapons and with a lighter.

The Nubian Benevolence Association was the official sponsor for the Muslim Women in (STEM) presentation at the Lorton Community Library on Saturday, March 23, but there was little doubt that Hajjar Ahmed, daughter of the organization’s co-Founder Hossam Ahmed, was the driving force behind the event.

After a series of attacks on mosques, wild rumours about animal slaughter and an attempt to outlaw the halal system of classification, the BBC’s Charles Haviland investigates how Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority is being targeted by hardline Buddhists.

Intellectuals sign online petition after Supreme Court ruling

(ANSAmed) – PARIS, MARCH 25 – The Islamic veil is still very much a national controversy, data from a front-page BVA survey in Le Parisien newspaper showed on Monday.

Glenn Beck suggested Tuesday that the ethics investigation into the erstwhile presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is retribution for the congresswoman’s outspoken crusade against what she has called the threat of radical Islam.

The most interesting thing about Argentine Pope Francis may be not just that he’s the first Latin American to head the Vatican, but also that he may become the Church’s biggest champion of interfaith dialogue ever.

(Via Comedy Central)

Despite Tennessee lawmakers’ best efforts, Sharia law manages to work its way into the state building’s men’s room.

In an upcoming biography of Fox News president Roger Ailes, author Zev Chafets reports that Ailes hasn’t donated to any Muslim charities, and connects that decision to comments tying all Muslim charities to terrorism.

Toronto police say a male suspect allegedly hit and harassed a pregnant woman on the street because she was wearing a hijab. Police allege a jogger went out of his way to strike the woman in two separate incidents during the last month on Yonge Street near Eglington Avenue.

Oh noes, it appears the wily stealth Mooslims installed a terrorist sink in the Tennessee state legislature! Or so thought a couple of Tennessee House and Senate members, namely Republican Sen. Bill Kreton and Rep. Judd Matheny.

Rejecting of their hate message against Muslims, many Swedes have showed up in the southern city of Malmo to protest against a far-right group, leading to abort the anti-Muslim rally. “There were angry skirmishes after the anti-racists marched from Möllevångstorget square to the Stortorget square around noon, a lot of people seemed ready for a fight,” said The Local’s Patrick Reilly from the scene.

One does not even have to wonder whether the media or Islamophobes would react in a similar manner if Holmes converted to Judaism or Christianity and proclaimed to justify his actions through those religions!

The man who introduced the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, at yesterday’s GigaOM Structure:Data conference in New York City thought it would be funny to quip, “If you don’t give a big round of applause for our next speaker, he’s gonna find out and it’s gonna go on your permanent record.”

Seeking a bigger support among German youth, a rightist group is using Facebook, YouTube and other social media websites to spread its racist, anti-Islam message. “They are clearly racist,” Alexander Häusler, an expert on right-wing extremism at University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, told Deutsche Welle.

(Via LoonWatch.com)

Anti-Islam vandalism increases in Kandy Sri Lanka. In order to hurt the Muslims in Kandy, filthy English wording has been written on the iron doors of a closed shop.

(Guardian)

Burma‘s president has declared a state of emergency after two days of sectarian violence in a central town that has killed at least 20 people.

(The Local)

Germany’s security service the Verfassungsschutz is a hornet’s nest of conflict, envy, jealousy and inappropriate insults, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing inside sources.

Agence France-Presse

A Frenchman who ripped a Muslim woman’s veil off her face as she strolled in a fairground was Wednesday given a five-month suspended prison sentence and ordered to compensate his victim.

This was the main slogan of a protest rally organized by a group of Georgian nationalists outside the government’s house. Members of the non-governmental organization named “National Front” staged the protest against construction of a new mosque in the sea-side city of Batumi near the Turkish border.

Islamophobic acts, jokes in bad taste or overtly racist provocations? In the past few days, mosques in several regions of France, received by mail envelopes containing pork. Some mosques, such as the one in Mulhouse, decided to lodge a complaint.

A Scottish reverend has invited Muslims to pray alongside Christians in an Aberdeen church because the nearby mosque is so small that some worshippers were forced to pray outside.

When local school officials in the sparsely populated far east of the Stavropol region announced that girls in hijabs, the Islamic head covering, would no longer be allowed in government schools, the Salikhovs had to make changes.

by Glenn Greenwald

US-born Hamid Hayat was sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly attending a terrorist training camp when he was 19.

The mainstream media is a bit more reflective, realizing it rubber stamped government propaganda and fed into the hysteria of invasion with patriotic fervor. Questions regarding blowback, repercussions, ramifications from this war however have not really been analyzed in-depth.

In 2005, then Pope Benedict quoted from an obscure medieval text which declared that the Prophet Mohammed, founder of the Islamic faith, was “evil and inhuman”, enraging the Muslim population and causing attacks on churches throughout the world before an apology was issued.

BY EMAAN MAJED

A justification for targeted killings in the middle east was to shield women from violence. They’ve made it worse.

While the University considers itself a diverse community, some students have felt left out of the equation — until now. The Second Reformed Church, located at 100 College Ave., will now offer a place for practicing Muslims to go for their Friday worship, Pastor Doug Shepler said.

Lawrence Krauss was under the impression that attendees of the debate were being forced to sit in segregated seating when clearly the troubles began when a few atheist men demanded to sit in-between Muslim women who had voluntarily chose to sit apart from men.

by Kevin McDermott (StL.Today)

JEFFERSON CITY • In what has become a regular ritual here, a state Senate committee heard testimony Tuesday on a bill that would prevent Sharia Law from taking over Missouri.

Hate group leader, Far-right Catholic fanatic and anti-Muslim Crusader/terrorist-inspirer, Rev. Deacon Robert Spencer of Our Lady of the Cedars Church, a full-time paid shill for racist David Horowitz has been pretty sore that I exposed the fact he is an ordained deacon.

(Via RollingStone.com)

New report details the damaging effects of the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance regime.

A 53-year-old man is charged with a hate crime, accused of setting fire to a Green Bay convenience store owned by a Sikh American – seven months after the most deadly U.S. attack on Sikhs in recent memory at an Oak Creek temple.

We covered the #MyJihad ad campaign back in December, a campaign that seeks to reclaim the term Jihad from Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists alike.

FrontPage Magazine is edited by David Horowitz, a conservative activist who once gave money to Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. But Mark Tapson says that it’s all part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plot to win “the hearts and minds of the young.

Jerusalem’s Mamilla, or Maman Allah, cemetery has been a Muslim burial ground since the 7th century. It is said to hold the remains of companions of the Prophet Muhammad, soldiers and officials from the rule of Saladin in the 12th century, as well as generations of Jerusalem’s most important families.

BRADFORD – Extending their hands to their Jewish neighbors to save their worship place, Muslims in the northern British city of Bradford are rallying efforts to raise funds for preserving the last remaining synagogue in the city.

Swedish Muslims have slammed the government for failing to combat discrimination, submitting a report to the UN with a list of proposed measures, such as setting up an inquiry into the abuse of Somali migrants in the tiny town of Forserum.

by Garibaldi

John Brennan‘s appointment to head the CIA reached the senate floor in a final phase that was supposed to witness a quick “stamp of approval” but in a stunning move Sen. Rand Paul announced that he would filibuster the appointment…

An engineering student at Kandahar University, Abdul Qayum was at the center of a major incident over the weekend, when he was detained by a CIA “strike force” that attacked his university and tortured in detention before President Karzai secured his release.

The New York Police Department’s surveillance of the Muslim community has had harmful consequences, according to a report being released Monday from the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition and its partners.

If the Washington Post’s deceptively titled article, ‘Rise of a Bosnian Mayor With Headscarf Challenging Assumptions about Islam,’ is the best our major media can do, then perhaps it’s good they’re dying. The title’s half the length of a tweet and it happens to do everything but challenge assumptions about Islam.

(Guardian)

The majority of Muslims physically attacked, harassed or intimidated because of their faith are women, according to the first results from the UK’s official helpline for victims of Islamophobia.

I headed to the dining hall and opened the Tufts Daily, only to see an advertisement (scroll down to see the ad) with the boldfaced words “FACES OF ISLAMIC APARTHEID” with pictures of individuals behind photo-shopped crosshairs within the advertisement…

WESTMINSTER, Md. — A citizens group aims to limit new construction at a former Catholic school complex in rural Howard County that an Islamic community is considering buying.

BY JILLIAN RAYFIELD

Florida is once again mulling a ban on sharia law, this time passing a bill out of the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee that would prevent courts from considering “foreign law” when handing down legal decisions.

Tablet has a roundtable about the Israel lobby. All the voices are Jewish. The best commenter is Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace, though Noah Pollak of the Emergency Committee for Israel lets his guard down in a remarkable manner.

“What are they doing at CPAC? Essentially, they are enforcing the Shariah,” said anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller. “Under the Shariah, the blasphemy laws, you cannot say, you cannot offend, you cannot criticize and you cannot insult Islam. That is effectively what they’re doing, they are enforcing the Shariah.”

Guelph police are investigating after racial graffiti was discovered on a mosque. Police say “numerous” spray-painted graffiti markings were discovered on the outside of the Guelph Muslim Society’s mosque at 286 Water Street early Tuesday.

By Hayes Brown on Mar 5, 2013 at 10:15 am

A grassroots campaign aimed at countering hateful anti-Muslim ads in New York’s subway system has gone live, placing posters in ten locations across New York City.

Alleging defamation, France’s interior minister Manuel Valls is trying to shut down a website which gives a voice to the victims of police harassment. The site has become especially popular with France’s Muslim population, who often claim that police target, harass and even kill them with impunity.

Two exchange students attending school in Perham, Minnesota say they were kicked out of a church there when they questioned a nationally known speaker who says “Islam equals terrorism.”

The annual Israel lobby confab has once again put its seal of approval on Islamophobia. A key member of what has been termed the “Islamophobia network” appeared Sunday at an officially scheduled session at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference.

Is Van Doorn’s conversion sincere or a Far-Right political stunt? He claims it is sincere and confirmed the speculation regarding his conversion to AlJazeera.

Quebec has the second largest Muslim population in Canada. The census bureau says about 200,000 Muslims live in Quebec. It is perhaps the fastest growing religion in Canada and is expected to triple within the next 20 years, but critics say with all of its diversity, Quebec is also perhaps one of the most Islamaphobic provinces in the country.

Vera Eyzendooren, president of the San Bernardino County Federation of Republican Women, accused a San Francisco attorney who is running for a leadership role in the state party of being a terrorist sympathizer, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

On Sunday night at Beitar’s Teddy Stadium, members of La Familia were in place an hour before kick off in the league game against Maccabi Netanya, chanting abuse not fit for a family newspaper at the club’s president – a former owner of Portsmouth – Arcadi Gaydamak.

The height of Spencer and Geller’s influence was in the summer of 2010 when they succeeded, along with their cohorts, in making Islam part of the Conservative movement’s “culture wars,” most notably with the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.”

KABUL, March 2 (Reuters) – NATO said on Saturday its forces had accidentally shot dead two Afghan boys, in the latest of a series of reports of civilian deaths at the hands of international troops.

“It has turned out that the praying Muslims are not at all Russian citizens and they are not Moscow residents. They are labor migrants. There are only 10 percent of Moscow residents among them and building mosques for everyone who wants it – I think this will be over the top,” Sergey Sobyanin said in an interview with Moscow’s Echo radio.

In 2010, Lleida, in the northeastern region of Catalonia, became the first Spanish town to impose such a ban. It was temporarily suspended by a regional court following an appeal by a Muslim association but then later upheld.

MediaMatters points out that this is not the first time Hannity has attacked Ellison for reasons related to his religion. In 2006, when Ellison was sworn into office and took his oath on a Quran, Hannity compared it to using “Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ which is the Nazi bible.”

Bail was set at $20,000 cash or bond yesterday for a Hoboken man charged with bias intimidation and robbery in an incident in which he allegedly called a cabbie a terrorist and knocked off his turban.

According to Pipes, “the Philadelphia region has witnessed 14 robberies (or attempted robberies) of financial institutions in the past six years in which the thieves relied on an Islamic full-body cover”. His solution? “Ban the niqab and burqa in public places, as the national governments in France and Belgium have recently done.”

US officials continue to feign shock at the decision to ban special forces from the Wardak Province of Afghanistan, but as details of their behavior in the province continue to emerge, the only wonder is that they managed to operate for so long without such a banning.

Istanbul — It concerns me that Islamophobia, an irrational fear of Islam and animosity toward Muslims, is becoming a dominant paradigm through which all Western-Muslim relations are now being explored.

At least 50 Muslim shop owners in Narammala in the Kurunegala District, have received death threats by mail. They have been warned to close their shops by March 31 or face death, Kurunegala district organizer of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) Abdul Sathar said.

By Lyda Longa

The U.S. Department of Justice and police are investigating the shooting of a Port Orange man driving over the Dunlawton Bridge as a hate crime.

Yesterday, we reported on how Accuracy In Media’s Cliff Kincaid and Rick Wiles of TruNews believe that President Obama is supporting a global Islamist movement and should be arrested.

None. Zero. That’s the number of fatalities or injuries from terrorist acts by American Muslims over the last two years, according to a recent report from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Look, the FBI found somebody that they didn’t have to give weapons to but was actually amassing weapons by himself, in order to kill Blacks, Jews and others.

An interfaith group is speaking out against Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) claim on Thursday that Americans need the Second Amendment’s protection in order to shield the nation from Sharia Law.

Student activists in California have exposed inflammatory remarks made by a university lecturer who is the head of an Israel lobby group that tries to pressure college administrations and state officials into investigating what the lecturer calls anti-Semitism.

Tea Party Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told a conservative radio show on Thursday that the GOP must oppose gun regulations to protect the country from the threat of “Sharia Law.”

A large chunk of Abdul Rahman’s home is gone, and so is his oldest son, Shakur. The ethnic Rohingya farmer tore down nearly half his home for scrap needed to secure his son’s passage on a boat bound for Malaysia.

The mayor of Malmö has slammed an upcoming exhibition of work by controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks, saying he hoped no one would visit the gallery to see artwork he said was “associated with xenophobes”.

CONCRETE, Wash. — A local civil rights organization is asking the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation in to anti-Muslim comments allegedly made by a Skagit County Middle School teacher in the classroom.

An office worker who left a severed pig’s head outside a Muslim place of worship on Boxing Day has been spared jail.Liam Ferrar was sentenced to 12 weeks’ imprisonment, suspended for a year, after a court heard he was disgusted by his actions and had written a letter of apology to his victims.

Khazir previously worked in PR and internet search engine optimisation when he noticed how videos of jihadis in Iraq and Afghanistan received large numbers of hits. He said: “Young people especially are often recruited and indoctrinated using videos posted on different social media channels – this can be by simply following a Twitter link.”

Law enforcement sources have uncovered several articles about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian anti-Muslim/Leftists terrorist in the bedroom of killer Adam Lanza.

When Kansas State Senator Susan Wagle voted for Senate Bill 79 that would ban Sharia law in Kansas, she said that a vote in favour of the legislation was “a vote to protect women”. “In this great country of ours, and in the state of Kansas,” Wagle said, “women have equal rights.”

A Tube worker has been caught posting vile racist and anti Muslim messages online.

Train engineer Martin Aitken used Facebook to insulted Muslim, Asians and disabled people in a series of offensive posts.

George Washington’s birthday, celebrated annually on Febr. 22nd, is an opportunity to reflect upon his exemplary character and the example he set for future generations of Americans.

