Friday Links – American flag hijabs, hate crimes, refugee crisis

Friday Links – American flag hijabs, hate crimes, refugee crisis November 20, 2015
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Saba Ahmed, the founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition, appeared on Fox News in an American flag hijab. See the BBC news article here (as I refuse to link to anything going to Fox News) and if you want to buy her hijab, Forbes has let us know it is ten dollars and can be bought in Times Square (more here, in Mic)

The sad events in Paris last week have led to a series of Islamophobic hate crimes elsewhere.  In the Toronto area, a woman in hijab was beaten and robbed, a couple in Scotland were mobbed as they closed up their shop in Edinburgh, another group of women on public transit in Toronto were accosted,  among other crimes (I could make a friday links just on stuff that has happened in Canada, unfortunately).
A customer in hijab was denied entry into a Zara store in France.  As a reminder, the various French laws on head coverings only apply to public buildings and schools.
In Switzerland, the man behind the anti minaret referendum of 2009, Oskar Freysinger, has announced he is running for one of Switzerland’s seven executive seats, the Federal Council, following the resignation of Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf after her party’s major losses in the recent parlimentary elections. Luckily for the rest of us (okay, me), linguistic tensions (article in French here) may mean that his candidacy is a Donald Trump-like front to get a Swiss German in there instead.
Bill Maher is crapping on Islam and Muslims as he is wont to do, and a piece in Salon by Sonia Saraiya calls him out on it, sort of (as an aside, of COURSE Asra Nomani was on his show…OF COURSE *headdesk*).
[Article in French] French politician, Marine le Pen, was caught live on radio in a series of contradictions during her efforts to recuperate what she could from the attacks in Paris, notably by accusing Justice Minister Christiane Taubira of saying that “one must understand why young kids run off to Syria,” which of course, she did not say. And of course, when she got called out, she promptly left the studio.
Closing a chapter on the Harper era, Justin Trudeau’s government has chosen not to appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court regarding the case of nib during a citizenship oath. It is still the honeymoon period, and I got my eye on you, Jay-Quellin.
Spreading like a cancer and even though there are so many other useful things politicians could be doing with our time and tax money, now it is Luxembourg’s turn to start thinking about a niqab ban (article in French).
With the ongoing debate in the US where several US governors air their refusal at accepting refugees from Syria, the Washington Post has an article about “That time the United States happily airlifted thousands of Muslim refugees out of Europe.
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe, among other sources, points out that posing as a refugee is not exactly the most efficient way to get in the US.

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