Faith Matters calls on the Home Office to stop two far-right politicians from Poland from speaking at a community event in Manchester on Sunday, May 1.

Those names include the disgraced former MEP and far-right extremist from Poland, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, and Konrad Berkowicz of the far-right Confederation bloc, which we’ve highlighted before.

We made the same call about Mikke in 2018.

We are indebted to the organisation A Million Poles for making us aware of the event next week.

Part of our updated dossier to the Home Office highlights Mikke includes recent anti-Muslim content on Twitter, including propagating outlandish conspiracies about a so-called Islamic’ takeover’.

On Twitter, Mikke has pushed disinformation and propaganda about the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the ICC agrees to investigate war crimes.

Mikke supported the far-right media personality Eric Zemmour in the French election – LGBT+ groups are suing Zemmour for Holocaust revisionism over his denial about the deportation of gay men by the Nazi machine of tyranny.

When informed on Twitter that the falangist fascist dictator of Spain, Franciso Franco was “Jewish”, Mikke scoffed, stating that he “smashed” communism, before adding, “But you have to fight the JEWISH COMMUNE, because it is an intelligent, very dangerous enemy!”. The account Mikke quoted with this reply posts highly inflammatory and racists statements like, “Being jew/muslim is far worse for me than racemixing.”

Mikke’s use of Twitter has, over the years, targeted the Swedish furniture giant in July 2019, calling for the boycott of these “homo-fascists” in Poland. Much has also been written about their political aspirations to curtail LGBT+ rights in Poland.

It’s easy to find other examples of racist speech on Mikke’s Twitter – including a grotesque antisemitic meme captioned with the N-word.

Mikke has called for lowering the age of consent for children as, “There are girls who are 12, 13, and completely mature.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke, Grzegorz Braun, Artur Dziambor, Robert Winnicki and Konrad Berkowicz (of the far-right Confederation bloc) faced widespread condemnation for standing beneath a banner which read “Vaccination sets you free”, echoing the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign which hung outside the Auschwitz death camp and other Nazi concentration camps.

In 2019, Berkowicz put a kippah (skullcap) on the head of a rival lawmaker Anna Krupk, during a debate on restitution for Jewish Holocaust victims, the Times of Israel reported.

The Confederation bloc opposed a motion supporting Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.

On Facebook in 2019, Berkowicz claimed that LGBT communities have “disturbed urges”. In 2016, Berkowicz shared an anti-Muslim meme linking refugees to ISIS as a “trojan horse” to enter Europe.

In 2020, the JPost reported that Mikke said on Polish television that “Murderous pogroms against Jews in Europe had a positive outcome because the weak in the Jewish community died and the strong survived”, which he used to claim that Covid-19 was ‘eradicating’ the weak and ‘improving’ the human gene pool.

Years earlier, Mikke made a Nazi salute in the EU Parliament in 2015 and 2014, claiming that the fascist dictator Mussolini was merely “trying to protect Jews” and that Hitler’ knew nothing’ about the Holocaust in a 2014 article where he expressed abhorrent views on rape.

The Polish anti-racism organisation Never Again told Faith Matters, “”The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association is dismayed by the planned meeting of the Polish far-right leaders in Manchester. We are seriously concerned they are going to promote their hatred and bigotry among the Polish community in the UK. This meeting has to be prevented and the preachers of hate must not be allowed to sow division and strife.”

A speaker at a far-right “freedom picnic” in the Bury area of Greater Manchester on September 15 had previously said that Poles were “being outmanoeuvred by Judeans who are trying to force our government to pay extortion money disguised as compensation”.

Stanisław Michalkiewicz, hosts a radio show on the Polish-Catholic owned Radio Maryja, which, according to the Anti Defamation League, has spread antisemitic messaging to its listeners for at least 25 years.

Aleksander Gancarz, the president of the Australian Institute of Polish Affairs, condemned Michalkiewicz’s presence in the country last February.

Michalkiewicz is facing legal issues in Poland after suggesting that a 13-year-old sexual abuse survivor was, in fact, a “whore” after the Catholic Church agreed to award her 1 million zloty in compensation.

He also referred to gay people as “sodomites” during a Polish-language radio interview last month where the discussion included a reference to an apparent “LGBT ideology”.

The event, hosted by a new far-right coalition called Konfederacja, was first exposed by Faith Matters in July, following their success among some Polish diaspora communities during the European Elections.

Another speak at Sunday’s event is Sławomir Mentzen, who is credited with inventing Konfederacja’s caustic slogan, “We don’t want Jews, gays, abortion, taxes and the EU”.

Sebastian Ross, another speaker, wrote on his Facebook page in April that some Jewish people were using “guilt” to weaponise antisemitism to generate funds for individuals and organisations to monitor it. Ross attached a cropped photo of a Jewish man with their finger in their nose to emphasise his point.