ALL Muslims should renounce their religion immediately in favour of Christianity or atheism – it would be better for them and for everyone else, controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders said in Melbourne on Tuesday.

Feb 18, Colombo: BBC Sri Lanka Correspondent Charles Haviland said that he and his crew were threatened while they were filming a rally of Sinhala Buddhist extremist organization Bodu Bala Sena yesterday at Maharagama.

Far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders could learn a lot about the strengths of multiculturalism during his Australian visit, community and religious leaders say. Mr Wilders will give speeches in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth this month about what he calls the “Islamisation of Australia”.

COLOMBO — Worried that their country could plunge into a new wave of communal violence, Muslims and Buddhists are coming together to condemn attacks against the Muslim community.

Trevor Aaronson (AlterNet)

The organization responsible for more terrorist plots over the last decade than any other is the FBI.

Police are hunting two men and a woman who burst into a mosque and shouted racial abuse. The incident happened at the Nasir Mosque on Brougham Terrace, in Hartlepool, at around 7.45pm on Tuesday, February 5.

By Moni Basu, CNN

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

Anti-Muslim fanatics are going to be in a fit over this interview with the OIC leader Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as they view the OIC to be evil incarnate. A very funny interview nonetheless by John Oliver of the Daily Show as they talk about differences in culture and perception between the “Muslim world” and the “West.”

A thug spat at a woman in the street apparently because she was wearing an Islamic head scarf.

Police have appealed for help tracing the man, who targeted the woman in Humberstone Road, near Leicester city centre.

Inaugurated in December of 2010, the Thiers mosque might not be here today. The website Lamontagne.fr reported yesterday that one or more individuals tried to set fire to the boiler room of the building.

This “price tag” assault and numerous attacks like it do not represent Judaism, which calls for respect and tolerance for other religious traditions and especially the dead.

(Huffington Post)

Controversial conservative Christian Pat Robertson doubled down Tuesday on claims that Islam is not a religion.

By Jason Kennedy

Auckland Muslim Jason Kennedy penned this open letter to New Zealand First MP Richard Prosser.

By By SEAN MURPHY, Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma lawmakers are considering banning judges in the state from basing any rulings on foreign laws, including Islamic Sharia law.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says MP Richard Prosser made a “mistake” when he said Muslim men should be banned from flying on Western airlines, but he will not be stood down.

“In January 2011, Baroness Warsi claimed that Islamophobia had ‘passed the dinner-table test’, meaning that prejudice against Muslims was commonplace in British society. This unique intolerance of Muslims can involve stereotyping, discrimination and even harassment of the significant number of Muslims that now live in Britain.

None of the reports that I have come across mention the religion of the perpetrators of this chilling and horrific crime in Papua New Guinea.

The French government has overturned a 200-year-old ban on women wearing trousers.

The Minister of Women’s Rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said that the ban was incompatible with modern French values and laws.

Six swastikas and tags were entered in red felt on the doors and walls of the place of prayer. This is the second mosque desecrated in a week in the department of Seine-et-Marne, after the desecration of the mosque Ozoir-la-Ferriere, located about sixty miles from Provins.

BY JILLIAN RAYFIELD

A former FBI agent and current anti-Islam activist believes that John Brennan, President Obama’s pick to head the CIA, is secretly a Muslim and therefore “unfit for duty” in the government.

In early November, I wrote about the infuriating story of Saadiq Long, the 43-year-old African-American Muslim who – despite having never been charged with any crime – was secretly placed on a no-fly list and thus barred from flying to the US to visit his seriously ill mother.

Have you figured out yet what “anti-jihad” blogger Pamela Geller thinks of Islam? If the “savages” ads and the World Trade Center ads didn’t make the picture clear, you’re in luck: Geller and her group are returning to the Metro, this time with a campaign modeled on a pro-Muslim campaign currently in the system.

A mentally ill man who thought he was meeting someone linked to the Taliban was arrested Friday morning after federal agents say he tried to detonate some sort of car-bomb at a Bank of America branch near Oakland’s airport.

By George Talbot | gtalbot@al.com

Alabama Democrats aren’t shedding any tears over state Rep. Richard Laird’s decision to leave the party this week.

The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that the Notre-Dame Catholic primary school at Saint-Mihiel, in the la Meuse department of Lorraine in north-eastern France, has been subjected to a campaign of Islamophobic harassment.

(Reuters) – A suspected arson attack damaged the main club house of Israeli Premier League side Beitar Jerusalem on Friday, a day after four fans were charged in court in connection with racist incitement against the team’s recruitment of Muslim players, police said.

MONTCLAIR — Montclair State University is investigating a bias incident in which someone drew a picture of planes hitting the World Trade Center on the door of a Muslim student group’s headquarters, campus officials said today.

Article by: CHAO XIONG , Star Tribune

A second photo of a St. Paul police officer dressed in a Muslim hijab surfaced late this week, packing an extra wallop: The officer appears to be wearing blackface makeup.

Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Michigan, said he received a complaint last week about the image and met Thursday with the owner of Target Sports in Royal Oak, Ray Jihad, about it.

The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that in addition to those at Ozoir-La-Ferrière and Besançon, a fourth mosque was the target of an Islamophobic act this weekend: at Meximieux in eastern France.

Dr. Ileana Johnson, the bestselling author of “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy” will be joined by Stephanie Reis, the founder of the Omaha ACT for America Chapter and property rights advocate Martha Boneta.

Muslim men if you’re ever around radio talk show host Laurie Roth, guard your private parts, she might go Lorena Bobbitt on you. Roth wants so-called “Islamic males” (whatever that means) to be castrated.

Sponsored by: Jenny Sessoms

Robert Bruce Spencer, an ordained Catholic deacon at Our Lady of the Cedars Catholic Church in Manchester, New Hampshire is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other civil rights organiations as a “hate group leader.”

“For years now,” Geller pontificates, “Leftists and assorted ‘anti-racists’ have been denying the existence of these Sharia patrols….” It is of course true that we deny their existence, but that is for the simple reason that they don’t really exist.

A planned Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) forum at Brooklyn College on February, 7th has brought together an angry assortment of Zionists and Islamophobes.

(BBC)

“Because I’m not very skilled I’m wearing what you could call a one-piece hijab – you just pull it over your head. But I’ve discovered the scope is endless. There are all sorts of options.”

(Scotsman.com)

TWO men and a woman have appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court after bacon was allegedly thrown at and stuck to the Central Mosque.

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.

(AFP)

Vandals have targeted a French mosque in a graffiti attack, tagging the worship centre with swastikas and anti-Islam slogans, officials said Sunday.

Members of a Muslim family whose house was shot at during a drive-by Thursday evening think they were targeted because of their faith. Tuesday, a stranger driving by Allie and Maryam Taghavi’s home in southwest Oklahoma City stopped and asked their 21-year-old son the family’s religion.

by Natalie O’Brien (The Age)

WHITE supremacists are urging Australian “patriots” to gather at public meetings by the controversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders, ready for trouble and a no-holds barred fight.

Timbuktu, Mali is one of the historic and majestic cities of Islamic and Muslim cultural heritage, indeed world heritage. For years it bloomed as a center of learning in the disciplines of mathematics, astronomy, physics, philosophy, gnosticism and theology.

Fox News radio host Todd Starnes visited Fox & Friends this morning to remind everyone that his Sharia law alert level is still at full-blown code red, and you should probably clutch your pearls as hard as possible.

A Muslim family say they have been forced to move from their home after offensive graffiti and a cross wrapped in ham were left outside their house. Murad Alam, 39, said his wife and two sons, aged eight and 10, had moved out of their home in Bingham, Nottinghamshire, to a “safe” place.

by Garibaldi

For quite some time it has been known that Robert Spencer, according to his own testimony, is a Catholic of the Maronite Melkite tradition.

February 1, 2013 | The Anti-Defamation League bills itself, and is typically seen by many in the mainstream Jewish community and beyond, as the “nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency.”

An invitation for Robert Spencer, a leader in the Islamophobia Movement to speak at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester has been rescinded according to the Boston Globe. It is a good sign that many are realizing that his hate has no place at a respectable institution.

An interesting feature of the recent controversy over the so-called “Muslim patrol” in Tower Hamlets was that some of those you might have expected to seize on the case as an excuse for a bit of anti-Muslim scaremongering balked at resuming their campaign against the Islamist menace on the basis of such flimsy evidence.

by ANDREW LEVINE

Western peoples have long viewed the Muslim world through an “orientalist” filter –imagining a backward, exotic and vaguely sinister “other.” But, until recently, they were seldom preoccupied with what they imagined.

Oh no, what are those wily Mooslims up to again? Looks like they’re using the good ‘ole American entrepreneurial spirit to create stunning dresses, designed no doubt to Islamize what will soon be known as Caliphfornia.

For Euro-Western supremacists and their Islamophobic allies negative attitudes to Islam and Muslims is in no way related to xenophobia against immigrants or age old hostilities to Islam and Muslims–it’s all the Mooslims fault, don’t ya know, “the Mooslims they’re here!!”

Everyone knows his name. He was, and still is, one of the most influential figures of all time, yet most of us have little real sense of the man himself. A favorite question of those asking about my new book, “The First Muslim,” is thus what surprised me most in my research. Or rather, what might surprise them.

Eli Cohen, the manager of Israel’s notoriously racist Beitar Jerusalem football team, has tried to calm fans angered by a decision to recruit two players from the Russian Premier League side FC Terek Grozny which is based in the capital of the Muslim-majority region of Chechyna.

(Via Islamophobia-Watch.com)

Geert Wilders has launched a new website, MoskNee (MosqueNo), which aims to offer advice to non-Muslims who want to mount a legal challenge to plans for a new mosque in their area.

PAKISTAN
Name | Age | Gender
Noor Aziz | 8 | male
Abdul Wasit | 17 | male
Noor Syed | 8 | male
Wajid Noor | 9 | male

by David Barkey (Tampa Bay Online)

Over the past two legislative sessions, the Florida House and Senate wasted precious taxpayer dollars hearing harmful and unnecessary anti-Sharia legislation.

Sri Lanka has over the past few years seen a resurgence in Sinhalese and Buddhist chauvinism particularly targeting the Muslim populace of the island nation.

A candidate for Bob Katter’s fledgling political party declared his preference for buying ”guaranteed non-halal meat” so his money does not ”go to the Muslim community”.

Paris (Wall Street Journal)

The roof of the Louvre’s new Islamic art department undulates like golden fabric gently lifted by the wind—a feat, considering it is made of steel and glass and weighs almost 150 tons.

It goes without saying that Islamophobes thrive off of a twisted interpretation of the “clash of civilizations.” Ideologically, they are unwilling to accept that Islam and Muslims have offered anything positive to humanity, this is a reflection of their deep-seated hatred and resentment of everything Islam and Muslim related.

The founders of the Creative Zionist Coalition, Jessica Felber and Orit Arfa are going to award Pamela Geller, the looniest blogger ever with what they are terming the “Queen Esther Award for Jewish Heroism” and Robert Spencer with the “Shushan Award for Righteous Gentile.”

The U.S. military has detained more than 200 Afghan teenagers (though some put the number much higher), characterizing them as “enemy combatants,” at a military prison next to the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Also, according to the U.S. military, these children/teen detainees have not been charged with any crime.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations Florida announced Tuesday that a letter in which then-Congressman Allen West wrote “NUTS!” sold on eBay for $2,625.

In Moghul’s article, “What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?”, he expounds on the myths that serve as the bases for Islamophobia. His voice is one of a growing chorus that shows that Islamophobia exists and has a persistent logic of its own, often grounded in anti-Semitic tropes.

On 6 August, after an extraordinary night in the Olympic Stadium, the Sun‘s Oliver Harvey was moved to write: “A ginger bloke from Milton Keynes, a mixed race beauty from Sheffield, an ethnic Somali given shelter on these shores from his war-ravaged homeland.

A teenager pulled a hijab from a woman’s head in a racist attack on her in a park. Paige Bain and her aunt Eileen Kennedy assaulted Umaimi Musa as she was sitting with her friend Mary Marandran in Glasgow.

President Obama addressed the big issues of war and peace in his inaugural address, and despite the vagueness of some of his pronouncements, they contain strong clues to his foreign policy agenda in the Middle East.

In the Lebanese capital of Beirut, far from the theatre of war in Iraq and his office in Birmingham, one of Britain’s leading civil rights lawyers has gathered some of the most damning allegations ever levelled against this country’s armed forces – certainly since the worst days of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

The following article deals specifically with the claim that the Quran teaches that Jews are “apes and pigs.” There is an important fuller discussion to be had on the relationship between Islam and Judaism and Muslims and Jews, a history which has seen its fair share of antagonism and hostility but that is an article for another time.

Lupe Fiasco was asked to leave the stage during his performance at an inauguration party in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. The rapper had been repeating politically charged lyrics for an unusually long time when event officials forced him to stop, according to various attendees.

While the film has obviously found its supporters, backlash against it continues to grow. Yesterday, director Kathryn Bigelow defended her film from charges it promotes torture in an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times .

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the United States, a day when an icon of the fight against Jim Crow and for Civil Rights is remembered. For many however it’s just another holiday off, a reprieve from the regular grind of work and there is no real remembrance as such of MLK Jr.

Until Friday, Jeremy Gimpel was just a name on a list. To be precise, he was number 14 on the list of Knesset candidates for Habayit Hayehudi, the new incarnation of the National Religious Party headed by Israel’s new political rock star, Naftali Bennett.

Golden Dawn, which says it wants to rid Greece of illegal immigrants, won 7 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections last June, entering the assembly for the first time on its fiercely anti-immigrant agenda.

There’s a new campaign to fight back against a series of anti-Muslim subway ads in New York City. Akiva Freidlin has launched a project, currently raising funds on indiegogo, to buy subway ad space that will counter those of Pamela Geller.

Anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish sentiment is rife in some quarters of Bulgarian society, specifically amongst neo-Fascists and Right-wingers such as Ataka and the VMRO who have protested and attacked Mosques and Muslims in the recent past.

Last year we ran a piece on former English Defence League activist Andy Hughes, proprietor of the Islamic Far-Right in Britain blog, whose articles denouncing the Islamist threat to western civilisation are regularly crossposted at the notorious Islamophobic blog Harry’s Place.

Whyalla’s Muslim community has been praying outside in stifling temperatures above 40C after fires damaged their mosque. The fires, which started about 4am on Thursday, are being treated as suspicious. A spokesman for the community, Hasan Aziz, said he believes the attack was a “hate crime”.

Last November, the Swedish newspaper Expressen published a leaked video that showed neo-fascist members of Swedish parliament running amok through the streets of Stockholm, wielding pieces of scaffolding pipe and shouting slurs like “Paki” and “little whore” at innocent bystanders.

Several years ago the highly-acclaimed – and supposedly über-liberal – television series The West Wing aired an episode in which President Bartlet had to address a diplomatic crisis involving Turkey.

It’s like bizarro Pam Geller! A Muslim activist has taken a cue from the anti-Muslim blogger and starting posting Quranic verses around town—but this time, instead of belligerent-sounding quotes, this Metro poster has chosen more positive ones.

KOMO TV reports that parents at Medina Academy, a private Muslim elementary school, fear that vandalism at their school is a hate crime after their school was tagged twice.

