The spirit of William Tell is stiring.
As my German is very limited I have taken these from English language newspapers.
From The Times of Malta and Taiwan News.
Swiss authorities stopped an Islamic preacher at the German border late yesterday to prevent him speaking at a rally against Switzerland's ban on building new minarets, local press reported.
Pierre Vogel, a German national, had been due to attend an Islamic rally in the Swiss capital Berne this afternoon against a ban on the construction of new minarets, which Switzerland voted for two weeks ago in a referendum.
Pierre Vogel intended to speak at a demonstration Saturday afternoon in the Swiss capital Bern that organizers say is in response to a "hate campaign" against Muslims in Switzerland. The German former professional boxer who converted to Islam is known for his conservative positions.
Vogel tried to cross into Switzerland by car near Basel at about 2230 local time (2130 GMT) yesterday but was refused entry and forced to return to Germany, daily newspaper Blick reported.
Local news agency SDA confirmed the report, citing Basel border authority spokesman Markus Zumbach, who said Vogel had been banned from entering the country by the government.
And from The Canadian Press
GRENCHEN, Switzerland — The mayor of a Swiss town says city workers will stop serving women in full-body veils because it is too difficult to identify them.
Grenchen Mayor Boris Banga says he has decided to ban head-to-toe and face-covering veils after a 19-year-old Muslim woman appeared fully veiled at city hall to register.
Banga said Friday the woman had to come to an extra appointment and lift her veil in front of female staff members in order to be identified, creating extra work.
Grenchen is a town of about 16,000 residents in western Switzerland.
I have found a report in German from the Berner Zeitung. The woman attended to register as a new resident with her father, a Moroccan, so heavily veiled that even her hands were 'bandaged'.

Thanks to Maggies.

 ASSOCIATION FOR WORLD EDUCATION 
WORLD UNION FOR PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM

It’s hard to believe another year has passed and we are now entering our fifth year of publication. Thanks to the generosity of our many readers we are looking forward to another interesting year of news, commentary, philosophy, history, fiction and humor.

A couple of days ago I asked why, if Zahi Hawass is so keen to "preserve Egyptian identity" he doesn't campaign against the repression of the Copts. To which he would no doubt reply: "Rubbish". Moe Beitiks on "Garbage City" (h/t David Thompson):

Cairo has attempted to replace this mass of independent workers with multinational waste management corporations, putting an already impoverished community at risk. To make matters worse, the government ordered a widespread slaughter of pigs earlier this year in an attempt to curtail the potential spread of swine flu. These are the same pigs to whom the Zabbaleen fed compotable waste. The result has reportedly been a trash-strewn Cairo. Which meant, at least in September, that many Egyptians might have felt a little like Zabbaleen.

This blogger, who focuses on the "green" aspects of the Zabbaleen, omits to mention the reason for their status, namely that they are Christians. It is good to see that the Muslims appear to have scored an own goal.

On the subject of Egypt's treatment of the Coptic Christians, here are parts of a documentary that Channel 4 did a couple of years ago on "Garbage City":

From The Sunday Times
Ten members of a suspected Islamist terror cell, said by MI5 to be plotting to blow up a shopping centre and a nightclub in Manchester, had been granted permission by the Home Office to work as security guards in Britain.
The Pakistani students — who were never charged for lack of evidence — were arrested over an alleged plot to bomb Britain last Easter. Police believed they had conducted “hostile reconnaissance” of the Arndale and Trafford shopping centres and the Birdcage nightclub.
It has now emerged that in the months before the alleged plot, the men were given licences to work as security guards by the Security Industry Authority (SIA), a Home Office body that regulates the private security industry.
When arrested, two of the students were working for a cargo firm which had access to secure areas at Manchester airport.
Critics said the case highlights serious flaws in the system for vetting overseas applicants for the permits. Foreign migrants do not need to have their applications counter-signed by a British referee. Officials privately admit they do not even attempt to make checks on applicants’ address histories in Pakistan.
The blunder occurred despite ministers’ promises to tighten up the system two years ago after it emerged that the SIA had allowed more than 7,000 illegal immigrants to work as security guards. One had even been allowed to guard the prime minister’s car.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, is writing to Alan Johnson, his Labour counterpart, to demand an explanation. “The fact that security checks on overseas nationals seeking clearance for the security industry are much more lax than for British people just beggars belief. This is clearly a huge hole in our security system,” he said.
“We’re spending huge amounts to protect us from the very real threat of terrorism yet parts of the system ... appear to be creating an open door for abuse and worse.”
Patrick Mercer, chairman of parliament’s counter-terrorism committee, said that without proper address checks and a UK referee, there was no way of knowing whether or not an applicant had spent the past five years in a terrorist training camp.
“Every element of the security industry must be trained properly by the government to be suspicious of all applications for jobs like this,” he said.
It is not known if the men were under MI5 surveillance at the time they applied for SIA permits. But critics say the SIA needs to be far more vigilant, especially about applications from Pakistan. Gordon Brown has repeatedly said that two out of three UK terror plots have been hatched in that country.
The SIA said: “We conduct robust identity, criminality and right-to-work checks on all applicants. We cannot act on hearsay, but do refuse, revoke and suspend licences on the basis of information given by partners such as the police.”

