Ihjaz Ali, 41, Umar Javed, 37, and Mehboob Hussain, 44, are accused of distributing threatening written material intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation after they were said to have handed out leaflets calling for the death penalty for homosexuals.
Two of their alleged accomplices, Razwan Javed, 30, and Kabir Ahmed, 27, were charged with the same offence on Thursday.
Twenty four Islamic associations have founded an Islamic Council in the Basque Country on 8th of December. The Council has the aim to represent the Islamic communities and to be a unique interlocutor with the regional government. The Muslim Basque Council is open to all cultural, political and religious associations mainly composed by Muslims and which work for the normalization of the Islam in the Basque society.
(source)
Algerian parents are risking the lives of their children by sending them to Europe aboard unsafe craft to take advantage of better social care facilities, a senior official said Monday.
Italian police say they have arrested three Moroccans suspected of preparing and spreading online material that could be used for training of terrorists.
Police said the three suspects were picked up before dawn Monday in and around Catanzaro, in southern Italy.
(source)
he Prime Minister of the Brussels Region, Charles Picqué (Francophone socialist), has called for legislation to ban the burqa and the niqab, a garment that covers the face entirely except for a small split for the eyes. Mr Picqué was speaking after a court in the Brussels borough of Etterbeek acquitted a woman who was taken to court for wearing the niqab.
(source)
(protesters in Paris)
The recently appointed leader of France’s far-right National Front party has once again turned her fire Islam, saying it is “absolutely not compatible” with a secular society. Le Pen, who took over as head of the party two weeks ago, has regularly faced accusations of Islamaphobia.
About 50 Egyptians demonstrated in front of the Egyptian embassy in the Hague Friday.
A Turkish woman living in Bern will spend three years and six moths behind bars for encouraging the family of her daughter-in-law to carry out an “honor” crime against her.
The 66-year-old woman pressured the woman’s father and brothers into revenge for what she alleged was the woman’s “risqué lifestyle”, a criminal court was told.
The victim was never harmed but she pressed charges three years ago.
(source)
Poland’s Roman Catholic Church is observing Islam Day, which closes the week of ‘Prayer for Christian Unity’.
The main ceremonies are being held in St. Florian’s church in Warsaw and will gather Catholics and Muslims today at a meeting devoted to ways of overcoming violence between various religious denominations.
(source)
In 2030, Muslims are projected to make up more than 10% of the total population in 10 European countries: Kosovo (93.5%), Albania (83.2%), Bosnia-Herzegovina (42.7%), Republic of Macedonia (40.3%), Montenegro (21.5%), Bulgaria (15.7%), Russia (14.4%), Georgia (11.5%), France (10.3%) and Belgium (10.2%).
Dutch police said Wednesday they had stopped a man of Egyptian descent from setting himself on fire outside his country's embassy in The Hague.
"When police came near him, they saw the man dousing himself with a liquid," possibly spirits, it said. "The agents overpowered the man as he was trying to set himself on fire using a lighter."
(source)
Folkestone residents have spoken at their shock at the fatal stabbing of an Afghan man in the street last night.
People have described the area of town where the killing happened as ‘a no go area after dark’.
One man died and five are in hospital after the fight which is believed to be the culmination of weeks of friction between rival Afghan gangs.
Kosovo's leadership found itself under pressure on Tuesday after the Council of Europe formally endorsed a report accusing senior members of the tiny Balkan nation's government of complicity in organ trafficking
The 27-page report, compiled last year by the body's special rapporteur, Dick Marty, implicated incumbent Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and other former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in charges that also included drug trafficking during and after the Kosovo War in the late 1990s.
The Equal Treatment Commission has ruled that schools have a say in the way in which students wear headscarves.
The commission was responding to the case of the Gerrit Rietveld College in the city of Utrecht, where 50 students objected to a new dress code. This only allows Muslim girls to cover their heads as long as 90 percent of the face remains visible. Headgear which covers the chin or eyebrows, for example, is regarded as hindering communication between student and teacher.
The commission has backed the college and says the question of communication is of sufficient importance. It also noted that the code applies to everyone. Hairstyles which cover the eyes are also banned.
(source)
Muslim and Jewish students trained in "conflict resolution" have been recruited by universities to help calm tensions between the groups.
The "campus ambassadors" will start work tomorrow at 10 institutions, including four in London as well as Oxford and Cambridge.
More than 250 North African immigrants seeking political asylum in Greece began a hunger strike on Tuesday after occupying a university campus in central Athens.
