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Three men have been jailed for three years for a campaign of racial harassment against a Muslim colleague.

Amjid Mehmood was tied to railings and force-fed bacon while a rucksack with protruding wires was put on his locker, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

Fellow road maintenance workers Lee McDermott, of Rowley Regis, and Sean Melaney and Phillip Skett, both from Birmingham, admitted racial harassment.

The nine-month campaign of abuse came to light when Mr Mehmood told police.

McDermott, 31, from Blue Stone Walk, Sean Melaney, 28, of Steatham Grove, Kingstanding, and Skett, 39, of College Road, Erdington, were each jailed for three years.

Source.

Well, that’s another piece of political quackery killed off.

Good riddance.

Daniel Hannan, Tory MEP for South-East England, attacks Tony Blair’s handling of the Saudi-BAE corruption case. Yet, he fails to mention that his own party has come out in support of proposals that will allow governments to block future criminal investigations into cases just like the BAE scandal.

The Telegraph bloggers have obviously fallen into line behind ‘their side’ with this story. They now have three tagged “BAE Systems”, yet not a single one mentions Tory support for Labour’s proposals.

So, Trevor Brooks, sorry “Abu Izzadeen”, has been jailed for inciting and funding terrorism, temporarily ending the career of yet another loud-mouthed Celebrity Fanatic.  Funny how these men (and they’re always men, of course) have always called on others to go and kill themselves for The Righteous Cause, yet have always preferred to stay at home (usually at the expense of the state they claim to loathe).

Denis MacShane’s attack on the judiciary, following their verdict on the Saudi-BAE corruption scandal, is torn to shreds by Septic Isle.

Robert Hefner review’s Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im’s latest book Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a at The Immanent Frame.

Race and color did matter in the Muslim world and they still do. However, the colourline is not exactly the same as that in pre-abolition America. I would say in the Muslim World it’s like the one-drop rule in reverse, as seen by so many African ethnic communities that are predominantly Muslim claiming Arab ancestry. As the majority of Muslim societies are patrilineal one’s mother’s ethnic origin doesn’t really count. Actually, sometimes slave women (not all of them Black) were preferred because they had no families or social ties to the communities they were enslaved in so there was a great deal of Muslims who rose to prominence whose mothers were Black slaves. This was true in the Pre-Islamic era as well (Note the famous story of warrior poet Antar ibn Shaddad). However, to totally ignore how these prejudices created oppressive and racist power structures within Muslim Societies in Africa is incomprehensible.

Source.

Ahead of their official launch later today (1pm in the UK), I decided to take another look at the Quilliam Foundation website and noticed some of the (Muslim) names on their board of advisors had been removed.

Here was a list of Muslim advisors when the website first went up:

Shaikh BaBikr Ahmed BaBikr
Shaikh Abdal-Aziz Al-Bukhari
Shaikh Dr Usama Hassan
Shaikh Ali al-Saleh al-Najafi
Mufti Abu Laith al-Maliki
Imam Dr Musharraf Hussain al-Azhari
Shaikh Abdus Subhan
Professor Yahya Michot

Three of these names have been removed: Yahya Michot, Abdus Subhan and Abu Laith al-Maliki. I couldn’t find anything on why they have been removed, other than some speculation on MPACUK’s forums.

Unsurprisingly, websites denouncing the foundation’s creators, especially Maajid Nawaz, have appeared.

The BBC profiles Mohamed Bougrine, the Morrocan dissident and human rights activist.

Martin E. Marty does so (not literally, of course):

Islam has no central authority. It is a family religion, a village religion, with millions of bases for a billion believers. Islam is not an institution or a dogma. When one calls for the destruction of Islam one has to mean the killing of all Muslims. Rather than accuse Parsley of calling for genocide, it is in place to ask him to spell out alternatives. Does “destroy” Islam mean winning a debate until every last targeted Muslim cries uncle and says, “I give up, you win”? He may mean that. Does the “destruction of Islam” mean the deconversion of a billion people and, preferably, conversion to Parsley’s “Christian civilization”? Try converting as many as one in your town, and then take on the millions more in Indonesia. Does “destroy” mean bombing the 1,209 mosques in America, which number includes only a few of the world-wide total? As of now, Parsley simply calls for “war.” By most definitions, doesn’t “war” mean “killing”?