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Muslim graves desecrated
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| shaolin_Z |
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Muslim graves destroyed in city
Dozens of Muslim grave stones have been smashed and pushed over in a cemetery in Handsworth in Birmingham.
The desecration was discovered on Friday by relatives visiting the Muslim part of the cemetery.
Leaflets were scattered, with insults against Muslims which were attributable to "Black Nation".
Last month, riots involving Asian and black youths took place in nearby Lozells, sparked by a claim that a 14-year-old black girl had been raped.
West Midlands Police have been at the scene collecting the leaflets and taking statements from those who found them.
We can't point the finger at a single community
Khalid Mahmood, MP
Supt Tom Coughlan said it was clear there was tension in the community.
"That has been seen over the events over the last two weeks," he said.
"I have always said that those problems were caused by a few people with a criminal intent and I think what we have seen overnight is exactly the same.
"We have people who are quite determined to start up tensions between the two communities."
Police are carrying out forensic tests and house to house inquiries over the desecration, which was reported to them on Friday morning.
Between 35 and 45 grave stones had been damaged.
Community leaders have condemned the act and called for calm over the situation.
Bishop Joe Aldred of the Black-Led Churches said: "Let us demonstrate to who did this, whoever they are, that what unites us is greater than they can ever try to use to divide us.
"As leaders in the Muslim and Christian communities of Birmingham we are at one in our condemnation of this act."
He said everyone was anxious there was no repeat of the disturbances of two weeks ago.
"We are hopeful, but watchful, against this kind of activity. We do not know the source of it but we cannot doubt the intention which is to divide."
The BBC's Phil Mackie, who was at the scene, said the leaflets were roughly photocopied and the messages could refer to the so-far unsubstantiated rumour which led to the riots.
It is not known if Black Nation is a real group or has been made up.
He said that many of the relatives tending the graves were there because of the Muslim festival of Eid.
Religious understanding
Perry Barr MP Khalid Mahmood was also at the cemetery.
He said: "These are disgraceful events, deliberately done to entice people. They are definitely trying to cause more problems particularly on this day when Muslim people are coming to pay their respects."
He said the person responsible must have had some understanding of the Muslim religion to pick the day of Eid to act.
Birmingham City Councillor Len Gregory said "We are all saddened at such senseless vandalism and our immediate concern is to re-establish the headstones in their rightful place and restore peace and tranquillity to the cemetery."
He said arrangements would be made to put the headstones back in place.
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Source: BBC
I see a pattern here (keep in mind the riots in France, banning of jiabs etc)... :mad: Deliberately inticing Muslims in the West to divide Muslims and non-Muslims and promote fear, hate and misunderstanding. Racial/Religious prejudice/intolerance/tension always helps support war/aggressive foreign policy. It'd very easy to notice these patterns when it's "your people" who're being persecuted/attacked and easy to ignore/not notice when they're not "your people," especially if you percieve "them" to be a "threat." (A reference to Islamophobia here, which doesn't apply to everyone but enough that it's worth mentioning)
Other than that, arrest and torture without charge and evidence (Gitmo, Abu Gharib). Things are getting ugly, and if people will allow themselves to be manipulated and choose to react/judge before thinking, things will get ugly even faster. :( |
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| Shakka |
| Well this certainly is a negative event and doesn't help anyone out. But if I may ask, where was your selective outrage when American tombstones were desecrated at Normandy a couple of years ago?:conf: |
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| shaolin_Z |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
Well this certainly is a negative event and doesn't help anyone out. But if I may ask, where was your selective outrage when American tombstones were desecrated at Normandy a couple of years ago?:conf: |
First of all, I wasn't a TA memebr back then so I couldn't have possibly posted anything about it. Secondly, that's equaly appaling (American graves being desecrated) and I wasn't aware of that (I've been much more in touch with the News ever since I started regularly participating in PDD). Thirdly, what does that have to do with this thread and what is the purpose of bringing it up? |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by shaolin_Z
First of all, I wasn't a TA memebr back then so I couldn't have possibly posted anything about it. Secondly, that's equaly appaling (American graves being desecrated) and I wasn't aware of that (I've been much more in touch with the News ever since I started regularly participating in PDD). Thirdly, what does that have to do with this thread and what is the purpose of bringing it up? |
Well, since you PM'd me about it, I don't feel a need to rehash everything you just said. I was merely pointing out the fact that this is a 2-way street. But you are correct, the subject matter of this particular thread is the desecratoin of muslim graves. Desecration of any grave is, imo, a classless and deplorable act.;)
FYI, here is what I was referring to. I just did a quick google to try and find some original sourcing, but I think this gets to the gist of things.
p.s. It looks like it may have been a lot more recent than my ancient memory realized.:S
Other desecration in the world
| quote: | Decline and free fall in France
The Australian
August 28, 2004
THIS week marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris, but the champagne corks were flying beneath clouds of French despair.