This image, however, continues to appear in neo-Nazis and white nationalist memes. ImgFlip, a popular website for creating memes, has become awash with antisemitic and Nazi imagery when using the simple search term “Jew”. The top image choice for memes includes the infamous “antisemitic meme of the Jew” which appeared on White Aryan Resistance hate site in 2004.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke, the disgraced former MEP, is another confirmed speaker.

Faith Matters continues to raise concerns about Korwin-Mikke and his repellent views.

Faith Matters will be forwarding its investigation to the relevant authorities in the Greater Manchester area.

Staff at a fried chicken shop received threats and abuse after an employee was arrested and then released without further action during the Parsons Green attack investigation.

A Facebook post from Aladdins Fried Chicken in Hounslow, west London, said staff faced abuse and threats on social media, over the telephone, and in person, following the arrest of Yahyah Farroukh, 21, on September 16.

The post added: “The investigation brought Yahyah, his friends, family, place of employment and the wider Muslim community under scrutiny and indignity.”

Mr Farroukh, and a 48-year-old man from Newport were both released without charge on September 21.

Police never formally identified Mr Farroukh as a suspect by name, but it emerged in the media.

During the short-lived investigation against him, Mr Farroukh’s Facebook profile remained accessible, and, in the absence of information, came speculation, and a natural curiosity to make sense of the unthinkable, to understand the motives behind this recent terrorist attack, which injured thirty passengers.

Within days, we learned of Yahyah Farroukh’s ‘party lifestyle,’ his place of employment, how he arrived in the UK as a refugee from Syria, and family visits to London and Scotland.

By September 22, however, an 18-year-old man named Ahmed Hassan, was charged in connection with the terror attack. His charges include attempted murder and maliciously causing an explosion.

During an interview on LBC, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, spoke of how deadly the bomb was, as it contained triacetone triperoxide (TATP), an explosive used in the Manchester, Paris, and Brussels terror attacks.

After the release of Yahyah Farroukh, it has now emerged that his mother suffered a heart attack after learning of her son’s arrest, hospitalising her in Egypt, as doctors are, however, confident that she will recover.

In the days before his release, the public Facebook page of Mr Farroukh became a temporary magnet for abusive posts from users within the UK and Europe. Disturbing comments accused him of being a terrorist, some wished death upon him, as others hoped he would face rape and sexual violence in prison.

Others spammed his wall post with broader anti-Muslim invective. In one such example, an account with a notable interest in ‘white power’ had posted several comments with pig emojis. Several posts made explicit reference to Islam and pigs, including a desire to rub pork in Mr Farroukh’s face. Days later, a user posted a grotesque meme linking Muslims to bestiality, adding the racial slur ‘black b*stard’ hours later.

Facebook did remove a violent comment from a man in the Czech Republic who wrote ‘F*ck you Muslims’ in a broader rant that referred to Muslims as both ‘parasites’ and ‘pigs’ on September 19. Before its deletion from the Mr Farroukh’s profile late light night or today, the Facebook thread had generated almost 200 comments since September 16.

But questions remain as to why his Facebook account was not disabled during the investigation.

Prominent anti-Muslim hate sites in the United States, jumped on the news of Mr Farroukh’s initial arrest, hoping to further their anti-refugee narratives, but have, unsurprisingly, failed to update their coverage to reflect his release.

A 17-year-old male has today been released without further charge, as two men, aged 25 and 30, remain in custody under section 41 of the Terrorism Act.

Mahershala Ali has won the Oscar for best-supporting actor – an accolade many had expected – for his performance in Moonlight, the critically acclaimed story of a black gay man’s coming of age.

Ali had already picked up awards from the Screen Actors Guild, Critics Choice, and the NAACP Image award. During his acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild, reflecting on his own experiences, he said: “I think what I have learned from working on Moonlight, you see what happens when you persecute people, and they fold into themselves.”

Muslims have won Oscars in various categories over the years but none in acting roles. Previous winners include Pakistani documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and director Asghar Farhadi – whose earlier film A Separation won the foreign film Oscar in 2012. His latest film, The Salesman, was screened in London’s Trafalgar Square hours before the ceremony. Farhadi did not attend the ceremony in protest at Donald Trump’s efforts to bar people entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries. His latest film would go on to win Best Foreign Language Film.

In Moonlight, Ali plays Juan, a drug dealer whose tender moments with the young protagonist Chiron provides him with a surrogate father figure who imparts life lessons bundled in moments of deep affection and unwavering acceptance.

Juan lives with his partner Teresa. It is within this orderly household that the problems of the external world – be it in school – or at home are forgotten. External contradictions fall by the wayside.

Within the swollen silences of dinner, the narrative is punctuated in the language of close affection. No judgements are made of Chiron. When it seems like the world has turned against him, Chiron is taught a powerful lesson about acceptance and to reject the hateful labels others apply.

