Muslim group calls for preacher linked to Trump to be denied UK visa

Britain’s leading Muslim organisation has called on the Home Office to refuse a UK visa to a prominent US evangelical preacher with links to Donald Trump and a track record of Islamophobic and homophobic statements.

Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, has been invited to preach at a Christian festival in Blackpool this month.

The preacher, who said Trump’s election victory was evidence that “God’s hand” was at work, has called Islam “evil” and “wicked”, claimed Barack Obama’s “problem is that he was born a Muslim” and said Satan was the architect of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights.

The Muslim Council of Britain has joined three MPs, including a government whip, in demanding the Home Office apply its criteria on hate speech to Graham’s visa request. [The Guardian] Read more

Payout for ex-scout leader after niqab Darth Vader row

A scout leader who was expelled from the movement for comparing a colleague canoeing in a niqab to Darth Vader has accepted an out-of-court settlement.

Brian Walker, 62, wrote to the Scout's magazine saying a leader taking girls canoeing in a niqab would "most likely drown" wearing "that Darth Vader tent".

Mr Walker, who took legal action against the scouts, has been awarded an undisclosed settlement.

The Scout Association said the settlement does not imply he was right.

Mr Walker was immediately dismissed by the scout's district commissioner for Bristol South after writing to the association's official magazine in March 2017.

In his letter, which was unpublished, he wrote: "Canoeists don't dress like that.

"They need all round unobstructed vision so they protect the group, and of course they will most likely drown wearing that Darth Vader tent."

He also criticised the association for "promoting political correctness and interfaith issues" with a visit to a mosque but then advising using a non-religious venue for the St George's Day service. [BBC] Read more

Pay-off for Scout leader expelled for making ‘Darth Vader’ veil remark

A Scout master dismissed for comparing a Muslim leader who wore a niqab face veil to the Star Wars villain Darth Vader has accepted damages and legal costs from the Scouts.

Brian Walker, 63, received a payment of £1,500 in an out-of-court settlement, and withdrew a discrimination claim due to go to court in Bristol in November.

.... This weekend Walker, an assistant Explorer Scout leader who was involved with Scouting for 52 years, said he would donate the sum to the Christian Legal Centre, to spend on cases challenging anti-Christian discrimination.

.... He singled out an article featuring a female Muslim scout leader said to be taking girls canoeing while wearing a full Islamic veil. He wrote: “Hello! Canoeists don’t dress like this . . . because they need all-round unobstructed vision . . . Of course they will most likely drown wearing that Darth Vader tent!” [The Times (£)] Read more

Sweden: Social Democrat Candidate Claims Islamic Law More Important than Swedish Law

The Swedish Social Democrats have had to remove a parliamentary candidate from their national election list only days before the vote after they claimed Islamic law was more important than Swedish law.

The candidate, who was running in the municipality of Karlshamn in the south of the country, was deselected by the party after he was reported as making several controversial statements on the topic of Islam, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.

“He has said things like Islamic rules are more important than Swedish rules,” commented Per-Ola Matsson, Social Democrat group leader for Karlshamn. His statements are said to have been linked to the debate on the wearing of veils by women, the full face version of which was recently banned by neighbouring Denmark. [Breitbart London] Read more

Shaken Dutch lawmaker Wilders says no more Prophet cartoons, for now

Dutch lawmaker and anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders has said he has no plans, for now, to revive a competition of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed after it emerged as a motive for a stabbing in Amsterdam last week.

Wilders, speaking on the sidelines of a conference in Italy, expressed shock over the attack, in which a man stabbed and injured two American tourists at Amsterdam’s central station. Dutch media identified the assailant as a 19-year-old Afghan.

The attack came after Wilders canceled plans to hold the cartoon competition, which had also drawn a complaint by Pakistan’s new foreign minister, who said cartoon depictions of the Prophet could incite hate and intolerance. [Reuters] Read more

Germany: Anti-Immigration Party Surges in Popularity

.... "For long enough, many citizens from all walks of life have noticed that the problems of integrating even third- and fourth-generation immigrants have grown bigger, not smaller — especially among Turks. The mass immigration of the past three years, under the banner of 'the right to asylum,' has significantly increased the fear of parallel societies, of crime, and of cultural alienation.

