They’re not cops or armed vigilantes, but Brooklyn’s new ‘Muslim patrol’ hopes to work with police to help make their neighborhood more Muslim-friendly. RT’s Caleb Maupin joined the patrol on its beat.
Founded by a Yemeni migrant and boasting at least 30 members, the Muslim Community Patrol’s (MCP) main aim is to be the “eyes and ears” of Brooklyn’s Muslim community. With uniforms and marked cars complete with sirens, the group could easily be mistaken for regular police – but don’t be fooled. The patrolmen are unarmed and have no police powers. Instead, the group radios to police if they encounter something that requires police action – or firepower. The volunteer-based organization is believed to be the first Muslim ‘patrol’ of its kind in the United States.
The patrol was founded in response to concerns over an uptick in Islamophobia, but they do much more than just patrol the streets. One volunteer who spoke with Maupin said that the group offers counseling, feeds the homeless, and participates in other community outreach projects.
“We’re here to help bridge the community together,” the volunteer said.
Local residents who spoke to RT seemed supportive of the initiative, although a few said the patrol, which mirrors similar groups created by Hasidic and Asian communities in Brooklyn, was cause for concern.
Video released Friday by the non-partisan research groupMEMRI, which translated the Arabic into English, taken from a Facebook posting by the Muslim American Society Philadelphia chapter last month shows a group of Muslim children in Palestinian scarves performing at a Ummah Day celebration where they sang a pro-Palestine and recited a poem calling for the liberation of Jerusalem and its Al Aqsa mosque that says “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”
(UPDATE: A different video clip mentions “Zionists”) Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, so the heads they would be chopping off would belong to Jews.
IPT Exclusive Video: Philadelphia #Muslim school students sing song with violent anti-Semitic pro-terrorist lyrics pic.twitter.com/5tPSqypd2V
On April 22, 2019, the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly) uploaded a video of an “Ummah Day” celebration to its Facebook page in which young children wearing Palestinian scarves sang: “Glorious steeds call us and lead us [to] the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The blood of martyrs protects us… Take us, oh ships… until we reach our shores and crush the treacherous ones… Flow, oh rivers of martyrs!” A young girl read a poem praising martyrs who sacrificed their lives for Palestine, and she asked: “Will [Jerusalem] be a hotbed for cowards?” Another young girl read: “We will defend [Palestine] with our bodies… We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”
MAS Philly belongs to the Muslim American Society (MAS), which has 42 chapters in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. MAS’ website says that its mission is to “move people to strive for God-consciousness, liberty and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity,” and that its vision is “a virtuous and just American society.”
Hungary will not relax rules for international universities despite pressure from the EU and offers from Germany to mediate in a row over a college founded by US billionaire George Soros, a government spokesman said.
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Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a nationalist who has often clashed with the European Union, has been accused of restricting academic freedom with his new higher education rules, which the Central European University said forced it out of the country.
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“There is no change in our core view”, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told Reuters.
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“We will not change the laws and regulations that govern higher education in Hungary. We still operate on that basis.”
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Central European University, set up by Soros, will move part of its operations to Austria from September because of rules forbidding it to issue US degrees.
The dispute, often seen as a proxy for disagreements between Soros and Orbán on migration, is one of the main issues that caused the European Peoples’ Party to suspend Orbán’s Fidesz before European Parliament elections.
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At the initiative of Manfred Weber, the EPP’s lead candidate to head the EU executive after the May elections, the government of the German state of Bavaria and the Technical University of Munich stepped in to help.
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Offering three new professorships and new courses to augment CEU’s teaching, they said they would open a way for CEU to issue international degrees.
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A Hungarian government official told an opposition member of the Budapest parliament that Hungary considered Bavarian participation in the Hungarian higher education sector “a step that builds trust”.
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And Balazs Orbán, a state secretary on the prime minister’s staff, said the government was “ready to examine the possibility for issuing diplomas recognized in the United States and Germany as well as in Hungary”.
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However, he reiterated that all universities had to comply with Hungarian law, and Zoltan Kovacs also made it clear that Bavarian participation, while welcome, would lead to no legal amendments.
At the mayor-founded academy in Bergamo, a group of about 30 uniformed migrants form two neat rows, hands behind their straight backs in a military-style “at ease” position.
In the corridor of a building, they repeat in chorus: “We are the students of the first course of the Accademia dell’Integrazione Grazie Bergamo, Thank you Bergamo”.
Then they break ranks, line up two by two and move to a larger room, where two of the students, wearing white aprons, begin serving lunch.
The “students” are asylum seekers and participating in a boot-camp style one-year programme whose explicit purpose is to integrate migrants.
Participants attend Italian-language classes, get internships at factories in the area and have to follow a strict routine.
They also have to do community service work for free.