Perhaps the most iconic and beautiful example of this loving bond between Juan and Chiron concerns the former teaching the latter to swim.

As Hilton Als writes, Moonlight “undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too”. For Ira Hilton III, the surrogate relationship between Juan and Chiron “speaks volumes for how Jenkins wants us to view relationships between black men.” Shane Thomas praises the universality of Moonlight, and for its assiduous and precise direction.

Stories concerning the religious identity of Mahershala Ali, however, have created their own momentum.

Born Mahershalalhashbaz (the longest prophetic name in the Bible) Gilmore in 1974 to a mother who was an ordained Christian minister, he converted to Islam in 1999, joining the Ahmadiyya sect in 2001.

His spiritual interest also included attending a Baha’i meeting and flirting with Buddhism. Yet, his defining moment of religious and spiritual clarity came from the act of prayer inside a mosque. Ali described this moment as: “I could not understand a word of the prayer, but ironically, they were tears of understanding. For the first time in my life, I knew where I was, spiritually speaking.”

Ali’s embrace of the Ahmadiyya sect should not be erased. It’s too important given the persecution Ahmadis face in Pakistan and countries like Indonesia.

A Faith Matters report titled, ‘Sectarianism, Extremism and Hate Crime, the Impacts on the Ahmadiyya Community,’ explored the complexities and root causes of this form violence and prejudice.

It’s a product of a wider extremist narrative which exploits the sensitivities around the blasphemy debate in Islam. It seeks to define Islam through its own narrow interpretations. This interpretative lens allows fundamentalists to dictate the narrative and define others as ‘outside’ of Islam, which helps normalise banal, everyday forms of prejudice, including the decision to boycott Ahmadi-run businesses. The murder of Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah made this sectarian issue headline news.

Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, deleted her congratulatory tweet after users pointed out that Ali’s Ahmadi beliefs. This deletion generated its own controversy.

Pakistan's Ambassador to UN, Maleeha Lodhi first tweets then deletes the tweet just bcoz #MahershalaAli is an Ahmadi. pic.twitter.com/EwpxrQGiJN

— Ayesha Khan (@KhanAyesha23) February 27, 2017

Nor should we erase the historic role of Ahmadi missionaries in black communities in early twentieth America. An important figure in Mahershala Ali’s religious journey was the Chicago native Abdul Karim. The Ahmadiyya movement has maintained a missionary presence among black communities in Chicago since 1935. Within the city limits of Chicago stands the Al-Sadiq Mosque, which remains one of the oldest mosques in the United States.

Some of the earliest independent black mosques took inspiration from Ahmadi teachings. The first mosque in Cleveland was later established by the former Ahmadi Wali Akram. Some black converts established their own mosques to accommodate the growing black consciousness and scholarship around Islam. Before the rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI), Ahmadi missionaries offered “the first multi-racial model for American Islam”. This influence, according to the academic Edward C. Curtis, reached Elijah Muhammad, a religious leader in the NOI, who had “regularly quoted, verbatim, from Ahmadi literature, including Ahmadi translations of the Qur’an”. Ahmadi missionaries had converted around 10,000 people by the 1940s.

A key figure in the early days of the Ahmadi missionary work in the United States was Muhammad Sadiq, who arrived in Philadelphia on February 15, 1920. A year later, with the help of other Muslims, Sadiq had launched the monthly periodical The Muslim Sunrise to challenge negative stereotypes about Islam in the press.

Sadiq used the periodical to argue that Islam could resolve the racism Christianity had failed to answer. He contended that Islam and the Arabic language would unite all people of African descent. This post-colonial message came at a time of great social discontent and racist violence.

In a post-9/11 context, Ali himself has spoken openly about the prejudice he’s faced. This included having his bank accounts frozen and learning that he was on an FBI watch list. His wife stopped wearing the hijab following acts of hatred and prejudice. Ali told the Radio Times: “But I will say if you convert to Islam after a couple of decades of being a black man in the US, the discrimination you receive as a Muslim doesn’t feel like a shock.”

Ali’s big cinematic break was in David Fincher’s 2008 fantasy drama ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’.

At 9:37pm on May 18, 2016, Katie Hopkins tweeted ‘Give me strength. Stick up a chuffing sign for English Language School’. Her bombastic tone accompanied an image which suggested that road signs in Bradford now included Urdu.

Twitter users soon exposed the hoax.

@jake_conran @KTHopkins @Juliet777777 Er, same van in the background. 100% photoshopped.

— Adam Leyton (@AdamLeyton) May 18, 2016

@jake_conran @KTHopkins same van. Pull your head out of your arse pic.twitter.com/H53qut3OV2

— Graeme Rayner (@grimois) May 18, 2016

The origins of the hoax stem from a white nationalist hate site called The New Observer. Its content rallies against perceived ‘white genocide’. Editors of the site insist on labelling migrants and refugees as“illegal invaders” and “Third World colonizers.”

