HATE CRIMES DATABASE FOR UK SIKHS

[Ranz_Killa]

Advice: if the police stop you, stay VERY calm, they will aggravate you and wind you up so that you react in ANY way, even if u swear at them, they will arrest you just for the show of being active. Try not to give them an excuse, thats all they are looking for.

:doh: True Say. They just will want an excuse. Will getting their badge numbers help if they harass u and go over the to? or is that useless as no action will be taken against them anyway..?

[Jasjit]

Gurmukh pyario

Waheguru ji ka Khalsa Waheguru ji ki fateh

Sardar Rajinder Singh Panesar of Bradford, posted the following on another forum:-

For your information, culprits did try to desecrate the Nishan Sahib at Ramgarhia Gurdwara Bolton Road Bradford. Due the reason that cloth we use is flame resistant the damage was very limited. This happened on Friday the 8th July at 10.30 am. The police was informed but response was very slow however a regular petrol to all the Gurdwara is now being carried out. The damage to pole was immediately repaired by 5 pm new Nishan sahib was showing its true colours.

A joint board of the Gurdwaras has decided to approach the media who has not been supportive of the Sikhs of Bradford.

Waheguru ji ka Khalsa Waheguru ji ki fateh

[JagtarSinghKhalsa]

Stabbed Sikh is blamed for attacks

John Breslin

A YOUNG Sikh man, who was stabbed, racially abused and blamed for the London bombings, said yesterday his attackers were trying to kill him.

Hardip Singh suffered serious wounds to his hands and arms after being attacked by two men outside a house in the midlands. He has no doubt they thought he was a Muslim.

The 23-year-old, originally from the Punjab in India, but studying business in Dublin for the past four years, described last night how the two men called him “bin Laden” and “a terrorist”, and blamed him for the London bombings and directed racial abuse at him. The incident happened earlier this week in Athlone, Co Westmeath, where Mr Singh was staying with friends.

After the abuse “one of them then produced a knife from his right hand side pocket and attacked,” said Mr Singh.

“He was trying to kill me. I tried to stop him, put my hands in front. The wounds were defensive. He cut my hand and I needed 10 stitches,” he said.

When the pair ran away (they were aged 20 to 24), Mr Singh called an ambulance and was taken to hospital. He was released that day and is now back in Dublin.

However, he said he could not leave his house for two or three days after the incident. He has suffered racial abuse before.

The Irish Sikh Council is seeking a meeting with the gardaí following the attack on the youth in Athlone.

The council has no doubt the attack was a backlash to the bomb attacks in London last week, as Sikhs are often mistaken for Muslims despite their distinctive beards and turbans. This is the first attack on a Sikh since the London bombings but it mirrors similar incidents that followed the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

In the US, two Sikhs were shot dead by a gunman who believed they were Muslim. No one has ever been charged with any of the attacks here despite them being reported to gardaí, the Irish Sikh Council’s Kirpa Singh said. That is one of the reasons they are seeking a meeting.

“This incident and many such similar ones in the past have become a common occurrence in the lives of practising Sikhs living in the European Union and USA as Sikhs keep fully-grown beards and wear turbans,” added the council’s Harpreet Singh.

“The Metropolitan Police in London have also admitted that the Sikh community is particularly vulnerable to backlash crimes in the aftermath of the London bombings because of their visibility and that this is a police concern.”

One Dublin-based Sikh, Sarabjit Singh, relocated to Britain following repeated harassment, including an attack by three teenagers on Dublin’s South Circular Road.

[sikhlionz]

Waheguroooooooooooooo

AK-47 u are right if it goes on in multicultural brum city centre then it can happy anywhere

the singh that got stabbed....

Waheguroooooooooo

At least the Sikh Secretariat is keeping a log of these incidents...

[JagtarSinghKhalsa]

The Scotsman (Sikhs mentioned at the end)

Sat 16 Jul 2005

National Front fans flames

FERGUS SHEPPARD

THE National Front will stage a march in central London this afternoon amid growing fears that Britain's Muslim community could increasingly be at risk from reprisal attacks, despite high-profile appeals by police and community leaders.

Several hundred supporters of the National Front will march along Victoria embankment and through Parliament Square before heading on to the East London Mosque, to stage a demonstration outside the building. The route will not pass any of the bomb scenes and the Metropolitan Police are satisfied they can contain any public-order incidents.

A National Front spokesman told The Scotsman that the event, arranged shortly after the 7 July bombings, was "designed to show our solidarity with the people who died and our disgust at the attacks".

An initial request to hold an event near the Edgware Road Tube station - an area with a large Muslim population - was refused by police, he said.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police and officers in the Football Intelligence Unit were yesterday studying websites run by far-right groups for any signs that violence against Muslims and their property was being orchestrated.

Gerry Gable, publisher of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, claimed he had seen names and phone numbers of Asian people published on a far-right website with paramilitary links, along with the suggestion they should be "paid a visit". Mr Gable said: "It only takes one psycho looking at these things to decide to go and take matters into his own hands."

