Blazing Cat Fur

Blazingcatfur has moved! Visit our new site - www.blazingcatfur.ca

2014-09-25T23:30:00.000-04:00

Notice - Looks like some weenies have put a content warning on the blog so it's goodbye Blogger and hello www.blazingcatfur.ca

Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty I am Free at Last!

No more I gotta live in this Potter's Shack!

You should be getting a blogger redirect to the new digs Let me know if you don't.

Thanks, BCF

An American Muslim and micro-aggresions

2014-09-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Margari Hill

This week marks the one-year anniversary of a potent Twitter campaign started by Michigan preacher Dawud Walid to get his fellow Muslims to stop using the Arabic word “abeed.” In its plural form, “abeed” means “slaves,” and Walid publicly challenged Arab-Americans for using it to describe African-Americans.

Inspired by Walid’s activism, California-based educator Margari Hill decided to address racism anew within American Muslim communities. This past February, she co-founded MuslimARC (Anti-Racism Collaborative), a multiracial virtual education and training organization.

After this past summer’s killing of Gaza civilians and the fatal police shooting of Ferguson’s Michael Brown, the group is grabbing attention for bringing fresh energy to what Hill calls an old conversation within Islam. Colorlines spoke on the phone twice and about how American Muslims tackle racism and build solidarity with other communities.

Dawud Walid’s twitter campaign inspired you to help start MuslimARC. What happened last year?

Last September there was an incident [in Detroit] where an African-American woman verbally insulted an Arab-American merchant. Dawud Walid, a preacher and the executive director of Michigan’s Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) saw that while discussing the story, some online commenters kept using the racial slur, “abeed.”

He wrote an article saying it was unacceptable, and he got a lot of negative responses to it. So then Dawud started tweeting about why we shouldn’t use the word and I followed his campaign. Some people apologized, others ignored him, and some people cussed him out. I thought, “Wow, he shouldn’t be doing this alone”...

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I would have thought being called a slave was more than a micro-aggression. It is about time someone held the Arabs to account.

Report: Nearly 2.5 million immigrants from ‘predominantly Muslim countries’ reside inside US right now

2014-09-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

Pakistanis protesting an American airstrike in 2006

Approximately 2.5 million immigrants from “predominantly Muslim countries" reside inside the U.S. right now, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies found.

The four-page report, which details which countries and world regions from which immigrants in the U.S.—both legal and illegal—came to this country, found that since 2000 nearly a million more immigrants from such Muslim countries came to the U.S.

In 2000, there were 1,518,755 immigrants from Muslim countries in the U.S. In 2010, That number stood at 2,184,664, and in 2013 it stands at 2,480,407.

Between 2010 and 2013, there was actually a greater increase in the number of immigrants from the Middle East than from Central America. During that timeframe, 207,758 more immigrants moved to the U.S. from the Middle East, whereas only 113,744 immigrants came from Central America...

US tweets photos of dead IS jihadis in ‘Think Again Turn Away’ campaign

2014-09-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

The faces are pixelated

The US State Department has ramped up its media campaign against the Islamic State by posting photos of dead IS jihadis on their twitter page.

The “Think Again Turn Away” official twitter account showed the photos of four dead militants who were reportedly killed in an air strike in Syria.

The aim of the account is to deter foreigners from joining the terror group.

There are numerous other posts from the US State Department on the page which denounce IS and show the consequence of the US air strikes...

h/t Lou Lou

Anjem Choudary is one of nine men arrested in terror raid in London

2014-09-25T07:43:00.002-04:00

Weird beard and Islamoloon Choudary outside the Regent’s Park Mosque in north-west London in July 2013

Radical preacher Anjem Choudary was one of nine men arrested today as part of an investigation into Islamist terrorism.

Choudary, 47, and eight other men aged 22, 31, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39 and 51 were arrested by Metropolitan Police officers in London this morning, and have all been taken to police stations - where they remain in custody.

Some 19 residential, business or community premises were also being searched today as part of the investigation, Scotland Yard said.

