Portugal: 3 Month Bonds Places, Rates Increasing
(ANSAmed) — ROME, SEPTEMBER 7 — Portugal carried out the issue of 3-month State bonds worth 854 million euros carrying an interest rate equal to 4.959%, up compared to the previous auction (4.854% on August 17). The statement was made by Igcp, the public credit management institute. As regards this issue, the agency had predicted an amount ranging from 750 million to 1 billion euros: today demand was more than two times greater that what was on offer.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Sarkozy: France Holding Up Better Than Italy & Others
(ANSAmed) — PARIS, SEPTEMBER 6 — French President Nicolas Sarkozy is praising the economic situation of France, which is “withstanding” the “gigantic” financial and economic crisis better than other countries. Sarkozy, who spoke in front of a group of road haulage contractors and then at LTR-Vialon, also defended the hotly debated pension reform adopted in recent months. “If we had not implemented it,” said the president, “France would not be in the situation it is in now. That is to say, the situation of a country that is best withstanding the gigantic crisis that the world is experiencing.” “Imagine what your reaction would be if France were in the situation of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy or the UK,” said Sarkozy, while speaking to 200 LTR-Vialon workers. “The world,” he concluded, “has been experiencing unusually fierce turbulence over the past three years. There are some countries that have withstood this.
They are countries that have taken difficult and necessary measures at the right time.” Sarkozy has begun a densely packed agenda of missions in the French provinces ahead of the presidential elections set for the spring of 2012.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
American Muslims Speak Out Against the Enforcement of Shari’ah Law in America
— A coalition of diverse American Muslim leaders has announced support for a proposed bill in the Michigan State Assembly, HB 4679, that is intended to bar Michigan courts from enforcing any foreign law, if doing so violates any rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and/or the state of Michigan’s constitution.
Like many Americans, members of the American Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC) have been observing the efforts of a growing number of state legislatures, which are seeking to address the incompatibility of various shari’ah court systems around the world with the principles and foundations of our Constitutional republic and its laws. As American Muslims, we believe that the law should treat people of all faiths equally, while protecting Muslims and non-Muslims alike from extremist attempts to use the legal instrument of shari’ah (also known as Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh) to incubate, within the West, a highly politicized and dangerous understanding of Islam that is generally known as “Islamism,” or “radical Islam.”
We see no evidence that statutes like HB 4769 will adversely impact the free exercise of our personal pietistic observance of Islam, which is not in conflict with the U.S. or Michigan constitutions. We recognize that not only Muslims, but also Jews, Christians and all people of faith need the government to protect their right to peaceful assembly, mediation and arbitration free of coercion, but also within the bounds of American constitutional principles. Therefore, we stand together as a diverse coalition in support of any legislation that serves to protect and integrate our communities into the fabric of this great nation, by strengthening our accountability to the laws of the land, and the constitutions of the various states in which we live.
As American Muslims we are conscious of the fact that Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups and other Islamists and their surrogates in the U.S. are trying their best to portray any opposition to manifestations of shari’ah law as “racism” and “discrimination against Muslims.” However, as a coalition of traditional, liberal and secular Muslim Americans, we denounce this fear-mongering and playing of the race card, which only serves to mask the Islamists’ highly politicized agenda. According to AILC member C. Holland Taylor, “the Islamist agenda threatens not only the well-being of the United States and its inhabitants, but also undermines and distorts the highest principles of Islam itself.”
“Michigan House Bill 4769 seeks to ensure that American Muslims can live in freedom and safety, in accordance with our constitutional principles, and not be enveloped by the tentacles of medieval, man-made laws that have been falsely accorded divine status,” said the AILC.
“To equate Bill 4769 to racism is not only dishonest, but is a poor and clumsy attempt at making ordinary Muslim Americans feel alien in their own homeland, while creating a rift between Muslims and the rest of our country,” said AILC member Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser.
Michigan House Bill 4769 states:
“[To] …limit the application and enforcement by a court, arbitrator, or administrative body of foreign laws that would impair constitutional rights; to provide for modification or voiding of certain contractual provisions or agreements that would result in a violation of constitutional rights; and to require a court, arbitrator, or administrative body to take certain actions to prevent violation of constitutional rights.”
The AILC statement reinforces the American Muslim community’s commitment to the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and the separation between religion and state. Unfortunately, Islamist groups would like to compromise this separation and provide cover to medieval, misogynistic and homophobic laws that no Muslim is obligated to demand as public law.
“Shari’ah law, wherever it has been applied in the public domain, be it in Iran, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, has resulted in untold misery and oppression of Muslims, in particular Muslim women, by Islamists and dictators who invoke shari’ah law to justify their rule,” said AILC member Manda Ervin. “Many of us fled the Muslim world to escape shari’ah law and to practice Islam in our personal lives, by moving to the USA and other western countries. We do not wish these laws to follow us here,” she concluded.
The Michigan state senators are not alone in expressing concern about foreign laws creeping into North America under the guise of religious freedom. Many Muslim academics, religious scholars and human rights activists have voiced their concern.
The contrast between what has occurred in Britain and in Canada provides a roadmap for how the U.S. may address these legal issues. In Britain, shari’ah arbitration courts have been allowed to assume virtually unchecked control of legal arrangements in many Muslim communities. This is creating a ghettoized, medieval and separatist state within Britain. In Canada, however, local Muslims led strong opposition to the Islamists’ shari’ah agenda and were successful in preventing its implementation, thereby sparing our Northern neighbor the fate of so many Muslims in the United Kingdom, where women are commonly subjected to forced marriage and the denial of basic human rights.
“We Muslims in Canada defeated an attempt by Islamists to sneak shari’ah law into Ontario,” said AILC member Tarek Fatah, who has been on the front lines of this struggle for many years. “We recognized the damage shari’ah had inflicted on Muslims in the UK, and its oppressive nature in Muslim-majority countries, and decided to oppose it. We urge American Muslims not to succumb to the Islamists’ propaganda, and to back the Michigan Bill, which will protect Muslims and non-Muslims alike from the impact of foreign laws that violate the U.S. or Michigan constitutions.”