The academy’s students can only use their smartphones for a few hours a day. For the best part of the day, their rooms are empty, with perfectly made beds. No language other than Italian is allowed. And they look more like cadets than students.
They must always wear a uniform and have three kinds of outfits.
When they are inside, it is a blue tracksuit with the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print on the back; the second uniform is orange, similar to waste collectors, and also bears the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print; the third, worn in free time, is a blue shirt and grey sweater with a small school logo, which also allows them to take the city’s public transportation free of charge.
“This is not a school for everyone”, Giorgio Gori, mayor of Bergamo, a wealthy city in northern Italy, about 50km east of Milan, told Al Jazeera.
It’s no place for slackers, he says, because participants “must respect a series of rules of cohabitation” and professional training is mandatory, “with the aim of getting them to a job”.
To get into the programme, participants must pass three interviews assessing their knowledge of Italian, the level of schooling and their ability to respect the rules.
Christophe Sanchez, the mayor’s chief of staff, who created the academy, believes that Italy’s system of asylum seekers’ management is not working and attributes its failure to the fact that they have rights but few duties: “Asylum seekers can stay in bed all day and there is no legal instrument to force them to do something.”
The underlying message of the academy seems to be that participants must demonstrate that they are hardworking people, that they really like Italy and are not troublemakers – in other words, that they deserve to stay.
The fact that the programme includes free-of-charge community work, not to mention the “Thank you” part in the name, gives the impression that migrants must be grateful.
Stefano Quadri, an activist from the Bergamo migrante antirazzista group, an anti-racist organisation, objects to the idea that migrants need to prove they deserve to be hosted, since asylum is a human right, and says free labour “destroys the local economy”.
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A worker at the Ruah coop, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, is worried that students live in relative isolation, with little contact with locals: “Integration means inserting a person in society,” he said.
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But organisers brush off criticism, saying that the programme is effective.
“We have so far done 380 hours of volunteer work and all our students understand Italian”, says Sanchez.
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As for the free labour, Gori insists it is not really free: “Between food, lodging and classes, we are investing 1,000 euros per months on each of them, so in a way they are getting paid.”
An infectious diseases doctor has warned that the number of cases in Sweden of Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease which can lead to death, has doubled since the 2015 migrant wave.
“Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by an intracellular protozoan parasite (genus Leishmania) transmitted by the bite of a female phlebotomine sandfly,” according to Medscape.
The parasites that spread the disease are common in the Middle East, Africa and in Mediterranean countries, however it is not normally present in northern Europe.
According to Sara Karlsson Söbirk, an infectious doctor at a hospital in Helsingborg who has studied the issue for 20 years, the number of cases in on the increase.
“We have in a collaboration with the Public Health Authority looked at the number of cases between 1993-2016 and see a peak of 35 cases in 2016, probably a direct consequence of the large refugee wave the year before, when most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan,” said Söbirk.
She notes that most of the cases were found in people who had emigrated to Sweden or who had traveled in the countries where the parasite was present then returned to Sweden.
The parasites can remain in the body for years before being activated as a result of a weak immune system.
“The attack on internal organs is the most serious form of the disease (visceral leishmaniasis) and usually leads to death if it is not detected and treated in time,” reports FriaTider.
Information from the Austrian Interior Ministry has revealed that asylum home staff members have faced numerous threats on their lives from resentful asylum seekers. According to the ministry, no less than 15 serious incidents have occurred in the last year.
As reported by Kronen Zeitung, the information came about in response to a question posed to Austria’s Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the national populist Freedom Party.
According to the report, many of those seeking asylum have made violent threats against asylum centre employees in order to be transferred to different facilities. In Maria Enzerdorf, a small Austrian town of 8,000 people, an asylum seeker intimated an employee with an iron bar simply because he felt like he should be moved to another location.
Varying motivations have acted as catalysts for additional incidents of death threats made against public employees.
In Salzburg, a migrant threatened to murder an employee over food.
In Bergheim, due to a lack of internet access, two migrants became so incensed that they threaten to kill one of the care workers.
A similar case occurred in Italy last year when a 26-year-old Senegalese migrant physically assaulted an asylum home worker because the home hadn’t apparently attended to his requests to set up wireless internet.
Several cases in Austrian asylum homes have also turned physical with a number of employees asserting that migrants have attempted to intimate workers by puffing their chests out at them as well as at staff security guards. In another instance, a conflict with one of the migrants resulted in a worker being injured.
Although none of the attacks mentioned resulted in severe or life-threatening injuries, several government employees working in asylum care in different European countries have been murdered by migrants since the migrant crisis began in 2015.
One of these tragic cases unfolded in 2016 when a Somalian asylum seeker by the name of Youssaf Nuur stabbed to death 22-year-old caseworker Alexandra Mezher.
In 2017, a similar attack happened in Germany when a Nigerian migrant stabbed to death asylum worker Soopika P. in the municipality of Ahaus.