Eleven of these were in east London, one was in west London, one was in north-west London and five were in south London - while a residential address was also being searched in Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire.

A police spokesman said: “These arrests and searches are part of an ongoing investigation into Islamist-related terrorism and are not in response to any immediate public safety risk.”

Officers confirmed that the nine men were arrested on suspicion of being a member of a proscribed organisation, supporting a proscribed organisation and encouraging terrorism.

Al-Muhajiroun is understood to be the banned organisation in question, sources said this morning.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Choudary said he has no sympathy for Alan Henning, a volunteer aid worker who was captured in Syria...

h/t Tom B

PressTV - Australia Muslim leaders call for restraint over terror threat

2014-09-25T07:30:00.000-04:00

Vandalism on the facade of a building in Australia (file photo).

Islamic leaders in Australia have called for restraint amid a series of recent threats and attacks against Muslims and mosques in the country.

On Wednesday, Australia’s grand mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, as well as other religious leaders called on the Muslim community to exercise self-control and reject the ISIL Takfiri cult’s call for Muslims to indiscriminately kill Australians:

“The recent so-called ‘fatwa’ from overseas, making reference to Australia as a target, has no religious authority and must be rejected,” the religious leaders said in a statement, adding, “We call on everyone to exercise restraint and civility. We must not let emotion take over common sense.”

Keep reading...

The international organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood is a myth created by the media

2014-09-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh

Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the leader of the Strong Egypt Party, recently said that the alleged international organisational structure behind the Muslim Brotherhood was nothing more than an “illusion created by the Egyptian media.”

Aboul Fotouh accused the Egyptian media of trying to foster the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a global movement and that it should be referred to as the “International Organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

He emphasised that his rejection of the notion that an international Brotherhood exists “does not deny the fact that there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and other countries; however, it is comparable to the socialist movement, which can be found in many countries around the world.”

In his interview with the Egyptian Today on Sunday, Aboul Fotouh emphasised that “it does not make any sense to demonise the Muslim Brotherhood after more than 80 years of giving back to the community. The Muslim Brotherhood should not be viewed as a devil just because some may disagree with them politically”...

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The socialist movement was a co-ordinated group for decades. It was run from the USSR.

I suspect, however, that the various Islamic groups do not possess the same cohesion. In fact, there seems to be a good deal of in-fighting and splintering.

But they share more or less the same ideas -- so whether they are co-ordinated or not scarcely matters.

In the public relations world, Israel is controversial, the Muslim Brotherhood is not

2014-09-25T06:30:00.000-04:00

Tunisia’s Chamber of Advisors to Bardo.

The world of public relations is filled with constant pressures and moving parts. As CEO of one of the largest American PR firms, I know and understand the intricacies of spin.

Last week, the Emirate of Qatar hired one of the world’s largest PR agencies, Portland Communications, “for a communications/political push targeted at Congress and Federal agencies to improve ties with the United States.” Qatar follows Sharia law and has numerous human rights issues.

On the heels of that partnership comes the revelation from recently released government filings that Burson-Marsteller, another one of the world’s leading PR firms, has been hired to improve the foreign image of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired organization. The Ennahda Party has good reason to want close American ties given the upheaval Islamist-backed governments have caused in the Middle East.

While paying homage to Middle Eastern money isn’t a problem that is unique to the PR industry, the shock is that the same firm taking money from the Muslim Brotherhood inspired group refused to work for Israel, calling Israel “highly controversial”...

Another angry letter writer: The infiltration of Muslims in the US

2014-09-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

To the Editor of the Marietta Daily Journal (Georgia, USA):

The Monday edition of the MDJ appears to be the smallest paper of the week. Last Monday, there were seven, possibly eight, articles that made reference to “terrorism, Islam, anti-Semitism, ISIS”, etc. At the threat of being attacked by the PCP (Political Correctness Police), I’ll cut right to the chase:

What are we doing about the infiltration of Muslims, not only in our country, but in our county? It is the responsibility of our local news media to bring this to the attention of its readers.