The immigrants, who have been employed in menial jobs on the southern Mediterranean island of Crete, arrived at the port of Pireaus in the early hours on Sunday and then occupied the first floor of the Law Faculty in central Athens on Monday.
Another 50 immigrants headed to the northern port city of Thessaloniki to carry out a similar protest there.
The dean of the Law Faculty closed the central Athens building until at least Friday.
In a separate incident, seven Afghan refugees sewed their mouths shut to protest at the slow pace with which their asylum applications were being processed by the Greek authorities.
(source)
A German Muslim who says he trained with a terrorist group in Pakistan has disclosed in a radio interview that he went on to served in the German Navy until he was expelled as a security risk.
Yannick Nasir, 23, said he was a trainee in 2003 at a camp run by the radical Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, believed to be behind the attacks in Mumbai, India which killed 164 people in 2008.
In recent years, Finland’s largest cities have developed areas where more than a fifth of the population is of foreign origin. In these city parts, the changeability of people is great, and the original Finnish population continues to decrease.
In Helsinki’s Itäkeskus and other eastern residential areas, for example, more than one fifth of the population have foreign backgrounds, and their number is increasing by about one percent every year.
For her soon-to-be checked doctoral thesis for the University of Helsinki’s Geography Department, researcher Katja Vilkama studied cities’ immigrant concentrations.
According to Vilkama, areas like Itäkeskus are entryways into Finnish society. However, once immigrants start to earn more and become familiar with Finnish society, they often leave these city areas behind.
(source)
A 30-year-old man was arrested Friday evening in Berlin's Neukölln district on suspicion of arson, following a series of attacks on several mosques in the German capital, a police spokesman said.
Investigators apprehended the man at the Blaschkoallee U-Bahn station.
The arrest follows a wave of arson attacks on Muslim houses of worship in Berlin in recent months. No one was injured, but the fires caused property damage in every case.
The assailant or assailants routinely left messages behind at the scene. Police did not describe the notes in detail, but media reports said the messages were collages of newspaper articles.
(source)
Scotland’s only Muslim MP last night backed warnings from a Tory cabinet minister that Islamophobia has become more widespread and socially acceptable in Britain.
(...)
Anas Sarwar, who represents Glasgow Central and is the son of Mohammad Sarwar, the first Muslim to be elected to the House of Commons in 1997, said that the peer’s comments were to be welcomed.
Asked about the “dinner table test”, the Labour MP said: “There is no doubt that there has been a rise in Islamophiobia in this country since 9/11, the war in Iraq and the 7/7 bombings.
A judge today condemned the 'enormous emotional pressure' exerted on women in Muslim communities after a rape case collapsed at the eleventh hour when the wife of an Asian man refused to give evidence against him.
The 35-year-old woman had accused her 34-year-old husband - a convicted sex offender - of raping her twice and was due to testify against him at a trial earlier this week.
But prosecutors were forced to offer no evidence and the case collapsed when the women suddenly decided to retract the allegations.
A German national who served as a senior member of al Qaeda's external operations branch as well as a leader in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was killed during fighting last year in Afghanistan.
Bekkay Harrach, a German national who operated along the Afghan-Pakistani border, was killed while leading an assault on the Bagram Airfield in central Afghanistan, according to a martyrdom statement recently released by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Harrach was also known as Al Hafidh Abu Talha al Almani.
(source)
Via SvD (PDF):
Foreign Minister Bildt estimated that approximately 100,000 Iraqis live in Sweden and told Ambassador Crocker that if the United States accepted Iraqi asylees and refugees at the same pace, the US would have over 500,000 Iraqi residents. He explained that the majority were Kurds who fled the former regime,s persecution but stressed that since 2003, most Iraqis arriving in Sweden were Arabs.
The Spanish ombudswoman, charged with defending citizens' rights, on Thursday defended Muslim women's right to wear the all-body veil, or burqa, if they want to do so.
Maria Luisa Cava de Llano said she was not against the burqa as long as it did not signal 'submission to the man and degrade the female condition.'
However, she said it was 'a different matter' if the burqa was banned for reasons of public order.
(source)
Dozens of exiled Tunisians protested outside the Tunisian embassy in Bern today, wanting their passports returned to them.
Some of the exiles have been in Switzerland for years, but following the change in government and the continued political unrest in Tunisian streets, the demonstrators said they wanted to return.
(source)
Prime Minister David Cameron has said he hopes Britain and France can open up a new front in the fight against violent extremism by working together to prevent the radicalisation of young Muslims.
After talks with French prime minister Francois Fillon, Mr Cameron said: "I am becoming increasingly convinced it is not enough just to target violent extremism - we have to target extremism itself.