"When I consider the often undifferentiated, blanket accusations against 'brown Chemnitz' [brown is the color of Nazism], then the established parties will not have to wonder why, almost without exception, they continue to lose to the colorful AfD.

"When concerned citizens increasingly are stigmatized as being Nazis — accusations which, incidentally, in their excessive use amount to a shameless trivialization of Nazi crimes — they often respond with the indifferent remark: 'Well, then I'm just a Nazi!' [Gatestone Institute] Read more

Sweden 'naive' about integration: ex-Peshmerga Swedish MP

Sweden's "naive" approach to integrating asylum seekers has opened the door to the far-right, an outspoken lawmaker told AFP ahead of elections expected to see the country's once-marginal anti-immigration party make gains.

Amineh Kakabaveh is an Iranian Kurdish ex-peshmerga fighter who sought asylum herself in Sweden in the 1990s and has been a member of parliament since 2008.

She has been a vocal critic of Sweden's handling of the 400,000 asylum seekers taken in since 2012, including 160,000 in 2015 alone, the highest number in Europe per capita.

Sweden is "increasingly divided", said the 40-year-old politician, whose views have earned her enemies among her own formerly-communist Left Party who accuse her of stigmatising immigrants.

Yet Kakabaveh is ruthless in her criticism of Sweden's shortcomings on integrating immigrants, giving it a failing grade.

"We have been naive. We have not been brave. We had no plan," she said, adding that this has enabled a rise in "fundamentalism" in Sweden's suburbs that has fuelled the far-right. [AFP] Read more

Sweden Sees Rise in Forced and Child Marriage Reports

According to the National Suppression of Honor Prevention of Childhood and Forced Marriage, a hotline set up for victims, the number of calls from those wanting to get out of forced or child marriages has steadily increased in Sweden.

Set up just over four years ago, the organisation’s hotline has seen 101 children and young people come to them for help in getting out of forced marriages between 2014 and 2018, SVT reports.

This year, however, the number of calls has dramatically increased with the hotline operators claiming to have received 132 calls relating to child and forced marriages, which is set to pass last year’s total of 139.

Despite being able to identify 101 potential victims of forced or child marriage, both of which are illegal in Sweden, only six cases have actually seen court convictions. [Breitbart London] Read more

Muslim groups call for female circumcision to be medicalised

A number of Sri Lankan Muslim groups have called on the government to medicalise female circumcision.

In representations made to the Parliamentary Committee on Women and Gender, members of the All Ceylon Jamiyathul Ulama, All Ceylon YMMA Conference, Centre for Islamic Studies and United Religions Initiative urged the Health Ministry to withdraw a recent circular prohibiting medical professionals from carrying out female circumcision.

In their submission, the joint Muslim groups stated that the Muslim community is very concerned about moves to ban this obligatory Islamic duty on the grounds that it is Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

“We wish to categorically state that the practice of female circumcision is an obligatory Islamic duty, that it confers numerous benefits and is not Female Genital Mutilation." [Dailymirror Newsletter] Read more

Cantonal initiative to ban headgear in schools ruled invalid

The Federal Court says that an initiative by the conservative right Swiss People’s Party to ban head coverings in schools in the southern canton of Valais is invalid. It confirms the decision taken by the Valais parliament.

The People’s Party proposal had attracted more than 4,000 backers after its launch in 2016. This amount of backing automatically triggers a vote, according to Swiss law. After its rejection by the cantonal parliament in December 2017, the party took the issue to the Federal Courtexternal link in Lausanne, Switzerland’s highest instance.

In a rulingexternal link made public on Friday, the Federal Court said that an initiative should not go against cantonal, national or international law.

The court said that even if the initiative’s wording was vague – it calls for a ban on headgear such as hats, helmets and scarves – the implicit meaning was clear: it was meant to ban wearing veils or headscarves. This was clear from the poster campaign during signature collection for the initiative, which featured a picture of a woman wearing a veil and the slogan “no to headscarves in schools”. The press release at the beginning of the campaign also dealt with this issue. [swissinfo.ch] Read more

Pakistan removes economist from key role following Islamist backlash

Pakistan’s new government canceled the appointment of a renowned Princeton economist to its Economic Advisory Council, an official said on Friday, after a strong backlash against the choice of a member of the Ahmadi religious minority.