One Associated Press article in particular, rather small and not prominent, was about the anti-Semitic protests occurring in Germany. However, there was no mention that the majority of protesters are young Muslim men. By eliminating that fact, one is led to believe that Germany has disregarded and forgotten about Hitler and the Holocaust.

They have not. Germany, as with most of Europe, has been employing political correctness for decades, which is a by-product of their decline in Christian/Judeo values. And we are following in their footsteps.

Today’s political correctness forbids the use of so many ‘sensitive’ words to the detriment of the reputation of a nation; i.e., Germany. Our speaking out and up is long past due.

Donna Kalish

Marietta

Another apology: Don't blame multiculturalism or Islam for ISIL and terrorism

2014-09-25T05:30:00.000-04:00

There's a very lucrative industry in the United States and other countries where writers, radio and television hosts, and politicians can spew out the provocative and controversial notion that "radical Islam" is at the heart of global instability.

People have made a great deal of money and gained a great many votes by harping on the religiously inspired components of terrorism, the belief of “jihad” as a dark force that fuels groups like ISIL, and especially nowadays by linking multiculturalism to the spread of fanaticism in Europe and elsewhere.

Of course, flawed interpretations of Islam exist and are manipulated; nobody can dispute this aspect of politics in the Middle East.

However, don’t blame multiculturalism, Islam, or the hundreds of millions of good, honest, and law-abiding Muslims for the heinous actions of terrorist groups.

Instead, focus on the shortsighted, realpolitik, and often times absurdly hypocritical foreign policy decisions of everyone from Reagan to Obama, the flawed policies of many Arab governments, in addition to the ignorance of European governments pertaining to the real causes of religious fundamentalism...

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NTDWI. Please! How stupid do you think people are?

With nothing to show, Hamas slouches toward a new conflict

2014-09-25T05:00:00.000-04:00

Palestinian gunmen from the military wing of Hamas during what they termed a “victory rally” amid the debris of destroyed houses in Shejaiya, a Hamas stronghold of Gaza City, Wednesday, August 27, 2014.

There is a saying in Arabic, “titi titi, zhai ma ruhti, zhai ma jiti” — as I went, so have I returned. I cannot think of an aphorism more suitable to describe Hamas this week.

On Tuesday, Israeli security forces in Hebron shot and killed the two suspected killers of three Israeli teenagers who were abducted on June 12 and whose bodies were later found in a field outside Halhoul, in the West Bank.

The early Tuesday operation marked the end of a terrible affair which sparked a chain of events leading to the summer’s 50-day Israel-Hamas conflict.

Anyone in Gaza expecting Hamas to forcefully respond to the deaths of its two West Bank killers, be it with a devastating barrage of rockets or any other form of a “high quality” terror attack, was sorely disappointed. Hamas’s negotiating team, stationed in Cairo for indirect talks with Israel, merely announced that, in protest of the deaths of Marwan Kawasme and Amer Abu Aysha, they would delay negotiations for three hours. Not exactly the fierce response many Hamas supporters would have liked to see...

Just a coincidence!

2014-09-25T04:45:00.000-04:00

German builders who fitted a supposedly random set of bricks into the ground for a new shopping precinct claim it was an accident when several of them ended up forming a swastika.

Use of Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany and can result in jail sentences, so when shoppers at the new precinct in the historic north-western German town of Goslar in Lower Saxony spotted the swastika made of bricks, they instantly called police.

More details at the Daily Mail.

Melbourne terror shooting: Denis Napthine warns against racism, singling out religions

2014-09-25T04:30:00.000-04:00

Premier Denis Napthine says it is crucial Victorians do not jump to single out a particular religious faith for Tuesday night's events in Endeavour Hills where an 18-year-old terror suspect was shot dead after attacking police.

He warned against racism, saying he was proud that Victoria was a “free and democratic society.”
[...]
He said it was vital no group was singled out in the aftermath of the death, and called on people to preserve Victoria's multicultural and diverse community.