About the American Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC)
The American Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC) is a diverse coalition of liberty-minded, North American Muslim leaders and organizations. AILC’s mission advocates for defending the US Constitution, upholding religious pluralism, protecting American security and cherishing genuine diversity in the faith and practice of Islam. AILC provides a stark alternative to the Islamist organizations that claim to speak for what are diverse American Muslim communities.
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Caroline Glick: American Jews and the Liberal Art of Demonization
US election season is clearly upon us as US President Barack Obama has moved into full campaign mode. Part and parcel of that mode is a new bid to woo Jewish voters and donors upset by Obama’s hostility to Israel back in the Democratic Party’s fold.
To undertake this task, the White House turned to its reliable defender, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. Since 2008, when then-candidate Obama was first challenged on his anti-Israel friends, pastors and positions, Goldberg has willingly used his pen to defend Obama to the American Jewish community.
Trying to portray Obama as pro-Israel is not a simple task. From the outset of his tenure in office, Obama has distinguished himself as the most anti-Israel president ever…
| — Hat tip: Caroline Glick | [Return to headlines] |
Fiat CEO Marchionne Becomes Chrysler Chairman
Turin, 7 Sept. (AKI) — Sergio Marchionne, chief exeuctive officer of Italy’s Fiat, has been named chairman of Chrysler two months after the Italian carmaker became majority owner of America’s third-largest auto company.
Turin-based Fiat took over Chrysler in July after it repaid the US and Canadian governments 7.6 billion dollars in loans from the bailout that saved the Auburn Hills, Michigan company from all but certain bankruptcy.
“Repaying our governments’ loans six years early and refinancing our debt reinforces our conviction that we are on the right path to rebuilding this company and restoring it to its rightful place on the global automotive landscape within the framework of Chrysler’s global alliance with Fiat,” Marchionne, 59, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Marchionne revamped Fiat in an effort to recapture marketshare lost to European rivals.
It is also reintroducing Fiat models to the US market where it has been absent for years.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Frank Gaffney: Where Are We: Ten Years After 9/11?
So, where are we ten years after 9/11? It is comforting that we have been blessed with a near-unbroken decade without further mass-casualty attacks since those that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, our government is pursuing policies that can only encourage those who aspire to do us harm to redouble their efforts.
Such an assessment was implicit in a critique of President Obama’s new counter-terrorism”strategy” delivered last week by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman. The Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut described the President’s so-called “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States” white paper as “ultimately a big disappointment”:
The administration’s plan… suffers from several significant weaknesses. The first is that the administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name, violent Islamist extremism. We can find names that are comparable to that, but not the one that the administration continues to use which [is] ‘violent extremism.’ It is not just violent extremism. There are many forms of violent extremism. There’s white racist extremism, there’s been some eco-extremism, there’s been animal rights extremism. You can go on and on and on. There’s skinhead extremism, but we’re not in a global war with those.
Sen. Lieberman observed, “We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists. To call our enemy violent extremism is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is ‘Al-Qaida and its allies.’ Now, that’s better, but it still is too narrow.”…
| — Hat tip: CSP | [Return to headlines] |
Sharia Lobby Shifts Into Fifth Gear
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Sharia advocates desperately want to convince legislators and the public that Islamic law is plain vanilla —- and totally nonthreatening to existing U.S. legal codes. Notwithstanding a nationwide Muslim Brotherhood-backed pro-sharia push, nothing could be further from the truth.
“There are many unpleasant doctrines within Islam,” including its “repugnant” criminal code, honor killings, female genital cutting, and a Quranic verse Muslim clerics often cite, proclaiming “wives as a tilth unto you” (2:223), to deny the existence of marital rape. [1]
So allowed sharia professor Sadiq Reza at an Aug. 25-26 New York Law School (NYLS) conference. Any attempt to enforce its criminal code, he added, “would violate Constitutional law.” He insisted, though, that western Muslims don’t “favor” these aspects of Islam and none seek to impose them. Evidence that they do abounds (here, here, here, here, here) but Reza said his broad web search found none.
Northwestern University Islamic law professor Kristen Stilt, too, disdained sharia criticism as “lunacy.” And University of Toronto Islamic law professor Mohammed Fadel referred the audience to a glossy, Soros-funded condemnation of skeptics, breathlessly entitled “Fear, Inc.” to persuade the gullible.
Soon afterward, journalist Joseph Klein recalled some points of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood “scholar” Yusuf Qaradawi, revered by the Islamic world —- and “Fear, Inc.” co-author Wajahat Ali. Qaradawi identifies fully with sharia as described by former CIA director R. James Woolsey and fellow so-called hate mongers headed by Center for Security Policy CEO Frank Gaffney, not Ali and his co-detractors. Qaradawi considers charity “jihad with money, because God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and our money,” as I noted in fall 2007. Like the MB-backed Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Qaradawi also seeks to internationally criminalize insults to Islam or Mohammed.
CSP’s sharia description is quite correct —- not the “hate” or “lunacy” that Reza, Ali, Stilt and Fadel call it. Sharia is indeed a
“complete way of life” (social, cultural, military, religious, and political), governed from cradle to grave by Islamic law… Shariah is, moreover, a doctrine that mandates the rule of Allah over all aspects of society.
[Links at URL]
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Anders Breivik’s Spider Web of Hate
An analysis of the Norwegian killer’s manifesto reveals the online network that features in his paranoid universe
Anders Breivik’s manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties.
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
As well as his very long manifesto, Breivik also laid out some of his thoughts on the Norwegian nationalist site Document.no. In his postings there, Breivik referred to something he called “the Vienna school of thought”, which consists of the people who had worked out the ideology that inspired him to commit mass murder. He named three people in particular: Littman; the Norwegian Peder Jensen who wrote under the pseudonym of Fjordman; and the American Robert Spencer, who maintains a site called Jihad Watch, and agitates against “the Islamisation of America”.
But the name also alludes to a blog called Gates of Vienna, run by an American named Edward “Ned” May, on which Fjordman posted regularly and which claims that Europe is now as much under threat from a Muslim invasion as it was in 1683, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna.