One concern is that football fans across Britain with far-right links might ditch traditional team rivalries to turn on Asian people when their teams play.

Policing around the Leeds-Millwall game, which takes place at Leeds' Elland Road ground on 7 August, is likely to be particularly intense. While both clubs have done their utmost to shed fans with racist sympathies, the setting of the game in Leeds could provide a cue for extremist violence.

Earlier this week, another far-right group, the British National Party (BNP), faced allegations of exploiting public fears in the wake of the London bombings when it used a picture of the bombed No 30 bus on the front of a campaign leaflet during a council by-election.

The leaflet, used in the BNP's unsuccessful attempt to win a seat on Barking and Dagenham Council, carried a picture of the destroyed bus with the slogan "Maybe it's time to start listening to the BNP".

The National Front march follows a day in which police commanders and senior community leaders sought to reassure Britain's Muslim communities but also to demand their support in exposing terrorist sympathisers. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, yesterday visited community leaders in Leeds, saying he wanted to take "concrete steps" to ensure that an atrocity like the London bombings could never happen again.

Sir Iqbal, speaking to Muslim leaders at the Baab-ul-Ilm centre in the city, said: "We are all responsible for it in a way because we have been talking about the fact there are elements within the community who perhaps are carrying out the rhetoric and message of hate and very little has been done.

"The community across the country condemns such activities but, beyond that, what have we been doing?"

The senior Muslim leader later met groups in the Beeston area of Leeds and attended prayers at the city's Grand Mosque, where he told worshippers: "We are not responsible for the crimes which have taken place, but we have to share the responsibility for dealing with it so this scourge of evil can be eradicated."

Sir Iqbal later flew back to London for a press conference at the London Central Mosque in Regents Park, where Islamic scholars issued a powerful religious ruling stating that the Koran offered no basis for terrorism and branding acts such as suicide bombings as un-Islamic.

Earlier in the day, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, spoke to a 500-strong audience at the Minhaj-ul-Quran Mosque in Forest Gate, east London, urging them to "seize the moment" and help defeat terrorism.

He said the Muslim community had to help the police find the "creatures of hate" who had turned young men towards violence.

Sir Ian told the worshippers: "I am afraid this is your problem, and you are going to help us."

The mosque audience heard a condemnation of the attacks from imam Ramzan Qadri, who said: "Islam has never given permission for such attacks to be made against any person or community."

The Met Police commissioner said: "I am delighted to hear the condemnation of this community against these terrible attacks because this attack was not on some host community, it was on all humanity.

"This is a perversion of the virtues of Islam, this is a criminal act of murder. But it is done in the name of Islam, and that puts the responsibility on all of us."

Sir Ian also went on to visit a Sikh temple in Manor Park, also in east London, where Jagtar Singh of the political party Sikh Federation (UK) presented him with a memorandum expressing key concerns of the Sikh community in Britain.

[JagtarSinghKhalsa]

Police chief appeals to Muslims to help fight terrorism

(Sikh mentioned at the end)

July 16, 2005 - 10:53AM

London's police chief today appealed to Muslims to move beyond their shock over the suicide bombings that killed 54 people and join the fight against terrorism.

He challenged Muslims to join the police in greater numbers.

"It is not the police, it is not the intelligence services who will defeat terrorism, it is communities who will defeat terrorism," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair told a gathering at the Minhaj-ul-Quran Mosque.

"We must seize this moment, this weekend, next week, we have to seize a moment in which the Muslim communities of Britain, helped by everybody of good will, changes from a current position of shock and disbelief into active engagement in counterterrorism," he said.

His speech drew mixed reactions.

"This is not the problem of the Muslim. This is the problem of British society," said Imam Ramzan Qadri, youth development coordinator for the mosque.

"They (extremists) adhere to something that is not Islam. They have no one on their backs who are scholars," Qadri said.

Abbas Aziz, vice president of the mosque's youth league, said the attacks "have strengthened our resolve to root it (extremism) out in our youngsters and try to educate them."

"The people who did this (the bombings) were not one of us," said Abid Tanoli, who had come for the weekly prayer service.

"Who is al-Qaeda? Even we don't know who they are," Tanoli said.

Blair told Muslims, "I need you."

"We've got nearly a million Muslims in London ... I've only got 300 Muslim police officers in London. I'm afraid that's not good enough," he said.

"I need your mothers and your fathers, your brothers and your sisters, your sons and your daughters."

Blair urged the Muslim community to change its attitude toward radical clerics such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is in prison awaiting trial for allegedly encouraging the murder of Jews and other non-Muslims, and Syrian-born Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, spiritual leader of the radical Muslim movement Al-Muhajiroun.

"You're going to have to move away from the very understandable position that lunatics like Bakri and Hamza are just lunatics and they're not important," Blair said.

"The trouble is, they only need to be important for half a dozen people. You have to find ways of identifying those preachers of hate and who they're talking to. We have to find ways in which we identify the young men and sometimes women who are vulnerable to extremism. That is a great challenge."