“It is not about faith, it’s not about ethnicity, it is about the alleged behaviour of an individual,” the premier said...

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I would agree it has nothing to do with ethnicity -- but please do not feed me the rubbish that is it NTDWI. You are not fooling anyone.

Glenn Greenwald: ‘Peace Prize President’ has bombed seven Muslim countries

2014-09-25T04:00:00.000-04:00

Glenn Greenwald

Liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald and Matt Drudge agree on one thing this week: Both noted that Syria has become the 7th Muslim country that the “Peace Prize president” bombed.

“Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama -- after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq,” said Greenwald, who’s famous for assisting Edward Snowden’s release secret U.S. intelligence documents.

The Drudge Report repeated this line of criticism on September 11, 2014 ( Peace Prize Prez Declares War), as did many right-leaning news sources.

Greenwald went on to blast Obama for being indifferent to the legality of his actions:

“The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).”

Keep reading...

Sol Stern: The unfree speech movement

2014-09-25T03:30:00.000-04:00

Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, left, with folk singer Joan Baez on the University of California at Berkeley campus in 1964. Corbis Images

This fall the University of California at Berkeley is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a student-led protest against campus restrictions on political activities that made headlines and inspired imitators around the country.

I played a small part in the Free Speech Movement, and some of those returning for the reunion were once my friends, but I won’t be joining them.

Though the movement promised greater intellectual and political freedom on campus, the result has been the opposite. The great irony is that while Berkeley now honors the memory of the Free Speech Movement, it exercises more thought control over students than the hated institution that we rose up against half a century ago.

Click on post title to read more...

We early-1960s radicals believed ourselves anointed as a new “tell it like it is” generation. We promised to transcend the “smelly old orthodoxies” (in George Orwell's phrase) of Cold War liberalism and class-based, authoritarian leftism. Leading students into the university administration building for the first mass protest, Mario Savio, the Free Speech Movement’s brilliant leader from Queens, New York, famously said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. . . . . And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

The Berkeley “machine” now promotes Free Speech Movement kitsch. The steps in front of Sproul Hall, the central administration building where more than 700 students were arrested on Dec. 2, 1964, have been renamed the Mario Savio Steps. One of the campus dining halls is called the Free Speech Movement Café, its walls covered with photographs and mementos of the glorious semester of struggle. The university requires freshmen to read an admiring biography of Savio, who died in 1996, written by New York University professor and Berkeley graduate Robert Cohen.

Yet intellectual diversity is hardly embraced. Every undergraduate undergoes a form of indoctrination with a required course on the "theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society," administered by the university's Division of Equity and Inclusion.

How did this Orwellian inversion occur? It happened in part because the Free Speech Movement’s fight for free speech was always a charade. The struggle was really about using the campus as a base for radical politics.

I was a 27-year-old New Left graduate student at the time. Savio was a 22-year-old sophomore. He liked to compare the Free Speech Movement to the civil-rights struggle—conflating the essentially liberal Berkeley administration with the Bull Connors of the racist South.

During one demonstration Savio suggested that the campus cops who had arrested a protesting student were “poor policemen” who only “have a job to do.” Another student then shouted out: “Just like Eichmann.”

“Yeah. Very good. It's very, you know, like Adolf Eichmann,” Savio replied. “He had a job to do. He fit into the machinery.”

I realized years later that this moment may have been the beginning of the 1960s radicals’ perversion of ordinary political language, like the spelling “Amerika” or seeing hope and progress in Third World dictatorships.

Before that 1964-65 academic year, most of us radical students could not have imagined a campus rebellion. Why revolt against an institution that until then offered such a pleasant sanctuary? But then Berkeley administrators made an incredibly stupid decision to establish new rules regarding political activities on campus. Student clubs were no longer allowed to set up tables in front of the Bancroft Avenue campus entrance to solicit funds and recruit new members.

