islamophobia

Source : IslamToday | 06 Mar 2012

Interfaith leaders in Minnesota stood together and held a press conference on 5 March against a Senate bill they say discriminates against Muslims.

The bill prohibits drawing upon foreign law or Sharia Law in Minnesota Courts. At present, U.S. courts are regularly required to interpret foreign law, including Islamic law.

Iman Makram Elamin said this can include foreign divorces, custody decrees, marriage certificates, Islamic wills, or enforcement of money judgments.

By Adam Goldman | AP | Newark | 22 Feb 2012

Americans living and working in New Jersey’s largest city were subjected to surveillance as part of the New York Police Department’s effort to build databases of where Muslims work, shop and pray. The operation in Newark was so secretive even the city’s mayor says he was kept in the dark.

For months in mid-2007, plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographics Units fanned out across Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims.

Source : Cihan News Agency | 03 Feb 2012

Reports from Europe indicate that there has been an increase in the number of xenophobic attacks.

Most recently, a report released by the Paris-based Islamophobic Crime Monitoring Group indicates that the number of Islamophobic attacks in France increased by 34 percent in 2011 in comparison with the previous year.

By Reuters | Skopje | 31 Jan 2012

Macedonia's president asked religious leaders on Tuesday to help calm tensions in an ethnically mixed region of the Balkan country where a local carnival sketch that mocked Islam has angered ethnic Albanian Muslims.

The January 13 Vevcani carnival, in which an Orthodox Christian man dressed as a Muslim cleric was mocked by others wearing burqas, sparked protests in the south-western Struga region, and late on Monday a church in the area was damaged by fire.

The cause of the blaze was not known.

By Jonathan Laurence | The New York Times | 23 Jan 2012

Two weeks ago, dozens of cars were set alight in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand after a 30-year-old truck driver, Wissam El-Yamni, was roughed up and then died while in police custody. The uproar underscored the hostility of young minority men toward authority across communities in Europe, an antipathy that has at times led to deadly violence.

Source : Arab News | Jeddah | 20 Jan 2012

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Thursday expressed alarm over the anti-Islam rhetoric coming out as the US presidential elections race heats up as well as over the recent results of parliamentary elections in some European countries.

“The rise in Islamophobia in Western politics is a great concern for the OIC,” said Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the OIC.

Source : Reuters | 13 Jan 2012

An Oslo court on Friday named two psychiatrists to conduct a new examination of Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Islam militant who killed 77 people last year, in an effort to end inflamed national debate over an initial report that found him psychotic.

Breivik has admitted detonating a bomb at a government building in Oslo that killed eight people and gunning down 69 more at an island summer camp for Labour Party youths in July.

Source : IslamToday | 11 Jan 2012

German authorities have announced a plan to place anti-Islamic websites under surveillance because of growing concern that they are becoming more radical and fomenting right-wing violence.

The domestic intelligence agency -- the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution -- said last week it had set up a working group to assess whether German-language sites such as Politically Incorrect and Nürnberg 2.0, whose stated aim is to oppose the "Islamisation of Europe" are in breach of the constitution.

Source : OnIslam & Newspapers | Cairo | 06 Jan 2012

A Queens man charged in a series of attacks targeting a New York Islamic center and other homes has cited his hatred of “all Muslims and Arabs” as the main drive of his attacks.

In his first statements to police, defendant Ray Lazier Lengend said he “hated all the Muslims and Arabs because they were trying to take over his life. They have been doing it for forty years,” the New York Daily News reported on Thursday, January 5.

by Donald McIntyre : The Independent/UK / 27 Dec 2011

A growing gulf between Israel's Jewish and Arab communities is highlighted in a critical EU paper which breaks new ground by suggesting that the international community has a role in ensuring "genuinely equal treatment" for the country's Arab minority.