"We have to drain the water from the swamp in which the violent extremism grows. I am sure that Britain and France can work together on this and learn from each other."
(source)
The City Council’s Environment and Technical Committee has given its final approval to zoning changes that will permit the construction of two mosques, one in the Amager district and one in the Nordvest district.
Russia will soon launch a Muslim television channel in the hope it will foster tolerance after the capital saw some of the worst clashes since the fall of the Soviet Union, state-run media reported on Tuesday.
Proposed by President Dmitry Medvedev two years ago, the satellite channel will go on air in February or March across Russia, home to some 20 million Muslims, or a seventh of the country's population.
"We believe it is necessary to cultivate a spirit of tolerance towards representatives of other faiths," RIA news agency quoted Russia's chief Mufti Ravil Gaynutdin as saying, adding programmes will be designed for a young audience.
(source)
CATALUNYA High Court has suspended the ban on the Burkha in public places imposed by Lleida city council in October.
The verdict, passed on Tuesday, January 12, says the ban will be lifted until a decision has been made by a judge on the appeal put forward by the Muslim association Watani.
(source)
Several dozen extremists in Finland have links to terrorists, according to the police. The majority of potential terrorists reside in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.
The authorities say that the terrorist threat in Finland continues to be small, but the number of potential terrorists has grown in recent years.
German federal prosecutors said Monday they had charged a Libyan man with acting as a spy in Germany to collect information on exiled members of the Libyan opposition.
The suspect, identified only as 46-year-old Omar K., stands accused of monitoring the Libyan opposition in Germany between May 2010 and his arrest in September, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement.
Omar K. is believed to have reported to his superior officer in Germany in return for payment. A Berlin court sentenced the officer, identified only as Abdel A., and a member of his network to jail terms last week.
(source)
Ekrem Şahin, a 23-year-old Turkish inmate who was serving a two-year sentence in Denmark’s Kolding Prison passed away after he was severely beaten by prison guards and went into a coma.
A group of relatives of deposed Tunisian leader Zine Abidine Ben Ali have taken refuge in a hotel at Disneyland Paris, just outside the French capital, a security source told AFP on Saturday.
Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Friday as he and members of his family and inner circle escaped a street uprising against his 23 years of authoritarian rule. He is himself now in Saudi Arabia after France refused to allow him entry.
(source)
One third of asylum seekers and refugees who arrive in Finland under the age of 24 are severely traumatised or exhibit visible symptoms of trauma.
Yet only one third of these people receive proper treatment in Finland, according to a study by the Helsinki Deaconess Institute.
Nearly 1,000 children or youth in need of treatment arrive in the country annually. Only one in three receives psychiatric or psychotherapeutic treatment. The main problems are long waiting lists and a lack of professional skills at care facilities. Trauma may also go unnoticed as children are often unwilling to talk about difficult experiences.(source)
Each time she goes to sleep, Valbona (35), from Peja, western Kosovo, looks at her wedding photograph taken 13 years ago. Beside her, she sees her smiling husband.
Today, that moment is just a memory. Two years ago, her husband remarried a German woman. Not only did Valbona, mother of their four children aged four to 11, know of his plan, she approved it.
This is because Valbona is not really divorced in the eyes of her family or the wider community.
The Turkish government has fiercely criticised the new Dutch government's stricter immigration and integration policies. Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reports that Ankara's Labour and Social Security Minister Faruk Çelik said the new policies place immigrants in an isolated position.
The minister mentioned the high costs of obtaining a residence permit, compulsory integration courses and the fact that Turkish language classes are not part of the curriculum offered at Dutch schools.
Mr Çelik pointed to the successful integration of Turkish immigrants in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. He said the Netherlands and other Western European countries could learn from their example.
(source)
Police in Norrköping came out in force Wednesday afternoon after they had been tipped off about a "mysterious foreign man" behaving strangely at a bus stop, and then getting on the bus with his rucksack. It turns out the 28-year-old man had carried out the muslim praying ritual at the bus stop, but when police caught up with him, and searched him, all suspicions were dismissed.
(...)
Also Moustafa Kharraki, deputy head of the Swedish Muslim Council, has noticed more suspiciousness against muslims lately. "This is very serious and it concerns pure discrimination. People have become fearful and suspicious, a lot has changed since Drottninggatan," Kharraki told the news agency TT.
Kharraki finds the actions of the Norrköping police "unacceptable". "police needs more knowledge. Any muslim can pray in a public space. It is completely normal and just because you pray, you are not a terrorist."