Pamela Geller reaffirms what is evident and a fact we noted from the beginning, her usage of the term “savages,” despite her lying denials, is in reference to all Muslims and Arabs.

by Rachel Shabi

America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo)…

Civilian deaths are too high, and the president’s power is too sweeping. An unmanned U.S. aerial vehicle — or drone — reportedly killed eight people in rural Pakistan last week, bringing the estimated death toll from drone strikes in Pakistan this year to 35.

by DAVID BADASH

Ann Coulter last night on Fox News‘ “Hannity” suggested America doesn’t have a gun problem, but a problem with Blacks and Muslims.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) is speaking out against a local community college’s purchase of 25 books on Islam and Muslim culture, saying a federal grant used to acquire the titles wastes taxpayer money and is biased against the Christian faith, according to the New York Daily News.

This was the headline to the London Evening Standard’s report of the Oxford “grooming” case today. In the online version it has since been changed to “Sex gang accused of grooming ‘troubled’ underage girls”, and the opening sentence now refers to “Asian” rather than “Muslim” men.

ANTI-Islamic sentiment has flared in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, with the planned renovation of a mosque near Monash University prompting a senior member of the local Uniting Church to claim mosques may provide a training ground for religious fanatics.

What does the conflict between Israel and Palestine have to do with Islamophobia? The fact that 1.) Foundations based in the United States are major backers of the Islamophobia Movement at home while at the same time being huge supporters of Israeli Settlements.

BY SPENCER ACKERMAN

The man in charge of America’s drone wars will face Senate questioning about perhaps their most controversial aspect: when the president can target American citizens for death.

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past 10 years (or write book reviews for the Wall Street Journal), you may have noticed that anti-Muslim sentiment in the past decade has recently spilled out into some of this country’s nastiest displays of hate.

A 17-year-old Alabama high school student, Derek Shrout, who was arrested last week for allegedly plotting to kill 6 Black students by blowing them up with homemade grenades, has been released on $75,000 bond, reports the Ledger-Enquirer.

Months after a debate over controversial anti-Muslim billboards in some Metro stations erupted, the woman behind those ads appeared at an event in Annapolis. And that controversy followed Pamela Geller to the event convened by the Maryland Conservative Action Network (MDCAN).

A mosque at Val-de-Reuil in Normandy in north-western France was sprayed with far-right graffiti last Wednesday night. Slogans included “Anti-Islam”, “Long live the FN” and “France, love it or leave it”.

When a local Islamic organization hired Bernardsville architect Daniel Lincoln to design a new mosque, he set out to create a building that would serve its purpose as a house of worship and fit into the colonial and bucolic character of this township’s Liberty Corner.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an official investigation into a mosque attack at the NATO İncirlik Air Base in the southern province of Adana, following claims that the attack was carried out by U.S. soldiers, Doğan News Agency has reported.

I FIND Chuck Hagel eminently likeable. I am not quite certain why. Perhaps it’s his war record. He was decorated for valor in the Vietnam War (which I detested). He was a mere sergeant. Since I was a mere corporal in our 1948 war, I find it elating to see a non-commissioned officer become Minister of Defense.

A self-styled “mosque buster”, who boasts that he has blocked plans for 16 mosques across Britain, was once linked to the far-right English Defence League (EDL) and claims that Islam encourages paedophilia, sexual abuse and pimping.

by Rich Abdil (Wonkette)

Last summer, then-as-yet-undefeated-congressman Allen West took his whirlwind American diplomacy tour to the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Many of the recent attacks have taken place shortly after well-publicised anti-Muslim hate speeches, argues author.

There has been a sudden uptick in the number of violent hate crimes where the victims are thought to be Muslim or “Middle Eastern”.

Surveillance video captures the moment Mr Mohammed and his girlfriend were attacked at point-blank range outside a shopping centre parking lot in Florida around 3am on Thursday.

Enter the surreal and absurd world of a former technocrat of the American empire turned book reviewing ‘vice president for research’ at the Orwellian “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.”

Robert Spencer is yet to condemn this. Does this mean that Catholicism is inherently predisposed to antisemitism? Of course we don’t think so, but those opposed to the second Vatican such as Spencer are silent on the matter.

MyJihad.org bus ad featuring two volunteers, an American-Muslim and an Israeli-Jew. (Credit: MyJihad.org)

So you want to rebrand a word. It’s hard to think of a more difficult rebranding project than “jihad.”

A Mosque was burnt down in Anuradhapura last October (2012). The perpetrators of this crime have not been identified as yet, but last week, an extremist group of Buddhist monks went to the same area and protested to remove the mosque there.

The latest installment of anti-Muslim advertisements put out by Pamela Geller have gone up in New York City subway stations. But they have quickly received a makeover, just as the last batch did.

News Hounds reports that Fox News’ latest contribution to the incitement of Islamophobia is its promotion of an Islamophobic documentary film called Jihad in America: The Grand Deception. The film is produced by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which is headed by Steve Emerson (listed in Fear Inc. as one of the “leading lights of the Islamophobia network”).

Over at Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, Richard Bartholomew examines the responses by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to theconviction of English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon on a charge of passport fraud.

On the Coptic Christmas holiday, Imam Mazhar Shaheen of the Omar Makram Mosque visited his friend and confidante the Pastor of the Qasr Al-Dubarah Church, Samih Morees, along with a thousand Muslims to extend well-wishes and greetings to their Christian neighbors.

The mosque is also known as the Prophet Dawud Mosque and has been the subject of attempted Settler violence in the past. In fact, according to the story below the first story of the mosque was taken over and converted into a Synagogue.

Israeli settlers raided a northern West Bank village on Saturday for the second time this week, leading to clashes with local Palestinians, a PA official said. Dozens of settlers from the illegal outpost of Esh Kodesh raided the Nablus village of Qusra, firing live ammunition into the air, settlement monitoring official Ghassan Daghlas told Ma’an.

(The Local)

“It’s no longer ‘the Turks’ but ‘the Muslims’,” Wilhelm Heitmeyer, head of the institute for research of interdisciplinary conflict and violence at Bielefeld University told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung on Monday.

The leader of the English Defence League has been jailed for using someone else’s passport to get into the United States. Stephen Lennon, 30, pleaded guilty to possession of a false identity document with improper intention, contrary to the Identity Documents Act 2010, at Southwark Crown Court.

Protests following the brutal rape and murder of a young Indian woman have spread to beyond India to other countries in the region, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

by Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam)

Most Jewish foundations support the equivalent of Bubbeh’s chicken soup: Israel, synagogues, youth groups, Jewish education, Jewish studies programs, etc.

Sunando Sen, a 46-year-old Indian immigrant, recently opened a small copying and printing business in New York City’s Upper West Side with his hard-earned savings. Described by friends as “very educated” and “so quiet, so gentle, so nice,” Sen’s American dream ended in tragedy last Thursday when Erika Menendez fatally pushed him in front of an oncoming subway train.

The answer to both questions is essentially the same. Hate on both sides is an outgrowth the foreign policies of Europe and America vis-à-vis the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. That’s the perfectly obvious answer that is too often lost in a fog of sophisticated propaganda.

During the four-and-a-half decade US-Soviet standoff known as the “cold war” despite the untold amount of blood spilt in international proxy conflicts and superpower support for various forms of repression, the US used the alleged threat of Soviet penetration of the western hemisphere to justify its own meddling throughout the Americas.

Muslims are subversive jihadists. The Middle East is perpetually unstable. “Islam has bloody borders.” If you’ve already made up your mind, you’ll find a way to twist the facts to support your conclusion. And if the facts don’t do the job, you can always hire new ones.

by Aaron Sankin

For the second time in recent months, billboards on side of San Francisco’s fleet of buses have become the front lines in a fight over the place of Islam in American popular culture.

By Tim Murphy and Adam Serwer (MotherJones)

Over the last four years, a die-hard cadre of activists and their allies in Congress have dragged the Republican Party into a fever swamp of Islamophobia and barely-concealed anti-Muslim bigotry.

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has been touting a WND/Wenzel Strategies poll purporting to findthat many Muslim-Americans want the imposition of Sharia law, contradicting other studies which found extremely low support for radical views among Muslims in the U.S. Should the results of a Wenzel Strategies survey be trusted?

Pasco County deputies are investigating an attack outside a Walmart as a hate crime. It happened around 3 a.m. Wednesday at the Walmart at 1575 Land O’Lakes Blvd in Lutz.

“On January 2nd, the story of a Saudi Sheikh issuing a fatwa that condoned ‘intercourse marriage’ or gang rape in Syria exploded over the internet.”

These labels are used by laypeople and journalists alike, often using jihad as a synonym for “any violence undertaken by Muslims.” An extreme example is the ad campaign posted a few months ago on New York City buses, equating Muslims to savages and any opinion not supportive of Israel as “jihad.”

The billboards proclaiming “Same family, Same message” sprouting throughout the Orlando and Daytona Beach areas are sponsored by the Longwood-based American Muslim Community Centers, the Islamic Center of Orlando and the United Muslim Foundation in Lake Mary.

A closed mind is a terrible thing to behold. But it’s a far worse thing to have to engage. And yet we must. This Saturday, the woman who murdered a complete stranger by shoving him into the path of an arriving subway train was arrested. Her name? Erica Menendez. Her target? Hindus and Muslims. Why? Because of 2001.

When Muslim-American organizations and activists concerned with Islamophobia woke up the day after the election, on November 7, they were elated. Key members of what had been dubbed the House Republican“Islamophobia caucus”had been voted out of office.

(Via Islamophobia-Watch.com)

A woman who launched a racist attack against a Muslim and pulled her hijab from her head as she robbed her of her phone has been jailed for more than two years.

On the evening of December 27, an Indian immigrant to America named Sunando Sen was pushed by a stranger onto the subway tracks in New York City and struck and killed by an oncoming train.

Mo Farah, gold-medal winner in the men’s 5,000m and 10,000m this summer in London, hilarious celebrator, and world-famous meme, couldn’t get through customs in Oregon over the Christmas holiday because he is of Somalian descent.

But with the help of the city’s newest food pantry, Ndaw was able to observe the holiday with the traditional meal — and adhere to the strictures of Islam by ensuring the food was halal. That means it’s free from pork and alcohol and that the animal was slaughtered under specific guidelines.

I’ve always thought of New Year’s as a purely secular holiday, widely celebrated with champagne, confetti, and kisses at midnight. In the US, the most famous New Year’s celebration centers on the drop of the Times Square Ball in New York City, an event that attracts an audience of over a billion worldwide.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup turned down a motion by the Justice Department to dismiss former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim’s lawsuit against various federal government agencies over her reported inclusion on the no-fly list…

Huma Yasin was 14 when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City, her hometown.

As an American-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants, the horror of that attack was made worse by early reports suggesting that the perpetrators were Muslims — like her.

Faisal Kutty, 44, is among “The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims,” compiled by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Jordan. The publication is part of an annual series that highlights how Muslims impact the world.

The Jewish-Christian-Muslim interfaith clergy announcing the ads said that this was “shared concept in the three religions”, and was in response to recent national tragedies and the recent anti-Muslim AFDI ads that ran in Denver.

The makeshift facilities are illegal but this huge community faces no other option. Athens, a metropolis on the edge of the Muslim world, is one of the few EU capitals without a mosque.

A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.

(Dutch.News.nl)

PVV leader Geert Wilders is to step up his campaign against Islam in 2013, the parliamentarian told Nos television in an interview.

This has been a big year for Islam and Islamic law in American media. As politicians vied for local and national office, anti-sharia messages — and sometimes overtly anti-Islam messages — were broadcast across the media, at times functioning to normalize anti-Islam discourse.

As the nation mourns the senseless violence in Connecticut and politicians in Washington bicker endlessly over the “fiscal cliff,” the#MyJihad public education campaign should have presented an unambiguous bit of good news to a country in sore need of it.

A police captain who sued the city over his punishment for refusing to attend a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day at a mosque filed notice Wednesday that he will appeal a ruling in the city’s favor.

Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, told Morning Joe‘s panel that he couldn’t say whether or not President Obama is a Christian. “I think you have to ask President Obama,” Reverend Franklin Graham said on February 21, 2012.

In 2007, about 50 Muslims intent on serving their community and their country, hosted a barbecue at the Veterans Affairs hospital at Jefferson Barracks, dishing out chicken and burgers to the patients and nurses.

The reaction to Moghul’s article was overwhelmingly positive as one would expect, but there were a few of the usual Muslim haters who showed up, ranting and raving about evil Islam and Muslims.

Israeli settlers run amok, attack monastery and spray paint the words “Jesus is a monkey.” (JD)

What if they were Muslim?

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera in which she expounds on the alleged threat France faces from radical Islam, Marine Le Pen – president of the far-right National Front party and member of the European Parliament – seeks international validation for her anti-immigrant views.

This was sent to us by a worshipper at the Thurnby Lodge mosque in Leicester. The site has been the centre of activity by the Far Right, including the British National Party and a pigs head was placed outside the entrance to the mosque yesterday, (26/12/12).

Standing in Denver’s main mosque on Christmas Eve, Christian, Muslim and Jewish community leaders launched an ad campaign promoting understanding and tolerance between the religious groups.

There are more Middle Eastern Christians than ever before, and they are poised between emergence as a new political force in a democratizing region and the dangers to them of fundamentalism and political repression.

December 25th was an an average day for the majority of the world’s Muslims, but for some, it signified Christmas along with its variety of associated meanings. Muslim beliefs related to Christmas and its celebration vary considerably–from a fun-loving holiday, to a dangerous heretical practice.

When Safiya Ghori-Ahmad applied for a job with the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, it rather quickly became clear that she was the most qualified of 300 applicants.

Every year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publishes a Christmas message for Christians in Israel and abroad. One of the message’s objectives is hasbara, or public diplomacy, to the Christians of the world. But this year’s greeting was especially political.

An article by Gil Ronen was just published in Arutz Sheva, Israel National News Europe Preparing Holocaust for Muslims. This article discusses the predictions of Moti Zisser an Israeli businessman. I looked up Moti Zisser, and he is a billionaire real-estate developer.

The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that on Thursday-Friday night four swastikas along with racist slogans riddled with misspellings were sprayed on the wall of the As-Salam de Tomblaine mosque in the Lorraine region of north-east France. (The slogan “Bougnoulle de mourt” would appear to mean something like “death to wogs”.)

The 28-year-old launched a racist tirade when he entered the site in the south side of Glasgow and told followers at the mosque that he had a bomb inside his backpack and they should run away. Rae, of Johnstone in Renfrewshire, also shouted that he had a gun and threatened to shoot those near him.

Spencer’s extremist allies in this cause are many, on the other side of the pond it’s the EDL, Geert Wilders, etc. and here in the USA it’s individuals like Pastor Usama Dakdok, who has said things like, “every Muslim is a demon.”

A Central Florida Muslim businessman detained by authorities at airports and border crossings more than 30 times since June has filed suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

ORLANDO, Fla. -

A sword-wielding woman was arrested Wednesday morning after she entered a mosque located on the campus of a private Orlando school.

The local authority’s housing wing, Tower Hamlets Homes, asked families on housing estates in Bethnal Green and Wapping to help organise parties to improve interfaith understanding.

by Glenn Greenwald, (Guardian.co.uk)

DOJ officials unblinkingly insist that the banking giant is too powerful and important to subject to the rule of law.

by Mohammed Ansar, Huffington Post

An estimated one billion passengers are carried on railway journeys each year. In the UK, despite spiralling costs, it’s an important part of everyday life for many people.

