MPACUK London battle on in our pre-emptive lobbying campaign where we are currently engaging local mosques to petition their local MPs to ensure that the detention without trial time limit is not increased. We recently updated readers of our liaison with a Mosque in Redbridge to educate and more importantly activate the congregation to take action against the proposal – local MPs need to be lobbied to defend our human rights and vote against this draconian law!

Israel is paying lip service to its pledge to freeze settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank as construction of these illegal colonies continues in defiance of International & UN laws.

Another Jummah, another mosque, another attempt at protecting my brothers and sisters from injustice. As you may know, London MPACers have been working tirelessly in reviving the mosques and making them into the beacons of light that they should be, so it was back to that mosque we met at our branch meeting last week...

So back it was to the mosque we met with 2 weeks ago, to ask them to support the campaign against extending detention without trial. Just as we had agreed, there was the Chairman, waiting after Zuhr to give me the petition. But nothing could have prepared me for the results…

London MPACers are continuing their quest to empower the Muslim communities to defend themselves in the face of discriminatory legislation. Since 2001, a whole host of draconian laws have been passed by an authoritarian government intent on undermining all of our civil liberties. Whilst Muslims rightly feel targeted by this legislation, the wider public have been drawn into a false sense of security, that these laws are needed to protect everyone from fanatics hell-bent on destroying our way of life and that these laws will only be used on “Islamic Extremists”.

A Muslim woman says she is scared to venture out after being ordered to take off her veil in a terrifying ordeal. Kauser Bibi was in Oldham Town Centre when she says a man began following her and asking her to take off her veil.

Why has General Musharraf not telephoned Gordon Brown to express his "deep concern" over yesterday's Queen's speech? Or Vladimir Putin or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad? Here is a government unpopular and in trouble over terrorism. Its civil rights lawyers are up in arms. Its leader postpones a general election and summarily arrests anyone he sees as a danger to his state. He butters up the military by promising them more nuclear weapons. He announces changes to the constitution without consultation, imposes central rule over dissident local districts and extends imprisonment without trial.

The result of a painstaking drive to dust off old, ignored archives, a photo exhibition in West Jerusalem is honoring Albanian Muslims who risked their own lives to hide and protect Jews hunted by the Nazis, Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday, November 4.
"Albania was the only country in Europe in which there were more Jews after the war than there had been before the war," American photographer Norman Gershman said at the opening of his exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial.

Following the national news can be bad for the blood pressure. According to a press leak, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) - Labour’s favourite think tank and one which has the ear of power - is to publish a report saying Christmas should be downgraded to improve race relations. In the interests of “evenhandedness”, the report says, and “if we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life, even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too”.