A coach full of British tourists expecting to see one of Europe’s busiest Christmas markets ended up in a closed “car boot sale” after the driver mistakenly took them to the wrong destination.
It was only on their return to Hull, East Yorkshire, that the group realised the market they were heading for – Belgium’s Winter Wonders festival in the centre of Brussels – had been less than three miles up the road.
They had taken the trip hoping to see an illuminated big wheel, as well as enjoying laser shows, street theatre and the delights of 240 shopping chalets.
Instead, they were met with a “Closed” sign and rows of empty stalls. Only one stall was open – and that was selling fruit and vegetables.
One of the unfortunate tourists, who did not want to be named, said: “The coach driver announced we had arrived and we all got off. We couldn't believe it. It was like going to a car boot sale which, to make matters worse, was shut. We just wandered around in disbelief."
Isa Maurer, of Brussels International Tourism and Congress, suspects the coach party was taken to a market at Queen Astrid Square in Jette, rather than the Winter Wonders Festival which attracts 2.5 million visitors a year.
“They were definitely not taken to the Winter Wonders event,” she said. “It’s a shame they did not make it as it is one of the most beautiful Christmas events in Europe.
National Holidays, which organised the trip, is now seeking an urgent explanation from the coach driver.

I can't remember the exact details of this story, but it is true as I know people who were there.
My football team is Leyton Orient who have only been in the top division once since their formation in the 1880s; the season 1962-63 which is the year my family and I moved to Leyton and I started to take an interest in their progress, or lack of it.
My father's team was Arsenal of North London who have never been out of the top division, whatever it has been called, over the last 100 years. Both teams play in red and white and in the days when such garments were worn both sets of supporters wore red and white knitted scarves and rosettes.
One Saturday Arsenal were due to play in Birmingham against one of Birmingham's big clubs, Aston Villa, City  or West Brom. Orient were playing Walsall to the north of Birmingham in the (much) lower division. A club of Arsenal's capacity hired numerous coaches, 20-30 for their supporters. Orient sometimes had as many as 2. On this particular Saturday Arsenal needed so many coaches the coach companies must have been using drivers who didn't know the Midlands motorways. In those days before sat-nav one such driver on the M6 was so relieved when he spotted another coach full of men in red and white scarves that he followed it, taking 50 Arsenal supporters to Walsall where they didn't want to be. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late to get across the city in time for kick off.
But they were made welcome and at least they saw a football match, which was potentially just as entertaining.

On the subject of Christmas markets,  lights, fun and good cheer there is a Cologne style Christmas market on London's South Bank at the moment.
I'm not sure that Gallopers are exclusive to Christmas or Germanic in any way, but they are fun, and bright and cheerful.

 

Listen here.

From The Sunday Telegraph
Christian hoteliers Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang received hate mail after they were accused of insulting a Muslim guest because of her faith.
The couple said they have been "living a nightmare" since they were charged in July with a "religiously-aggravated" offence of causing harassment, alarm or distress.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the couple have told of their relief at being cleared of insulting Ericka Tazi, a Muslim woman who was staying at their hotel.
They said that they had suffered emotionally and financially since the prosecution began, received threats warning they would be attacked and nearly lost their business due to an 80 per cent decline in takings at their nine-bedroom hotel, the Bounty House in Aintree, Liverpool.
"The last nine months have been a nightmare for us," said Mr Vogelenzang.
"We've been drained emotionally and financially. We have, sadly, received some threats and hate mail. That has been upsetting. Our business has almost been destroyed."
"We are unhappy that the police pursued this case with such enthusiasm, and we feel the law needs to be clearer about free speech," said Mr Vogelenzang. "We are delighted that our legal system eventually came to the right decision, but we regret that it came to court at all.
"We are glad that we live in a country which has free speech. Many people have given up their lives in the last century to protect those freedoms. It seems such a shame that we appear to be losing our liberty."
They said that they forgave Mrs Tazi despite the stress caused by her claims and her alleged insults against Christianity.
"We have no ill feelings for Mrs Tazi and we are looking forward to getting on with our lives. We wish her all the best," said Mr Vogelenzang.

