Roger Scruton’s sacking exposes the Tories’ cowardice

.... So what are the ‘outrageous remarks’? It appeared that Scruton had said that Islamophobia is ‘a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’. Which is true.

He also said that ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’ A fact which is also true. Obviously since the British Labour party became a party of anti-Semites it has become exceptionally important to pretend that anti-Semitism is equally prevalent on the political right in Britain and that to criticise any of the actions of George Soros is in fact simply to indulge in anti-Semitism equivalent to that rolling through the Labour party. [The Spectator] Read more

Government sacks Roger Scruton after remarks about Soros and Islamophobia

.... Scruton, who has been a friend of Orbán for more than 30 years, denied that he was antisemitic or Islamophobic. He said Islamophobia had been “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”.

Scruton also said: “Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims”, and accused the Chinese of “creating robots out of their own people”.

Scruton’s sacking follows Labour-led calls for his dismissal. His comments came at an especially awkward time for the Conservatives as the party has been coming under increasing scrutiny over its stance on Islamophobia while continuing to attack Labour for antisemitism. [The Guardian] Read more

Britain has a moral duty to oppose Brunei’s attack on human rights

.... Brunei is now the eighth country that can use the death penalty to punish consensual same-sex sexual activity. Those convicted of anal sex or adultery can be stoned to death, public flogging is authorised as a “punishment” for lesbian sex and for abortion, and trans people can be criminalised through charges of “indecent” dressing.

This state-sponsored violence against people for their sexuality will appal us all. The oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people sits alongside a broader programme of attacks on women’s rights, with women facing punishment for pregnancy outside of marriage. [The Times (£)] Read more

Teacher at centre of LGBT row in Birmingham received death threat

Andrew Moffat says his lessons were not accepted by some Muslim parents, adding: "You can't teach someone to be gay". The teacher at the centre of the row over LGBT lessons has told Sky News he received a death threat and has been given advice from police about how he travels to and from school.

Andrew Moffat, the assistant head teacher at Parkfield Community School in Birmingham, wrote the No Outsiders programme that is used to teach diversity and equality in some schools.

Protests by mainly Muslim parents who object to their children learning about same-sex relationships have now spread from Parkfield to other schools in Birmingham and beyond.

Mr Moffat told Sky News: "I had a message saying, 'You won't last long'. There's been some very difficult messages to receive." [Sky News] Read more

Indonesian court upholds conviction of Buddhist woman who complained mosque was too loud

Indonesia's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a woman whose complaint about the volume of mosque loudspeakers led to an 18-month prison sentence for blasphemy.

In a March 27 ruling posted on the court's website on Monday, the court rejected the appeal by Meliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese, Buddhist resident from the island of Sumatra.

The court did not provide a reason for the decision.

Meliana's lawyers said she had made remarks in a private conversation in 2016 on the volume of mosque loudspeakers. Those remarks were twisted to appear like she was objecting to the call to prayer itself and repeated in the community and on social media, her legal team said. [ABC] Read more

Quebec moves to ban the burka and hijab for govt employees

It has been 10 years since Quebec’s Bouchard – Taylor Commission recommended that all public officials who embody the authority and the neutrality of the state and its institutions, such as judges, Crown prosecutors, police officers, prison guards and the president and vice-president of the National Assembly of Québec be prohibited from wearing any visible religious symbols such as the hijab, turbans, yarmulkes and the crucifix.

Four consecutive governments have attempted to implement a law on separation of church and state, but have failed. This time the likelihood of success is certain.

The fact is that while the Sikh turban, Jewish yarmulkes and the Catholic crucifix are definitely religious symbols, the hijab is not. Rather it is a political symbol that until the late 1970s was unheard of in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Somalia and Nigeria. It was the uniform of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

Let’s hear from the world’s most prominent exponent of the hijab, newly-elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Somalia-born hijabi Ilhan Omar. Speaking to Vogue, Ms. Omar said: “To me, the hijab means power, liberation, beauty, and resistance.”

She admitted that “wearing her hijab allows her to be a walking billboard.” For Ilhan Omar the hijab is an Islamist flag just as Che Guevara’s beret was to wannabe revolutionaries or the KKK conehead is to White Supremacist ideology. [New Delhi Times] Read more

Parents should have no veto over LGBT lessons

Education secretary says he backs heads and teachers to make the right decisions over relationships and sex education. Damian Hinds has told headteachers that parents do not have a veto over what is taught in schools amid concerns over protests about how LGBT lessons are taught.

The education secretary has said that schools should listen to parents views on relationships and sex education (RSE) but backed school leaders and teachers to make the right decisions.

