Independent : “Paris attacks: Women targeted as hate crime against British Muslims soars following terrorist atrocity”
According to statistics, there is a 300% increase in acts against Muslims in Britain after the recent Paris Attacks
The Independent says that with the increase of hate crimes against British Muslims, following the Paris Attacks, the victims were mostly Muslim girls and women aged from 14 to 45. As per a report to the Government’s working group on anti-Muslim hatred, 115 cases of Islamophobia assaults were hitherto recorded in Britain alone since the Paris attacks. The perpetrators are mainly white males between the ages 15-35.
Guardian: “Sweden slams shut its open-door policy towards refugees”
Sweden reverses sharply its open-door policy towards asylum-seekers to the EU-minimum. Prime minister says:
“It pains me that Sweden is no longer capable of receiving asylum seekers at the high level we do today. We simply cannot do any more.” Most refugees would receive only temporary residence permits from April and there would be severe restriction on the right to bring families to Sweden, the Prime Minister adds.
This U-turn in refugee policy, following the imposition of border controls two weeks ago, is a policy choice the ruling red-green coalition used to see unthinkable until asylum seekers began arriving this autumn at a rate of 10,000 a week. Based on official estimates, up to 190,000 could come to Sweden this year.
Guardian: “One in five Muslims do what? How to create your own dodgy data”
The guardian criticizes a controversial and provocative front page by the Sun headlined: “1 in a 5 Brit Muslims Sympathy for jihadis”.
The author stresses that this is one among a litany of worrying claims and reports based on completely unreliable figures and polls; “there are about three million Muslims in the UK, and 600,000 of them support violent terrorists? A terrifying thought, in the wake of the recent Paris attacks”.
In his turn, Mr. Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, points out “A survey on British Muslim sympathies doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, yet it has been aggressively reported by the Sun just when hate crimes are soaring”. The author, referred to this as systematic scaremongering which will pour oil on the fire of tensions across the country.
Mr. Versi cites Dr. Maria Soblewska, who is a senior lecturer in quantitative methods at the University of Manchester, as saying that, based on an in-depth study of 14 polls of British Muslim opinion in the 18 months after the 2005 bombings in London, “public opinion polls have no value for estimating the number of prospective and likely extremists and terrorists,” and that it is “truly scary to think that our counterterrorism policy may rely on these polls”.
Washington Post: “A harvest of anti-Muslim hatred”
In its opening, the Washington Post talks about the hate crimes against Muslims in the US.
The newspaper describes a meeting in a mosque to discuss an enlargement plan: “a representative of the Islamic Center of Fredericksburg, which seeks to build a larger facility than the one it has inhabited peaceably for 15 years, was talking the lingo of planning and permitting. The protesters who kept interrupting him spoke a different tongue: the language of hatred.”
It adds that one of the protesters pointed his finger at Samer Shalaby, who is a Muslim trustee of the center, and said: “Nobody, nobody, nobody wants your evil cult in this county. I will do everything in my power to make sure that that doesn’t happen, because you are terrorists. Every one of you are terrorists. . . Every Muslim is a terrorist.” In astonishment, Mr. Shalaby replied mildly, “How did you come up with that?”.
The editorial board adduces that “bigotry has a long history in the United States”, and that it not really surprising that “it showed its snarling face in Fredericksburg last week”, just four days after the Paris attacks. In the same vein, it criticizes the “toxic rhetoric of presidential candidates and governors, who vilified Muslims since that terrorist attack”.
Washington Post (Column): Attacks on American Muslims are growing uglier by the day. It must stop.
In turn, Washington Post’s columnist Petula Dvorak criticized the demagogy vented by some presidential candidates: “Political opportunists running for president have been cooking up a heaping platter of anti-Muslim sentiment since the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris.
They’ve geared us up for an epic Hategiving with their ugly proposals to shut down mosques, register American Muslims and reject Syrian refugees who aren’t Christians.” She commented on a proposal to register Muslims in the US: “The tone is actually worse than it was after the Sept. 11 attacks on our own soil. Registration by religion? Sounds like Nazi Germany, not a country with a First Amendment that enshrines freedom of religion.”
“Why are we degenerating so quickly and so far from our country’s founding values? Because it’s an election year. And political leaders — egged on by the grandstanding and lies of Donald Trump — are peddling fear like it’s a miracle drug.” The author notes.