Nor does the content lose its traditional antisemitism. Articles are rich with Holocaust denial. And obsess over the ideas of an all powerful ‘Jewish lobby’. An article on September 6, 2015 was headlined ‘Jewish Supremacists Using “Holocaust Fable” to Promote Third World Invasion of Europe’.

The election of Sadiq Khan as London Mayor was ‘the first such formerly European city to officially fall before the nonwhite invasion of Europe.’

But to return to the Bradford story, the hoax goes beyond photoshopped roadsigns. Quotes are either invented or a product of plagiarism. It lifted quotes from a Guardian article published back in 2003. It also claimed that Bradford has its own Grand Mufti. A bizarre inaccuracy compounded by the fact that the individual died in 1974. In actuality, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni served as the Mufti of Jerusalem under the politicial authority of the British Mandate in Palestine. Nor is the text photoshopped in the image Urdu in origin.

The white nationalist Vanguard News Network (VNN) had also shared the story yesterday evening. Neo-Nazi hate site, the Daily Stormer, reposts content from The New Observer.

Twitter user @Juliet777777 was the source of Hopkins’ tweet. This pro-Pegida account often directs its 19.4k followers to hate sites like The New Observer.

As of writing, the hoax image tweeted by Katie Hopkins has received more than 300 retweets. It’s also possible that Hopkins saw the image as nothing more than an exercise in confirmation bias. Nor has she removed or apologised for the gross inaccuracy.

The post Why did Katie Hopkins share a white nationalist hoax? appeared first on Religious Reader.

Ken Livingstone’s comments on Hitler and Zionism created a justified outrage. His comments divorce the realities of Hitler’s antisemtism and Nazi violence.

Hitler opposed the creation of a Jewish state in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. Hitler’s antisemitic outlook owes in part to the writings of Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His commitment to the conspiracy of a Jewish plot to rule the world prevented him from entertaining the idea of a single Jewish state. This became a meaningful way for the Nazis to dehumanize Jewish communities.

Hitler obsession with the racist conspiracy of global Jewish influence germinated in Vienna. This grew in the 1920s when party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg introduced him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Nazi Party had already published copies of the text in 1919. And by 1939, the party had published at least 23 versions of the text.

So Livingstone’s point that Hitler “was supporting Zionism” is wrong. Nor did Israel exist in 1932. The conflation between Zionism, Israel and Hitler only serves to cause deep upset. Livingstone’s comment also divorces the complexities of Jewish thought in this era. Removed from the historical context of growing antisemitic violence and discrimination, he caricatures Zionism. This caricature suggests that it shares similar genocidal and racist proclivities. And it also infers that Jews were complicit in their own destruction. Not only are the statements antisemitic but devoid of empathy.

It’s possible that Livingstone alluded to The Haavara (Ha’avarah) Agreement of 1933. This plan would allow German Jews to emigrate to Palestine and keep some of the value of their property in Germany. Negotiations proved controversial in many Jewish circles. The Nazis saw this as a means to undermine the solidarity of Jewish boycotts of German goods. It had little to do with a desire to resettle German Jews.

Researching this agreement also brings up a number of racist conspiracy theories. It also, rather bizarrely trended on Twitter for a short time yesterday. Proclivities towards this thinking in some confirms Barkun’s theory of ‘stigmatized knowledge‘. In short, stigmatized knowledge presents information that mainstream institutions have not validated.

The agreement did allow some wealthy German Jews to emigrate. But as Y’faat Weiss noted:

“The  agreement  did  not  improve  the  living  conditions  of  the  Jews  left  behind,  and  the  number  of  such  Jews  who  actually  emigrated  to  Israel  indirectly  because  of  the  agreement  is  in  doubt. In  view of the peculiar demographic structure of Polish Jewry, such an agreement could not have met the needs of the Jewish rank and file in this country.”

Nor was the agreement signed until August 25, 1933. Hitler’s rise to power made antisemitic violence a state-sanctioned policy. On March 11, 1933, the SA (Sturm Abteilung) militia attacked Jewish-owned shops. Antisemitic violence erupted nationwide. In that same month, the Nazis had erected Dachau concentration camp. Within its first year alone, the Nazis had incarcerated almost five thousand political enemies.

Nor was Hitler a benign force in this period. He signed the order to murder Fritz Gerlich, editor of the anti-Nazi newspaper, Der Gerade Weg, in Dachau in 1934.

The Enabling Act allowed Hitler to rule by decree. He then called for national boycott of Jewish businesses. When not met with SA violence, Jewish shop owners found their shop windows painted with the Star of David and other slogans.

On April 7, 1933, the Nazis purged German Jews from the civil service. Jewish doctors and dentists could no longer work in public health schemes. Teachers were fired. Lawyers could no longer work for the state. A few weeks later and the Nazis had banned kosher traditions.

The Nazis introduced quota systems to limit education for Jewish children in state schools.