The failure of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government to resist pressure to drop economist Atif Mian reflects the increasing clout of hardline Islamists, whose parties won around 10 percent of the vote at the last election in July.

Faced with a looming balance of payments crisis that may force the country to seek a fresh bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or other lenders, the government had picked Mian to join an 18-member council to advise prime minister Khan.

Aged 43, and a scholar in the field of finance and macroeconomics, Mian is regarded as one of the world’s top young economists.

The prime minister’s adviser on media, Iftikhar Durrani, confirmed that Mian’s appointment had been revoked, while the government’s main spokesman alluded to the pressure the government had come under from religious quarters. [Reuters] Read more

German far right fuels Muslim ‘takeover’ fears

That question is once again at the center of the country’s public discourse amid the violent protests that followed last week’s brutal killing of a German man, allegedly at the hands of two Muslim refugees, and the publication of a new book titled “Hostile Takeover, how Islam halts progress and threatens society.

On Saturday, about 11,000 people (8,000 right-wing and far-right protesters and about 3,000 anti-Nazis, according to police estimates) took to the streets of the eastern German city of Chemnitz, where the killing occurred. Eighteen people were injured, including a TV reporter who was thrown down a flight of stairs.

There’s nothing new about such clashes, or even the debate over Islam. What the past week reveals, however, is the degree to which the refugee influx since 2015 continues to dominate the country’s politics and fuel support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The pictures of marauding neo-Nazis in Chemnitz suggest the German government has largely failed to keep the violent extreme right in check, despite decades of trying. [POLITICO] Read more

Burqa ban: Danish police fine tourist after she tries to renew visa while wearing face veil

Police in Denmark have fined a Turkish tourist 1,000 kroner (£121) after she entered a police station to renew her visa while wearing a full-face covering.

Officers in Aarhus, in western Denmark, said the 48-year-old woman was unaware of the Scandinavian nation’s recent law making it unlawful to wear such garments in public.

The contentious “burqa ban” prohibits anyone from wearing garments which cover the face, including burqas and niqabs.

Police said the woman paid the fine, removed her full-face cover and walked away. They provided no further details. [The Independent] Read more

Islam shows its female face with rise of women mosques

Relegated to the basement, silenced by the imam and barred from the front door, some Muslim women have had enough of male domination at the mosque and are setting up their own.

From Copenhagen to Los Angeles, a handful of female mosques now cater to Muslim women who want their own place of worship, just as men have had through the ages.

“It is possible to change a narrative that has been patriarchal for centuries,” Sherin Khankan, founder of Europe’s first women’s mosque, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Her first-floor mosque - adjacent to a clothes shop - is invisible from the busy Danish shopping street below. But behind its anonymous, gray door, a quiet revolution is brewing.

For the past two years, women have been leading prayers, delivering sermons and running Copenhagen’s Mariam Mosque - though Khankan says she is not challenging the Koran, just rewriting a male-dominated way of worship. [Reuters] Read more

Saudi Arabia Will Now Punish Online Satire With Five-year Jail Term

Saudi Arabia has announced it will punish online satire with jail sentences of up to five years, as the kingdom continues its crackdown on political dissent.

Saudi leaders are treading a fine line between societal reform and political repression, seeking to retain absolute power while modernizing the conservative nation.

In a statement Tuesday, the country’s public prosecutor said any online content that “disrupts public order” would be subject to new punishments, AFP reported.

“Producing and distributing content that ridicules, mocks, provokes and disrupts public order, religious values and public morals through social media...will be considered a cybercrime punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of three million riyals ($800,000),” the tweet said.

The country’s cyber crackdown has raised concerns among human rights groups, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—son and heir to the elderly King Salman and considered the power behind the throne—seeks to maintain the crown's tight control of society. [Newsweek] Read more

Saudi Arabia declares online satire punishable offence

Saudi Arabia will punish online satire that "disrupts public order" with up to five years in prison, the public prosecutor said Tuesday, as the kingdom cracks down on dissent.