Two New Jersey white supremacists who allegedly attacked several men of Egyptian descent on New Years Eve – and then boasted about the assault on a social media website – were charged this morning with the commission of hate crimes, federal prosecutors said.

BY ERICA BLAKE, BLADE STAFF WRITER

A third crime has been added to the charges filed against an Indiana man arrested for the arson fire at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo.

by Sheila Musaji

There are only two groups who equate jihad and terrorism – the Muslim extremists and the Islamophobes, and both of them are now attacking the My Jihad campaign.

In an effort to be more precise, accurate and neutral, the Associated Press decided to remove several words, including “Islamophobia” and “homophobia”, from the 2013 edition of the AP Stylebook. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page calls the move “a linguistic blow for blandness.”

by Sanaz Raji (Frontline PBS)

It is not every day that an Iranian makes it into the Western mainstream media and pop culture with a positive story that leads to near-universal admiration among Iranians and non-Iranians alike.

We touched upon Moghul’s: loss and return to faith in God, the place of doubt in Islam, literature, what exactly is a “Muslim reformer,” the phenomenon of “ex-Muslims and ex-terrorists” in relation to Islamophobia, Jesus and carpet bombing, a possible shisha pow-wow with Kamal Saleem, the Arab uprisings, Saudi Arabia, etc…

Monday, Dec. 17, 2012 The Jews Against Islamophobia (JAI) Coalition condemns the latest hate-mongering ads, sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), that are scheduled to appear in New York City subway stations today.

Such is the case with a fascinating ruling released last week by the New York Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court, in the criminal case of People v. Edgar Morales. The facts of the case are quite simple, but the implications of the ruling are profound.

Social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook have been abuzz with the anti-extremism campaign MyJihad: Reclaiming Islam.

The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Dave Agema, would block “foreign laws that would impair constitutional rights” in the state. The Associated Press reports that though the bill “doesn’t specifically mention the Islamic legal code called sharia,” its “supporters have said they are concerned about the use of sharia spreading.”*

As world Buddhist leaders we send our lovingkindess and concern for the difficulties the people of Myanmar are faced with at this time. While it is a time of great positive change in Myanmar we are concerned about the growing ethnic violence and the targeting of Muslims in Rakhine State and the violence against Muslims and others across the country.

“The Muslim Community at the Al Hedaya Islamic Center in Newtown CT and at other area Masajid in Danbury CT (Danbury Masjid & Baitul Mukarram) share in the grief of the families of the children in today’s tragedy,” the center said in a statement on its website.

“Massacre in Wisconsin,” screams the large headline on the cover of the winter edition of the “Intelligence Report,” a magazine published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent civil rights group fighting the influence of hate groups in America.

On Tuesday 11 December six swastikas were found on the walls of the mosque in the Penhars neighbourhood of Quimper, in the Finistère department of Brittany in north-west France, the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports.

The EEOC is suing ABM Security Services, which provides guards for the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, for religious discrimination after an employee claimed she was forced to choose between keeping her job and wearing her traditional Muslim head covering.

by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian)

I’ve now seen “Zero Dark Thirty”. Before getting to that: the controversy triggered this week by my commentary on the debate over that film was one of the most ridiculous in which I’ve ever been involved.

A legislative aide who joined an anti-Islam group and became obsessed with its mission crossed the line and illegally used state resources to promote its interests, a state ethics panel concluded in a ruling released Friday.

by Laila Al-Arian (Salon.com)

I started watching “Homeland” because I was bored. All of my favorite shows were coming to a (season’s) end, and I needed something new to watch.

by Tara Lohan (AlterNet)

Islamophobia has been spreading like wildfire across Texas.

by Dr. Gabriele Marranci

Recently I came across a short article titled: The Muslim ‘prayer bump’ and Traumatic Brain Injury. Since I am interested in both religion as well as neuroscience, I eagerly read the short post.

Chanting that the mainstream Muslim federation, the Union des organisations islamiques de France, are fascists who should be treated as garbage, they brandished placards with slogans such as “Islam out of the Louvre” (a new exhibition of Islamic art had just opened at the Louvre Museum) and “No to the Islamisation of Alsace-Lorraine”.

Geller and Spencer’s British buddies whipping up racial fears and hatred of immigrants, but we’re supposed to believe them when they say that the EDL is not racist. Look at message that the “defenders of freedom and democracy” are pushing on Twitter.

They were wrapped up in peaceful prayer when the man walked into the mosque and claimed he had a gun. The imam leading the prayer at the Ibrahim Khalilullah Islamic Center in Fremont told police that the Caucasian man, believed to be in his 30s, shouted that he was going to kill the four people inside.

Richard Norton-Taylor (The Guardian)

CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday.

We recently posted an article written by Bob Pitt of Islamophobia-Watch concerning controversy over Islamophobic remarks by anti-Muslim speakers that led to several walk-outs at a symposium in London sponsored by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA).

By Samuel Burke and Claire Calzonetti, CNN

Aasif Mandvi’s job title as a TV correspondent is both a complete joke and utterly realistic: Senior Muslim Correspondent.

Within her long conversation with host Jan Markell and co-host Eric Barger, Bachmann suggested that Americans read Islamic study materials to learn about Muslims’ supposed plot to conquer Western civilization, comparing the tactic to reading Adolf Hitler’s infamous book, Mein Kampf.

by Carl S. Berg (Illume Magazine)

Tea Party circles in East Tennessee might seem an unlikely environment for launching a Muslim organization. Will Coley, a 31-year-old Tennessee native, Muslim convert and Tea Party activist did just that.

Shortly after the end of his first term in office, Liberal leader William Gladstone penned a pamphlet against Catholicism. Denying it was even a spiritual faith, he argued that British followers could not be loyal to the Crown and the Pope and said they sought to undermine traditional British values, hiding “crimes against liberty beneath a suffocating cloud of incense”.

Supreme Court President Asher Grunis should be pleased. A mosque under construction in the West Bank, whose demolition he supported, was pulled down last Tuesday – another performance by the Civil Administration bulldozer, underreported in the media.

Two women punched a pregnant woman and pulled her friend’s hijab from her head in a racial attack.

Eileen Kennedy, 28, and a 15-year-old female, assaulted Umaimi Musa at Royston Road, Glasgow, on September 3.

Ilisha has written several seminal articles for Loonwatch on the relationship between honor killings and Islamophobia that have gone a long way in debunking the prevailing narrative frame propagated by the looniverse that casts Islam as inherently supportive of “honour crimes.”

Her latest ads, shared exclusively with The Observer, will feature a panorama of the sky the moment the World Trade Center burst into flames in 2001, accompanied by a quote from the Quran that reads “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers.”

Last week, two separate brutal attacks against Muslim men took place in Queens, New York. On November 24, 72-year-old Ali Akmal was nearly beaten to death while going on his early morning walk and remains in critical, but stable, condition.

Fox News is again trying to drum up “controversy” around the Park51 Islamic community center in Manhattan. On Sunday, Fox Nation re-published a New York Post article claiming that “community programs” no longer exist at Park51, just Muslims praying.

by Sheila Musaji, The American Muslim

A recent appearance by Pamela Geller on Russell Brand’s “BrandX” television program is an interesting and humorous example of just how the Islamophobes work.

Hate crimes against perceived Muslims, which jumped up 50% in 2010 largely as a result of anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels last year, according to 2011 hate crime statistics released today by the FBI.

(Via LoonWatch.com)

Lesley Hazleton fascination with religion has led her in recent years to be consumed by a study of Islam, particularly the Quran and the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad.

Offensive graffiti attacking Allah and Islam has been painted outside a Muslim family’s home weeks after a cross wrapped in ham was left by their door. The 31-year-old mother and two sons, eight and 10, say they have suffered five or six racist incidents since they moved to Bingham, Notts, in October.

The gruesome situation in Myanmar is not getting better. An AlJazeera documentary goes in-depth into the history of the persecution of the Rohingya, as well as the events that spurred this years terrible violence.

HOUSTON (KTRK) — A disturbing discovery was made outside of a Houston area mosque and now Islamic community leaders are calling it a hate crime. A dead pig was left in front of the mosque Tuesday in Cypress.

by Charles Davis (AlJazeera English)

The first time I ever spoke with Pamela Geller she chastised me. “I’m here at the booth and they don’t have my name,” she complained over the phone in a moderately irritated Long Island accent.

The article rightly points out that the Torah doesn’t say,“‘Make a modesty squad.’ They made it themselves.” One has to wonder if the Vaad were Muslim if such a point would be made?

Jesus made him do it says “Christian soldier” and self-described fighter for “freedom, democracy and justice” Richard Henry Bain. Doesn’t that sound like many people we’ve heard before? George W. Bush? Robert Spencer? Anders Breivik? All of them come to mind.

The Jewish Chronicle has published a report on conflicts that arose during a one-daysymposium sponsored by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism which was held at the Wiener Library in London last weekend.

A study published by a sociologist has revealed that fear-mongering non-governmental anti-Muslim organisations have been heavily influencing US media since 9/11, their messages seeping into news articles and television reporting and drawing their ethos from the fringes, straight into the mainstream.

by Charles Johnson (LGF)

Rick Santorum has now joined the illustrious company of Pamela Geller

By ERIK SCHELZIG, Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Gov. Bill Haslam on Tuesday issued his strongest defense yet of a Muslim aide who has been criticized for once working in the field of Shariah compliant finance.

There’s no question that there are extremist Muslim groups in the United States. The problem is when it goes from particular extremist to all Muslims,” she says. “I think Horowitz is just coming up to the line of Islamophobia and not stepping over it.” For that, he has the legions behind him.

All Saints Church in Pasadena has received dozens of e-mails denouncing its decision to host a conference by the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council — and some have been hateful, said the church’s Reverend Ed Bacon.

by RYAN J. REILLY, TPMMuckraker

Mohammad Husain and his wife were looking for a bite to eat and a nice place to relax when they stopped in last month at a Shreveport, La. sandwich shop owned by Rep. John Fleming (R-LA).

By Steve DeVane, FayObserver.com

Shamsiddeen said the sign was moved inside a fence after someone defaced it with graffiti. He said he expects the vandalism was the work of just one person.

The union representing Ontario’s elementary school teachers is coming under fire for running an anti-Islamophobia workshop as part of a series of seminars on how to teach students about equality.

To all those now hailing the re-election of Barack Obama as a triumph of decent, humane, liberal values over the oozing-postule perfidy of the Republicans, a simple question:

Is this child dead enough for you?

In Masjid Annasr’s prayer space on a Saturday afternoon, Zaynab al-Samat is in a minority of one. A slight woman dressed in a pale purple abaya and matching hijab, she is the only Hispanic supplicant at this roomy northwest Bronx mosque that almost exclusively serves a local West African population.

By: Hrafnkell Haraldsson

I started out with this: I wanted to see how many negatives Muslim-baiter Pamela Geller could work into an article on World Net Daily. Okay, I admit it! It was a slow Sunday night!

A life-altering decision about faith has propelled Amanda Redmond into the Muslim fashion business. The Halifax native, 23, was stuck overnight in a New York airport nearly three years ago when the soft light of the airport mosque called her in.

The report sounded as though it came from somewhere else. Police arrested a man who threatened to kill as many people as possible at a mosque before killing himself. In fact, the mosque is in San Antonio. The arrest — and the deadly threat — occurred here. San Antonio police charged the suspect with making a terroristic threat, a Class B misdemeanor. A judge set his bail at $2,000.

Robert Greenwald, a documentarian is working on a new film, Drones Exposed, and though it is sad that we live in a world in which there has to be a documentary about drones and their repugnant aftermath, it is nevertheless important that we do not remain in the dark about what is happening in our name.

ROCK HILL — A Rock Hill Walmart employee was fired Saturday after police say she grabbed a co-worker’s arm, threatened to cut her throat and called her an anti-Muslim, derogatory name, according to a police report.

Planning permission for a mosque in Worcester Park was unanimously turned down by councillors after a lively meeting last night. Councillors said the proposed mosque in Green Road would bring too much traffic to the area and voted to refuse planning permission after hearing arguments from concerned neighbours and from the project’s backers.

For most Muslims, what happens to the body of a deceased person is not quite as important as what happens to that person’s soul. Still, historians of all backgrounds are scrambling to locate the body and belongings of a Muslim buried in Washington, DC nearly 200 years ago, for it touches the soul of early American history.

by DAVI BARKER, Examiner.com

Tonight I attended a fundraising dinner hosted by Global Deaf Muslim (GDM) which was part of their campaign to the translate the Quraninto American Sign Language (ASL).

During my recent trip to Pakistan as part of our upcoming documentary film, Drones Exposed, I was struck most by the stories told to me by children who had experienced a U.S. drone strike firsthand.

“The goal was to teach what Islam really is because there’s so much negativity going around about Muslim people who are portrayed so negatively in the media,” Amina Hasan, organizer for the Muslim Student Association (MSA), told Daily 49ER, the university’s news website, on Sunday, December 2.

New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa quietly visited a Newark mosque Friday that had been listed in a secret report by the New York Police Department, and he reassured worshippers that New Jersey officials do not believe certain groups of citizens have lesser rights than others.

Britain First, the far-right group led by former BNP members Jim Dowson and Paul Golding, held a protest today outside a residential property in Southend which it is claimed has been used by the Jaafriya Islamic Welfare Centre for religious functions without planning permission.

Two men were arrested yesterday during a protest over a planned Muslim education centre in the North. Police estimate that around 200 members of the English Defence League turned out to the protest in the former pit village of Shotton Colliery, County Durham.

Queens, New York has been the scene of two gruesome separate attacks on Muslim men of South Asian descent in apparent hate motivated attacks. We reported the stabbing attack on Bashir Ahmad (57) that occurred on November 19 which police are investigating as a “hate crime.”

EDL leader Stephen Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) has been charged with multiple counts of mortgage fraud. So on top of being an anti-Muslim bigot and all around Islamophobe he’s also a suspected criminal who loves committing fraud through the tactic of false representation.

Early on Thursday morning a swastika was found on the front of the Muslim prayer hall in the Rue de Suisse in the centre of Nice. Ramzan Magamadov, the president of the city centre Muslim association that manages this place of worship, said he was “very shocked by this racist act” and has filed a complaint.

CAIR is calling on all people of conscience to contact the SUBWAY restaurant chain to request that a formal apology be given to a Louisiana Muslim allegedly locked out of a sandwich shop in that state because of his faith. [SUBWAY, based in Milford, Conn., has more than 38,000 locations in 100 countries.]

(Courier-Journal)

At first, feminist religion scholar Leila Ahmed was alarmed by the growing visibility of young American Muslim women wearing headscarves.

Stavropol, November 30, Interfax – The parents of a schoolgirl living in the village of Privolny, Stavropol Territory, are complaining that their daughter has been barred from school for wearing a headscarf.

Organizations using fear and anger to spread negative messages about Muslims have moved from the fringes of public discourse into the mainstream media since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to new research by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sociologist.

An 11th-century book by a revered Baghdad Muslim scholar turns out to be a tongue-in-cheek guide for party crashers, according to the researcher who translated the book into English.

Authorities said a man vowed to shoot up a San Antonio mosque and then turn the gun on himself, but law enforcement foiled the violent plot before it ever materialized.

Jewish, Hindu and Muslim leaders from Queens gathered with lawmakers to denounce the possible hate crime committed at a Kew Gardens Hills Mosque earlier this month, and city Comptroller John Liu suggested some of the NYPD’s policies could make bias crimes more common.