In May of 1933, the Nazis held a series of public book burnings. This included texts written by Jewish authors and political enemies. Months later and Jewish academics were purged from teaching positions at universities.

All this violence and discrimination came before the signing of the Ha’avara agreement on August 25, 1933. The antisemitic climate in Nazi Germany increased with each passing month and year.

The Nazis made clear in in 1937 that a single Jewish state would prove detrimental. A memo from German General Consulate in Palestine said:

“The formation of a Jewish state… is not in Germany’s interest because a (Jewish) Palestinian state would create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counter weight against such possible power growth of the Jews.”

 

It’s true that some in the Nazi party did seek to deport Jews out of Europe in 1940. But crucially, as Ken Livingstone forgot to mention, was never adopted as policy. The idea went against the fundamental tenets of Hitler’s antisemitism.

Hitler wanted a genocidal response to what he saw as a global Jewish pursuit of power. He wrote that Jews were “a pestilence, a spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death.”

It’s why the Nazis and their collaborators had murdered nearly two out of every three European Jews by 1945.

In his magnum opus Life and Fate, the writer Vasily Grossman understood the varieties of antisemitism:

“Anti-Semitism is also an expression of a lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms – in science or in commerce, in craftsmanship or painting. States look to the imaginary intrigue of world Jewry for explanations of their own failure.

At the same time anti-Semitism is an expression of the lack of consciousness of the masses, of their inability to understand the true reasons for their sufferings. Ignorant people blame the Jews for their troubles when they should blame the social structure or the State itself. Anti-Semitism is also, of course, a measure of the religious prejudices smouldering in the lower levels of society.”

Ken Livingstone would do well to read Grossman, learn his history and not attack historical memory through the lens of antisemitic falsehoods.

The post Why Ken Livingstone is wrong about Hitler and Zionism appeared first on Religious Reader.

Around 300 of Croatia’s Jewish population held a vigil outside the country’s most notorious concentration camp in protest at the government’s alleged failure to challenge rising neo-Nazi sentiment in the country.

Part of this failure concerns the downplaying of the crimes of Croatia’s pro-Nazi regime. The ultra-nationalist and antisemitic Ustaša regime took power on August 10, 1941, after Axis forces had invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941.

Concentration camps were built nationwide to ‘purge’ Croatian society of ‘foreign elements’. This extended to Jews, Serbs, Roma and non-Catholic minorities.

Ustaša fascists exterminated over 500,000 Serbs. They forced 250,000 into exile and made 250,000 more Serbs convert to Catholicism under pain of death, according to Yad Vashem.

The fascist regime murdered  75 per cent of Croatia’s pre-war Jewish population of 40,000. Jews in Croatia now make up 1 per cent of the general population.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma were also murdered by the Ustaša regime, as were between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims.

Croatia’s largest concentration camp was the Jasenovac complex, a string of five camps along the Sava River, east of Zagreb. Close to 100,000 people were murdered in this camp between 1941 and 1945.

Prisoners at the Jasenovac camp received little food. Shelter and sanitary conditions were minimal at best. Guards tortured, assaulted and murdered prisoners with impunity.

The tools of murder included hammers, knives, bars and axes. They also used blowtorches and welding rods to torture prisoners.

Eduard Sajer, a survivor of the Jasenovac concentration camp, recalled how guards had segregated barracks for Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews and Serbs. When not working as an electrician in the camp, Sajer had to dig graves for individuals murdered by a blow to the head from a mallet. He bore witness to the murder of his brother and lost his parents and other siblings in the camp. He watched others being burnt alive.

Granik and Gradina also served as local killing fields.

Croatia’s surviving Jews were deported to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1943.

According to Marko Attila Hoare, an expert on genocides the region “the Ustasha  extermination  of  Serbs  provided  a  catalyst  for  Chetnik  massacres  of  Croat  and  Muslim  civilians“.

Dinko Sakic, commander of the Jasenovac camp, had fled to Argentina after the war and was eventually found guilty of crimes against humanity in 1999. Sakic was responsible for the murder of more than 2,000 Serbs, Jews and Roma. He ordered executions, refused to treat the sick, worked people to death and tortured some with a blowtorch. The courts found that Sakic had personally shot dead two prisoners for smiling.

Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, saw attempts to rehabilitate the image of the Ustaša. Fascists veterans received benefits from government officials. The  late president Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999, was often accused of Holocaust revisionism.

The funeral of Dinko Sakic proved a lavish affair in 2008. According to local media, he  was buried in the Ustasha uniform and described by the priest at the funeral as “a person Croats must be proud of”. Israel’s former ambassador, Shmuel Meirom, condemned the funeral.

Now in 2016, there is a sense of a neo-Nazi revival. Ultra-nationalists shouted pro-Nazi slogans at a rally attended by thousands of people, including Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Ivan Tepes in January.