AS the Government of Jacques Chirac tries to mend chronic flaws in the country's social fabric -- highlighted by a rise in racist and anti-Semitic violence -- the French intelligentsia is lamenting the nation's loss of diplomatic clout and cultural authority.
Right-wing newspaper Le Figaro is this month running a series anatomising the causes of French decline. The mood of national lamentation is summed up by philosopher Chantal Delsol, who asks: "How is it that such a brilliant nation has become such a mediocre power, so out of breath, so indebted, so closed in its own prejudices ... To be French today is to mourn for what we no longer are."
In the past few years many of the nation's delusional bubbles have been pricked one by one. The ideals of the French Republic, in which allegiance to the French state overrides loyalties to religion, race or tribe, have been undermined by the rise of a Muslim community under strong if not militant leadership. The tension was reflected in the Government's decision to ban religious headgear, particularly the Muslim hijab or veil, from schools.
French writers and intellectuals, meanwhile, have fallen from their lofty place in the Western imagination, while French is in linguistic retreat as English spreads in Asia and the former Eastern bloc.
France's reputation for technological innovation was also delivered a blow in May this year when the new roof at Charles de Gaulle Airport's terminal 2E collapsed from structural weaknesses, killing five people. The illusion of French immunity from Islamic terrorism, fostered by its neutrality during the Iraq War, was exposed in the same month by a run of bomb threats against the French rail system by an Islamic group.
Meanwhile, the latest in a series of anti-Semitic attacks took place last Sunday when arsonists in the early hours of the morning broke into a Jewish community centre in the 11th arrondissement of eastern Paris, daubed Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic slogans on its walls, doors and furniture, and set it ablaze.
Among the slogans were: "Without Jews the world would be happy". The building had served as a soup kitchen for elderly Jews.
It was the second such attack in a week -- the previous Saturday, worshippers noticed the words "Death to Jews" on the wall of a door facing Notre Dame Cathedral, the spiritual centre of French Catholicism.
Last year in France there were 193 violent attacks against Jews and 731 threats, prompting French Education Minister Luc Ferry to concede: "For the first time since World War II, anti-Semitism is now more widespread than racism that is not directed at Jews. We cannot act as if this didn't exist, we cannot not respond to it." France still has Europe's largest per capita Jewish community but emigration from France to Israel, as a consequence of these anti-Semitic acts, is running at levels not seen since the Six-Day War.
Analysts have been quick to point out, however, that the roots of new-wave anti-Semitism are in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the failure of French society to assimilate a large Arab emigre population, ghettoised in high-rise suburbs fringing the main cities. With high crime and unemployment levels, these communities are breeding grounds for anti-Semitism and Francophobia. The failure of France to integrate these communities economically is of a piece with its failure to integrate them culturally.
Prominent left-of-centre philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, an essayist (author of The Defeat of the Mind) and broadcaster, has argued that France should not see the new wave of religious hatred in the colours of Europe's traditional anti-Jewish bigotry. "The Jews are not being accused of being a dangerous race," he says. "They are accused of being racist, especially because of what they are supposed to do or to approve in Israel, and that's a very difficult task for us, because we know how to deal with incitement to racist hatred but not how to deal with incitement to anti-racist hatred, and that's what's happening every day in words and deeds."
French authorities have vowed to vigorously prosecute race crimes while reminding the nation of a painful lesson from its past -- the failure of collective courage. President Chirac, speaking recently to a small town that hid 5000 Jews from German occupiers during World WarII, issued a call to the wider community: "I ask [the French] to remind their children of the mortal dangers of fanaticism, of exclusion, of cowardliness and resignation to extremism."
The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, by US and French troops, was marked on Wednesday with parades and speeches. Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist mayor of Paris, used the memory of this golden moment to remind Parisians of old evils given new currency. He said: "Oblivion, indifference or, even worse, falsification are permanent dangers of the origins of barbarism, which forms anti-Semitism, racism or repulsion against others because of their identity."
The message was particularly apt because alongside resurgent anti-Semitism France has also experienced a neo-Nazi revival in areas such as the eastern (and formerly German) region of Alsace. The villagers of Hipsheim recently awoke to find Nazi slogans painted on a community hall. A few days later Muslim tombstones in a cemetery outside nearby Strasbourg, the regional capital, were daubed with swastikas. Officials believe the desecrations are a backlash by neo-Nazi groups against the rolling 60th-anniversary celebrations of Hitler's defeat, which began on June6 in Normandy.
This week's celebration in Paris might recall the euphoria of liberation, but it also concentrates the mind on the Nazi occupation in which thousands of French Jews, caught in the net of the collaborationist Vichy government, were sent to their deaths in concentration camps. As American historian Norman Cantor explains in The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews: "The French officials acted on their own initiative and collected for shipment several hundred children even though the Nazis had not asked for them."