All of these paranoid fantasists share a vision articulated by the Danish far-right activist Anders Gravers, who has links with the EDL in Britain and with Spencer and his co-conspiracist Pamela Geller in the US. Gravers told a conference in Washington last year:
“The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, and the latest example being the Lisbon Treaty. However the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a Eurabian superstate, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This was already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 1995 by the EU and nine north African states and Israel, which became effective on the 1st of January, 2010. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy.”
Spencer’s jihadwatch.org is linked to 116 times from Breivik’s manifesto; May’s Gates of Vienna 86 times; and Fjordman 114 times.
Spencer and Geller were the organisers of the protest against the so-called 9/11 mosque in New York City. They also took over Stop Islamisation of America, a movement with links to the EDL and to a variety of far-right movements across Europe. Of the two, Spencer is less of a fringe figure. He has been fulsomely interviewed by the Catholic Herald in this country and praised by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who called him “a profound and subtle thinker”. Damian Thompson, a leader writer on the Telegraph, once urged his readers to buy Spencer’s works, especially if they believed that Islam was “a religion of peace”. Last week, Spencer’s blog re-ran a piece from Geller’s Atlas Shrugged website claiming that Governor Rick Perry, the creationist rightwinger from Texas, is actually linked to Islamists via Grover Norquist, the far-right tax cutter whom Geller claims is “a front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Geller also once republished a blogpost speculating that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X.
As well as the “counter-jihad” websites such as Spencer’s and May’s, analysis of Breivik’s web reveals a dense network of 104 European nationalist sites and political parties. Some of these are represented in parliaments: Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom party; the French National Front; the Danish People’s party, the Norwegian Progress party (of which Breivik was briefly a member before he left, disgusted with its moderation); the Sweden Democrats. Others, like the EDL, are fringe groupings. Then there are those in between, such as the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik. But they range all across Europe. They are united by hostility to Muslims and to the EU.
One place where these strands intertwine is the Brussels Journal, a website run by the Belgian Catholic MEP Paul Belien, a member of the far-right Vlaams Belang party. The British Europhobic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan appeared for three years on the Brussels Journal’s masthead. Hannan has since denounced the European neo-fascist parties as not really rightwing at all.
To appear on this list is not to be complicit in Breivik’s crime. Peder “Fjordman” Jensen was so shocked by it that he gave himself up to the police and gave an interview to a Norwegian paper in which he appeared genuinely bewildered that his predictions of a European civil war should have led anyone to such violence.
It is still more unfair to blame Melanie Phillips. Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that “Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying”, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the “counter-jihad” belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
The world view of the counter-jihadis echoes that of the jihadis they feel threatened by. The psychological world of the jihadis has been described by the British psychiatrist Russell Razzaque, who rejected recruitment by Hizb ut-Tahrir when he was a medical student. It is not just a matter of a black-and-white world view, he says, though that is part of it. “It’s a very warm embrace. You felt a sense of self-esteem, a sense of real embrace. Then it gives you a sense of purpose, which is also something you’ve never had so much. The purpose is a huge one. Part of a cosmic struggle when you’re on the right side: you’re another generation in the huge fight that goes back to the crusades.”
This clearly mirrors Breivik’s self-image. What makes him particularly frightening is that he seems to have radicalised himself, just as jihadis do, before he went looking for advice and guidance on the internet. But he was able to take the last few steps into mass murder all alone, so far as we know. Jihadi groups also withdraw from the world into a cramped and paranoid universe of their own. Suicide bombers such as the 9/11 and 7/7 groups spent months psyching each other up before the crime, talking obsessively for hours every day. But Breivik, though he withdrew from society to his farm, seems to have spent his time alone with the internet. It allowed him to hear his own choir of imaginary friends, and hear inside his head their voices cheering him on to murder and martyrdom. Here they are, mapped.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Battisti Asks Forgiveness But Denies Murder
Ex-terrorist takes ‘political responsibility’ in ANSA exclusive
(ANSA) — Sao Paulo, September 7 — Former Italian left-wing terrorist Cesare Battisti asked forgiveness Wednesday for the victims of attacks in the 1970s, taking some responsibility while denying he killed anyone.
“Today I take much responsibility for what I did at the time, because I was a boy,” Battisti told ANSA in an interview at his beachfront home outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, the country where he is in political asylum.
“Thinking that an armed assault could change things in Italy was a mistake”, he said, underlining his role in a militant communist group.
“But this does not count as a confession of direct involvement,” he added, calling his responsibility “political” in nature, and denying guilt for any of the four counts of murder in the 1970s for which he has been convicted in absentia.
Battisti was arrested in Brazil in April 2007, some five years after he had fled to that country to avoid extradition to Italy from France, moves which he called necessary to avoid “winding up with a life sentence in Italy for crimes I did not commit”.
The son of one of Battisti’s victims, Alberto Torregiani, accused Battisti of “continuing to lie,” and said the convicted murderer should turn himself in to the Italian courts and “show proof of his innocence that he’s spoken of for years yet no one has ever seen”.
Torregiani, who was paralysed from the waist down in the 1979 attack in Milan that killed his jeweler father Pierluigi, has galvanised public opinion in the case, bringing relations between Italy and Brazil to a new low. In January the relatives of Battisti’s victims staged street protests outside the Brazilian embassy in Rome and consulates and offices elsewhere in Italy, while militants from Berlusconi’s key government ally the Northern League called for a boycott of Brazilian goods.
In January 2009 the Brazilian justice ministry granted Battisti political asylum on the grounds that he would face “political persecution” in Italy.
The ruling outraged the Italian government who demanded that it be taken to the Brazilian supreme court, which in November 2009 reversed the earlier decision and turned down Battisti’s request for asylum.
However in June, the court voted six to three not extradite the former terrorist and to uphold a decision by Brazilian ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in one of his last acts in office at the end of last year.
Italy is appealing the decision at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Muslims in Athens Will Have Their Own Mosque
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, SEPTEMBER 7 — After almost 40 years of proposals and plans discussed but never approved, a mosque is finally to be built in Athens, the only European capital until now to be without a place of worship for its Muslim community (over 200,000, including both Greeks and foreigners). The decision was taken today by the Greek Parliament, which approved by 198 votes to 16 the construction of the long-awaited Islamic temple.
