A new inquiry into the unrest in Leicester seems to be biased from the outset.
Leicester mayor Sir Peter Soulsby has established an independent inquiry into the violent disorder that rocked the east of the city for much of September. Last week, he appointed Dr Chris Allen to lead it. This has gone down like a lead balloon among many members of Leicester’s Hindu community.
A US woman who admitted leading an all-female battalion of the Islamic State group (IS) has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, a 42-year-old from Kansas, committed terrorist acts in Iraq, Syria and Libya over an eight-year period.
She also admitted to giving military training to more than 100 women and girls, including some as young as 10.
She pleaded guilty to the charges in June.
An Iranian girl in middle school was beaten to death after police officers found a torn-up photo of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in one of her schoolbooks, local news outlet in the Sistan and Baluchestan Province Haalvsh reported on Sunday night.
A series of violent incidents in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, and the nearby towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, have left Christians worried about their safety and future under the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Many Christians living in these communities are complaining that the Palestinian Authority is not doing enough to punish those who attack churches and Christian-owned businesses. The perpetrators are Muslims who make up the majority of the population in the Bethlehem area.
Earlier this year, Palestinian Evangelical Pastor Johnny Shahwan was arrested by the PA security forces on charges of “promoting normalization” with Israel.
Somalia’s president says at least 100 people were killed on Saturday in two car bombings at a busy junction in the capital, Mogadishu, and the toll could rise in the country’s deadliest attack since a truck bombing at the same spot five years ago killed more than 500.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, at the site of the explosions in Mogadishu, told journalists that nearly 300 other people were wounded. “We ask our international partners and Muslims around the world to send their medical doctors here since we can’t send all the victims outside the country for treatment,” he said.
How can they tell when a bomb goes off? Does the place look better post detonation?
In Paris, a trial is taking place concerning the 14 July 2016 attack in Nice when a man drove a truck into a crowd of families attending a firework display. The three-month trial, due to end in early December, is of eight associates of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel accused of assisting him in the attack, when a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. A total of 86 people were killed, including 15 children. More than 450 were injured. You’d think it would be a big deal. You would be wrong.
I’ve been reporting on the trial for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In the church-like Palais de Justice, where the public can watch the trial on large screens, the average attendance is around six. One afternoon there were only two of us, me and a sweet-faced old lady whispering a melancholy but urgent commentary to herself.
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign recently dropped tens of thousands of dollars on private security services following her calls to defund the police and support for a campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, federal filings show.
The Minnesota Democrat’s campaign spent $27,081.14 on “security services” between July and September, almost all of which went to Relative Intel LLC, Federal Election Commission records show. Relative Intel offers protection services, training and consulting.
Mohamed Ibrahim can barely bring himself to recall his run-in with so-called Islamic State fighters.
With tears in his eyes, the husband and father-of-three spoke about the eight militants who stopped his bus in Syria in late 2017 after living under IS rule for years, pressing a rifle to his cheek.
“I started to sweat. My heart was pounding,” Mr Ibrahim said.
Efforts to prevent a young Sudanese woman being stoned to death, after she was convicted of adultery, are being hindered by the absence of government ministers in the country.
Sudan has been run by a military junta since a coup one year ago.
Campaigners say the 20-year-old didn’t get a fair trial and should be freed.
A government official agreed that the trial was “a joke” but added: “We don’t have a minister who can intervene to demand her release.”
Community Media Advocacy Centre senior consultant Laith Marouf says the Heritage Ministry “begged” Montreal-based CMAC to take a grant, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
… “(Heritage Canada) begged (CMAC) to apply within four days to receive funding to create a series of conferences across the country that bring together racialized and Indigenous broadcasters, media producers, academics, to discuss a strategy for anti-racism in the media,” Marouf said in the podcast.
Conservative despair about the liberal erosion of the West is delivering it to its mortal foes.
The tacit alliance between the Western left and the Islamists—Muslims intent upon conquering the West for Islam—has long been a source of deep concern.
Left-wingers, who exercise outsize influence over Western culture, sometimes make common cause with Islamists over their mutual aim of destroying the West and the State of Israel. This is even though the Islamists’ theocratic denial of democracy and human rights, their oppression of women and their persecution of gay people and dissidents run wholly contrary to the Western left’s professed values.
As if that axis isn’t dangerous enough, there’s now disturbing news of a parallel attraction developing between Islamists and conservatives. In a long and important article in Focus on Western Islamism, Sam Westrop has detailed a burgeoning alliance between Islamists and American Republicans.
Marking the solemn annual observance of al-Qaeda’s killing of nearly 3,000 Americans in the 9/11 atrocities, I described the conundrum we’ve wrestled with in the 20-plus years since: What do we do about terrorists who should be put to death but can’t be tried?
Zakaria Amara, leader of an al-Qaida-inspired terrorist plot to explode truck bombs in Ontario in 2006, recently faced two days of interrogation by RCMP national security investigators to assess what threat he might still pose as he sought release on parole.
$1.5B ‘Islamophobia industry’ foments fear, moral panic in Canada
A recent study revealed that north American networks that influence and fund Islamophobia “has become a transnational sector” as the “industry,” with access to over $1.5 billion in funding, foment Islamophobic fear and moral panic in Canada.
Jasmin Zine, a Canada-based professor of Sociology, Religion and Culture, and the Muslim Studies Option at Wilfrid Laurier University mapped these political, ideological, institutional, and economic networks in a four-year study.
In a 127-page report published recently, Zine and her team concluded that at least 39 U.S.-based organizations coordinate the market. A 2016 study concluded that this network was financed by 1,096 charitable institutions between 2014 and 2016 through donor-advised funds (DAF), giving them access to over $1.5 billion.
Boy I sure wish I could get my hands on some of that cash! But it looks like this broad and Laith Marouf got my share!
Council chiefs to remove Stoke-on-Trent terrorist’s name from London Bridge attack report
One member argued including Usman Khan’s name played into hands of far-right extremists
The name of a Staffordshire terrorist who killed two people in the London Bridge attacks is to be removed from a council report over concerns including it could play into the hands of far right extremists.
Usman Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent, was responsible for the attack at Fishmongers Hall in 2019. At an event to help ex-offenders, he fatally wounded Prisoner Education Scheme volunteers Saskia Jones, 23, and 25-year-old Jack Merritt, before being shot dead by police.
But at a meeting of Staffordshire county council’s Safeguarding Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Monday, which was receiving the chief coroner’s report outlining how future deaths could be prevented following the inquests of Khan’s two victims, debate focused on the inclusion of Khan’s name in the report.