Demonstrators marching in Paris to mark International Workers’ Day have been met with tear gas, images from the French capital show, with reports of over 350 people detained.
The procession was scheduled to start at 2:30pm local time but clashes have already erupted between riot police and protesters who have turned out in their thousands. Huge plumes of smoke can be seen rising from tear gas canisters or smoke grenades along the protest route.
Some 380 protestors were arrested on Wednesday and more than 17,700“preventive checks” carried out by police, according to French reports.
Meanwhile, France Info reports that a group of between 200 and 300 protesters tried to break into a police station in Besançon, eastern France. Local authorities said efforts were made to break into the station via the car park behind the building, but were repelled by police using tear gas.
In Paris, protesters in some parts of the city have begun erecting barricades to block the advance of charging riot police. According to the latest media reports, 14 police officers sustained injuries.
Journalists at the scene reported seeing protesters throwing projectiles at police, who continued to charge the crowd and fire gas canisters. Several protesters and at least one policemen have reportedly been injured in the clashes.
Demonstrators including Yellow Vest protesters, labor unions, pensioners, and students are marching through the streets of Paris to celebrate International Workers’ Day. Each year, May 1 is marked by large demonstrations of workers and labor activists who organize marches to campaign for improved working conditions and other social issues.
According to a Welsh man, his 55-year-old father may have died because the British national health systemfailed to treat himwhen he suffered a stroke on a Sunday.
Colin Rogers, 55, suffered a basilar artery occlusion on April 14, which he could have survived if he had undergone a thrombectomy, which removes a blood clot from the brain.
Instead, Rogers was taken to Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil. The University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff could have performed the procedure, but enough specialists staff were reportedly not available. Rogers died on April 18.
His son Callum, 26, stated, “Although we don’t know what the outcome would have been, this potentially could have saved his life. My dad was denied the chance of survival as Wales does not have access to this treatment and doesn’t have any units. We were also told [by a stroke consultant] that if he fell ill on a weekday they would have had a chance to transfer him to a specialist unit in England. Because this was a Sunday it was impossible. To find this out is just gut-wrenching.”
Colin Rogers’ family issued a statement saying, “Up to 500 people a year in Wales may die or be left profoundly disabled because of a lack of availability of endovascular thrombectomy. This has to be done within 24 hours or it is too late. Colin is not the only person to have died because of this postcode lottery and this is not a new problem. We want to change this. We want to raise awareness and campaign for equal access for patients such as Colin, who will die or live a profoundly disabled life without treatment. We want to make a difference so that people are not failed by the system as Colin was.”
A spokeswoman from the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee (WHSSC) stated:
Whilst we do not comment on individual cases the general position in Wales is that WHSSC took on the commissioning of mechanical thrombectomy from April 2019. Prior to this individual health boards commissioned the service directly from providers. In south Wales, WHSSC accesses treatment from provider hospitals in Cardiff and Bristol on a case-by-case basis dependent on the capacity available at the hospitals when required. The capacity depends on the availability of specialist staff able to carry out the procedure which has varied over time.
The University Hospital Wales, Cardiff, has recently recruited a second consultant who is due to start in autumn 2019, allowing the service to be developed further. Treatment for patients from mid Wales and north Wales is usually commissioned from hospitals in the Midlands or Liverpool, again dependent on the availability of specialist staff. To the extent that specialist staff are available, this is a seven day a week service.
A basilar artery occlusion (BAO) starts with variable and stuttering symptoms which can cause a delay in diagnosis; the attack has high morbidity and mortality. BAOs represent 1% to 4% of all ischemic strokes.
A fundraising page has been created to push for 24-7 access for clot-removal treatment.
Over two million migrants have received anonymous debit cards at a cost of €1.55 billion, according to the Hungarian government.
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“Over two million migrants have received anonymous debit cards. The equivalent of 500 billion forints (1.55 bn euros) has been spent in this manner”, Chief Security Advisor to the Prime Minister György Bakondi said on Hungarian M1 television.
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Mr. Bakondi said that the cards are unlawful, because European citizens cannot own anonymous banking cards, they cannot be monitored, and no public procurement procedure was launched for their issuing.
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“This solution, which has not been thought through and is unlawful, and other efforts on the part of the European Union to legalise illegal migration such as the migrant visa and the establishment of legal channels for immigration, represent a security risk with healthcare, economic and cultural consequences for Hungarian and European citizens”, he stated.
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In the Chief Security Advisor’s opinion, the EU doesn’t want to stop migration, but legalise it.
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“Hungary, however, does not agree with this. Hungary’s opinion is that the problem must not be brought into Europe, but that instead, assistance must be provided to enable problems to be solved on site”, he added.
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Mr. Bakondi also mentioned that the good weather has led to an increase in the number of migrants on the Balkan migration route.
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