He has written to the Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the NAHT headteachers' union, following a meeting between NAHT and Department for Education officials. [Tes Global] Read more

LGBT+ lessons: Hundreds of children could be withdrawn from Birmingham school over relationships education, protesters warn

Hundreds of children could be withdrawn from a Birmingham primary school that is facing daily protests from families who oppose LGBT+ lessons.

Anderton Park Primary is the second school in the city to face demonstrations from parents who argue that their children are too young to learn about families with same-sex parents.

Now the protest organisers are threatening to take 400 children out of class amid an escalating row over equality lessons. The protesting parents want the headteacher to resign.

Shakeel Afsar, whose niece and nephew attend the school, said a mass withdrawal could take place if the school refuses to suspend teaching about two mummies or two daddies. [The Independent] Read more

Report slams council for "appearing to have wilfully ignored extremist activity"

A former counter-extremism co-ordinator for Waltham Forest Council is writing a national report that singles the borough out as having a “grim history of extremism and terrorism”.

The Guardian has been granted exclusive access to extracts of the report, which also covers Cardiff, Birmingham and Glasgow and is not yet published.

The report highlights incidents in Waltham Forest including a prominent Islamist being given an award by the council and collection boxes in high street stores for groups advocating extremist ideologies.

.... According to Ms Littlewood’s report, an ongoing issue in the borough is the area’s links to other Pakistani Islamist groups promoting extreme views.

Currently, a number of high street stores in Leyton have been found to have collection boxes on their till counters to raise money for Dalwat-e-Islami and Madani.

Dalwat-e-Islami are a non-political, religious group in Pakistan and extremists from their group shared posts on Facebook praising the man responsible for the murder of Ahmadi-Muslim Asad Shah in Glasgow in 2016. [East London & west Essex Guardian] Read more

There are two types of hijabs. The difference is huge

.... There are two vastly different kinds of hijabs: the democratic hijab, the head covering that a woman chooses to wear, and the tyrannical hijab, the one that a woman is forced to wear.

In the first kind, a woman has agency. She sets the terms of her hijab, appearing as ascetic or as appealing as she wishes. She can also wear makeup and fashionable clothing if she likes.

In the second kind of hijab, the woman has no agency. Where we lived, the terms were set by Iranian government authorities under a mandatory dress code that banned women from wearing makeup in public and forced them to wear a baggy, knee-length garment to fully disguise the shape of their bodies, over a pair of pants and closed-toed shoes. For a while, the authorities even decreed the colors that women could wear: gray, black, brown or navy.

Years of young Iranian women’s unofficial revisions of the code have succeeded in wearing down the government’s rigidity, but the official law remains unchanged and is capriciously enforced. A random sweep can result in mass arrests on a single day. [The Washington Post] Read more

'Taught the stones shouldn't be too big'

Brunei is introducing strict new anti-LGBT laws, with some offences punishable by stoning to death - a move which has sparked international condemnation.

Two Bruneians, who have left the country, share their experiences of what it's like growing up as an LGBT person in Brunei. [BBC] Read more

‘It’s dangerous to go out now’: young, gay and scared in Brunei

A day after it became legally possible to be stoned to death for having gay sex in Brunei, 21-year-old Zain* got a bitter taste of the new reality.

Walking down the street in skinny jeans and high-heeled boots, a flamboyant anomaly in the conservative sultanate, the university student became a target.

“I saw this van about 50 metres away,” said Zain, who is gay. “When the driver saw me, the van accelerated, just to run me over, but I dodged it. I was like, ‘Bitch, what the hell was that?’”

The Guardian view on Brunei and stoning: don’t leave it to celebrities to act

Read more

Last week Brunei – a tiny tropical nation on the island of Borneo, a former British protectorate that is home to 420,000 people – introduced harsh new sharia laws, including death by stoning for adultery and gay sex, and amputation of limbs for theft. [The Guardian] Read more

Social media to tackle under-reported Islamophobia in Bristol

A social media "poster" encouraging Muslims to report Islamophobic hate crimes has been designed in Bristol.

Rizwan Ahmed, from Bristol Muslim Cultural Society (BMCS), is behind the initiative.

He said the "under-reporting of Islamophobic abuse" made it difficult to gauge the scale of the problem.

The idea is part of a move by the Tackling Islamophobia Working Group (TIWG), set up to unite Muslim communities, police and other agencies.

Rizwan Ahmed said he came up with the idea after the success of a graphic he designed a few years ago, which used important dates from the Islamic calendar to help people plan time off work.

He said it was "so effective" that some of his friends in Bristol were "sent it from as far as Singapore."

He said Islamophobia was "becoming a growing issue" and people were not aware of what they could report, such as verbal abuse. [BBC] Read more

San Diego school district and parents reach settlement over Muslim civil rights program

The San Diego Unified School District settled in late March with a group of parents who sued over the district’s possible partnership with the Council on American–Islamic Relations, a national advocacy organization, on an anti-Islamophobic bullying program in schools.