Deputies from all parties voted in the favour of the measure (the draft bill of which first arrived in Parliament in October 2006), with the exception of representatives of the far-right LAOS party, whose leader Giorgios Karatzaferis accused the government of wanting to create “a laboratory for the production of terrorists in the centre of Athens”.
The construction of the mosque, which is likely to be situated in the Elaionas area, close to the centre of the city, will put an end to the inconvenience suffered by tens of thousands of Muslims, who are still gathering five times a day (the frequency with which good worshippers must prostrate themselves and offer their prayers towards Mecca) in flats, garages and even basements all around the capital. Five years ago, the Greek government said that it would provide 15 million euros, but costs have risen significantly in the meantime.
The fact that the mosque has so far failed to be built, as LAOS deputies have argued, is due in large part to opposition from residents of certain districts of Athens who have not wanted a Muslim place of worship in their area, for fear that such a place could become a breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalists.
Six years ago, the then Foreign Minister, Dora Bacoyannis, who had previously been mayor of Athens, suggested the restoration of an 18th century Ottoman mosque in Monastiraki, in the heart of the capital close to the Acropolis. Yet though he appreciated the proposal, the imam Munir Abdelrasul turned it down saying that the building would be too small to house even a small proportion of worshippers in the city.
The impasse was eventually overcome by the leader of the powerful Greek Orthodox Church, the then Archbishop Christodoulos (who died in January 2008), who put forward the construction of the new mosque on seven hectares of land belonging to the Navy and lying in the Elaionas area, less than a kilometre from the metro station. The archbishop also offered three hectares of Church-owned land in the town of Schisto, north-east of the capital, for Athens’ first Islamic cemetery. Christodoulos’ suggestion was immediately accepted by the government, which backed plans for the mosque in Elaionas.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Berlusconi Wants Parliament to Rule on Ruby Case
‘Lower house should evaluate case’, says PM
(ANSA) — Rome, September 7 — Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi has asked a parliamentary panel to rule on the jurisdiction of the Milan court where the prime minister is being tried on sex charges.
In a letter sent to parliament late Tuesday by Berlusconi’s lawyer Niccolo’ Ghedini, the prime minister accused the court of failing to consider an earlier request for the parliament to evaluate the case.
Berlusconi is being tried on charges that he paid for sex with an underage prostitute known as Ruby Rubacuori or Ruby the Heartstealer, and then abused his position to cover it up.
“The court has not only failed to decide but also to send its records to the lower house to evaluate the case, which is of central interest,” the letter said.
“This house wants to evaluate the use of the material”, it said, referring to telephone intercepts of several women implicated in the Ruby case.
The letter questioned whether the “utilisation” of the telephone intercepts was in violation of Article 68 of the Constitution and asked the parliamentary panel to rule on the issue before the court case resumes in Milan on October 3.
In February lawyers for Berlusconi challenged the jurisdiction of Milan magistrates before the trial of the premier began.
“The parliament has already said that the competence (should belong to) the tribunal of ministers,” they said, referring to a special court that deals with alleged offences committed by ministers while carrying out their duties.
At the time his lawyers reaffirmed that the premier was acting in an official and not private capacity when he phoned Milan police in May to inquire about the teenage runaway Ruby, who had been detained for alleged theft.
Berlusconi, who denies abuse of office, has insisted he wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident because he had been told Ruby was the niece of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The lawyers also said the jurisdiction for the crime of allegedly using an underage prostitute should be in Monza, not Milan.
Both the premier and Ruby, whose real name is Kharima El Mahrough, have denied having sex while she claims thousands of euros he gave her were gifts.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Koran: German Project Compares Its ‘Versions’
(ANSAMED) — ROME, SEPTEMBER 7 — Today it is believed that Islam’s holy text was directly dictated by Allah to Mohammed and therefore it must be viewed as a body of strict rules. But there was a time when the wise Muslims talked in critical terms about the Koran. A German group of researchers — as reported by the ‘Jesus’ monthly in an article — has now decided to follow that path once again. We are talking about the Corpus Coranicum, a project by the Berlin and Brandenburg Academy of Sciences that aims to present, in an open and digital form, the different ‘lessons’ of the book of Koran referred by oral and written history, together with the most significant historical commentaries and the texts of the cultural environment in which Islam’s holy book was formed.
The objective of Corpus Coranicum is not that of drawing up a ‘critical edition’ of the Koran as a whole — establishing a new text ‘cleaned out’ of historical encrustment, transcription and transmission errors that piled up during 1400 years of history.
Rather, as project director Michael Marx explained to Jesus, “we are setting the foundations for a potential critical edition: what we are doing is taking 35 different editions into account, trying to insert certain data from our database to refresh memories that the history of Muslim culture has a critical approach to the text”.
The idea of comparing, from a synoptic standpoint, the various ‘lessons’ of the Koran is certainly controversial. In most contemporary Muslim societies the prevailing notion is that the text of the Koran was directly dictated by Allah to Mohammed, and that consequently any intervention on the text must be considered blasphemous. In reality, for centuries the Muslim researches looked into the variations to the text, debating, accepting or rejecting the various ‘lessons’ set forth by the different traditions. And it is this same heritage that the Corpus Coranicum aims to systematise, organising it according to the Western research methods.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Long-Standing Swiss Foreign Minister Resigns
Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey has officially announced her resignation, effective in December.
During her nine years in government, Calmy-Rey’s style and actions have often drawn criticism, but Swiss diplomacy has gained in international visibility.
The 66-year-old, who also holds the rotating post as Swiss president this year, said she would not put herself up for re-election in December.
Wednesday’s move had been subject to intense media speculation.
“I gave my best for the country. I focused on bilateral relations with the European Union, the strengthening of ties with countries outside Europe through strategic partnerships and positioning Switzerland as a mediator on the international stage,” she told a news conference.
She said she was particularly proud of the role of Switzerland in the Human Rights Council.
Calmy-Rey said it was in the interest of Switzerland to increase its visibility in a global context.
However, she added that there was no consensus in Switzerland about the country’s foreign policy and rejected criticism that her diplomacy activities were mere public relations.
Her resignation comes just under 50 days before parliamentary elections on October 23 and is likely to boost the campaign of her centre-left Social Democratic Party.