Anti-Islam crusader Daniel Nalliah and his evangelical Christian church are set to fight a plan to build a mosque in the same street. Mr Nalliah, a pastor at Catch the Fire Ministries, said his church was weeks away from building a $2 million base at 25 Green Street, Doveton.

(Via Islamophobia-Watch.com)

NZZ am Sonntag reports that the Administrative Court in the Swiss canton of Thurgau recently lifted a headscarf ban imposed by a school in Bürglen.

By Hamed Aleaziz

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is reportedly stepping down from his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee.

The Institute of Race Relations draws our attention to a Wales Online report on a new study of racism and race equality in Wales by Professor Heaven Crawley that was commissioned by Race Council Cymru.

Brigitte Gabriel, a fanatic anti-Muslim bigot with a long and detailed history of Islamophobia has largely been discredited in the mainstream media. Gone are the days when Gabriel would get air time on Real Time with Bill Maher, feature profile articles in the New York Times, etc.

To their bewilderment and bitterness, on the morning of Saturday, November 24, Muslim worshippers at Villefontaine in northern Isère discovered racist graffiti on the walls of their mosque.

Self-proclaimed Muslim Zionist and looniverse pet “Sheikh” Adbul Hadi Palazzi has always struck us as a bit of a kook and a charlatan. Many have expressed their suspicion that his conversion had more to do with the politics of Islamophobia than it did with a sincere religious awakening.

A pig’s head was found on Friday at the PalaSharp Arena in Milan where the local Islamic community holds weekly prayers. The head was found by delegates of the civil protection agency in an area close to where ceremonies are held every Friday.

West had made himself notorious for his anti-Muslim attitude. He argued that Islam is “not a faith” but a “totalitarian theocratic political ideology,” and that terrorism is inherent to Islam.

There are so many obsessively redundant stories about Muslims and Islam. They are too familiar: stories about the veil, Jihad, the status of women, minorities and apostasy. Western reporters love to search and find a Muslim in the West who tells a story of persecution by Muslims.

(Hope Not Hate)

A Muslim family who had just moved into their new home were disgusted when ‘racist’ neighbours left a burning crucifix on their doorstep – wrapped in ham.

(Islamophobia-Watch.com)

Some 6,000 members of the Sweden Democrats will be receiving an anti-Islam newspaper at the end of the month, courtesy of the party.

In a Nov. 19 letter to Jewish groups, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-CAN, charges that a textbook used at the Joe Dwek Ohr HaEmet Sephardic School employs “inflammatory and hateful terms in describing Muslims.”

Each guest was greeted and offered a tour of the facility before being ushered to the main assembly hall for a program with several speakers, including Jerry Martin, U.S. attorney for Middle Tennessee, and Thomas Perez, U.S. assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice.

(Via Loonwatch.com)

Of course the Islamophobes’ strategy is to close their eyes, shut their ears and pretend that their ideology didn’t contribute to anti-Muslim radicalization.

PARIS – A right-winger famed for his aggressive rhetoric against Muslims has been elected a new leader of France’s former ruling party after an election that saw traded accusations of fraud.

By Olivia Patton

Renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum addressed a packed auditorium Friday afternoon, berating Western Islamophobia, a problem Nussbaum said continues to plague the country today.

On Monday, November 19, representatives of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-OK) will meet a Muslim Air force veteran who had been barred from returning to Oklahoma when he finally arrives at Will Rogers World Airport.

The victim, identified by friends as Bashar Mohammod, 57, was attacked from behind while opening the Masjid Al-Saaliheen mosque for prayer around 4:45 a.m., police said.

Jews and Muslims were in a sticky situation Sunday at the Northeast Denver Islamic Center— they were up to their elbows in peanut butter and jelly as they made roughly 1,000 sandwiches to hand out to people on the streets.

Choral director Jeffrey Cobb told his singers and orchestra – roughly 180 local adults and teens drawn from college, a high school, and churches – that a pastor barred an Islamic prayer from the piece they planned to sing.

by Erik Bleich

Islamophobia was originally developed as a concept in the late 1990s and early 2000s by political activists to draw attention to rhetoric and actions directed at Islam and Muslims in Western liberal democracies.

A case involving New Jersey’s contentious laws regarding alimony payments has been sidetracked by the insistence of a father’s rights group leader, Bruce Eden in highlighting the religion of a Muslim judge who was simply doing his duty and applying New Jersey law.

If you travel across the USA you will come across buildings that display obvious features of Islamic architecture. Is this evidence of a long history of slow, creeping Islamization of America?

The controversial ads unveiled on the back of 10 CTA buses Wednesday read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” They conclude with the words, “Support Copts. Defeat Jihad,” referring to friction between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Egypt.

After US Presidential elections and before national elections Israel is launching air strikes and threatening a ground invasion on the beleaguered Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated regions in the world, 1 million of whom are refugees from the 1948 creation of the state of Israel.

In a country like France in which freedom of expression should be cherished, it is being maligned. It almost seems as if this ad was banned because it was anti-Islamophobic not because of its political and religious connotations.

Sweden Democrat MP Erik Almqvist will step down as the party’s economic policy spokesman over racist statements he made on a film clip and his subsequent denials, party leader Jimmie Åkesson announced on Wednesday.

Some local organizations are coming to the rescue of a local religious institution that recently became the victim of hate crime.

Now, that story is turning into one of love and compassion, with the outpouring of donations.

She wanted rice for their three children. He said they couldn’t afford it. Apartheid-like restrictions had prevented Muslims like Tun Naing from working for Buddhists here in Rakhine State along Myanmar’s western border, costing the 38-year-old metalworker his job.

Original article by Jai Singh

I have recently come across some major information regarding a pivotal member of Robert Spencer& Pamela Geller’s inner circle, specifically David Yerushalmi.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), founded by Steven Emerson in 1995 claims to investigate “the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic terrorist and extremist groups in the United States and around the world.”

Palm Beach Gardens – After a partial recount of early voting ballots on Sunday, Republican Rep. Allen West still refuses to relinquish his Florida congressional seat to Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy, calling the recount a sham.

by Charles Johnson (LGF)

The right wing universe is now in full-bore conspiracy theory mode over the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, just as I predicted.

by Garibaldi, LoonWatch.com

It’s a familiar phenomenon in our world today, defining one’s identity in negative terms or in opposition to a perceived “outside” and “otherized” threat.

(Via Islamophobia-Watch.com)

A jury has been shown a photograph of a man wielding a stick outside Kingston Mosque moments before an attack by masked and hooded men.

LOURDES — Leading bishops have voiced alarm at a rise in anti-Islamic sentiment in France and admitted that hardening attitudes within the Roman Catholic church are fuelling the trend.

The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at UC Berkeley announces the launch of Islamophobia Studies Journal, a a bi-annual peer reviewed academic periodical focusing on emerging research on and analysis about the nature of Islamophobia and its impact on culture, politics, media, and the lives and experiences of Muslim people.

Last March, Shaima Alawadi was murdered in what initially appeared to be a hate crime. The 32 year-old Iraqi Muslim woman was severely beaten, and a note found near her body read, “Go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.”

Nathan Lean’s book The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims is a look at the pernicious ways in which anti-Muslim sentiment is fostered, both in the US and to a smaller extent in Europe.

Locked in the toughest fight of her congressional career, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann defended her witch hunt against alleged Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators in the federal government last night during the final debate against her Democratic challenger, Jim Graves.

For the better part of two years the campaign saga has pounded the surf of our daily lives like a relentless black tide. Now, in a matter of hours, polling places at last will close, with either President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney emerging victorious at the other end, the flotsam and jetsam of the last 24 months receding quietly into memory.

Renowned atheist Professor Richard Dawkins received a surprise standing ovation in the traditionally Christian community of Stornoway last night, following a two-hour speech in which he said there was probably no God.

Pamela Geller: “The Ultimate Definition of a Criminal Troll” Geller on Russell Brand’s show Brand X. Geller’s views are “completely unacceptable”:   Watch the complete interview here.

Islamophobia Strikes Late in Michigan Congressional Race by Amy Sullivan (The New Republic) A right-wing Super PAC is running attack ads against a Syed Taj, a Democratic congressional candidate in Michigan, in an attempt to portray the Muslim doctor as [...]

(HuffingtonPost)

A gruesome, anti-Muslim television ad aired Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, insinuating that President Barack Obama is sympathetic to violent extremism in the Middle East.

by Jacob Hausner In an article published on October 24, 2012 on Breitbart.com’s “Big Peace” website, John Guandolo, a former FBI agent who had to leave the agency due to his “unprofessional conduct” wrote an article with the blusterous title, CIA [...]

This is the headline to an article in the Daily Mail reporting claims that Israel has destroyed a Sudanese weapons factory in a bombing raid. The article itself suggests that “the raid acted as a ‘dry run’ for a forthcoming strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities”.

Last spring, US officials detained Indian superstar Shahrukh Khan: King of Bollywood Detained in the US….Again. In 2004, US officials detained Yusuf Islam, a British singer-songwriter formerly known as Cat Stevens. Now they’ve detained Pakistan’s cricket legend and popular politician, Imran Khan.

(Opposing Views)

CINCINNATI (CN) – The public transit authority in southeastern Michigan has the right to ban advertisements that it deems political for targeting Islam, the 6th Circuit ruled.

My daily fight against Islamophobia in the US has only served to increase my aversion to all forms of bigotry, including and especially anti-Semitism, and to increase my appreciation for what I consider to be a singular fight against all forms of bigotry.

According to Myisha Lewis-Reed, the mother of a student at Clinton Junior High School in Mississippi, White told her students that president should not be re-elected because he’s Muslim, WJTV reports.

A Federal Way man accused of viciously beating a Sikh cab driver while shouting anti-Muslim slurs now faces a hate crime charge. King County prosecutors contend Jamie W. Larson attacked the cab driver during an Oct. 17 ride after commenting on the man’s turban.

By Joe Palazzolo

Does First Amendment protect our right to say what we want in advertisements on the side of a city bus?

Yes and no.

In reality, of course, the EDL is a movement of far-right racists who just hate Muslims, as the vile comments that its rank-and-file supporters post on Facebook demonstrate every day.

SITTWE, Myanmar – A human rights group expressed concern for the safety of thousands of Muslims on Saturday after revealing satellite images of a once-thriving coastal community reduced to ashes during a week of violence in western Myanmar.

It is perhaps human nature to seek to blame someone else for one’s own personal failings. But what is possibly only a misdemeanor in personal interactions becomes rather more serious when entire nations and races are systematically and comprehensively blamed for the failures of other nations to comprehend simple truths.

Robert Spencer’s pivotal role in the international anti-Muslim propaganda network has beenextensively documented. In conjunction with Pamela Geller and a range of anti-Muslim allies, Spencer’s actions are continuing to escalate, particularly via his SIOA/SION/AFDI organisations.

A group which opposed the building of a £500,000 mosque in Lincoln has now promised to work alongside the Islamic association. The proposed, two-storey place of worship at the Old Boultham Dairy, could win full planning permission on November 7. If approved, the mosque could be up and running in about two years.

Clearly, someone in Sears’ sales department thought selling such an “ethnic” costume was a good idea, there is a demand out there for “funny-Ay-rab-Mooslimy-savages” costumes and being the good Capitalists they are Sears wanted to corner that market.

It is puzzling how Islamophobes have so little memory about our own recent history. Debbie Schlusselis suspicious because the facts that we know so far don’t add up (in her mind). She wonders how Leon Traille can be a crazy or homeless person and also well educated (M.S. from Georgia Tech).

The ongoing insurgency in the predominantly Muslim Southern Thai states bordering Malaysia does not get much media coverage in the USA. The issue is usually covered in soundbites or framed as “Islamic extremists” versus the Buddhist Thais. Relevant history and context is breezed over or ignored.

Shortly after 9/11, one of the cars on Pardis Parker‘s street in Montreal was spray-painted with the words “go home Arab.”

The incident deeply impacted the Sri Lanka-born Parker, and inspired him to write his very first film: Afghan.

The season in which studios begin to roll out their Oscar contenders is upon us. Ben Affleck’s third and probably most important directorial feat, Argo, will certainly receive due attention from the Academy.

An unpleasant suprise awaited the Charef family when they woke up on Sunday morning. They found Nazi graffiti on the walls of their house at Pont-du-Château, in the Puy-de-Dôme department. Swastikas and Celtic crosses had been drawn on the wall. These are signs regularly used by far-right and Islamophobic groups.

BY ANDREW LEONARD

It was the moment progressives had been waiting for. Bob Schieffer turned to Mitt Romney and said, “What is your position on the use of drones?” Twitter gasped. Up to that point, Schieffer had thrown one softball after another, but here was the high hard one down the middle.

(Express Tribune)

The incident took place in a Christian colony in Kalore Kot, a small town in Bhaker distinct late Thursday night.

A paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

The French Muslim Council (CFCM) urged the government on Monday to ban a far-right group that occupied a mosque on Saturday and issued a “declaration of war” against what it called the Islamization of France.

SION’s closest UK allies are in deep water. On top of 53 EDL activists being arrested, EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) was also arrested by Met police for entering the USA illegally.

Original guest article by Jai

Readers will be aware that Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller’s main British allies are the English Defence League/British Freedom Party leadership.

A pastor is causing a commotion in his Texas town – and possibly hurting with his non-profit status – because of a politically motivated church marquee. The Church in the Valley marquee reads, “VOTE FOR THE MORMON, NOT THE MUSLIM! THE CAPITALIST, NOT THE COMMUNIST!”

Thoufeek Zakriya is an Indian Muslim from Cochin who does does calligraphy in a number of languages, including Arabic, Samaritan, Syriac and Sanskrit. More interestingly, he is a Muslim who does masterful Hebrew calligraphy.

(Reuters) – A ban on girls wearing the Islamic headscarf to a school in southern Russia has angered Muslims and forced President Vladimir Putin, who has robustly defended the Orthodox Church, to affirm that Russia is a secular state.

When we’re all proven wrong and living in a bacon-less hellscape of Shariah law ruled by the iron fist of Mullah Obama, we can’t say we weren’t warned. According to the right-wing fringe, racism is dead — but long live Islamophobia, for there is jihad in every mosque and we must be vigilant.

(WNWO)

TOLEDO — The Indiana man accused of setting fire to a prayer room at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo has been charged with hate crimes in a federal indictment.

Dozens of far-right extremists have stormed the construction site of a mosque in western France to show their hostility toward it and denounce immigration that has brought millions of Muslims into the country.

by Sheila Musaji

Robert Spencer finds it noteworthy enough to note on Jihad Watch that Seattle elementary school bans Halloween costumes: they could offend students from “other cultures”.

The loudest Christians making waves about Islam for much of this year have not been terribly, well, Christian. There have been the protests against plans to build mosques in places like Tennessee and New Jersey, and arson attacks on mosques in Joplin, Missouri and Toledo, Ohio.

Daniel Greenfield, operative of the extremist SultanKnish blog, paid shill of David Horowitz and regular trafficker in “genocide” talk about Muslims recently blogged about Margaret “Maggie” Wood Hassan, who is running as the Democratic candidate for Governor in New Hampshire.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul has worked hard to distance himself from his party’s hawkish foreign policy, carefully cultivating an image as libertarian hero that may one day carry on the legacy — and potentially presidential ambitions — of his father, Rep. Ron Paul.