(source)
Sweden’s integration minister Erik Ullenhag is meeting on Thursday with representatives from the Swedish Muslim community to develop a strategy for combating Islamophobia in the wake of the Stockholm suicide bombing.
Leaders of Albania's Muslim community say they are against government plans to ban the use of veils in schools.
They issued a statement defending the use of the veil, which is not widespread in the small Balkan country despite it having a majority Muslim population.
(source)
Swiss police said they were seeking witnesses after an attempt to set fire to the Tunisian embassy in Switzerland early Wednesday.
"Early Wednesday morning, one or more unknown people provoked the start of a criminal fire at the Tunisian embassy in Bern. The cantonal police are looking for witnesses," police said in a statement.
(source)
Via YLE:
The spontaneous flow of immigrants moving to the small town of Lieksa in North Karelia is causing some disharmony among local residents. According to the town council, Lieksa has benefited around 200,000 euros from its new immigrant population. But local critics say immigrants are taking away jobs and housing from residents.
Lieksa has already received 130 immigrants in just over a year. This has meant the town has been able to hire two formally unemployed local residents to work in its immigrant advice centre.
Most of the new arrivals are refugees from Iraq and Somalia – all of whom have made a personal choice to start a new life in Lieksa. Despite the town being one of the most picturesque in the area, one of its main attractions for immigrants has been rental accommodation. For letting agents, who only two years ago had more than 100 empty apartments, immigrants have been a real saviour.
(source)
Truth is, I don't see the big scoop in this story. The Americans are concerned about possible attacks against their diplomatic missions.
A day after UKs' former home secretary Jack Straw blamed some Pakistani Muslim men for targeting "vulnerable" White girls sexually, UK's Hindu and Sikh organizations also publicly accused Muslim groups of the same offence.
Overwhelmed by cheap Chinese competition and divided by rival Muslim groups, Serbia's once-thriving Sandzak region is languishing in a deep economic and social malaise that has sparked the first calls for autonomy.
(...)
In recent years, a bitter battle has been waged for influence among Sandzak's Muslim religious community, stoked by two rival muftis. So far incidents have been minor, mainly skirmishes over rival property claims.
On one side of the divide is a group led by Adem Zilkic, which is based in the capital Belgrade and recognised by the Serbian government as the official interlocutor for the country's Muslims.
But his influence is being undercut by the mufti of Novi Pazar, Muamer Zukorlic, who accuses his rival of kowtowing to Belgrade and who set up a rival organisation in 2007.
(source)
The Netherlands has offered life benefits to Bosnians who settled in the country in the wake of the 1992-1995 war, if they decide to return home, Bosnian Ministry for Human Rghts and Refugees said on Wednesday.
(...)
It is estimated that some 30,000 Bosnians settled in the Netherlands after the war and many have failed to integrate into Dutch society.
The Dutch government said it was a “quality solution for all foreigners who have failed to integrate into Dutch society”.
(source)
A Catholic high school in Volendam is guilty of discrimination on religious grounds for banning a Muslim pupil from wearing a headscarf, the equal opportunities commission said on Friday.
The girl started wearing a headscarf this school year and was banned from attending lessons, prompting her father to make a complaint.
(...)
Schools can introduce a ban if it is necessary to preserve their special identity, but that was not the case with the Volendam school, the commission said.
(source)
The leader of one of Germany's Muslim organisations is to attend a Coptic Christmas Eve service on Thursday night, in a sign of solidarity with the nearly two dozen Egyptian Christians who were killed last week by a suicide bomber.
(...)
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany, or ZMD, said its chairman, Aiman Mazyek, is to attend the mass in the western city of Dusseldorf and meet with church leaders and worshippers.
ZMD, one of four national mosque organisations in Germany, is the most liberal and represents 300 ethnically mixed mosques of both Sunni and Shiite affiliation.
Mazyek is also to visit the Coptic bishop of Germany, Anba Damian, on Saturday in Frankfurt, then join a Catholic bishop at an inter- religious memorial service for the 23 Copts killed early on January 1 in Alexandria.
(source)
An advertisement for a hotline set up by the Berlin hospital Charité. The suicide prevention program for young girls of Turkish origins urges them to "end your silence, not your life." (in Turkish)
According to intelligence reporting, two Norway-based East Turkestan Islamic Party (ETIP) associates on 08/07/2008 held a telephonic discussion about a possible threat to the Olympic Games. In the course of the conversation, reference was made to the number "8", the travel of an unidentified person to Beijing on 08/08/2008, and speculation about whether "it" would explode.