"Producing and distributing content that ridicules, mocks, provokes and disrupts public order, religious values and public morals through social media ... will be considered a cybercrime punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of three million riyals ($800,000)," the public prosecution tweeted late Monday.

The kingdom's powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has drawn harsh criticism from rights groups over the targeting of human rights activists and political dissidents across the spectrum since his appointment in June 2017.

Saudi Arabia's legislation on cybercrime has sparked concern among international rights groups in the past.

Dozens of Saudi citizens have been convicted on charges linked to dissent under a previous sweeping law, particularly linked to posts on Twitter. [AFP] Read more

'We need to grow up': Malaysian MPs condemn caning over lesbian sex

A Malaysian MP has called for laws that criminalise homosexuality to be immediately abolished amid outcry over the caning of two women convicted by a sharia court of attempting to have lesbian sex.

Charles Santiago, a parliamentary member from the Malaysian state of Selangor, expressed his outrage in a series of tweets after the punishment was carried out in the Terengganu court on Monday morning.

That two women were caned while “100 people gawked at them” in the public gallery of the court was shocking and humiliating, he wrote on Twitter.

“We need to stop targeting the LGBT community. We need to stop invading their privacy. We need to stop abusing them. We need to grow up as a society and learn to embrace diversity,” he wrote. [The Guardian] Read more

Growing group of young Salafists increasingly isolated from society: report

There is a growing group of young salafists in the Netherlands who politicians can't get a grip on, according to a study by Mohammad Nazar Soroush at Tilburg University, for which he is receiving his doctorate, NOS reports.

Nazar Soroush studied salafist Muslims in the Netherlands for 15 years. He visited 64 religious meetings over the past three years, and listened and watched young salafists at mosques, foundations and leisure activities. Salafists are Muslims who try to live as strictly as possible to the authentic, pure form of Islam.

The young salafists seek the protection of a closed community, that has traits of a family, Nazar Soroush said. What struck the researcher, was how negative the young people are about the world outside theirs.

"They can not spend time with old friends, or people who are not their ideological brothers", he said to NOS. "A girl asked what she should say to a colleague who says salam aleikum when she comes in. The answer: do not say 'As-salamu alaikum' (peace be upon you) but 'Aleikum' (upon you), because the colleague as non-Muslim is not worthy of peace." [NL Times] Read more

Britain's Burka Blues: "I'd Like to Thank Boris Johnson"

.... All the while, it is not the Islamic religion that justifies these suppressions but a culturally-defined patriarchal system that could not be more out of keeping with Western societies, where many women are increasingly asking to be in command of their lives, and where men, however powerful, who abuse women are exposed – and sometimes arrested, tried and imprisoned. Yet we are expected to feel guilty if we dare to question what some Muslim women question: if shariah law is really the most wholesome lifestyle for many women.

The Netherlands is just the latest EU country to have banned the burqa in a major step towards affirming our democratic convictions about human rights and respect for the autonomy and individuality of everyone. Already, some twelve European countries have passed laws for full or partial bans on the burqa, while the UK government still stumbles over even the slightest restriction suggested. [Gatestone Institute] Read more

We need a ‘German Islam,’ says interior ministry

Germany will tighten control over foreign influence of its Muslim community, State Secretary for the Interior Ministry Markus Kerber said Monday, after a week of violent far-right clashes in eastern Germany.

“We have watched foreign forces dictate to German Muslims how to practice their religion for far too long,” Kerber told Tagesspiegel in an interview published Monday. “And because they also have their home here, we will now lend them more support in strengthening their self-confidence.”

“We want to create more discussion formats for German Muslims,” Kerber added. “The minister will also actively encourage German Muslims to conduct a debate on a German Islam.”

According to Kerber, that debate will take place within the so-called Islamkonferenz, which Kerber set up as the interior ministry’s head of policy under Wolfgang Schäuble between 2006-2009 as a “forum for dialogue” on the relationship between Islam and the state.

