A district court in canton Zurich has given a Muslim preacher, accused of promoting violence, an 18-month suspended prison sentence. It also ordered the 25-year-old Ethiopian to be deported and banned from re-entering Switzerland for 15 years.
Police arrested the cleric in October of last year, after receiving reports of the controversial sermon delivered at the An’Nur mosque in Winterthur, in north-eastern Switzerland. The man is also charged with distributing pictures of executions...
Doctors sporting full beards should not be allowed to practice in Danish hospitals, the right-wing Danish People's Party has said, arguing voluminous facial hair is a clear manifestation of Islamic faith. The comments caused a huge social media backlash.
The idea was recently floated by Henrik Thorup, a top Danish People’s Party (DF) candidate in the upcoming Danish municipal elections. Unveiling the controversial proposal, Thorup said that enforcing the ban should “put an end to this...
Muslims in the northern multiethnic Parisian suburb of Clichy-la-Garenne will not be permitted to pray on the streets, the French interior minister said. "They [Muslims] will not have prayers on the street, we will prevent street praying," Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told Questions Politics on Sunday.
Muslims have held Friday prayers on the streets since March when a local mosque in a government building was shut down and turned into a library. French authorities are accused by...
A mosque in Sweden was vandalized Sunday when unknown attackers painted a swastika on one of its door, according to a Muslim body head. The Al-Huda Islamic Cultural Center’s mosque that came under attack is in Flen town of Sodermanland district.
Sweden Islamic Federation President Tahir Akan told Anadolu Agency the Muslim community was sad after the attack on their mosque. Police informed us about the attack, Akan said. ''Police have launched a large-scale search. Developments are...
Britain's primary school inspectors will question girls who wear the Muslim headscarf at school, the head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) announced over the weekend. Amanda Spielman explained the move was to tackle situations in which wearing a headscarf "could be interpreted as sexualization" of school children. Spielman's announcement, which came as a recommendation not yet added to the inspectors' official handbook, advises schools to record pupils' responses to...
Some 14 members of anti-Islamic organization Pegida Nederland held an early Sunday morning protest action against the construction of a mosque, with at least one person accused of dousing the site with pig's blood. A video that the organization posted on Twitter and Facebook shows a man disguised as a priest planting a wooden cross at the mosque site, and then using a toilet brush to splatter the blood on the cross and around the location.
Enschede mayor Onno van Veldhuizen...
A teacher has been suspended after removing a pupil’s hijab headscarf in front of her classmates. Footage was posted to Snapchat at a school in Nashville in the United States, with the use of the caption “pretty hair”. Other children in the footage can be seen playing with the girl’s hair, while a second video goes under the caption “lol all that hair cover up”. The traditional Islamic headscarf is worn by some Muslim women and covers the hair and neck, while the face is not covered. It is...
Authorities in China’s Xinjiang region have updated guidelines on detaining Muslim Uyghurs on religious “extremism” charges, which include the posture they take while at prayer, their hair color, and even how they wear their watches, official sources said. Thousands of Uyghurs accused of having “extremist” and “politically incorrect” views have been held in political re-education camps and prisons throughout the region in recent months.
Authorities circulated a list earlier this year...
A Canadian Muslim group and a civil liberties association on Tuesday filed a challenge to a law in Quebec province that forbids face-covering by those who wish to access or provide public services. The law represents "blatant and unjustified violations of freedom of religion", the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said in the filing in Quebec Superior Court. They argue the new face-covering law takes direct aim at Muslims who wear a...
The University of Cincinnati is investigating comments a music professor made on a Muslim student's assignment after they were shared on social media. Among the professor's notes: "July 4th is not the day we tape a sign to a damn stick and go out and march with smug college brats and dysphoric drama queens."
College-Conservatory of Music Assistant Professor Clifford Adams' comments first went public Thursday when another UC student posted a photo of the exchange on Facebook. Fay...
Professor Gisela Müller-Brandeck-Bocquet has been accused of “discrimination” after asking everyone at the University of Würzburg lecture to take off their headwear. The professor argued this should include the Muslim woman, because the lecture hall was a secular space. But she says she did not insist that the headscarf be removed.
Instead, a university spokesman told BR24 [in German] that Professor Müller-Brandeck-Bocquet had launched into a discussion of equality between men and...
A lecturer at an Israeli university expelled an Arab student from class after she refused to take off her hijab. The lecturer in Bar-Ilan University’s Middle Eastern Studies department last week asked the student to take off her head and face covering, and then asked her to leave the classroom when she refused, Ynet reported. It is not known what made the lecturer, who was not named, kick the student out of his classroom. Seventeen percent of Israel’s citizens are Muslims.
The student...
A couple is being investigated in France after calling their son “Jihad”. The boy was born at the beginning of August in the city of Toulouse. The registrar responsible for recording the birth certificate then passed the information onto local prosecutors.
French law allows parents freedom to choose any name which is not considered harmful to their child or infringing the rights of third parties. The prosecutor can now pass the case onto a judge to decide whether to order the parents...
In August 2016, six teenage boys were arrested in Harlow, Essex, after Polish immigrant Arkadiusz Jóźwik died following a brutal street attack which his brother said began after he was heard speaking Polish on the street. The decision to leave the EU in some cases emboldened people to express their feelings of hate and "legitimised" the prejudice that they had by empowering them to express and verbalise those feelings.
As part of hate crime awareness week, I was in Parliament this...
A former soldier who posted hate speech on Facebook about hanging Muslims and slaughtering refugees was today spared jail. Donna Bowdler avoided prison last September after making vile remarks on the social network about the death of Muslims and destruction of mosques.
But while on bail over those offences, dating from October to December 2015, she made yet more offensive posts, between January and August 2016. She wrote about slaughtering refugees and later said: “Come and have a go...