(Reuters) – A Roman Catholic cardinal has caused an uproar at the Vatican by screening a spurious YouTube video that makes alarmist predictions about the growth of Islam in Europe.

Nationalist organizations have criticized Moscow Chief Mufti Albir Krganov’s initiative to build more mosques in Russia to accommodate the needs of the large inflow of immigrants from Muslim countries.

The hijab ban won flaks from Russian scholars for violating the right of Muslim students to practice religion. Moscow – Several Muslim families pulled their daughters out of schools in Russia’s south after the girls were told they were not allowed to wear their hijabs, a top Muslim said on Monday.

(Via Loonwatch.com)

A positive, creative response to the “Innocence of Muslims” film controversy. (H/T: Syed, who asks: “Now I wonder why this isn’t featured on the frontpage of some magazine?”)

Reaching new lows in their foulness, English Defence League members have turned on 14 year old anti Taliban blogger, Malala Yousafzai, describing her as ‘a piece of shit’ an ‘it’ and ‘free loading trash’.

During a speech at Rick Joyner’s MorningStar Ministry, phony ex-terrorist and Values Voter Summit headliner Kamal Saleem said that the Obama administration has established a stealth Islamic “shadow government” to control the United States.

More serious than Geller posing in a pic with Mitt Romney is the insidious nature of Romney’s ties with the Islamophobia movement. Romney’s senior foreign policy adviser is none other than former Bush era UN Ambassador John Bolton.

Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.

VISOKO: A new woman mayor in Bosnia who is the first in her country and the continent to wear the hijab headscarf, said on Tuesday her election was “a model for Europe and Islam.”

(Loonwatch.com)

President Barack Obama’s administration has moved to further ease sanctions on the Burmese government, easing a ban on imports.

Florida pastor Terry Jones got the world’s attention back in 2010 when he set fire to the Quran, the Islamic holy book. His screeds gained national prominence during the whole debate over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” that year.

The early presence of Muslims in the Americas is a favorite subject of mine that I constantly return to study and Lynn Parramore’s contribution in this article is a great addition to the topic on top of coming at very important time.

Do we live in a conspiracy theory based culture? Yes, and it is not just the United States but the globe which is affected by bad ideas/theories that gain significant or widespread social traction.

CAIRO – Stimulating a sense of pride in Muslim women, an umbrella Muslim organization has organized workshops to teach leadership skills and promote community engagement among females in Minnesota.

(CBCNews)

The federal government is cancelling the contracts of non-Christian chaplains at federal prisons, CBC News has learned.

Why, then, attack Gülen and attempt to portray him as an extremist when one of the cornerstones of Gülen’s Sufi-inspired approach is his teachings about the principle of hoşgörü (i.e, seeing the good in others) and dialogue?

Dr. Abdul Kazi does not have to be convinced there is a significant number of uninsured residents in the Calhoun County area.

He sees them through his practice all the time.

These racist and religiously bigoted statements have currency with a significant number of individuals, that is why these backward candidates feel bold enough to make them. Imagine someone talking about the “Jewish Problem,” parallels would rightly be made to the Nazi era.

The D.C. transit system must allow a pro-Israel ad that equates Muslim radicals with savages, a federal judge ruled Friday. A spokesman for the Metro system said it would comply with the judge’s decision and that the advertisements would go up over the weekend.

On September 11, most Americans carried on with their day, perhaps pausing for a moment to reflect on the terrorist attacks in 2001. But not the crew of Islamophobes who have exploited the attacks as an opportunity to foment hatred of Muslims and profit off that hatred.

The sprinklers worked. The structure was saved. Insurance will cover repairs. But the fire, heat, smoke, and water from the incident on Sunday caused major damage to the house of worship and school.

Fox News’s Todd Starnes is sick and tired of ‘South Park’ and Hollywood getting a free pass. The Fox News commentator participated in the Values Voter Summit panel on “Religious Hostility in America” over the weekend.

by Sabrina Siddiqui (Huffington Post)

President Barack Obama’s campaign building in Des Moines, Iowa, was vandalized with the words “Muslim Lier” (intended to be “Liar”), spray-painted on a large banner.

Spencer was forced into undermining his career long effort to demonize Islam and Muslims, reluctantly conceding that the term Jihad means more than “terrorism” and “violence,” a position he is loathe to share on a daily basis with his readers since it doesn’t fit his scheme of evil Muslim hordes Islamizing the universe.

Updated, 6:47 p.m. | Striking back against an anti-jihad advertisement in the subways widely perceived as anti-Muslim, two religious groups – one Jewish, one Christian – are taking out subway ads of their own to urge tolerance.

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — A former college student who wrote letters of support to a man convicted of setting off a bomb and fatally shooting 77 people in Norway was charged on Tuesday with making a campus bomb threat last year.

The RCMP is investigating the possibility of a hate crime after several piles of bacon were found outside a mosque in Port Coquitlam, B.C. Police say it’s the second such act of vandalism and mischief at the Islamic Society of British Columbia mosque and Islamic Centre in the last 18 months.

The outbreak of the fire was accompanied by an explosion and press reports indicate that there is no doubt it was arson. CCIF points out that the fire follows graffiti attacks on halal butchers inChalon-sur-Saône and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Far-right activist David Horowitz has been out promoting his new book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion, and told conservative talk show host Steve Deace yesterday that President Obama, much like professor Cornel West, is taken seriously simply because he is black.

(Via Right Wing Watch)

We know that when Michele Bachmann speaks, even fact-checkers can’t fully cover all of her dubious and debunked claims in just a single article.

Officials on Monday ruled a fire at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo an arson, but remained tight-lipped about details. At least four people did a walk-through of the Perrysburg Township mosque Monday afternoon, though when asked for a comment, Dr. Mahjabeen Islam declined. Police on scene also declined to comment on the investigation.

Rightly or wrongly, the message is: use certain hateful words in public, and you’ll pay the price. So why is there a different set of values at work when it comes to the hurt caused Muslims by hateful, Islamophobic characterizations of the Prophet Mohammed, or denigrations of Islam?

France, The CCIF notes that last year the municipal council broke off negotiations over the sale of public land to an association that planned to build an Islamic cultural centre there, following an Islamophobic campaign.

The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that last Thursday night a halal butchers at Chalon-sur-Saône in eastern France was defaced with Islamophobic graffiti. When the owners went to the police to file a complaint on Friday morning they found that other businesses had been similarly targeted.

An ice cream maker out of Livingston, Montana, is facing boycott threats after the company’s president responded insensitively to a Muslim customer’s Facebook question about the contents of their product.

Jews have too much influence over U.S. foreign policy. Gay men are too promiscuous. Muslims commit too much terrorism. Blacks commit too much crime. Each of those claims is poorly stated. Each, in its clumsy way, addresses a real problem or concern. And each violates laws against hate speech. In much of what we call the free world, for writing that paragraph, I could be jailed.

By RAMDANE BELAMRI

Amid a nationwide debate in France surrounding attitudes towards the Islamic veil, or hijab, a French rapper has surprised fans by announcing her conversion to Islam and choosing to wear a headscarf.

The link Daniel Pipes provided about the film being made by Imran Farasat is to Farasat’s site in Spain, announcing that he will make a film and that it will be released in 2012 in 4 to 5 languages. Based on the site, and on limited google searches, Farasat is a Pakistani ex-Muslim now living in Spain.

The advertisements, created and funded by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

The protests, marathon public hearings and years of meeting in homes and business parks were just memories Friday afternoon. That’s when members of the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley gathered for a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the upcoming start of construction on its long-in-the-works mosque project.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly implied that Riddle referred to the Afghan people as “terrorists.” She referred to the Afghan people as “radical Muslims” “who want us all dead.” Our bad.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is quite impressive, she is the leader of one the largest emerging economies and nations in the world, and her strong condemnation of Islamophobia in the West in her recent UN Speech has not gone unnoticed.

The Collectif contre L’islamophobie en France reports a graffiti attack on a mosque at Vandœuvre in north-eastern France. The word “Israel” in Hebrew has been sprayed onto the doors along with a Star of David and “LDJ”

Islamophobic sites like IslamVersusEurope, BaredNakedIslam and Vivienco, have been posting and regurgitating a story claiming that a 53-year-old ‘Muslim’ inhabitant of El Ejido abused, and raped a female horse (click on the names for their articles).

Robert Spencer made the mistake of tweeting at Ahmed Rehab with what he thought was a wisecrack and witty side-busting tweet, but ended up receiving a rhetorical Jiu Jitsu flying kick which left him floored. The question still stands Spencer, are you going to “watch” yourself now as part of your “Jihadwatch?”

(Via Comedy Central)

The bacon shortage is an Islamic conspiracy, and President Obama’s disloyalty to murderous dictators means another Turkish Empire.

“Y’all better vote for f–king Obama, OK? For better or for worse, all right? We have a black Muslim in the White House. Now that’s some amazing s–t,” she said. “It means there is hope in this country. And Obama is fighting for gay rights, so support the man, goddamnit.”

Mona Eltahawy, the prominent Egyptian-American writer and activist, has been arrested in New York after spraying paint over a controversial poster on the subway that has been condemned for equating Muslims with “savages”.

by Ali Abunimah (Electronic Intifada)

A video first published by Le Parisien and shot on Saturday shows French police arresting women in the Place du Trocadéro in Paris apparently just for wearing headscarves.

The anti-Islamic propaganda film Innocence of Muslims exacerbated the stereotypes and animosities between Americans and Muslims worldwide. The anti-American protests that have swept across the world have proven that for better or worse, one film can make a difference.

In April 2011, pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran in Gainesville, Florida, sparking deadly clashes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One year later, he burned a Koran again, and no one paid any attention. That same month he came to Dearborn, Michigan, to protest in front of the Islamic Center of America, the nation’s largest mosque.

When did the memo go out that it was okay to call Muslims savages?

A week ago Joe Scarborough responded to the deadly Muslim protests of the anti-Islamic film by calling it “savagery.”

Yesterday was the big day when Zombie Muhammad was expected to flog a Qur’an with a cat ‘o nine tails at the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Judging by the nonexistent press coverage, even in the local paper, the event was a bust, if it happened at all.

This morning controversial pro-Israel, anti-Islamic ads went up on 10 locations in New York City subway stations. The ad, which was condemned by several Jewish groups, reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.

On Friday, Boston Police responded to a report about a piece of anti-Islamic graffiti near the intersection of Main Street and School Street. The message read “Islam sucks! You rat pack Islamic rats. The Warlock. USA #1.”

Michele Bachmann has been on a rather intense anti-Islam tear recently, fearmongering about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the government. Recently, she’s touted the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya as proof of her conspiracy theories.

BAY CITY, MICH. (AP) — A Michigan man who authorities say attacked two men because he believed they were Muslims has been ordered to write a report on the history of Hinduism.

At a moment when I would otherwise be reviewing Yom Kippur teachings and preparing spiritually for the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar, I instead feel called as an American Jew to respond to the abominable, Islamophobic advertisements in the New York City subways.

US officials leaked to several news outlets Friday an impending decisionby the Obama administration that it intends to remove the Iranian dissident group Mujahadeen e-Khalq (MEK) from the treasury department’s terror list.

I was raised as an evangelical Christian in America, and any discussion of Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations around the world must include the phenomenon of American Islamophobia, for which large sectors of evangelical Christianity in America serve as a greenhouse.

Cross posted from Al Jazeera

Many tweets included SAW, or “sallallahu alayhi wasallam”, which translates to “peace be upon him”. The hashtag #MuhammadShowedMe quickly went viral, receiving almost 15,000 mentions in just two days.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen called Friday for a ban on wearing Muslim veils and Jewish skullcaps in public, adding to religious tensions sparked by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

A message of hate was spray-painted on a Suffolk County mosque and now police are searching for the vandals.The angry words on the Bay Shore mosque threatened a rising war. It’s believed that someone came over the fence and vandalized the building, police said.

On Friday, Youm-e-Ishq-e-Rasool (pbuh) [love of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) Day] was observed throughout Pakistan. Many demonstrators carried signs with red hearts bearing the Prophet’s name and inspiring slogans (“Our leader Muhammad” and “Honor Our Prophet”). This positive theme had great potential, but unfortunately, was marred by more violence.

Contrary to widely held assumptions, Muslims revere Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and both are mentioned extensively in the Qur’an. There is no reason for Muslims to celebrate the denigration of Jesus.

by Garibaldi

In light of the terrorist attack on the Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois chaired a Senate hearing on hate crimes.

A US actress who appeared in an amateur anti-Islam video that sparked protests across the Muslim world is suing the film’s suspected director. Cindy Lee Garcia accused Nakoula Basseley Nakoula of duping her into a “hateful” film that she was led to believe was a desert adventure movie.

by Ilisha

The otherwise obscure French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hedbo, is making headlines again, and the most recent controversy seems to have the press divided on the politics of free speech and provocation.

by Myriam Francois-Cerrah, guardian.co.uk,

‘The Qur’an says that marriage is valid only between consenting adults, and that a woman has the right to choose her own spouse.’

While outrage continues in the Middle East over the incendiary film, “The Innocence of Muslims,” a new pro-Israel ad denouncing Jihad as “savage” will soon make its debut in New York City’s subway system.

Pamela Geller, premiere anti-Muslim loon hoax perpetrator loves creating fictional stories and passing them off as real news. She has a particular penchant for fabricating stories about Nigerian Muslims, in her racist eyes all Africans look the same.

New reports from Libya confirm that the Libyan citizens the right wing blogosphere claimed were “dragging Ambassador Stevens’ body through the streets like Somalia” were actually trying to save his life: Video Appears to Show Libyans Retrieving Envoy’s Body.

Eric Bolling walked back his words about the Obama administration on Monday’s “The Five.” The roundtable was discussing the White House’s response to the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya, which was initially believed to have been spurred by an anti-Islam film.

(Via Loonwatch.com)

Startling similarities between two Newsweek covers, pointed out by MondoWeiss

by Max Reed, Gawker

It’s hard to find a better image than the one on the Newsweek cover to really communicate how rage-filled Muslims constantly are, but we’ve found a few that will strike a chill into your heart.

A DUTCH MP who is a outspoken critic of Islam is seeking a visa to visit Australia for a speaking tour next month. Geert Wilders, who has compared the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, has been invited by the Q Society to give speeches in Melbourne and Sydney.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who appears to be behind the amateurish anti-Islam film that sparked violent protests at Western embassies in Arab and Muslim countries around the world last week, doesn’t exactly have a family-friendly background.

Anti-Islam rhetoric in the United States has heated up this week in the wake of the violent protests in the Middle East. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough joined in the backlash this morning, saying the entire Muslim world hates the United States “because of their religion.”

Carpet will soon cover the tile flooring, speakers will be installed and prayer mats purchased to provide the school’s Muslim students, estimated at around two dozen, with a quiet and private place to pray.

The message is being placed on a billboard at 1015 S. Church St. by a self-described Washington, D.C.-based Christian advocacy and education organization called Sojourners, according to the group’s communications director, Tim King.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations today requested involvement of the Federal Government in this incident. An email newsletter sent out by the organization to subscribers Monday afternoon contained a link to this story and similar stories published by other news organizations.

Thoughtfulness has flown out the window at Newsweek this week, as Tina Brown traded in a little bit of integrity and placed her bets on Islamophobia being a big seller with the magazine’s screaming “Muslim Rage” cover.

by Sunny Hundal

The English Defence League are planning to screen the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ film trailer in East London next month.