The clubs had used this 40-foot strip of sidewalk for years on the assumption that it was the property of the City of Berkeley and thus constitutionally protected against speech restrictions. But the university claimed ownership to justify the new rules. When some students refused to comply, the administration compounded its blunder by resorting to the campus police. Not surprisingly, the students pushed back, using civil-disobedience tactics learned fighting for civil rights in the South.

The Free Speech Movement was born on Oct. 1, 1964, when police tried to arrest a recent Berkeley graduate, Jack Weinberg, who was back on campus after a summer as a civil-rights worker in Mississippi. He had set up a table on the Bancroft strip for the Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Dozens of students spontaneously sat down around the police car, preventing it from leaving the campus. A 32-hour standoff ensued, with hundreds of students camped around the car.

Mario Savio, also back from Mississippi, took off his shoes, climbed onto the roof of the police car, and launched into an impromptu speech explaining why the students had to resist the immoral new rules. Thus began months of sporadic protests, the occupation of Sproul Hall on Dec. 2 (ended by mass arrests), national media attention and Berkeley's eventual capitulation.

That should have ended the matter. Savio soon left the political arena, saying that he had no interest in becoming a permanent student leader. But others had mastered the new world of political theater, understood the weakness of American liberalism, and soon turned their ire on the Vietnam War.

The radical movement that the Free Speech Movement spawned eventually descended into violence and mindless anti-Americanism. The movement waned in the 1970s as the war wound down—but by then protesters had begun their infiltration of university faculties and administrations they had once decried.

“Tenured radicals,” in New Criterion editor Roger Kimball’s phrase, now dominate most professional organizations in the humanities and social studies. Unlike our old liberal professors, who dealt respectfully with the ideas advanced by my generation of New Left students, today's radical professors insist on ideological conformity and don’t take kindly to dissent by conservative students. Visits by speakers who might not toe the liberal line—recently including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Islamism critic Aayan Hirsi Ali —spark protests and letter-writing campaigns by students in tandem with their professors until the speaker withdraws or the invitation is canceled.

On Oct. 1 at Berkeley, by contrast, one of the honored speakers at the Free Speech Movement anniversary rally on Sproul Plaza will be Bettina Aptheker, who is now a feminist-studies professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Writing in the Berkeley alumni magazine about the anniversary, Ms. Aptheker noted that the First Amendment was “written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants. . . . In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social cartography. We [Free Speech Movement] veterans were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.”

Read it and weep—for the Free Speech Movement anniversary, for the ideal of an intellectually open university, and for America.

Mr. Stern is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. This op-ed has been adapted from a forthcoming article in the magazine.

The Islamic State makes electronic surveillance respectable again

2014-09-25T03:00:00.000-04:00

What a difference a year makes.

Last September, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff captured the world's mood when she opened the U.N. General Assembly with a withering rebuke of America's massive electronic surveillance program.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama, fresh from ordering up airstrikes against Islamic extremists in Syria, will strike a different tone, calling on the international community to ramp up surveillance of legions of foreign jihadists fighting alongside the self-styled Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

And he is likely to find a receptive audience.

The U.N. Security Council is poised to endorse a U.S.-drafted resolution that would require governments to grant law enforcement authorities wider scope to monitor and suppress the travel and other activities of suspected local jihadists.

European powers such as Belgium, Britain, France, and Germany are updating their laws and policies to strengthen government monitoring authority and, if necessary, to prevent anyone suspected of pursuing military glory in battlefields from Somalia to the Middle East from traveling. From the White House Tuesday, Obama drove home the message, saying that the United States and 40 allies aim “to cut off ISIL's financing; to counter its hateful ideology; and to stop the flow of fighters into and out of the region.”

British officials proposed a law that would strip suspected terrorists of their U.K. citizenship, rendering them stateless. The French government can now seize suspected militants' passports or identification cards. For those who return from fighting abroad, numerous European law enforcement agencies are looking to trace them.