Calmy-Rey is the fifth cabinet minister to step down within the four-year term of the current government which runs out in December.
Active neutrality
Observers say two characteristics marked her time in government: her openness to the world as head of the foreign ministry and a dogged and tough attitude, which helped her to achieve her goals.
Calmy-Rey was not an easy personality to get along with. The first woman to head the foreign ministry, she shook up the diplomatic corps, used for years to the low-key leadership style of her predecessor Joseph Deiss.
Demanding, controlling and at times impulsive, the foreign minister did not always use the most diplomatic tone in dealing with her staff. Some revived the nickname “Cruella”, which had stuck to her in Geneva when she was head of finance there.
Her aim was clearly not to win plaudits from within the ministry, but to raise Switzerland’s profile on the international stage. Dynamic and hardworking, Calmy-Rey made a concentrated effort to revive the policy of “active neutrality” adopted by Switzerland in the early years of the Cold War.
On March 20, 2003 she became the first minister of a foreign country to walk across the demarcation line between the two Koreas, and she went on to Pyongyang for talks with the North Korean leadership.
Also in 2003, she actively supported the “Geneva Initiative”, an unofficial peace plan which aimed to reopen dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In the years that followed, she promoted the creation of an international Human Rights Council, conceived as a more effective instrument to monitor conformity with the principles promulgated by the United Nations.
In 2006, in the name of the Geneva Conventions, she openly denounced Israeli bombing in Lebanon, terming it “disproportionate”, and called for respect for humanitarian law.
Her intervention drew criticism from the Israeli side, but also praise in Switzerland and elsewhere. This was a new tone for Swiss diplomacy, which up till then had taken a softly-softly approach so as to avoid confrontation.
Public diplomacy
The only woman in government for a further two years, Calmy-Rey was regularly placed at the top of the list of most highly-regarded politicians in opinion polls. Her popularity reached a peak in 2007, when for the first time she took over the national presidency.
Calmy-Rey carefully cultivated her image. Too much, in fact, according to her opponents, who accused her of promoting “public diplomacy” mainly to enhance her own visibility…
| — Hat tip: Jedilson Bonfim | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: Anti-Islam Party Will Boycott Xenophobia Debate
Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam party PVV will boycott any eventual parliamentary debate on xenophobia, MP Joram van Klaveren is reported as saying in Trouw.
GroenLinks MP Tofik Dibi said this summer he plans to call for such a debate in relation to the Norwegian killings but has not yet done so.
Other parties support the debate, but not in connection to events in Norway. Trouw says they would prefer to discuss the issues as part of the general debate on the queen’s speech and government policy following the presentation of the cabinet’s 2012 spending plans later this month.
Van Klaveren said the PVV sees no merit in any debate and will not attend.
Wilders is often criticised for failing to answer his critics in public debate, preferring instead to react to events using the microblogging service Twitter.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Serbia: Non-Aligned Movement Considers Supporting Palestinian Statehood
Belgrade, 6 Sept. (AKI) — Foreign ministers of more than one hundred non-aligned countries at a conference in Belgrade on Tuesday considered giving their support for Palestinian statehood during the United Nations General Assembly reconvenes later this month, Serbian foreign minister Vuk Jeremic told journalists.
“It wasn’t our intention to have political discussions here, but non-aligned decided to have it. It’s an exceptionally important global issue,” Jeremic said.
Non-aligned ministers gathered in Belgrade to commemorate 50th anniversary of the movement which currently includes 118 countries. The ministers pointed out the movement represents two thirds of the world population and should play a more active role in global politics.
UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in a message to the conference that the non-aligned movement was a key partner to the UN “in building long lasting peace in the world” and striving to resolve disputes by political means.
Palestinian leaders have said they would submit a request to the UN General Assembly this month to recognize Palestine as a state, which is opposed by Israel and its western allies.
The move lacks approval in the UN Security Council because of opposition of veto-wielding United States, Great Britain and France. But if the non-aligned backed it in the General Assembly “it is quiet possible that the fate of a great vote in New York will be decided in Belgrade”, Jeremic said.
He said the ministers were still discussing a draft document on support of Palestine. Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed Kamel Amr, whose country currently presided over the movement, earlier called on the states deriving from the former Yugoslavia to recognize Palestine.
Belgrade finds the non-aligned move awkward, because of its aspirations to join the European Union and a possible parallel between Palestine and Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008.
Belgrade opposes Kosovo independence, which has been recognized by over 80 countries, including the United States and 22 out of 27 EU members. But most non-aligned countries haven’t recognized Kosovo so far.
“It is not clear why they decided to make the move here,” Jeremic said.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
The Muslim “Overtaking” of France: As Mosques and as Faithful
Disclosure of the results of a study by the Hudson Institute, which provides a framework certainly unprecedented in the country’s religious landscape
In France there are more Islamic mosques being built, and more frequently, than Catholic churches, and there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Catholics in the country.
Nearly 150 new mosques are currently being built in France, home to the largest Islamic community in Europe. The projects are in various stages of completion, according to Moahmmed Moussaoui, President of the Muslim Council of France, who provided this data in an interview on August 2 with RTL radio.
The total number of mosques in France has already doubled to exceed 2,000 in the last ten years, according to a research entitled: “Building mosques: the government of Islam in France and Holland.” The best known French Islamic leader, Dalil Boubakeur, Rector of Great Mosque of Paris recently suggested that the total number of mosques should double, to 4,000, to meet the growing demand.
Instead, the Catholic Church in France has only twenty new churches built in the last ten years, and formally closed more than 60 churches, many of which could become mosques, according to research conducted by the French Catholic daily La Croix.
Although 64% of the French population (41.6 million people, out of about 65 million inhabitants) are defined as Roman Catholic, only 4.5% (about 1.9 million people) are practicing Catholics, according to the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP).
Also in the field of comparison, 75% (4.5 million) of the approximately 6 million Muslims of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa in France are identified as “believers”, and 41% (about 2.5 million) claim to be “practitioners”, according to a report posted on Islam in France by the IFOP on August 1 of last year. Research says that more than 70% of French Muslims claimed to have observed Ramadan in 2011.