The report states: “We cannot show the vandalism in its entirety because the images were very vulgar. It appeared to be male genitalia and was spray painted as well as racial slurs against blacks, and vulgar references to Iraqis.”Original post: Racists vandalise Virginia mosque

tr. from French to English (Al-Kanz)

New attack against a place of worship. According to the CFCM, the mosque of Condé-sur-Escaut, in the North, was incurred in the night from Thursday to Friday, September 14, an attempted arson.

by Max Blumenthal (The Guardian)

Did an inflammatory anti-Muslim film trailer that appeared spontaneously on YouTube prompt the attack that left four US diplomats dead, including US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens?

CNN reports that the man behind the “Innocence of Muslims” movie is likely not an “Israeli real estate developer” by the name of Sam Bacile, but instead as some speculated an Egyptian Copt by the name Abenob Nakoula Bassely.

The ISNA Convention is one of the most important gatherings in the American Muslim calendar, so it is unsurprising that anti-Muslim activists focused on spreading misinformation and Islamophobia would target the convention with attacks and smears.

There is no excuse for violently reacting to such a poorly made and clearly incendiary movie, ever; in fact it is surreal, like something out of a salivating Islamophobes wildest dream.

Pajama’s Media, founded and funded by billionaire Aubrey Chernick, (who according to the Center for American Progress’ Fear, inc. report is one of the biggest donors to the Islamophobia Movement) recently posted a 20 minute video from September 1, 2001 [...]

Manifestations of Islamophobia can be found on the Internet, in comments by the PVV, and in acts of violence committed against mosques. Dutch anti-discrimination policies are coming under pressure now that this ideology has forced its way to the centre of the political stage.

California employers face new restrictions against shunting Sikh and Muslim workers to backroom jobs out of public view based on their wearing of turbans, beards and hijabs, under a law signed Saturday by Gov. Jerry Brown.

“As painful as this day is and always will be, it leaves us with a lesson: that no single event can ever destroy who we are, no act of terrorism can ever change what we stand for,” the president said at a memorial ceremony at the Pentagon.

AMSTERDAM/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Anti-Islam groups in America have provided financial support to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, an anti-immigration campaigner who is seeking re-election to the Dutch parliament this week.

CcIF notes that gunshots were fired at the same mosque in 2005 and that last year a mosque in nearby Villeneuve-sur-Lot was the target of an arson attack. In 2010 a mosque at Marmande, also in southwestern France, was sprayed with fascist graffiti.

Past targets have included gays, feminists and pagans, atheists, people with Alzheimer’s, adoptive parents, Haitians and people who don’t pray enough. This time, the televangelist focused his ire on wives who fail to properly obey their husbands.

As with Jews and Catholics before, I discuss that Muslims are being seen as an impossible-to-integrate, fast-reproducing invasion force who follow a religion that’s more an ideology of conquest than a faith. Using the latest facts and figures, I illustrate the far less alarming truth about these new arrivals.

by Mark Townsend (The Guardian)
A number of rightwing British activists have publicly praised mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik – one describing him as a “role model” – since the Norwegian extremist was sentenced.

PARIS – Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, told Jewish and Muslim leaders on Tuesday that “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” referring to recent rulings in Europe against circumcision and ritual slaughter.

Not surprisingly, Greece’s neo-nazi political party “Golden Dawn” has become increasingly violent since winning a shocking number of the country’s parliament seats earlier this year.

In Tennessee, an incumbent in the U.S. House found herself on the defensive after being called soft on Shariah law, the code that guides Muslim beliefs and actions. And the state’s governor has been forced to explain why he hired a Muslim.

As the Democratic National Convention meets in Charlotte, North Carolina the mandate of caring for the poor has largely dropped out of the conversation, replaced by a more popular focus on the middle class.

This year during Ramadan — the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar when Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad — I was in solidarity with my Muslim sisters and brothers throughout the world by reading the Quran.

WHITE PLAINS — As supporters held up signs protesting Islamophobia, a coalition of community leaders and residents gathered downtown Thursday to denounce anti-Muslim advertisements posted at Metro-North stations throughout Westchester County.

by Jacob Hausner In our fever pitched anti-Muslim environment there are those eagerly willing to piggyback on the hate atmosphere by subverting truth and fairness; for them it is another opportunity to malign Muslims and Islam. The largest American Muslim [...]

ISLAMABAD: The Christian girl who was allegedly framed for blasphemy by her local mullah was hailed as a ”daughter of the nation” by one of Pakistan’s most senior Islamic clerics who also vowed to guarantee her safety if she is eventually released from prison.

Anti-Muslim organizer Pamela Geller has joined forces with Justice Department attorney and author, J. Christian Adams, in a scathing critique of a National Geographic Museum exhibit on the contributions of Muslim scientists, theWashington City Paper reports.

The EDL’s ‘fascist end-goal’We have already drawn attention to the English Defence League’s response to Warsi’s appointment (see above). However, it’s also worth checking out the comments that followed this official post on the EDL’s Facebook page.

“There has never been any legislation offered to establish Shariah law – not at the federal level, not at the state level. There’s not been a municipal ordinance opposing this, there’s not been anything,” said Ellison, the nation’s first Muslim member of Congress.

DETROIT (AP) — When DC Comics decided to blow up its fabled universe and create a brave, diverse future, Geoff Johns drew from the past for a new character: his own background as an Arab-American.

Hank Williams Jr. repeated his anti-Obama tirade at a concert in Texas on Sunday. Performing at the Stockyards Music Festival, the country singer went on an extended rant against the president.

by Garibaldi

In Toronto, Canada there was an Al-Quds(Jerusalem) Day Rally, a yearly event protesting Zionism and the occupation of Jerusalem by Israel, an event that had its genesis in Iran in 1979.

This story comes to us via. Critical Dragon. It is an older story, originally published by the SPLC in November of last year. It is quite astonishing as it clearly proves Robert Spencer‘s links to and parroting of the White Nationalist line.

Chishti is in custody now, pending investigation on charges that he planted charred pages on the young girl. This gives the story an added twist of depravity, what kind of adult would do something so cynical, so base? I hope he is also charged for inciting violence.

Vilks, the Swedish artist who enraged Muslim groups with his depictions of the Prophet Muhammad as a dog, agreed earlier this month to speak at a conference organized by the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of Nations (SION).

(Via Loonwatch.com)

Recently, we’ve had trollish commenters pop up on our site defending the invasion and decimation of Iraq by the USA. It seems that the whitewashing of the war and historical amnesia has already settled in.

Tarek Fatah’s record of appeasing anti-Muslim charlatans and fear-mongers is well known, as is his furthering of Islamophobic causes.

ATHENS — Thousands of immigrants in Greece have taken to the streets to protest anti-Muslim sentiments and racist attacks against foreigners in a country plagued by a huge debt crisis.

Gabriela Saucedo Mercer is a favorite to win the GOP primary in Arizona’s 3rd district. In the height of loony irony, Mercer herself an immigrant to the USA doesn’t want Middle Easterners to enter the country, legally or illegally. (h/t: Jawad)

by Brian Tashman (RightWingWatch)

Yesterday on Secure Freedom Radio, Frank Gaffney hosted the vociferously anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-Obama Rabbi Aryeh Spero to discuss his new book, “Push Back: Reclaiming the American Judeo-Christian Spirit.”

The re-packaging and re-titling of the video is not only a detriment to factual news reporting and information gatherers, it is an insult to the memory of the poor Shia’ man who was murdered by these extremists.

When I first heard that a white supremacist opened fire on a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin a few weeks ago, I froze. My stomach lurched and my thoughts turned to the friends I’d made in the Sikh community through my work as an atheist and interfaith activist.

These are matters of political philosophy that can and should be debated. But the depth of the partisan, generational and racial divide on attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims is frightening because the values Americans claim are central to their definition as a society are at stake.

A very interesting story out of Bangladesh about the possible unearthing of an ancient mosque from northern Bangladesh. This is an interesting find and a story that also reveals a lot about the state of how antiquities and archeology into early Islamic history is treated by some governments.

Earlier this summer, a handful of Republican Party county committees in Tennessee passed resolutions criticizing Republican Gov. Bill Haslam for hiring Samar Ali, an accomplished young Muslim-American native of Waverly, Tenn., and honors graduate of Vanderbilt University and its law school.

by Garibaldi

Time for a history lesson on the anti-Muslim Islamophobia blog wars. It has been a while since we reported on “intra-Counter Jihad blog wars,” which are really nothing more than pitiful, though amusing, little soap operas.

(Freep.com)

A 19-year-old Michigan State University student is recovering at home in Oakland County today after surgery overnight for a broken jaw his family says stems from a brutal hate crime.

(TheLocal.se)

The neo-nazi Swedish Resistance Movement (Svenska Motståndsrörelsen) marched in the central Swedish town of Bollnäs earlier this summer, after a controversial rape case had rocked the community.

by Garibaldi

“I wish to apologize to all militant nationalists that I wasn’t able to execute more”– Anders Behring Breivk

Hundreds turned out Saturday at Landreth Park in a show of solidarity with area Muslims after their mosque was destroyed in a suspected arson fire on Aug. 6.

Neighbors-Joplin Mosque Rally, as it was called, was organized by Ozark Christian College student Ashley Carter.

Pamela Geller’s defeat the “savages” San Francisco Muni advertisements created a firestorm among local culture jammers who are challenging the pro-Israel pundit’s message by re-designing the originals ads. See the latest makeover above.

(Via Loonwatch.com)

Good to see CAIR speak out about this as well (h/t: Fred). Doesn’t look like this fits the whole Islamization boogeyman, stealth jihad myths Islamophobes love to push.:

(Via LoonWatch.com)

MEMRI and other anti-Muslim Islamophobic groups and websites routinely play sermons from Imam’s or Ayatollah’s praying to God for the destruction and or decimation of “enemies.”

While you were busy mourning Neil Armstrong, Fox News analyst Monica Crowley was looking for a way to politicize his death. She found it in one of the far right’s most insidious tropes — Islamophobia.

By Nathan Lean (LATimes)August 26, 2012

On Friday, a Norwegian court ruled that Anders Behring Breivik, who mowed down 77 people in a bombing and shooting rampage in Oslo in July 2011, was sane.

by Mehdi Hasan (Huffington Post)

You could not make it up. An 11-year old Christian girl in Pakistan with Down’s Syndrome is in police custody, and could face the death penalty, for allegedly burning pages from the Quran.

Some individuals like Pamela Geller are so anxious to find anything at all that is negative about Islam or Muslims that they are willing to pass on any unsubstantiated rumor from anywhere as “proof” that Muslims are evil. Geller’s professed “love” for Muslims is expressed as pathological hatred.

North Smithfield police have arrested and charged a Cumberland man in connection with a case of vandalism at a local mosque.

Robert Scalso, 20, of Mendon Rd. is facing a misdemeanor charge of vandalism, police confirmed Monday morning.

Everyone knows how it works. Everyone knows what it sounds like. Everyone knows how easy it is to get away with it. Everyone knows, deep down, that hatred feeds on tolerance. That however well-intentioned, a society’s forbearance for the toxic slur, for the poison of ethnic or religious or racial prejudice, does hatred invaluable servic

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

Gaffney: This is a really extraordinary thing, as you say the Southern Poverty Law Center has fallen dramatically from its past and is now in the service of people who are really the perpetrators of the worst of the anti-Semitism and hatemongering and so on.

No doubt flushed with the “success” of its recent protest at the site of a proposed mosque in Sunderland, the National Front has belatedly latched on to the plan to convert a vacant building in Worcester Park in South London into an Islamic centre, which has already been the subject of local opposition.

Lurid tales of the Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood allegedly “crucifying” President Mohammed Morsi’s political opponents has gone viral all across the looniverse, but skepticism seems to have surfaced in an unlikely place.

The Ghuman family of Sarwarpur, near Ludhiana, cannot understand what the fuss is about. Ever since Sajjan Singh Ghuman, an NRI Sikh living in England, rebuilt a mosque in his native village that was damaged during Partition, the shrine, as well as his family back home, have attracted the curiosity of outsiders.

(NBC News)

Czech authorities say a 29-year-old man suspected of plotting a terrorist bombing was an admirer of Anders Behring Breivik, the man accused of killing 77 people in Norway last year.

Muslims around the world are gathering for Friday prayers, and in one neighbourhood in the US state of Virginia, the worshippers will enter a building that could hardly be further from a traditional mosque.

Shortly prior to the start of the London Olympics, there was an outburst of hysteria over the failure to provide sufficient security against Terrorism, but as Harvard Professor Stephen Walt noted yesterday in Foreign Policy, this was all driven, as usual, by severe exaggerations of the threat.

Revenge. It is among the most potent drivers of human behavior. The 9/11 terrorist attacks more than a decade ago shocked the world, and for some, the horrific attacks provoked a powerful demon with a voracious appetite for vengeance.

Hank Williams Jr. reprised his role as a fiery anti-Obama blowhard on Friday, telling fans at a concert that the president was Muslim and anti-American.

(Huffington Post)

American Muslims and Sikhs have been experiencing another uptick in aggression against them. Last week shots were fired at a Morton Grove, Ill., mosque; paintball guns left ominous paint splatters all over amosque in Oklahoma.

There is probably a terrorist in your lunchbox right now. Seriously. Well, maybe not an actual terrorist, but a stealth jihad symbol or doohickey of some sort for sure. Trust me. They’re everywhere!

by Yousef Munayyer (Chicago Tribune)

In seven days this month, at least eight places of worship associated with Middle Easterners or South Asians have been targeted in the United States. A Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., was the site of a massacre where six people were murdered.

I have to say I love the Bay Area, the weather, the nature, the people–just beautiful. I knew thatPamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s SIOA hate ad campaign wasn’t going to last long before being touched up by the creative hands of guerilla artists, and it hasn’t.

On August 16, 2012, a Palestinian American man went to pay respects to his deceased father at Evergreen Cemetery and was horrified to see anti-Muslim hate graffiti on a number of Muslim graves. Evergreen Cemetery is home to at least 500 Muslim graves. Cemetery officials and the police have been notified.

Turban Campaign: Now Is The Time To Unite Against Racists, Fascists and Islamophobes Following the tragic events earlier this week at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin which lead to the murder of six people in an attack orchestrated by a member of [...]

The above ads are appearing at Metro-North stations in New York. A continuation of Islamophobic activists Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller‘s AFDI/SIOA racist and anti-Muslim/Islam advertisement campaign. In light of recent hate attacks, 8 over a period of 11 days, and another possible attack yesterday, theattempted firebombing of a Muslim family’s home in Panama City, Florida, can we not consider such advertisements to be an incitement to violence?

Panama City police are investigating what appears to be a fire bombing in the Forest Park area. It happened about 3:45 Wednesday morning at a house on Timber Lane in phase-1 of the subdivision called The Woods. The owner’s son said he heard a loud noise outside of his bedroom window, looked out and saw the ground below on-fire. He called 9-1-1, then put out the fire.

(BBC)

A team from the UK’s Channel 4 News gained access to Sittwe, which has been off limits to reporters for months. They filmed an area once home to 10,000 that had been reduced to rubble.

A federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit filed against the U.S. government and the FBI over the agency’s spying on Orange County Muslims, ruling that allowing the suit to go forward would risk divulging sensitive state secrets.