The Washington Post  (WaPo) and New York Times (NYT) had  virtually identical analyses about the Virginia Five Jihadi wannabees arrested in  Sargodha in the Pakistan province of Punjab recently. The five young men from Virginia included three Pakistani-Americans, a Yemeni-American and an Egyptian-American: Waqar Khan, Ramy Zamzam, Umer Farooq, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, and Aman Hassan Yemer. 

The analyses blamed the behavior of these educated young American Muslim men on their viewing of Jihadi You Tube videos on the internet. It is alleged that is what motivated them to seek to enlist in an Islamic terrorist group. The analyses took a leaf out of the Power Point presentation of Major Nidal Hasan, the suspected Fort Hood mass shooter and self proclaimed Jihadi, and said it was a result of American troops fighting their extremist brothers in the ummah. Nowhere did either newspaper address the Jihad doctrine that emanates from the sermons in radical Mosques in Fairfax County, Virginia like Dar Al Hijrah in Falls Church and the Islamic Circle of North America Center in Alexandria. 

What both newspapers essentially did was to give a platform and megaphone to several Muslim Brother front groups, Muslim Political Action Committee, Muslim American Society and CAIR. They touted the fact that parents of these missing young Virginia Muslim men contacted CAIR, and they in turn contacted the FBI.  The analyses decried the fact that these home grown American Muslims were not marching to a more pluralistic tune in America versus their brothers in Islamized Eurabia. PBS was no better as they gave viewership space on the News Hour to Nihad Awad, a CAIR founder to further the script-watch the video here. Neither paper questioned the fact that Muslim Brotherhood fronts, including the ISNA and CAIR had been cited as unindicted co-conspirators in the federal Dallas Holy Land Foundation trial and had funneled millions of dollars to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas as “Zakat” or Islamic charity.

Note these excerpts:

Washington Post, “Arrests suggest U.S. Muslims, like those in Europe, can be radicalized abroad”

American Muslim organizations, jolted by the spate of cases, are abandoning their hesitation to speak out about the issue. While underlining that only a tiny minority has become radicalized, two major groups -- the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- said this week that they would launch counter-radicalization programs aimed at young people.

"We have to look very hard at those who arrived in the last 10 or 15 years," said Charles Allen, a veteran CIA officer and chief intelligence officer for the Homeland Security Department from 2005 until this year. "We're having this problem with Somalis, and we're having it with Pakistanis, and there will be other nations as well."

A 2007 study by the Pew Research Center found that most Muslim Americans are "decidedly American" in income, education and attitudes, rejecting extremism by larger margins than Muslim minorities in Europe.

Haris Tarin, the Washington director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said that imams and community leaders in the United States have undergone a profound "shift in attitude" about the extent of the problem.

"All of these cases definitely have raised a red flag in our community," Tarin said in an interview. "How do we ensure young people . . . do not fall prey to this extremist ideology, especially on the Internet and cyberspace?"

"We just don't have the same type of cases here" as in Europe, said Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer, noting that many Muslim Americans who go abroad want to "fight Americans abroad."

Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science who has studied would-be jihadists in the United States and elsewhere, noted that radicalized individuals have been unable to tap domestic networks of supporters.

The Internet provides "ideological ammunition" for such youths, he said. However, he noted, "They don't have the training; they don't have the equipment. . . . . But the most important point, the community itself does not really provide them with shelter."

New York Times, “New Incidents Test Immunity to Terrorism on U.S. Soil”

 “These events certainly call the consensus into question,” said Robert S. Leiken, who studies terrorism at the Nixon Center, a Washington policy institute, and wrote the forthcoming book “Europe’s Angry Muslims.”

“The notion of a difference between Europe and United States remains relevant,” Mr. Leiken said. But the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American operations like drone strikes in Pakistan, are fueling radicalization at home, he said.

“Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react,” Mr. Leiken said.

Concern over the recent cases has profoundly affected Muslim organizations in the United States, which have renewed pledges to campaign against extremist thinking.

“Among leaders, there’s a recognition that there’s a challenge within our community that needs to be addressed,” said Alejandro J. Beutel, government liaison at the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, and main author of a report by the council on radicalization and how to combat it.

Mr. Beutel, a Muslim convert from New Jersey, said the council started a grass-roots counter radicalization effort in 2005, but acknowledged that “for a while it was on the back burner.” He said, “Now we’re going to revive it.”