Similar chants were heard during a recent football match between Israel and Croatia.

The Croatian government is now taking steps to allay fears. President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic met representatives of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascists. Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic issued a statement condemning the Ustashe regime.a

The post Croatian Jews boycott official Holocaust memorial over rising neo-Nazism appeared first on Religious Reader.

A mayoral candidate in the upcoming Bucharest election had denied Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust in a 1994 news article.

Marian Munteanu now of the National Liberal Party (PNL), had founded the ultra-Christian and nationalist Movement for Romania (Mişcarea pentru România) in 1991. The accusations surfaced in their newspaper ‘Mişcarea’ in June 1994. The party foleded in 1996 as Munteanu pursued other interests.

He denied that Romania had experienced an anti-Jewish Holocaust and the 400,000 deaths were no more than a ‘deeply flawed assessment’.

Much of Romania’s Holocaust denial concerns the actions of Nazi collaborator General Ion Antonescu. His antisemitism is, however, without question. In a 1941 session of the Council of Ministers he said: “I give the mob complete license to massacre [the Jews]. I will withdraw to my fortress, and after the slaughter, I will restore order.”

Antonescu ordered pogroms and the closure of all ‘Jewish communist cafes’. The repressive regime had proved one of Hitler’s most consistent allies during the Second World War. General Antonescu had met with Hitler in 1943 to reassure him of Romania’s unconditional support.

Romania and other Axis allies were part of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Odessa, a city in the Ukraine, was home to 180,000 Jews – around a third of the population. Before Romanian occupation, around half of Odessa’s Jewish population had fled.

On October 22, 1941, an explosion at Romania’s military headquarters in Odessa had left 67 dead, including the Romanian military commandant.

This provided the pretext for genocide. Troops had shot dead many of the 19,000 Jews rounded up near the habour areas. Others were doused with petrol and burned alive.

Romanian forces took 20,000 Jews to the village of Dalnik. Some Jews were shot. Others found themselves locked into a warehouse which was then set ablaze. Troops shot any fleeing individuals.

The Romanian administration then ordered the surviving Jews into two ghettos. Many died as a result of malnutrition, disease and exposure. In 1942, Romanian authorities deported almost 20,000 Jews from the Odessa ghettos to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, including the Bogdanovka, Domanevka, and Akhmetchetka regions.

Like other European countries, antisemitism had existed in the pre-war years. The fascist Iron Guard found broad political support for their antisemitic violence and propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s.

King Michael of Romania arrested Antonescu in 1944. The former general returned to Romania to face trial in 1946. And he admitted signing the order to massacre Jews in Odessa.

Antonescu believed that “Judaic and Masonic” influences corrupted Romanian life. He built his nationalism on a wave of antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment. In spite of his public statements after the failure to capture Stalingrad, in private, Antonescu did believe he was at war with Jews.

His regime had overseen the murder of roughly 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma people — more than any other country except Germany.

A firing squad killed Antonescu and three others found guilty of war crimes in 1946.

Attempts to rehabilitate General Antonescu were most pronounced in the 1990s. Iosif Constantin Dragan had used his wealth and ownership of the weekly newspaper Europa to question the Holocaust until his death in 2008. In 1991, articles the Europa weekly denied Romanian complicity in the Holocaust. Europa even gave column space to Romania’s extreme-right.

The fraudulent antisemitic conspiracy ‘Protocol of the Elders of Zion’ was even serialised in the right-wing press. Other magazines published their own Holocaust denial in 1994.

In 2003, Romania’s Ministry of Information denied the existence of the Holocaust. The statement was soon withdrawn. Legislation passed in 2002 meant that Holocaust denial could result in a six year prison sentence. That legislation, however, did little to stop the flow of Holocaust denial literature.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence, Holocaust denial and Romania’s complicity in genocide continued. Part of the problem is collective historical memory. Children were not taught about the Holocaust in schools until 1998. Only in the last decade have secondary-school children been able to take special classes on the Holocaust. Yet it has not addressed the nationalist assumptions embedded in pre-communist Romania.

Legislative amendments passed in 2015 made Holocaust denial illegal. And it also sought to weaken far-right movements who lionize Antonescu and the Iron Guard.

The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of Holocaust in Romania criticised Munteanu’s views on the Holocaust, according to the Agerpres news website.

Munteanu insists that his quotes were taken out of context.

There’s growing pressure on the PNL to withdraw Marian Munteanu’s candidacy due to his ‘fascist sympathies’.

The post Bucharest mayoral candidate outed as Holocaust denier appeared first on Religious Reader.

Channel 4 commissioned ICM to poll Muslims in Britain on a range of issues from women’s rights to marriage equality.

But did the poll titled “What do British Muslims really think?” answer its own question? Polling British Muslims is a difficult and expensive task. It’s why YouGov avoided the Sun’s now infamous ‘1 in 5 Muslims’ poll.