“If they come back, you have to have very tight surveillance because these people are dangerous -- very dangerous,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations...

UK: Step up and approve airstrikes, defence secretary tells MPs

2014-09-25T02:30:00.000-04:00

An Isis Command and Control Center in Syria before and after it was struck by bombs dropped by a U.S. F-22 fighter Reuters

Parliament must “step up” and decide whether to endorse British military action against Islamic State, the defence secretary said today.

Michael Fallon warned that the campaign to drive Isis out of Iraq could take years, as MPs prepare to be recalled for a vote to authorise RAF airstrikes on Friday.

“It’s going to be a long haul,” he said on a brief visit to Afghanistan. “It’s not simply a question of helping the Kurds recover the ground and the towns that they have lost but to drive Isil (Isis) out or Iraq is clearly going to take months and possibly years,” he said.

Click on post title to read more...

Mr Fallon was speaking in Kabul after talks between ministers and the opposition parties paved the way for a parliamentary recall.

A motion to be put to the Commons by David Cameron is likely to confine British action to targets in Iraq following a request to the prime minister in New York today from Haider al-Abadi, the new Iraqi prime minister.

In the face of increasing impatience for action from his backbenchers, Mr Cameron has waited for an indication from states in the region that they want Britain’s help. That is is now forthcoming and he is now ready to seek backing from the Commons.

“The pressure is now on our parliament,” Mr Fallon said. “Parliament needs to step up and decide whether they’re prepared to endorse military action and we will be testing that very soon.”

There have been unofficial contacts for days between the Labour leadership and Downing Street and Labour now looks likely to back action in Iraq. There are big doubts on all sides about the legality of action in Syria, despite the American-led attacks yesterday.

Defence sources said that RAF fighter jets at an airbase in Cyprus were ready to start strikes against Isis in Iraq as soon as necessary.

Many Tory MPs now believe that Britain should follow America in attacking Isis in Syria and Mr Fallon is understood to favour that course.

The Labour leader Ed Miliband hinted that he would have no objection to Britain agreeing to a request from the “democratic” Iraqi government to join airstrikes against Isis in Iraq.

“The situation in Syria is somewhat different,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “It is not a democratic state. I think for the legitimacy of the action that is being taken in Syria, it would be better if there was a UN resolution.”

He denied that this was tantamount to allowing President Putin of Russia – who has repeatedly blocked UN resolutions on Syria - to veto British foreign policy.

“This action against Isil will only work not just with airstrikes but with action on the ground,” he said. “In Iraq we have got the Iraqi army and the Kurds, whom we are helping, rightly in my view. The question is, how are we going to defeat Isil in Syria without ground troops?”

The former defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth, who has been a prominent supporter of airstrikes against Isis, said he did not think parliament had to be recalled to endorse strikes in Syria although further discussions would be needed.

“However, in the current climate, given what’s happened to the PM last year, I am entirely sympathetic to his caution and apparent desire to run it past parliament first,” he added.

Madeleine Moon MP, a Labour member of the defence select committee, said she would vote against Britain expanding its involvement in the campaign beyond a possible training mission, providing humanitarian assistance and using Tornado jets to gather intelligence, until a major hostage crisis was resolved.

“There is no urgent need for UK engagement and protecting hostages in whatever way we can must have a priority for the UK,” she said.

Alan Henning, a volunteer aid worker from Manchester, and John Cantlie, a journalist from West Sussex, have been paraded by Islamic State dressed in identical Guantanamo Bay-style orange robes in two separate hostage videos.

Their captors have threatened to behead Mr Henning next, after executing David Haines, a third Briton, as well as two American journalists.

On the ground in Iraq, Isis militants have redoubled their attacks on the besieged Kurdish enclave of Kobani since US aircraft began strikes over Syria, Kurdish officials claimed.

“The number of their fighters has increased, the number of their tanks has increased since the bombardment of Raqqa,” said Ocalan Iso, the deputy leader of Kurdish forces defending the town. “We call on American forces to hit their positions. They are 8 km from Kobani. They were 25km away before,” he added.