Putting these elements side by side furnishes empirical evidence of the claim that Islam is on its way to overtaking Roman Catholicism as the dominant religion in France. As the numbers grow, the Muslims in France are becoming more assertive than ever before. A case for all groups: Muslims in France are asking the Catholic Church for permission to use its empty churches as a tool to solve the traffic problems caused by thousands of Muslims who pray in the street.
In a statement on March 1, addressed to the Church in France, National Federation of the Great Mosque of Paris, the French Council of Muslim Democrats and Islamist group called Collectif Banlieues Respect asked the Catholic Church, in a spirit of inter-religious solidarity, to allow the empty churches to be used by Muslims for Friday prayers, so that Muslims “are not forced to pray in the street” or “be held hostage by the politicians.” Every Friday, thousands of Muslims in Paris and other French towns close roads and sidewalks (and consequently, block local trade, and trap the non-Muslim residents in homes and offices) to accommodate the faithful who are unable to enter the mosque for Friday prayers. Some mosques have started to broadcast sermons and chants of “Allahu Akbar” in the streets. These hardships have caused anger and reactions, but despite many official complaints, authorities have not intervened so far in fear of igniting incidents. The issue of illegal street prayers reached the top of the French political agenda in December 2010 when Marine Le Pen, the new charismatic leader of the National Front, denounced the occurrence “an occupation without troops or tanks.”
During a meeting in the city of Lyon, Le Pen compared the Islamic prayers in the streets to the Nazi occupation. He said: “For those who like to talk a lot of the Second World War, we can also talk about this problem (the Islamic prayers in the street, ed), because it is an occupation of territory. It is an occupation of sections of land, of districts in which religious law enters into force. It is an occupation. Of course there are no tanks or soldiers, but nevertheless it is an occupation and weighs heavily on residents.”
Many French agree. In fact, the issue of Islamic prayers in the street — and the wider issue of the role of Islam in French society — has become a problem of the greatest magnitude in view of the presidential election of 2012. According to a survey by the IFOP, 40% of the French agree with Le Pen that the prayers on the street seem to be an occupation. Another poll published by Le Parisien shows that voters see Le Pen, who argues that France has been invaded by Muslims, and betrayed by its elites, as the best candidate to address the problem of Muslim immigration.
The French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose popularity was at 25% in July, the lowest figure ever recorded for an incumbent president a year before the presidential election, according to TNS-Sofres seems determined not to be outdone by Le Pen in this battle. He recently declared that prayers in the street are “unacceptable” and that the roads can not become “an extension of the mosque.” And he warned that this could undermine the secular tradition of France’s separation of state and religion. The interior minister Claude Guéant told the Muslims of Paris, on August 8, that instead of praying in the streets they can use a disused army barracks. “Praying in the streets is not something acceptable, it must cease.”
| — Hat tip: RE | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Eye-Witness Backs Up NUJ Account of EDL Attacks
A journalist on the scene has spoken to Press Gazette about how photographers came under attack whilst covering an English Defence League demonstration in east London on Saturday afternoon. The journalist, who said they did not wish to be named for fear of reprisals from the far-right group, backed up reports by the National Union of Journalists that a photographer was set on fire and that a female journalist had made a complaint of a sexual assault. He said that it appeared that the photographer might have been sprayed with lighter fluid setting light to their shirt. The photographer carried on working but was later treated in hospital for minor burns, the source said. He said: “There were a group of about 20 photographers standing on a raised piece of land behind the police line while Tommy Robinson [the EDL leader) was speaking near Aldgate. One of my colleagues was punched and a female photographer was hit inappropriately, they are classing it as a sexual assault.” He added: “The EDL has a history attacking members of the media. I think they turn on photographers because we are more visible than writers who can blend in more easily. They don’t like journalists covering their events because it leads to reports and pictures coming out showing their violence.” He said that he has covered a number of EDL events and knows of other incidents where journalists have been attacked, intimidated and even followed home by suspected EDL supporters.
A video emerged yesterday of Saturday afternoon’s demonstration (link below) which showed an apparent EDL supporter scuffling with a photographer and then being detained by police.. Yesterday NUJ leader Michelle Stanistreet said: “These violent attacks are an appalling abuse of press freedom and a clear attempt by members of the EDL to deter journalists from carrying out their work. “These attacks are designed to intimidate NUJ members and those in the local community who are determined to stand up to far-right groups. The police need to take decisive action to ensure that the thugs who attacked journalists during the EDL protest are identified and prosecuted.”
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: EDL ‘Violently Attacked’ Journalists, Claims NUJ
Journalists covering an English Defence League rally in London were subjected to a series of “violent attacks” on Saturday — including sexual assault and a photographer being set on fire, according to the National Union of Journalists. Members of the far-right group held demonstrations in east London over the weekend which saw 61 arrests including public order offences and assaults on police. The NUJ has revealed that after the event it received “numerous reports of harassment, threats and abuse” including “physical assaults, racist abuse, bottles and fireworks being thrown at the press and photographers being punched and kicked”. The union claimed that one journalist “was subjected to a sexual assault” and said that another NUJ member “suffered minor burns after an EDL supporter used a flammable accelerant to set the photographer on fire”.
The union said it was now offering support and assistance to the journalists who were abused and condemned the attacks as a “violation of press freedom”. “These violent attacks are an appalling abuse of press freedom and a clear attempt by members of the EDL to deter journalists from carrying out their work,” said NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet. These attacks are designed to intimidate NUJ members and those in the local community who are determined to stand up to far-right groups. The police need to take decisive action to ensure that the thugs who attacked journalists during the EDL protest are identified and prosecuted.”
NUJ London photographers’ branch secretary Jason Parkinson said Saturday’s violence was the “latest in a long history of violence, threats and even fatwas issued against the press”, which he claimed were designed to “intimidate and deter the media exposing the violent and racist behaviour of the far-right”. “An attack on the press is an attack on press freedom and on our democracy,” he added. Before Saturday’s protests the NUJ warned there could be violence against journalists following instances of “verbal threats, intimidation and physical violence” at previous events.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: EDL Members Protest Outside Prison
Political activists have gathered outside HMP Bedford in a show of support to their leader who is currently remanded in the jail.