The agreement specifies that guest speakers from religious organizations are not permitted to present to students on religious topics. Educators can’t show a preference for one religious viewpoint over another. And religions must be taught in the context of world history, with the “time and attention spent discussing each religion being proportionate to its impact on history and human development,” the agreement says.

But just how that’s measured, and who does the measuring, isn’t clear. [PRI.org] Read more

'German Islam': Can a state-led project succeed with a new interpretation of religion?

.... While the programme was launched in 2006 by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, it was mainly initiated to promote dialogue between representatives of the German government and the country's Muslim community, it significantly transformed over the years. Even though it was originally designed as a mechanism of communication and dialogue between the German state and Muslims living in Germany, the conference added a completely new dimension to its programme: redefining Islam.

The initiative to redefine and adjust Islam to German values combined with efforts to stimulate the integration of Muslims into German society is not an entirely new idea. In early 2000's former Interior Minister Otto Schily for example, raised this issue when saying that Muslims had to be assimilated and be prepared to adopt a "European Islam". [The New Arab] Read more

Adopting the new Islamophobia definition would be terrible for the Tories

I do not think I am alone in having real difficulty with the word Islamophobia and attempts to define it as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. Racism of any sort is unacceptable and catered for in the existing law, but this definition is impossibly vague. The reality is that it will preclude any criticism of “Muslimness” which, however well balanced and evidenced, will automatically be regarded as racist.

Let me give you an example. When I was a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we examined legislation to ensure that it did not involve any violations of human rights. For the same reason, we conducted thematic enquiries. I suggested the position of Muslim women in the UK might merit an enquiry.

A preliminary examination of the evidence suggested that an enquiry might be worthwhile. But the majority of the Committee decided against it on the basis that it might be regarded as anti-Muslim even to have an enquiry, unless all women were included. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the parliamentarians were simply too frightened of the consequences for their reputation of even embarking on the exercise. [The Spectator] Read more

Psychologist against LGBT+ lessons investigated by professional body for ‘unethical’ comments

A prominent campaigner against relationship and sex education (RSE) lessons including sections on LGBT+ partnerships, is being investigated by her professional body over comments deemed to be "unethical".

The British Psychological Society said it was “extremely concerned” by the views expressed by chartered psychologist Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett on sexual orientation and gender identity.

In a talk that was filmed, the Muslim convert who has led a campaign opposing mandatory RSE lessons in schools, said that many young Muslims were “turning to same-sex relationships because they haven’t had the guidance.”

It emerged after education experts have warned that recent protests outside two primary schools in Birmingham against LGBT+ inclusive lessons could spread across the country. [The Independent] Read more

Iranian women's rights activist says NZ hijab display after Christchurch shooting is 'heartbreaking'

A women's rights activist in Iran says her heart broke when she saw New Zealanders wearing the hijab in an attempt at solidarity following the Christchurch mosque attacks.

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist and journalist who hosts the website My Stealthy Freedom where women in Iran post photos without headscarves, admired Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's compassion, but was conflicted about the national display.

After 50 people were shot dead in two Christchurch mosques on March 15, photos of Ardern wearing a hijab went around the world, with many political commentators admiring her act of solidarity.

Alinejad, who has lived in self-imposed exile since 2009 and received death threats for her campaigning against Iran's obligatory wearing of headscarves, told Reuters: "I felt admiration that a prominent leader and women in New Zealand showed compassion to the Muslim community, but I also felt that you are using one of the most visible symbols of oppression for Muslim women in many countries for solidarity, and it also broke my heart. [NZ Herald] Read more

'It broke my heart': Iranian women's rights activists says she wishes the Jacinda Ardern hadn't worn the hijab to meet Muslims following the Christchurch mosque slaughter

An Iranian women's rights activist has spoken out against Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's decision to wear a hijab following the Christchurch mosque terror attacks.

Masih Alinejad is both an activist and journalist, and is outspoken in her condemnation of Iran's laws surrounding obligatory wearing of headscarves.

Ms Alinejad said seeing images of Ms Ardern wearing a headscarf in solidarity with the victims of the Christchurch massacre 'broke her heart'.

She said while she admired the New Zealand leader's compassion and desire to connect with her Muslim community, the headscarf is a sign of oppression for many women. [Daily Mail Australia] Read more

Homophobic and misogynistic books found in library at Islamic primary school

Zakariya Primary School on Romford Road has been rated ‘inadequate’ a second time by the inspectors after a visit in February.

In their report, inspectors say leaders at the school have not ‘taken effective steps to protect pupils from extreme views’.