As French authorities attempt to staunch the rise of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi activism, the famed French intelligentsia is struggling with a malaise of the national spirit that has been dubbed "declinism". Its symptoms are multifold: the decline in France's position as a world power (accentuated by the Chirac administration's gamesmanship before the Iraq war), the stagnation of its economy and the defeat of its aspirations to global cultural leadership.
In the past 12 months a number of best-selling books have been published sketching out the dimensions of the crisis. Their titles include French Disarray, France in Freefall and French Arrogance.
In his France in Free Fall (La France Qui Tombe), Parisian lawyer and free-market economist Nicolas Baverez slams the French political class -- Left and Right -- for cultivating "the status quo and rigidity". He calls for an end to the "social statist model" in which the public sector is "placed outside of any constraint requiring productivity or competitiveness".
"Overtaken by the democratic vitality and technological advance of the US," writes Baverez, "downgraded industrially and challenged commercially by China and Asia, the decline of France is accelerating at the same rhythm as the vast changes in the world."
Baverez argues that French foreign policy, based on a vision of France as a leader of Europe and a champion of multilateralism, has ended in national isolation and failure: "French diplomacy has undertaken to broaden the fracture within the West and duplicate American unilateralism on the European scale by its arrogant dressing down of Europe's new democracies." As a result it is happy to maintain a "verbal pretence of having real power", without any real capacity for influence or action.
France displays symptoms of an "obsessive concern with its standing, and terror in the face of its decline", say journalists Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin in French Arrogance (L'Arrogance Francaise). The book charges the national leadership with an attempt to "recover its influence and to reconquer its lost power" through the instrument of the European Union.
The authors spare their audience any traditional French niceties. Their tone borders on self-mockery: "With our sermons, our empty gestures and our poetic flights we have pissed off the planet. Worse, we make them laugh."
Sarah Turnbull, Australian author of the bestseller Almost French, adds a note of caution. Although she agrees that the country is struggling with fundamental issues -- "finding its place in the world and in Europe" and "achieving harmony and unity within its own borders" -- she has lived through a similar wave of French pessimism.
"Ten years ago when I first moved to France, all the newspapers were bemoaning la malaise francaise -- national depression, the country's identity crisis. The French had lost their way. Then along came the World Cup win and soon everyone was hailing France's new vigour and confidence. Perhaps it's just cyclical."
# posted by blog administrator @ Saturday, August 28, 2004
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
: article : Jewish graves desecrated in France, again
CNN.com - Jewish graves desecrated in France - Aug 10, 2004
Jewish graves desecrated in France
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Posted: 7:34 AM EDT (1134 GMT)
LYON, France (AP) -- Vandals scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti on dozens of tombstones in Lyon overnight, authorities said Tuesday, the third time a Jewish cemetery has been desecrated this year.
Swastikas and inscriptions with Adolf Hitler's name were painted on headstones in de la Mouche cemetery in this southern French city, the same burial site that was desecrated by skinheads in 1992.
Richard Wertenschlag, Lyon's chief rabbi, told France Info radio that the vandalism was an affront to the Jewish community and to France's values.
"How is it that after the Holocaust, someone can still attack Jews -- even those who are dead -- for the simple reason that they are Jews?" he said.
The vandalized graves were at the back of the cemetery, a distance from the guardian's house, and among its oldest tombs. A monument to Jewish World War II soldiers was also covered with graffiti, the French Veterans Affairs Ministry said.
The crime drew the swift condemnation of the French government.
"The perpetrators of this outrage are being actively pursued," President Jacques Chirac said in a letter to Marcel Dreyfus, a local Jewish leader in Lyon. "They will be punished to the maximum extent the law allows."
In the Czech Republic, dozens of tombstones have been found toppled at a Jewish cemetery in the eastern of town Hranice, police said Tuesday.
Spokeswoman Michaela Sedlackova said that some 80 tombstones were overturned in the cemetery in the town 187 miles east of Prague. She said it was not clear when the incident happened. The cemetery dates to the 17th century. Sigmund Freud's brother, Julius, was buried there in 1858.
In France in May, swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were scrawled on 127 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in the Alsatian town of Herrlisheim. And last month, vandals painted swastikas and Satanic symbols on 32 tombstones at a Jewish cemetery in Saverne, also in Alsace. Muslim and Christian cemeteries have also been vandalized.
Despite a series of government measures, anti-Semitic violence has increased in recent years in France, coinciding with rising tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Authorities have blamed young French Muslims for some of the violence.
A recent report by the French Interior Ministry found 510 anti-Jewish acts or threats in the first six months of the year, compared with 593 for all of 2003. |
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| shaolin_Z |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
Well, since you PM'd me about it, I don't feel a need to rehash everything you just said. I was merely pointing out the fact that this is a 2-way street.
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Agreed. :)
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
But you are correct, the subject matter of this particular thread is the desecratoin of muslim graves. Desecration of any grave is, imo, a classless and deplorable act.;)
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Agreed once more. ;) |
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