Around 30 members of the English Defence League (EDL) were stood near to the entrance of the prison in St Loyes Street with pictures of Tommy Robinson claiming his human rights are being breached.
Mr Robinson is currently on hunger strike in the prison after he allegedly broke his bail condition by attending a demonstration of the EDL in Tower Hamlets over the weekend.
One EDL supporter, Dave Hedges of Dunstable said: “Why shouldn’t he be able to speak? Tommy Robinson is being persecuted and we are all here to show our support to a great bloke.”
| — Hat tip: Kitman | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Hundreds of Muslim Youths Could be Trained as Stewards After Success of Anti-EDL Protest
Hundreds of Muslim youths could be trained to steward volatile events following the good work of a peace-keeping team deployed on Saturday. About 300 volunteers — most of them aged 18 to 25 — patrolled the streets around Whitechapel dispersing large groups of youths to prevent trouble breaking out over the English Defence League demonstration at Aldgate.
Volunteers and youth workers played a “vital role” in keeping young people calm, police said. A Met spokeswoman added: “The stewards who worked on Saturday were well trained and effective.”
Wearing high visibility jackets, the stewards were joined by an extra 500 informal volunteers, meaning their numbers were not far from rivalling the 1,000 or so far right activists being held on the borders of Tower Hamlets by police. While there were scuffles and arrests in the EDL camp, little trouble was reported in the areas around Aldgate East where a 1,500-strong crowd had gathered for a counter protest. The London Muslim Centre and Islamic Forum of Europe, which jointly trained the volunteers, now wants to build up a bigger taskforce. Dilowar Khan, LMC’s executive director, said: “We need to continue to strengthen our unity because the EDL issue is not going to go away.We need more trained stewards — the more we have the better.”
Stewards even stepped in and helped a female EDL member who fell out of the rogue coach that made its way through Whitechapel. The woman was assaulted by a passerby after scuffles broke out close to the East London Mosque. Azad Ali, IFE’s head of community engagement, said: “The volunteers escorted her back to where her coach was. They clearly have ideological differences but these Muslims were willing to protect EDL members from harm.” Mayor of Tower Hamlets Lutfur Rahman said: “If they weren’t there working with police things could have erupted.” The teams met several times in the run-up to the static demonstrations and agreed tactics with officers. Stewards are not a new thing at the mosque and LMC. Many were provided in the anti war demonstrations against the Iraq conflict in 2003.
[JP note: Perhaps one of the inevitable consequences of this event: the birth of a Muslim Defence League. Given comments by the Tower Hamlets acting borough commander for the Metropolitan police, Robert Revill, on stewards provided by the Islamic Forum of Europe and the London Muslim Centre — “It was amazing to see the way they controlled very tense situations, I wish I had some of them in the police force!” — this initiative will probably be welcomed by the authorities. Just what London needs in the run-up to the Olympics — Muslim peace-keepers provided by a mosque noteworthy for its extremism.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Parents of ‘Honour Killing’ Teen Charged
The parents of a teenager who is suspected to have been the victim of an honour killing have been charged with murder.
Shafilea Ahmed’s decomposed remains were discovered on a river bank in Cumbria in February 2004 after she disappeared from her home in Warrington, Cheshire, in September 2003.
The inquest into her death was told that the 17-year-old was a bright and intelligent young woman who wanted to go to university and become a lawyer.
She was most likely strangled or suffocated, pathologists said.
South Cumbria coroner Ian Smith later recorded a verdict of unlawful killing, saying he believed Shafilea was probably murdered.
Cheshire Police said the girl’s father, Iftikhar, 51, and mother Farzana, 48, appeared at Halton Magistrates’ Court, in Runcorn, and have been remanded in custody.
The pair appeared in the dock and spoke only to confirm their names and addresses.
The case was adjourned for a bail hearing at Manchester Crown Court on Friday where they will appear via video link for a bail hearing.
The couple were initially arrested on suspicion of kidnapping their daughter in December 2003 but in June 2004 were released without charge when the Crown Prosecution Service ruled there was insufficient evidence against them.
They were re-arrested in September last year but released on bail and have always denied any involvement in their daughter’s death.
| — Hat tip: Nick | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Stewards Stopped Mass Brawl After EDL Coach Run-in, Mayor Says
Volunteers have been praised for dispersing a large group of youths enraged that EDL supporters had made their way into the East End on Saturday.
A confrontation between a rogue coach of far right activists and East End youths could have “escalated quickly” were it not for the fast actions of police and peace-keeping stewards, mayor of Tower Hamlets Lutfur Rahman, who was at the scene, has said. The coach had made its way into Tower Hamlets through Whitechapel Road around 6.30pm and stopped close to the East London Mosque where a scuffle broke out between EDL members and youths. Worshippers who had come out from evening prayers were verbally abused and intimidated by EDL members, Dilowar Khan, the executive director of the London Muslim Centre centre said. The tension reached a peak moments later when a group of youths in the area threw missiles including traffic cones at the vehicle. Shortly afterwards the coach broke down close to Stepney Green Tube station and Mr Rahman said it was the cooperation between officers and community leaders which stopped the violence spreading.
The far right supporters were escorted onto a double-decker bus and youths at first tried to block the road to prevent them from leaving but were persuaded to move on. Mr Rahman said: “When they could see that coach imagine how enraged the young people were. We persuaded the hundreds of kids to get on the pavement and let the police do their job. Those youngsters listened to me, our people and the police. If the community leaders hadn’t been there it could have been worse.”
Some 300 trained stewards in high visibility jackets were provided by the mosque and Islamic Forum of Europe during the day. Police arrested 44 EDL passengers on the coach.
Questions are now being asked as to how the coach was able to enter the borough in the first place. Mr Khan said: “Why were they allowed to come through the borough? It ended up being the most dangerous part of the day.” Mr Rahman added that he would welcome a police investigation to look into the incident. He said: “I am very disappointed that the coach came in for the safety of the EDL members and the safety of our residents.” But he added that police did a “fantastic job” throughout the day.