ICM’s researchers picked 138 random Local Super Output Areas where Muslims make up at least 20 per cent of the population. This skewed the findings to areas with relative social deprivation. It also over-represented certain ethnic groups. Yet it still captured 51 per cent of the total Muslim population.

Of the 1,081 Muslims polled, 55 per cent were Pakistani. British Asians/Asians totaled 83 per cent of the polling data. Data from the last census revealed that British Asian/Asians totaled 67.6 per cent of Muslims in England and Wales.

The poll included just 11 Arabs and 16 white Muslims who account for 6.6 per cent and 7.8 per cent of Muslims in England and Wales.

Despite methodological issues it remains a serious poll.

As with previous surveys – Muslims identify with Britain at a higher rate than the national average. They also expressed greater attachment t0 their local areas. A vast majority believe that Britain was a good place for Muslims to live in, and 78 per cent said they would like to integrate into British life on certain topics.

Nearly a quarter supported the idea of sharia law operating in parts of Britain above British law. Yet what defines sharia law remains ambigious and open to interpretation. But as Dr Imam Mamadou Bocoum notes: ‘Shariah means a road that leads into Spring Water, which is nothing but to live in peace and harmony. Amongst the principles of the Shariah is to preserve and protect life, intellect, property, honour, lineage, and religion‘.

There was little support among the Muslims polled to establish a caliphate. Support for ISIS polled at just 3 per cent. Few blamed the police or government for girls travelling to Syria.

More than a third of Muslims polled would report individuals who they suspected of seeking to participate in terrorism abroad to police. A figure that stands above the control sample of 30 per cent. Nearly half would attempt to dissuade the individual.

On the subject of extremism, 47 per cent agreed that Muslims need to do more to tackle extremism. The data reveals that a vast majority of Muslims look to the government to tackle Islamophobia and fund special projects to help communities root out the causes of violent extremism.

Islamophobia is a concern in this context, even when 73 per cent thought that religious harassment was not a problem in their local area. Individuals may of course experience less discrimination within their own ethnic and faith communities. Or in a public setting disclose their experiences to strangers. Research also points to the fact that hate crimes increase in areas of deprivation.

The wider public had also expressed a wider concern for Islamophobia than the Muslims polled. Nor do we know what language the interviews were conducted in. So it’s possible that individuals may not understand a question that pertains to religious prejudice.

There was also an overwhelming desire to empower young Muslims and women in the decisions that affect them. And many felt that better leadership in Muslim communities would help address the causes of violent extremism. Just one in 10 sought information on current affairs from mullahs at mosques. And a fifth never attend their local mosques. But 72 per cent felt that their local mosque did represent their views.

The most popular choice for television news was BBC 1, and a vast majority got their news from social media accounts. Yet again, the BBC remained the most popular source for news online.

Discussions of attitudes towards homosexuality dictated a majority of media coverage. The poll found that 52 per cent dsaid they disagreed with homosexuality being legal in Britain, compared with 5 per cent among the public at large who disagreed.

For British-born Muslims, 27 per cent agreed that homosexuality should be legal. Almost a third said neither/nor and 38 per cent disagreed. But that figure requires a caveat since the total figure in the weighted and unweighted sample is below 500 people. Muslims born outside of Britain were more likely to disagree that homosexuality should be legal (a net disagreement of 68 per cent in a sample of 601 or 609 when factored against weighted and unweighted bases).

On the topic of gay marriage and allowing a homosexual person to teach, the data reveals slight differences between Muslims born in the UK and abroad. But the above caveat still applies.

Despite a proclivity towards antisemitic tropes, British Muslims were not hostile towards Jewish communities. ICM asked the control and Muslim samples to measure their feelings towards faith and non-faith groups on a thermometer. Oddly, views towards Sikhs were missing from the data. The control group survey were more likely to agree that antisemitism was a problem. Yet 44 per cent of the Muslim survey and 46 per cent of the control group did not consider antisemitism a problem in Britain today.

The control survey were far more likely to disagree (51 per cent) with the statement ‘Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust’. Yet 18 per cent did agree with the statement, compared to 34 per cent in the Muslim survey.

Confusion about deaths in the Holocaust in the Muslim survey may owe to ignorance, not antisemitism. As 55 per cent did not know the true figure. Just 14 people agreed that it was a myth perpetuated by Jewish people. The control group was not asked this question so it’s hard to make a direct comparison.

Muslims surveyed overwhemingly had also rejected the right of individuals to publish pictures of the prophet Muhammad. But 12 per cent stated that it would depend on the nature of the pictures. Responses in the control group were more in favour of publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. A fifth of non-Muslims who rejected this position were Christian.

Opinions in the control group sample were even more divided when it came to the question of publishing cartoons that mock the prophet Muhammad. Fourty four per cent said publications should not have this right  – and that included 32 per cent of non-religious people and 50 per cent of Christians. A measure of support from Christians may owe to a sense of Abrahamic solidarity or the UK’s own historic and abolished blasphemy laws.

Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University, surveyed different faith groups in 2013. It found a variety of liberal and conservative views towards topics like abortion and homosexuality.

ICM also asked how often Muslims had mixed socially with non-Muslims in the past year. Again, what defines this social interaction remains open to interpretation. It was rare for Muslims to have had no social mixing outside of the home. Nor are social interactions defined by the boundaries of a person’s home. That applies to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Yet the data does show that at least a fifth did host and visit non-Muslims friends at least once a week, and 17 per cent welcomed non-Muslims into their homes on a daily basis.

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who will present the Channel 4 documentary What British Muslims Really Think tomorrow evening, made a problematic statement on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Phillips stated that: “What we also found is that there is a correspondence between this desire to live separately and sympathy for terrorism. People who want to live separately are about twice as likely to say that they have sympathy for terrorist acts.” Yet the data reveals that just 40 people expressed sympathy for terrorist acts. Nor was there any effort to extrapolate the meaning from a vague term, as sympathy does not always mean edorsement. Phillips is overstating the opinions of a tiny proportion in the data set.

That rhetoric can also suggest that religiosity and support for terrorism are somehow linked, a point that misunderstands the nature of radicalisation.

ICM asked some wide ranging, probing and sensationalistic questions; but to suggest it captures the breadth of Muslim opinion is not quite accurate.

The post What do Muslims in Britain actually think? appeared first on Religious Reader.

A Daily Express article which suggested that burqa sales are on the rise in Blackburn contains some basic errors.

The headline “Burka sales BOOM” can serve to reinforce the imagery of religiosity and violence. Imagery that has featured in counter-jihad circles since 2006.

The Other Islamic Bomb => pic.twitter.com/RlcqQwal2i

— Scott M (@EVdeals1) April 27, 2013

Describing a ‘sales boom’ is a journalistic cliche and not instrincially offensive. In this context, however, it lacks sensitivity.

The central claim of the article weakens under scrutiny. Paul Baldwin, the Express journalist, only interviewed a single store owner. And Baldwin acknowledges that ‘exact figures are hard to establish because many burkas are sold door-to-door’.

Nadeem Siddiqui has seen a rise in sales. His Hijab Centre in Blackburn went from selling ‘one or two burkas a month’ to ‘one or two in a week’. It’s a rise but it hardly meets the inflated claims of the headline.

The Express also carried out a ‘snap survey’ in the town and ‘found around 30 per cent of muslim women completely covered their faces’. That figure sounds daunting when the journalist had just informed readers that Muslims make up 11 per cent of the local population.

It turns out that the journalist spoke to just twenty women who wear the niqab or burqa. And given their campaign to publicly ban this veil is it any wonder they declined to be named or photographed?Nor is the campaign anything new.

The Express ran a front page in favour of a ban on October 21, 2006. It also claimed in 2006 that “An astounding 97% of Daily Express readers agreed a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony.” Much of the 2006 debate was influenced by former Labour MP Jack Straw’s public opposition to the face veil.  Straw reaffirmed his position to the Express a decade later.

Last month the newspaper claimed that 12,000 readers want a ban the burqa. The language of the survey demonstrates how to ask a leading question. Understanding polling methodologies is important.

Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall MEP has also called for a ban in a party where members deploy Islamophobic rhetoric when politically expedient.

Debates on the burqa are nothing new and have stretched as far as Australia. Some European countries have issued public bans despite a minority of women wearing face veils. Cameroon and Chad issued bans following acts of domestic terrorism.

The article claims that the popularity of the niqab and burqa grows in other northern towns and London. In the absence of evidence, however, comes insinuation.

Some individuals direct their anxieties and rage towards Islam and Muslims at individuals they perceive as Muslim. Some white converts experience religious slurs dressed in the language of race. Racialisation means that non-white Muslims, especially Sikhs, face violence and racist abuse.

A decision to wear (or remove) Islamic veils clothing is more nuanced. In one example, a London youth worker started wearing the hijab after suffering Islamophobic abuse. This trend, some argue, continued in a post-9/11 climate. A point raised by Nadeem Siddiqui, who runs the Hijab Centre in Blackburn.

Others removed their headscarf or hid it after experiencing abuse. Violence and verbal abuse against Muslim women who wear Islamic veils continues to cause concern. Comments posted below the Express article or in far-right channels contain many dehumanising slurs.

These views overlook the varieties and experiences of the religious life. And ignores the fact that some just pick and choose the verses that speaks to their own cultural specificities.

The popularity of the Express’s campaign reflects how anxieties and prejudices towards Islam and Muslim evolve and grow. And how misleading stories appeal to the echo-chambers of those prepared to believe the worst about Muslims in Britain.

The post Are sales of the burqa and niqab on the rise? appeared first on Religious Reader.