Airstrikes continued with at least ten attacks reported in a Syrian town near the Iraqi border overnight, according to monitors. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights cited local claims that aircraft hit the town of Boukamal for the second night running.

Saudi Arabia acknowledged its leading role in the air strikes over Syria and Iraq today by releasing a picture of a member of the country’s royal family who had just returned from an airstrike in his fighter aircraft. The picture showed a pilot identified as Prince Khaled bin Salman.

The Western air campaign has provoked mixed reaction from the Syrian rebel opposition after strikes hit bases in areas linked to Jabhat al-Nusra. The group is linked to al-Qaeda but also respected by many ordinary Syrians for its opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian rebel officials stressed that the overthrow of President Assad must remain the central aim of the country’s civil war.

“We regret that the international community has come up with partial solutions to the Syrian conflict in which hundreds of thousands were killed or detained by the Assad regime,” said Nasr al-Hariri, secretary general of the Syrian National Coalition.

US officials have claimed that the target of the strikes near Aleppo were members of an al-Qaeda-backed plot to plant bombs on international airliners.

Australia: Brisbane Muslim prayer centre vandalised with abusive graffiti

2014-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00

The incident is the second defacing of a Queensland mosque in less than a week. Photograph: Tertius Pickard/AAP Image

Vandals have attacked a home being used as an Islamic prayer centre in Brisbane, leaving abusive anti-Muslim graffiti, in what police have called a “brainless crime”.

Police were called to the home in Rocklea on Wednesday night after members discovered the walls of some temporary buildings had been spraypainted with the words “evil” and “die”, as well as “Muslims are evil and have no respect for our ways”, and “get the fuck out of our country”.

President of the Indonesian Islamic Centre, Hamid Marwadi, told Guardian Australia this was the first time they had been targeted.

“That’s why we are shocked to come and see the graffiti,” he said. Marwadi said he thought it was prompted by recent police operations and statements from politicians “encouraging the tough laws on terrorism”.

“I believe politicians shouldn’t say Islamic terrorists because Islam is not terrorism,” he said...

Fiyaz Mughal: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia threaten both our communities

2014-09-25T01:45:00.000-04:00

For the past two years, I have dedicated a lot of time, personal safety and peace of mind to setting up and delivering the Tell MAMA project nationally.

The work involves mapping, measuring and monitoring anti-Muslim hatred nationally, while supporting victims who have suffered it.

Much of this work is pressurised, with ISIS, the Rotherham grooming case, international crises and local home-grown terrorism spiking the hatred off-line and on-line and where visible Muslim women have been the targets.

Mosques have also been key targets and after the brutal murder of Lee Rigby in May 2013 we monitored more than 35 that were attacked within 12 weeks in England and Wales.

Much of our work has been affected by far-Right sympathisers, glib and loose anti-Muslim rhetoric on-line, targeted incidents against mosques and the opportunistic hate incidents targeted at Muslim women.

Yet we have also seen some individuals who support groups like UKIP involved in fiery anti-Muslim rhetoric and this remains a problem...

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Hey Fiyaz, you think Muslims themselves might have something to do with the anti-Semitism?

Arab writer: The barbarians within our gates

2014-09-25T01:30:00.000-04:00

With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire.

He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries—Iraq and Syria—whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon.

Obama is stepping once again—and with understandably great reluctance—into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone.

The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.

Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms.

With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world...

Saudi pilots get death threats after raids on jihadists

2014-09-25T01:07:00.003-04:00

RIYADH: Saudi pilots who conducted air strikes on jihadists in Syria received online death threats on Wednesday after photos were published of those involved, among them a son of the crown prince.

The official Saudi Press Agency released photographs of eight airmen it said were involved in Tuesday’s US-led operation, carried out with Gulf allies.

In one picture they stood, some smiling, in green flight suits with arms around each other in front of one of their fighter jets.