Blair said there was "nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Muslim," or a fundamentalist of another faith.

"The key issue is the slide into extremism," he said.

Blair later visited a Sikh temple, the Gurdwara Dasmesh Darbar, where some complained that they had suffered from a post-bombing backlash.

"I've received more suspicious looks and called Bin Laden a few times since," Nirmal Singh, 35, a volunteer at the temple, told a reporter.

"Sikhs are the largest and most visible minority so we are constantly looked at with suspicion because of our turban and beards," said Jagtar Singh, a member of the national executive committee of The Sikh Federation UK.

"For every crime that is reported, our own information show there's 30, 40 or 50 that are not reported."

- AP

[JagtarSinghKhalsa]

Sir Ian also went on to visit a Sikh temple in Manor Park, also in east London, where Jagtar Singh of the political party Sikh Federation (UK) presented him with a memorandum expressing key concerns of the Sikh community in Britain.

109182[/snapback]

KEY CONCERNS OF THE SIKH COMMUNITY IN THE UK

Presented to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair

At Dashmesh Darbar Gurdwara, East London

Friday 15 July 2005

1) Sikhs have been very outspoken to condemn the atrocities of last Thursday. We have received anonymous threats for calling those that attacked innocent civilians "cowards" who do not "respect human life".

2) Sikhs are the largest and most visible ethnic minority in London and the UK. There are an estimated 700,000 Sikhs in the UK with around 200,000 in London. Due to our visible identity we are at the greatest risk of race hate crimes.

3) Following 9/11 an innocent Sikh was the first person to be incorrectly arrested in the US simply for his identity. This resulted in world wide media coverage that resulted in serious levels of race hate crimes against Sikhs across the world. The first person killed after 9/11 in the US was a Sikh. Sikhs were also killed elsewhere, such as in Moscow.

4) The first place of worship attacked in the UK after last Thursday's terrorist attacks was a Gurdwara in Erith, Kent.

5) The first person seriously attacked in other parts of Europe as a direct result of the bombings in London was a Sikh bus driver in Copenhagen. He suffered serious injuries after being attacked with baseball bats. We have had numerous reports of race hate crimes targeting Sikh taxi drivers, bus drivers and even tube workers that interact with the public in providing essential services.

6) Attacks against Sikhs are spreading and increasing in seriousness. A serious knife assault against a Sikh has been reported in Ireland in the last 24 hours.

7) Many race hate crimes are not being reported. Our own information that is being gathered through informal networks suggests for every case being reported to the police there may be as many as 30, 40 or 50 cases that are not being reported. While most of the race hate crimes are verbal rather than physical, that does not mean it's not serious, or very upsetting for the persons being targeted.

8) In general the police are doing a good job in terms of reassurance and safety. However, a report has come in from Birmingham City Centre of what can only be termed a race hate crime against a Sikh by the police itself on the basis of his "identity". Six police cars full of police manhandled a practising Sikh simply because of his identity as he was entering his office having just returned from lunch. Community confidence in the police across the UK has suffered requiring the need for a very public apology at the highest levels to try and restore confidence.

9) Senior politicians and those in authority have not learnt the lessons from the aftermath of 9/11 and have failed to acknowledge the difficulties being experienced by Sikhs due to "Mistaken Identity". We demand that politicians and those in authority at the highest levels make it very public that attacks against Sikhs and Gurdwaras are totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

This Memorandum was presented by Sikh organisations working in collaboration to highlight race hate crimes against Sikhs. The organisations include the National Council of Gurdwaras, Sikh Federation (UK), Sikh Secretariat, Sikhs In England, United Sikhs and Young Sikhs (UK).

[JagtarSinghKhalsa]

Blair later visited a Sikh temple, the Gurdwara Dasmesh Darbar, where some complained that they had suffered from a post-bombing backlash.

"I've received more suspicious looks and called Bin Laden a few times since," Nirmal Singh, 35, a volunteer at the temple, told a reporter.

"Sikhs are the largest and most visible minority so we are constantly looked at with suspicion because of our turban and beards," said Jagtar Singh, a member of the national executive committee of The Sikh Federation UK.

"For every crime that is reported, our own information show there's 30, 40 or 50 that are not reported."

- AP

109189[/snapback]

Please record ALL race hate crimes on the HATE CRIMES DATABASE FOR UK SIKHS

http://www.sikh-secretariat.com/sikh_incident_form.htm

Report on behalf of others that are not on the Internet.

Each town/city should have reps. Email: jagtarkhalsa@yahoo.com if you wish to act as a rep.

Ask around at the Gurdwara, school, university of any race hate crimes targeting Sikhs.

[khalsa mero roop]

I think worst is to come yet on sikhs. We should be tyar bar tyar.

[khalsa mero roop]

The Ramgharia gurdwhara in Coventry was attacked my goraa. Windows were smashed by stones?

Vaaheguroojeekaakhaalsaa

Vaaheguroojeekeefaateh!!