At a news conference Friday at the small Virginia mosque where the men had been youth group regulars, mosque officials expressed bewilderment at claims that the men wanted to join the jihad against American troops in Afghanistan.

“I never observed any extreme behavior from them,” said Mustafa Maryam, who runs the youth group and said he had known the young men since 2006. “They were fun-loving, career-focused children. They had a bright future before them.”

Also at the press briefing, asked about reports that the five men had contacted a Pakistani militant via the Web, Mahdi Bray, the head of the Freedom Foundation of the Muslim American Society, told reporters that YouTube and social networking sites had become a dangerous recruiting tool for militants.

“We are determined not to let religious extremists exploit the vulnerability of our children through this slick, seductive propaganda on the Internet,” said Mr. Bray, who is organizing a youth meeting later this month in Chicago to address the issue.

“Silence in cyberspace is not an option for us,” he said.

What both the Washington Post and the New York Times did not address are some other findings by the Pew Research Center Survey of American Muslims and the Mapping Sharia Project that evince more credible reasons. Note this prescient finding from the same 2007 Pew Survey:

In contrast to the predominantly positive findings, however, 26 percent of younger Muslim-Americans (aged 18 to 30 years of age) said that they could personally justify or support the use of suicide bombings if it was in the defense of Islam. Of that figure, however, only 2 percent said they could often justify it, while 13 percent said “sometimes” and 11 percent said “rarely.”

The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Center for Security Policy found radicalism rampant in American Mosques. Note this WorldNetDaily report:

An undercover survey of more than 100 mosques and Islamic schools in America has exposed widespread radicalism, including the alarming finding that 3 in 4 Islamic centers are hotbeds of anti-Western extremism, WND has learned.

The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has trained former counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents from the FBI, CIA and U.S. military, who are skilled in Arabic and Urdu, to conduct undercover reconnaissance at some 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers and schools across the country.

"So far of 100 mapped, 75 should be on a watch list," an official familiar with the project said.

Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian government and U.S. front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt.

Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official who runs the Center for Security Policy, says the results of the survey have not yet been published. But he confirmed that "the vast majority" are inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons by Saudi-trained imams and anti-Western literature, videos and textbooks.

In the current FBI investigations in Minneapolis that lead to recent indictments concerning the disappearance of Somali émigré youths recruited to fight for al Qaeda affiliate Al Shabaab, the Abubakar as-Saddique Islamic Center was cited as a venue for these nefarious activities. Note this from a recent Iconoclast post on the Minneapolis Somali recruiting indictments:

The indictment released Thursday provides few details, but it links Mohamed to a broad conspiracy involving other men who returned to Somalia to fight or train with terrorists, including Shirwa Ahmed, a 26-year-old Minneapolis man believed to be the first U.S. suicide bomber.

According to the indictment, others connected to the conspiracy include: Salah Osman Ahmed, Kamal Said Hassan, Ahmed Ali Omar, Abdifatah Isse and Khalid Mohamud Abshir -- all of whom left the United States in December 2007 with a final destination of Somalia. Ahmed, Hassan and Isse all have pleaded guilty to the same charges Mohamed faces.

Wold said after the hearing Thursday that his client knew the other men through the mosque where they prayed. Isse Hussein, Mohamed's cousin, said Mohamed prayed "a lot" at Abubakar as-Saddique Islamic Center in south Minneapolis.

On the matter of the influence and role played by Jihadi cyberspace terrorist training videos, we were involved- See NER: Is Google and Enabler of Terrorists? in the effort to take down these al Qaeda training videos. Senator Lieberman’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC) in 2008 successfully requested that Google You Tube remove these  terrorist videos. Our colleague Joseph Shahda had also alerted HSGAC about terrorist websites and chat rooms that had been hosted at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) here in the US.  However, they simply decamped and lodged on ISPs in Malaysia.  Shahda commented concerning a MEMRI article: “Is Shutting Down Cyber Jihad Possible? The Real Scope of Cyber Jihad.” about the difficulty in shutting down these Al Qaeda websites:

Shutting down the terrorist forum hosted by the Malaysian ISP is very difficult based on my previous experience. I think there should be an official US request to the Malaysian government to shut down these terrorist forums.

The WaPo and NYT articles provided a platform to Muslim Brotherhood fronts that allowed them to present their version of what motivated the Virginia Five to bolt for Pakistan. The terrorist websites and videos they watched, in our opinion, simply reinforced the fundamentalist doctrine poured in their ears at Mosques in Northern Virginia and those in Minneapolis and elsewhere in America that fostered these homegrown Jihadis. 

A three cornered cliché from The Spectator's James Dellingpole:

 Climategate has gone über-viral...