Authorities in Hamburg have become the first in Germany to officially recognize Islamic holidays so Muslim employees and students can celebrate them at home. The decision forms part of an agreement between the north German city and local Muslim groups. Similar agreements exist with Christian and Jewish communities in the city.

(The Independent)

A gifted young English chess player was physically assaulted and his family subjected to Islamophobic abuse by other parents during a recent competition in Austria, his father claims.

Pamela Geller so adores the “objectivist philosopher” and author Ayn Rand that she gave her blog the name Atlas Shrugs, in homage to Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged.”

David Conrad, a resident of Morton Grove, Ill., was likely peeved by the noise from the Muslim Education Center. Conrad’s home is adjacent to the center’s parking lot, and during the holy month of Ramadan, men, women and children pack the mosque on a nightly basis.

by Juan Cole

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”

The right wing group demonstrated against the building of a mosque in St Mark’s Road in Sunderland on Saturday, August 11. Police were forced to separate the protesters and anti-fascist groups as tensions heightened in front of worried residents.

Following an acid bomb being hurled at a Muslim school in the Chicago suburb of Lombard, a spokesperson for CAIR told Raw Story that the number of attacks on American Muslims has escalated recently due in part to the Republican Party’s “Islamophobia machine”.

(SacBee)

ONTARIO, Calif.—Pig’s legs were thrown on the proposed site of a Southern California mosque, and a Muslim civil rights group is asking federal officials to investigate.

(NewYorkTimes)

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — The worshipers bowed low, their heads touching the freshly laid carpet, as the new mosque filled with echoes of exultation.

(NewsOK)

The Grand Mosque of Oklahoma City was fired upon by paintballs early Sunday, and the vandals fled the scene before they were apprehended.

Everitte Barbee is a U.S. citizen who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He’s also a calligraphy artist. About a year and a half ago, the 24-year-old commenced work on a unique project: The Quran for Solidarity is, as far as Barbee is aware, the first Quran to be completely handwritten by a non-Muslim.

Last night the College Preparatory School of America (CPSA), a full time Islamic school in Lombard IL and a member of the CIOGC had a 7-up bottle with acid and other materials thrown at the school during the night time Ramadan Prayers.

The Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Chicago) said today that two air rifle shots were fired last night at the outer wall of the Muslim Education Center (MEC) mosque in Morton Grove, Ill.

Friday, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin six Sikh Americans, five men and one woman, victims of a terrorist attack were laid to rest “surrounded by men and women singing traditional Punjabi hymns.” They were killed in their house of worship, the Gurdwara, where they had gathered for prayer and celebration.

Rep. Joe Walsh has a history of bigoted anti-Islam and anti-Muslim statements. In a recent town hall the Congressman didn’t even have the decency to correct a man in the crowd who described Islam as a “dangerous” threat to the USA.

Christian college student’s idea leads to rally for burned mosque By Josh Levs, CNN (CNN) - When 20-year-old Ashley Carter heard about a mosque burned to the ground in her town this week, she was shocked. “I was very saddened,” she told CNN on [...]

by Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com)

Shortly after the Islamic Society of Joplin opened a mosque in 2007 in Joplin, a small town in Southwest Missouri, the sign in front was set on fire, an act determined to be arson.

(Via Comedy Central)

Hilarious clip of Stephen Colbert taking down goofy anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Colbert also interviews Rep. Keith Ellison from Minnesota’s fifth district.

n Friday, Mitt Romney declined to condemn Rep. Michele Bachmann’s witch hunt against Muslim Americans in the federal government, breaking with GOP leaders like Senator John McCain and Speaker John Boehner.

Daryl Johnson had a sinking feeling when he started seeing TV reports on Sunday about a shooting in a Wisconsin temple. “I told my wife, ‘This is likely a hate crime perpetrated by a white supremacist who may have had military experience,’” Johnson recalls.

Members of Rhode Island’s Muslim community have asked to meet with police and the FBI to request heightened security at their places of worship after the sign for a mosque in North Smithfield was vandalized.

Acid attacks have come to our attention mostly through news reports of such incidents in India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Islamophobes and the like are all too happy to point to Islam as the cause of such incidents even though the motivations of such attacks have to do with issues completely unrelated to Islam.

Muslim supporters of a proposed Islamic center rejected by St. Anthony elected leaders plan to host a Ramadan meal Thursday in an effort to share their faith with non-Muslims, organizers say.

A SHEFFIELD cabbie has been left unable to work after his vehicle was set on fire while he was praying at his local mosque. Mohammed Joydu Miah, aged 40, of Nidd Road East, Darnall, was at morning prayers at the Aaliya Mosque, on Staniforth Road, when his cab went up in flames.

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD

Rep. Michele Bachmann has gotten a lot of attention lately for her witch hunt against Muslims in the U.S. government, but she’s not alone.

Vandals have attacked an Islamic centre in Horley. The centre on the corner of High Street and Yattendon Road was vandalised in the early hours of Sunday. Alcohol and eggs were thrown at the building and graffiti was sprayed across its main door.

The mass shooting of a gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Wisconsin on Sunday is merely the latest chapter in a history of violence. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, more than 300 incidences of hate crimes against Sikhs were reported, according to the Sikh Coalition (PDF).

Mo Farah revealed that he was inspired to gold on Saturday night after seeing Jessica Ennis win gold. It was a golden night in the Olympic stadium as both Jess Ennis and Greg Rutherford picked up gold medals in the heptathlon and long jump before Mo Farah took to the track.

Americans, Here are some of the things we know about Wade Michael Page: He led a “racist white power trio” called End Apathy; he had a tattoo commemorating 9/11; he shaved his head; and, on Sunday, he killed six individuals and wounded a police officer at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. – A temporary occupancy permit has been granted for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro after a final inspection on Tuesday morning. Mosque leaders hope to hold evening prayers there as early as Friday.

On the morning after the tragedy in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson placed the blame for the shooting at the Sikh Temple on atheists and those who “hate God.”

WASHINGTON—In response to the shooting death of six Sikh worshippers at a temple in Oak Creek, WI yesterday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) offered a public expression of her thankfulness that no Americans had been killed in the rampage.

It is legitimate to criticize Muslim organizations and parties, and to work against violent groups like al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda is a tiny fringe religious-nationalist movement; far fewer Muslims have been involved in it than white southerners have been involved in the Ku Klux Klan.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever may have caused today’s fire. The Washington-based Muslim civil rights organization is in touch with the FBI about the case.

(Via Islamophobia-Watch.com)

Press TV reports from a demonstration in Gennevilliers against the sacking (since withdrawn) of four Muslims workers at a summer camp run by the local authority.

The man who allegedly murdered six people at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee yesterday, identified in media reports as Wade Michael Page, was a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.

MURFREESBORO — Islamic Center of Murfreesboro members will pass a field lined with 13 white crosses in front of Grace Baptist Church on Bradyville Pike on the way to their new mosque once it opens.

At the moment we do not know who the shooter was, or his motivation, but in light of the rise in bias attacks and incidents against Sikhs, who are often mistaken for Muslims, this story may be related to violent anti-Muslim Islamophobia and general xenophobia.

The loons would go wild, but this didn’t happen in a Muslim country, and it wasn’t a mosque. It happened in Russia, inside of an Orthodox Christian church. Months later, members of the band Pussy Riot are still in jail, charged with “hooliganism.”

By Niraj Warikoo (Freep.com)

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was named Thursday to the citizens advisory board of an Ann Arbor-based legal center that fights for conservative Christian causes.

by Haddock

Anti-Islam and Islamophobic polemic about who or what Muslims worship has taken on many varying forms over the centuries.

As disciples of the Buddha who live in the West, we would like to take the holy month of Ramadan as an opportunity to express our growing concern about Islamophobia, both within our governments and within the Buddhist community worldwide.

by Deepa Kumar

When Mitt Romney stated that it was Israel’s “culture” that was responsible for the country’s superior economic development he was simply recycling an argument long used to explain black poverty in the US.

In our previous story on the slaughter of Assamese Muslims, we over played the assumption that Muslims in Assam were largely Bangladeshi immigrants. This is another false narrative that has circulated in the press.

By Gina Ryder

On a hot weekend in July, Muslim women were hard at work operating a flea market to raise funds for fall programming at their Muslim American Society community center in Astoria, N.Y.

The story of congregants from the Gaza‘s tiny Christian community being held against their will and forcibly converted to Islam quickly went viral all across the looniverse, and even made its way to countless mainstream news sites.

Authorities in China’s restive northwestern region of Xinjiang have banned Muslim officials and students from fasting during Ramadan, prompting an exiled rights group to warn of new violence.

Walid Shoebat recently told David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag that Abedin’s marriage to Weiner, who is Jewish, is either part of her Muslim Brotherhood espionage or shows that Weiner converted to Islam, or both.

Ethiopian Premier Meles Zenawi has inflamed tensions with Ethiopian Muslims over his increased interference in their religious affairs, a violation of the Ethiopian Constitution. Zenawi’s “iron-fisted” rule has also alienated large sections of the non-Muslim populace.

Muslims attending morning prayers Wednesday were confronted by two pigs’ heads in the entrance to their mosque in a French town where an Islamist gunman killed two paratroopers in March.

Residents of Bogalusa, Louisiana were whipped up into a patriotic fervor based on a misunderstanding about a US military service member supposedly being denied service at a Texaco gas station (h/t: Al).

This is particularly important as we learn more about the effects of climate change, dwindling resources and, most importantly, decreasing access to fresh water around the world, which is a growing concern in many Muslim communities and countries.

Last week, ISNA President Imam Mohamed Magid and ISNA Director of Community Outreach Dr. Mohamed Elsanousi convened a small multilateral forum of scholars in Mauritania to discuss challenges faced by religious minorities in Muslim-majority communities around the world.

In a blow to the efforts of Islamophobes to paint all Muslims as linked to “terrorism,” Judge James Cacheris granted Jamal Abusamhadaneh citizenship. Ending a five year ordeal of vilification and hate.

PARIS — Tensions between French authorities and the country’s Islamic community resurfaced on Tuesday after it emerged that four summer camp instructors had been sacked for fasting during Ramadan.

Opponents of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro filed a motion in federal court Monday claiming that U.S. District Judge Todd Campbell accepted “false allegations” in affirming that the controversial mosque can continue its opening process.

Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shaherkani is one of only two Saudi women to travel to London after the International Olympic Committee lobbied the conservative Islamic kingdom to end its refusal to send women to the Games.

(newschannel5)

NASHVILLE, Tenn.- The question of religion is playing a major role in one of the most heated congressional primary races in the country.

BY: DINA MALKI, examiner.com

United Methodist Rev. Wess Magruder has not only decided to observe the Ramadan fast this year with his Muslim friends, blog about his experience, but break his fast with Muslims as well.

by TheYoungTurks

Did Wes Harris, founder and chairman of the Original North Phoenix Tea Party, say that that there is ‘no such thing as a moderate Jew’ along with other outrageous anti-Jewish statements?

Forty-two religious and secular organizations united on Thursday in condemning conservative lawmakers’ allegations that Muslim-American individuals connected to the U.S. government may be trying to spread the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sam Kharoba fancies himself an “expert” on terrorism. The Jordanian-born Kharoba, a Christian, believes the founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, is a “pedophile, a serial killer, a rapist.”

Nearly one-third of respondents said they did not know the president’s religion, according to the poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The park they are planning to build together is just a concept now. An artist’s rendering of a wish list. Hope on paper.

But both Cordova congregations have started before with less.

Despite criticism from leading Republicans over their attacks on a notable senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a group of House Republicans conducting a witch hunt on government officials supposedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are doubling down on their accusations.

A Cologne court has decreed that a child’s circumcision is “bodily harm” and thus verboten. Unless the German Bundestag intervenes, which it has pledged to do, about four million Muslims and 100,000-plus Jews will have to practice a central part of their religion in the catacombs of Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.

There is a controversy in Edmond involving the expansion of a local mosque. The small mosque, which has been in Edmond for 20 years, sits across from the University of Central Oklahoma. Officials have requested permits to expand the building to five times the size it is now.

State Sen. David Storobin has joined the hopeless fight against a mosque being built in Sheepshead Bay – a battle that’s been repeatedly quashed in the courts and has left political insiders believing that the newly minted legislator is more concerned with winning votes than helping mosque opponents

Last week, prominent Muslim commentator Mehdi Hasan argued that fear-mongering and negative stereotyping of Muslims in public life has spun out of control.

AURORA – The Muslim community in Colorado joined thousands of fellow Americans on Monday, July 23, in mourning the victims of a shooting spree at a crowded midnight movie. “We are part of this community,” Dr. Ashraf Azeem, a local pediatrician, told Reuters.

A building superintendent at an apartment complex just off the Rutgers University campus called the New Brunswick Police 911 line in June 2009. He said his staff had been conducting a routine inspection and came across something suspicious.

In 1995, I was a student delegate at the United Nation’s 50th Anniversary conference on religious harmony held in San Francisco. We began by reciting verses from each of the world’s major faiths, including an Islamic prayer that was listed as the “Mohamedan Prayer.”

by Robert Grenier, Former CIA station chief Robert Grenier heads ERG partners, a financial consultancy firm

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Monks who played a vital role in Burma’s recent struggle for democracy have been accused of fuelling ethnic tensions in the country by calling on people to shun a Muslim community that has suffered decades of abuse.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. – A Texas man accused of making terrorist threats against a local mosque has pleaded not guilty.

Javier Alan Correa turned himself in to U.S. Marshals in Nashville for processing on Monday.

A prominent Phoenix tea party leader who believes Muslims cannot be trusted to be loyal to the United States and should not be working for the federal government is incensed with U.S. Sen. John McCain’s defense of a top State Department official and is eying a recall drive against Arizona’s senior senator.

Subtle Islamophobia has been a part of U.S. national discourse for a very long time, but up until recently, the rabid, vitriolic, and out-in-the-open form of anti-Muslim hysteria of the cyber-world was limited to websites like Jihad Watch.

There are numerous articles on The American Muslim (TAM) discussing Gaffney and the CSP. This article will become the “backgrounder” providing the information in an abbreviated format with links to references for more detailed discussions of particular issues.

by Joseph Harker (Guardian UK)

By now surely everyone knows the case of the eight men convicted of picking vulnerable underage girls off the streets, then plying them with drink and drugs before having sex with them.

AURORA — In 2009, Najibullah Zazi sent three e-mails from his Aurora apartment to a suspected terrorist in Pakistan asking about the ingredients necessary to bake something for an upcoming marriage.

(Via Comedy Central)

Jon Stewart skewers Michele Bachmann’s witch-hunt against Huma Abedin.

Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy were in the news recently due to the widely condemned slanders that he fed to politicians such as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann about so-called “Muslim Brotherhood infiltration” into our government.

A new super PAC targeting a Tennessee House primary has raised all its funds from a board member of a local anti-Islamic conservative group who is also the one-time finance chairman of one of the candidates in the race.

It is interesting how many of those in Congress who have an Islamophobia problem are members of the same group CAPITOL MINISTRIES which hosts regular Christian Bible studies for, and ministers to, members of Congress.

By TRAVIS LOLLER, Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A federal judge ordered a Tennessee county on Wednesday to move ahead with opening a Muslim congregation’s newly built mosque after a two-year fight from opponents.

It is curious that AFDI/SIOA/SION thinks that the proper response to a political ad focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, placed by a non-Muslim organization is to attack Islam and Muslims.