One of the pilots involved in the raids is a son of Crown Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz himself, according to Saudi newspapers.

Dozens of Islamic State group (IS) and Al Qaeda militants were reported killed in the coalition air raids, sparking jihadist threats online where the Saudi pilots’ photos reappeared.

One Twitter user said the air force men were “wanted by IS” while another said their throats “will sooner or later be slit”.

A broader threat came from a Twitter post which called for the killing of police as well as military men...

Militants surround Iraqi base, trap 200 soldiers

2014-09-25T01:03:00.002-04:00

BAGHDAD: Around 200 Iraqi soldiers were trapped in an army camp in western Iraq on Wednesday, besieged by Islamic State militants who routed hapless army forces in a raid on a base close to Baghdad at the weekend.

A soldier cornered in the camp said food, weapons and ammunition were running short, with forces sent to rescue them struggling to clear a route.

“There are troops behind us but they can’t reach us because the whole area is planted with roadside bombs and land mines,” said Hussein Thamir, a soldier who spoke to Reuters from inside the Albu Etha camp, about 10 km south of the city of Ramadi.

“There was an army group in front of us whom (Islamic State) destroyed completely six days ago,” said Thamir.

“If we withdraw, will be killed.” Using similar tactics, Islamic State insurgents on Sunday overran an army base in Saqlawiya, just 50 km west of Baghdad, killing or capturing between 400 to 600 soldiers, a senior Iraqi security official said...

Qatari emir urges world to shun Israeli leaders

2014-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, emir of the State of Qatar, addresses the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2014. (photo credit: UN Photo by Cia Pak)

NEW YORK — The Qatari emir accused Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during this summer’s 50-day war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

Sheik Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani used his speech at the UN General Assembly Wednesday to urge world leaders not to receive Israeli leaders in their “diplomatic salons.”

The Qatari leader also called on the Security Council to pass a resolution forcing Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian lands according to a clear time table...

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Destroying Israel is still the #1 priority of the sheikh. He is untouched by the violence happening in the region (indeed, he likely helped to pay for it).

First World Problems: UNC students protest ‘Country Night’ because...sexism

2014-09-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

Photo form the protest Facebook page: it looks kind of Islamic, in a way

Students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC) are once again “speaking out against what they see as sexist admission practices" in university bars.

UNC senior and local disc jockey, Trevor Dougherty, is at the forefront of the fight for gender equality at bars and clubs, helping to organize a silent protest of “sexist bar policies and rape culture at UNC.”
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As Campus Reform previously reported, Dougherty fought to end ladies’ nights at local bars with fellow DJ, Rob Sekay, because the two believe that the marketing strategy “objectified women.”

The silent protesters stood across the street from the local bar, Deep End, during its weekly “Country Night” and condemned the five dollar difference in admission rates. Students 21-and-up pay three dollars each. Women 18-20 years old pay five dollars; men in the same age bracket pay ten dollars.

“It perpetuates the culture that undervalues women and treats women as sexual objects,” Dougherty told The Daily Tar Heel...

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Heaven forbid they raise their voices against something like this: Islamic State militants raping thousands of women to populate caliphate, Iraqi official claims

Extremist Muslim calls for Melbourne terror teen to become a martyr

2014-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Ustadh Mohammed Junaid Thorne

An extremist Muslim railing against the Abbott Government says he hopes the Melbourne teen shot dead by police will become a martyr.

The shocking rantings of Ustadh Mohammed Junaid Thorne are attracting support from Australian high school teens and university students, many of them in Brisbane.

Numan Haider, 18, was shot dead after repeatedly stabbing a Victorian senior constable and an Australian Federal Police officer outside a Melbourne police station.

It is understood Haider, who had become radicalised in a matter of weeks, had tricked the officers by extending to shake their hands before he whipped out one of two knives and began hacking the officers.

His Facebook page contained posts, some not dissimilar to supposed Sheikh Ustadh Mohammed Junaid Thorne, who is being supported on social media by a number of Queensland youths...