The City of Helsinki will stop reserving special hours for Muslim women to use the public pool in Jakomäki. In the future, the timeslot for Muslim ladies will be open to all women.
Other swimmers had criticised the practice, according to Teemu Raatikainen, who manages the pool.
Previously, the Jakomäki swimming hall blocked off Saturday mornings specifically for Muslim women. The women's session followed a swimming class for Muslim girls.
(source)
The Christian Democrats want it to make it a crime to support organisations that have been listed as extremist or terrorist organisations, according to leader Göran Hägglund.
In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, he also says that the party will take up the fight with the other three parties in the centre-right government Alliance.
(source)
Amsterdam police will not arrest women in burkas, even if a ban is introduced. Police chief of the Amsterdam corps Bernhard Welten said in a public television programme that police officers have to use their common sense. "I do not feel that I should always be an instrument of the government who always does what is asked."
In response, Freedom Party MP Hero Brinkman, a former policeman himself, strongly criticised the police chief, “The police should be subservient to the authorities. The government and parliament make the laws. The police enforce them. We would be a banana republic if it were the other way around.”
(source)
(Hadewijch trailer)
The Security Police (Supo) has found links between the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab and individuals in Finland. (...) According to Turun Sanomat and several other papers, Supo is keeping an eye on several dozen people who may have connections to al-Shabaab and other al-Qaida-style terror groups.
The head of Supo's anti-terrorism unit, Lasse Anttila, confirms there are people in this country who have maintained contacts with al-Shabaab.
(source)
The number of Britons choosing to become Muslims has nearly doubled in the past decade, according to one of the most comprehensive attempts to estimate how many people have embraced Islam.
Four in 10 French and German people see Muslims living in their country as a "threat," according to a poll published Tuesday by French newspaper Le Monde.
Forty-two percent of French people and 40 percent of Germans questioned by pollster IFOP said they considered the presence of a Muslim community in their country "a threat" to their national identity, Le Monde said.
The findings of the study "go beyond linking immigration with security or immigration with unemployment, to linking Islam with a threat to identity," said Jerome Fourquet of IFOP, quoted by Le Monde.
(source)
Unidentified attackers set a church ablaze with a grenade in Russia's mainly Muslim North Caucasus late on Sunday, media reported, in the latest act of violence in a region where Moscow is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency.
No one was hurt in the attack on the Russian Orthodox Church, state-run RIA news agency reported, which took place at 9.30 p.m. in the town of Ordzhonikidze, in the impoverished Ingushetia region which borders Chechnya.
(source)
The fire which damaged a building sometimes used as a mosque in Vänersborg, north of Gothenburg, was most likely started on purpose, according to police.
Police received a call around 9 pm and the fire was under control four hours later. The main damage to the building was caused by smoke and water leaks but police have no suspects so far, Swedish Radio News reports.
(source)
Intending to put into practice the Qur’anic ayat that all Muslims are brothers, a new website called Muslim-HomeExchange.com (http://www.muslim-homeexchange.com) was launched recently to enable fellow Muslims to swap and stay at each other’s homes for an agreed period of time for free.
Website founder Hadi Oudhini, a French Muslim studying tourism in Paris, decided to embark on this idea after witnessing first hand the problems faced by Muslims when renting apartments in other countries for holiday.
(source)
A Swedish Premier Division hockey referee published a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed on Facebook.
Now he has been suspended and, according to sources, SÄPO [the security police] were contacted.
“We had a meeting with this person and we agree that he should take a time out,” said Swedish Hockey Association’s security chief Peter Anderson.
(source)
Germany's Coptic Christians have received threats of attack by radical Muslims and asked for protection, a bishop said in a newspaper Sunday, as Egypt's Coptics reeled from a massive bombing.Swedish authorities shut down a church in Gothenburg after they've received similar threats.
"The Internet is full of threats of this kind against us. The police have alerted us several times against attacks by radical Muslims," Coptic Bishop Anba Damian said in a report on the Bild's online edition.
(source)
Greece is planning to build a fence along its border with Turkey to keep out illegal immigrants, Citizen Protection Minister Christos Papoutsis said on Saturday.
"Greek society has reached its limits in taking in illegal immigrants," Papoutsis told Athens News Agency. "Greece can't take it anymore."
Greece's 206-kilometer (128-mile) border with Turkey is the most common entry point for illegal immigrants to the European Union from Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia.
(...)
Around 80 percent of the illegal immigrants in the EU arrive via Greece, where there are currently an estimated 300,000 people living illegally.
(source)