One book the inspectors found said: ‘Many so-called wise people are committing it, but sodomy is such an awful thing that even animals abhor it except the pigs.’

Another said: ‘A wife must not deny herself to her husband… Moreover, the wife is not permitted to do anything that may render her companionship less desirable or less gratifying. If she does any such thing or neglects herself, the husband has the right to interfere with her freedom and to rectify the situation.’

While leaders at the school said the pupils do not use the library, the children told Ofsted that they do on a regular basis.

The management also said that these views are unacceptable and did not know the books were in the library. [Newham Recorder] Read more

Spielman: LGBT protests ‘setting terrible example for children’

The head of Ofsted has called on campaigners to halt protests outside the gates of schools that teach pupils about LGBT issues, claiming it “serves no one well to intimidate teachers”.

Chief inspector Amanda Spielman used her speech at the Muslim Teachers’ Association’s 40th anniversary yesterday to say the protests make a “difficult situation worse, while setting a terrible example for the children”.

“It is children’s voices that always get lost when adults stop talking and start shouting,” she added.

Protests over relationships and sex education have been taking place around the country, with many parents and religious groups citing concern about the teaching of LGBT issues and homophobia in schools. [Schools Week] Read more

LGBT lesson row head teachers 'feel alone' and unsupported

Head teachers involved in a row over primary school LGBT rights classes say they "feel alone" and unsupported.

Parents, mostly of Muslim faith, have protested outside Parkfield Community School in Birmingham arguing their children should not learn about same-sex relationships.

More than 85 heads met with Department for Education (DfE) officials and the council in Birmingham on Friday.

The DfE said the schools can teach LGBT content but do not have to.

The No Outsiders project was halted at Parkfield Community School after demonstrations by some parents who said they believed the subject was "undermining parental rights and authority".

Deputy head teacher Andrew Moffat, who devised the programme, has said it was not about sex education but "community cohesion" and "people getting along". [BBC] Read more

Iranian women's rights activist condemns Western feminists for wearing the hijab in 'solidarity', saying: 'Calling the compulsory headscarf my country's culture is INSULTING'

A women's rights activist in Iran has said it is 'insulting' for Western visitors to wear the hijab in an attempt at solidarity.

Masih Alinejad, who has spearheaded Iranian women's struggle against the head covering, said female dignitaries from Europe had left her fellow campaigners 'on their own' by choosing to wear the hijab when they visited Iran.

Rejecting the argument that visitors should wear the hijab out of 'respect for the culture of Iran', she said they were 'sending a message that men are more equal than women'.

Ms Alinejad, the founder of the White Wednesdays movement which saw many women remove their headscarves in protest, said she was battling against a 'discriminatory law'. [Daily Mail] Read more

I’d be wrong to stay silent about homophobia in Islam – even though I’ll get abuse for it

It is hard to be a progressive Muslim in today’s riven, regressive, fanatical and tribalised world. It just got harder. Since January, groups of parents in Birmingham – most British Muslim – have stood outside primary schools and protested against teachers who are committed to teaching children about equality and respect for all, including LGBTQ people. Hundreds of pupils have been kept out of school.

This unseemly conflict started at Parkfield Community School, judged outstanding by Ofsted and known for its broad and open learning environment. A welcoming sign outside is written in six different languages. Suddenly none of that mattered. Young mums and various agitators stood outside and railed against sex education classes which “promote” homosexuality to their innocent babes.

.... Yet talk to them about “Islamophobia” and you will hear the most passionate arguments and compelling stories about what that means and why it’s wrong. They cannot see their own double standards. Nor do they understand the impact of their iniquitous views on LGBTQ people as well as other Brits who have always stood up for migrants, refugees, racial and religious minorities.

Muslims are making enemies of friends just when we face an existential threat. The coming confrontations, they need to understand, will not be between gay people and Muslims, but decent humans and those who are set to destroy decency, mutuality and the common bonds of humanity. Which side will they be on? [inews.co.uk] Read more

UN slams 'inhuman' Brunei law on stoning for adultery, gay sex

The United Nations decried Monday new "cruel and inhuman" laws set to take effect in Brunei this week which impose death by stoning for gay sex and adultery, and amputations for theft.

"I appeal to the government to stop the entry into force of this draconian new penal code, which would mark a serious setback for human rights protections for the people of Brunei if implemented," UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet said in a statement.

Brunei, an absolute monarchy ruled for 51 years by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, has said it will implement the new penal code starting Wednesday.

Brunei first announced the measures in 2013, but implementation has been delayed, in the face of opposition by rights groups, and as officials worked out the practical details.

The new law stipulates the death penalty for a number of offences, including rape, adultery, sodomy, robbery and insulting or defaming the Prophet Mohammad. [AFP] Read more