Why should a teenage girl not be able to express her religious beliefs and at the same time pursue an education at school?
It is a tough question, but one to which the French believe they have an answer.
Which is, broadly, because there is such a thing as a French nation, and the teenager is part of it. Nothing defines France, and separates it from its neighbours, quite so clearly as the issue of la laïcité, or secularism.
A former soldier who absconded from a prison kitchen by strapping himself to the underside of a delivery van has been recaptured.
Daniel Abed Khalife, 21, was arrested in Chiswick, west London, on Saturday, having gone missing in his cook’s uniform from HMP Wandsworth in London on Wednesday morning.
The Metropolitan police said they had arrested him just before 11am on Saturday.
There’s fevered speculation about inside jobs or state actors involved in the HMP Wandsworth prison break by terror suspect Daniel Khalife. But as police close in on Richmond park, whether he’s found cowering in a ditch or at a press conference in Tehran, this dramatic escape reveals just how close we are to a full blown crisis across our prison system.
Wandsworth has been failing in plain sight in front of helpless officials at the Ministry of Justice for years. Repeated inspections have revealed squalor, overcrowding and chronic staff retention problems with young, inexperienced officers out of their depth. Writing about another filthy jail recently, Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor, rapidly running out of superlatives for crisis, correctly said that dirty and uncared for jails were a proxy for far more serious problems. At Wandsworth, summed up by recent prison leaver Chris Atkins as ‘chaos run by schoolchildren’, all the ingredients for this week’s catastrophe were there already, without the James Bond flourishes.
A man whose daughter was sent home twice allegedly threatened to kill the headteacher for imposing an abaya dress ban at a French school.
The father of the high school student is suspected of making the death threats over the phone.
According to C News, the daughter attends Ambroise-Brugière High School in Clermont-Ferrand, which has nearly 1,300 students.
France’s top administrative court has upheld a government ban on girls in state schools wearing abayas, rejecting complaints that it was discriminatory and could incite hatred.
The government announced just before schools reopened this week that the abaya, a long, flowing dress worn by some Muslim women, would no longer be allowed because it violated the French principle of secularism, or laïcité.
An association representing Muslims – Action for the Rights of Muslims (ADM) – had filed an urgent motion with the state council, France’s highest court for complaints against state authorities. They called for an injunction against the ban, saying it was discriminatory and could incite hatred against Muslims, as well as racial profiling.
The footage is mundane and revelatory all at once.
The hallway, filmed from an unmoving closed-circuit camera, appears unremarkable. It’s the point in time, and the people in the former children’s hospital, that make the hours and hours of video from this and other cameras on site extraordinary.
ISIS fighters roamed the hallways of this building complex in the Syrian city of Aleppo, which they had claimed as a headquarters. They moved blindfolded prisoners. They struck them with sticks. They walked past a man being tortured – straining to stand, arms tied aloft behind his back.
A manhunt has been launched for a soldier suspected of terror offences who escaped from prison on Wednesday morning.
Daniel Abed Khalife, 21, was awaiting trial after being accused of leaving fake bombs at a military base.
He escaped from HMP Wandsworth, London, and is thought to still be in the city.
Civil servants have been forced to freeze funding worth more than £2 million to a Birmingham mosque described as “infamous” due to a history of alleged extremism.
The £2.2 million grant from the Department of Culture’s Youth Investment Fund was set to go towards a youth facility at the Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre. This was withheld after a video of a preacher discussing the stoning of women went viral on social media.
Do they never learn?
Dozens of girls who turned up for school in France on Monday wearing abayas in defiance of a ban on the Muslim garment were sent home when they refused to remove them, a government minister told French broadcaster BFM on Tuesday.
The abaya, an over-garment covering the body from shoulders to feet that some Muslim women wear, was banned in schools by the French government last month.
The government says the abaya constitutes a display of religious affiliation, banned at schools under a 2004 law.
Denmark’s government has announced a bill seeking to ban the public burning of the Quran. Expected to pass by the end of this year, the law prescribe a two-year jail-term, and a fine, for the
“inappropriate handling of objects with essential religious significance for a religious community.”
The move comes amidst rising terror threat levels after a string of Quran-burning incidents in Denmark and Sweden, with the latter, too, under pressure to take action.
Today in history witnessed one of the most stalwart defenses against the Islamic spear-thrust into Europe — the Battle of Albulena in Albania in 1457.
To appreciate the significance of this epic clash, one must first appreciate the leader of the Albanian forces, George Kastrioti, better known as Skanderbeg (“Lord Alexander”). Today, he is as little known in the West as he was once widely celebrated all throughout Europe. His life, which is featured in the new book, “Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam,” certainly validates the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
Renowned French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud Blackler discusses the expansion of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, the Islamic Caliphate, and the halal & hijab push in western democracies, in an interview with The New Indian Editor-in-Chief Aarti Tikoo.
Blackler specializes in Islamic normativity and has written two books – The Halal Market or The Invention of a Tradition and Frérisme or Brotherism (yet to be translated into English). Her research focuses on Salafi indoctrination, halal ecosystems, and the particular form of Islamism that emerged in the 1960s in Europe and other western liberal democracies. Her works also revolve around the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in promoting a more radical version of Islam and pushing the traditional schools of Islam to the corner, in order to lead all Muslims towards the Caliphate.
STOCKHOLM — Swedish police on Sunday arrested two people and detained around 10 people after a violent riot broke out at a protest involving a burning of the Quran, police said.
The protest was organized by Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika, whose protests — which have included public desecrations of the Muslim holy book — have sparked outrage across the Middle East.
Sunday’s protest was held in a square in the southern city of Malmo, which has a large immigrant population, and according to public broadcaster SVT around 200 people had showed up to watch.
A scene that delights the heart of every Muslim. ☪
After a copy of the Qur'an was burned, thousands of Muslims came together in Malmö, Sweden, holding copies of the Holy Book and engaging in a collective group reading. pic.twitter.com/EPtebVigHo
— MEND Community (@mendcommunity) July 12, 2023
Another year, another conference, another tableau of speakers, some associated with antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny and hatred.
The convening organization is not the grotesque Goyim Defense League, a Hitler-admiring American neo-fascist groupuscule linked to a spate of graffiti, leaflets and posters the RCMP has begun investigating in the Toronto area. It’s the federally funded Muslim Association of Canada (MAC).
Federally funded? Of course it is, has been for years.
I used to monitor conferences like this but came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth my time.
A speaker may be pulled once in awhile but those responsible will cry innocence til next time and there is always a next time.
Federal funding by our vote whoring UNIPARTY was one reason I left it behind but the Kumbaya crowd was the last straw.
They have convinced themselves that their moderate crocodile friends will eat them last.
The effort wasn’t worth the static from these appeasers.
And the conferences go on and on and on because diversity!
Soon we will be as sophisticated and multicultural as London, Paris, Brussels or Berlin and soon we will have our own Leicster’s.
Hundreds of Christians fled their homes on August 16 when, in the eastern Pakistani district capital of Jaranwala, Muslim mobs started an anti-Christian riot, vandalizing churches and setting churches and Christians’ homes on fire — all based just on an accusation that a Quran had been desecrated.
At least 20 churches throughout the city were set on fire and more than 400 homes belonging to Christians damaged. The rioters attacked and vandalized a Christian cemetery and burned the office of the Christian assistant commissioner of Jaranwala.
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