Kerber responded to Interior Minister Horst Seehofer’s controversial claim earlier this year that Islam “doesn’t belong in Germany” by saying: “If there is to be an Islam that belongs to Germany, German Muslims must define it as ‘German Islam.'” [POLITICO] Read more

Man who stabbed American tourists in Amsterdam names Wilders, cites 'insults' to Islam

A man who stabbed two American tourists at Amsterdam’s central station last week named Dutch, anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders during police questioning and said he was motivated by perceived insults to Islam in the Netherlands, prosecutors said on Monday.

The man, identified by Dutch media as Jawed S., is a 19-year-old Afghan with residency in Germany, who traveled to Amsterdam to carry out an attack because of what he said were repeated insults to God, the Koran and Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, prosecutors said in a statement. [Reuters] Read more

LGBT rights: Malaysia women caned for attempting to have lesbian sex

Two Malaysian women convicted of attempting to have lesbian sex in a car have been caned in a religious court.

The Muslim women, aged 22 and 32, were each caned six times in the Sharia High Court in the state of Terengganu.

According to an official, this is the state's first conviction for same-sex relations and its first public caning.

Human rights activists reacted with outrage. Homosexual activity is illegal under both secular and religious laws.

The caning was witnessed by more than 100 people, according to local news outlet The Star. [BBC] Read more

Trojan Horse reviewed by Andrew Gilligan — the man who helped report the scandal

A new play distorts the truth of how Muslim hardliners took over schools in Birmingham.

.... Trojan Horse does have a stab at balance: a character representing the head teachers targeted by the plotters gets a small amount of stage time, but her removal is shown as justified. Then there’s the difficult-to-avoid matter that, in leaked WhatsApp messages, Razwan Faraz, Alam’s co-plotter and deputy head of one of the schools, spoke of women’s “perpetual role serving men” and called gay people “satanic” and “animals”. They get round this by saying, well, some Tory MPs voted against gay marriage, you know.

Making excuses for some of the most illiberal elements in society turns out to be strangely popular with the liberal classes. A full house of rapt white faces watched the show with me, and it has, perhaps inevitably, won the Amnesty freedom of expression award.

But documentary it is not. This production’s claim to our attention is its assertion to be true. But what it actually shows, once again, is how tricky and dangerous a genre is documentary-drama. It can end up falling between two stools, neither good journalism nor good drama. [The Times (£)] Read more

The inevitability of Fortress Europe

Watching European attempts to come to terms with the problem of migrants from the Third World is to watch a slow-motion train crash. All manner of liberal nostrums about the duty to accept refugees, the right to free movement within the EU and even the notion of a secular indifference to religious distinctions are all being tested to destruction.

There seems only one possible conclusion: a Fortress Europe with distinct echoes from its past as Christendom. This may not be what Europe’s elites would choose but popular pressure seems unlikely to allow anything else.

.... At the end of the book all that Wolfreys has established is that there are frictions between Muslims and non-Muslims at every level of French society. Wolfreys has merely taken one side in that conflict.

As so often happens, anti-Islamic feeling is then denounced as racism but that is only true in the same sense that, say, English anti-popery was often conflated with hostility to the Irish or Spanish. The more important point is that a clash of civilisations really is happening and, as we surely all sense, the present rather silly debates about hijabs, niqabs and burkas are merely the opening skirmishes. [Standpoint] Read more

Islamic education in schools must focus on Islamic way of life: PM

The teaching of Islamic subjects, especially in kindergartens, will emphasise the inculcation of positive values among Muslim students.

Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said that Islamic education in kindergartens and schools is currently focussed on the techniques of performing prayers, instead of the Islamic way of life.

"We want to empower kindergartens, because that is where we want to nurture our children.

"We will ensure that Islamic values will be given focus in the subject, instead of politics.

"(Current) Islamic education is limited to teaching certain prayers, not the Islamic way of life.

"This is what we want to change in our education system… so that it would work to build the characters (of students) according to Islamic values," Dr Mahathir said during a question-and-answer session at the Congress on the Future of the Bumiputera and the Nation 2018 today.

The session was moderated by Economic Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Azmin Ali. Also present was Dr Mahathir's wife Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali and PKR de facto leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

Dr Mahathir said as for non-Muslims, the subject of moral education will continue to be taught. [New Straits Times] Read more