Mr Rahman had been touring the west part of the borough since the morning to try and encourage communities to stay calm. The EDL arrived at Liverpool Street at around 3pm and were escorted to a cordoned off area near Aldgate Tube station by police while anti fascism demonstrators were kept at Aldgate East station. Latest police figures state that a total of 61 arrests were made throughout the day. Of those, 46 people have been bailed to return to a north London police station in November. A further five people have been charged under the Public Order Act and three for assaults on police. Four have accepted cautions and four have been released with no further action.. None of those arrested are thought to be from Tower Hamlets.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Tower Hamlets, EDL, Jews and Israel
This weekend, Tower Hamlets in London’s East End saw the latest attempt by the English Defence League to intimidate Britain’s Muslim communities. Jews and Israel were dragged into the affair, by both the EDL and anti-Israel boycotters. Jewish representative groups had called for the EDL’s proposed march through the area to be banned on grounds of public order. The march was banned, but a static demonstration was held instead. EDL leader, Stephen Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), is prohibited by bail conditions from attending demonstrations. Nevertheless, he addressed the demonstration, having arrrived in a rather pathetic “rabbi” disguise that he discarded after mounting the speaking platform. (He was subsequently arrested and now faces charges.) [….]
CST and other Jewish groups have repeatedly warned Jews against getting mixed up in the EDL’s anti-Muslim provocations. Lennon and his EDL followers probably thought it was just a joke that he should dress up as a rabbi (“Rabbi Benjamin Kid’Em On” to be precise), but the joke reveals a vital political lesson:
The EDL is only interested in Jews (and Israel) as devices with which to try and provoke Muslims. No good will come of this for either Jews or Muslims. It is racist politics and anyone who sincerely cares about anti-racism, Jews, or Israel, should condemn it..
These trashy attempts by EDL to drag Jews and Israel into their provocations should be rejected out of hand by any sincere anti-racist. Nevertheless, reactions to the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik, have already shown that there are those in the anti-Israel brigade who appear unable to stop placing Zionism and Israel at the centre of their world-view.
A similar phenomenon occurred in Tower Hamlets, with a few “Boycott Israeli Goods” activists using the anti-EDL demonstration as a handy vehicle upon which to hitch their wagon. Their number included Carole Swords, a senior Respect activist in Tower Hamlets, whom CST Blog recently noted as having told pro-Israel activists to “go back to bloody Russia!”.
“Go back to bloody Russia!” is the kind of “Send ‘Em Back!” sentiment that the EDL can likely identify with; but Swords was most certainly not on the EDL’s side this (or any other) weekend. The boycott Israel activists, including Swords, can be seen in the below video. Its title, “Tower Hamlets kick out the EDL & their Israeli Propogandist [sic] allies”, dangerously alleges that there was some kind of meaningful and independent pro-Israel participation in the EDL’s anti-Muslim provocation. (Swords comes in at about 2..18, amongst those attempting to muster up “Free Palestine” chants from the anti-EDL demonstrators.)
The potential and actual linkage between antisemitic incidents and anti-lsrael sentiment (e.g, see this hateful graffiti from Manchester last week) is blatant; and linking pro-Israelis with the EDL risks serious antisemitic escalations wherever EDL intensifies its actions. For example, the risks that lie within Stephen Lennon’s speech in Tower Hamlets (view it on Youtube by clicking here), which threatens EDL retribution throughout the country should any Muslim in future perpetrate a terrorist attack here in Britain. The threats occur from approximately 9 minutes 15 seconds into the speech. He tells “every single Muslim watching this video on youtube”
On 7/7 you got away with killing and maiming British citizens…
…We will not tolerate it. The Islamic community will feel the full force of the EDL if we see any of our citizens killed, maimed or hurt on British soil ever again.
There are decent ways of opposing the physical and political threat posed by Islamist groups and activists; but this is the polar opposite of any such approach, with indiscriminate threats being issued against anyone who is a Muslim (or who is assumed by EDL to one). This is the same racist idiocy as holding all Jews as responsible for the actions of any single Jew; and by which Jews throughout the world come under physical attack every time that Israel is in the headlines. It should be opposed without sectarian distractions about overseas conflicts.
[JP note: Odd that the CST appears to have very little to say about the extremism of the Tower Hamlets Muslim community and the valid grounds for concern of many that the authorities do not seem to be doing anything to check the growth of this extremism.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Libya/Croatia: Gaddafi’s Bosnian-Croat Wife in Talks to Buy Adriatic Resort’
Zagreb, 7 Sept. (AKI) — The wife of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is negotiating to buy a tourist resort on Croatia’s Adriatic coast, the Croatian media reported on Wednesday.
Local newspaper Makarska Chronicle said Gaddafi’s wife Safia, a Bosnian Croatian national, was planning to buy a resort in the town of Igrani, which before the breakup of the former Yugoslavia belonged to a Serbian utility company.
Safia was born Sofia Farkas in Yugoslavia, in the city of Mostar, present day Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is Gaddafi’s second and present wife.
The newspaper said the negotiations started when rebel offensive to depose Gaddafi intensified in Libya and were now in an “advanced phase”. Safia and her three children fled to Algeria after rebels took over Tripoli late last month.
Meanwhile, the new Libyan authorities have said they have located Gaddafi, who is believed to be still hiding in Libya, and it was just a matter of time before he was “arrested or killed”.
Gaddafi himself attended the Yugoslav Air Force Academy and forged close ties with late Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito as leaders in the non-aligned movement.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Arab Revolts: IISS Report: Democracy Not a Foregone Conclusion
(ANSAmed) — LONDON — The year 2011 will go down in history as the year of the “Arab awakening”. A process, however, which is not “necessarily” equivalent to a “spread of democracy”. This analysis, in essence, sums up the challenges and risks that the world must face today and summarises the diagnosis of the state of world affairs that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) of London attempts to form each year. The future, in summary, is in flux now more than ever. Also because the sway of the USA will increasingly be replaced by “coalitions of the willing and able”. “We are in a moment of transition,” said IISS Director, John Chipman. “Domestic affairs in America are the priority and external intervention is now seen as a quagmire.” This is why in Libya the U.S. decided to assume the role of a “super-facilitator” of a “European action with Arab support”. The Libyan example therefore seems to suggest the ushering in of a period in which “the motto ‘regional solutions to regional problems’“ will become “the main aspiration” of the USA. Therefore multilateralism will make a virtue of necessity. The Arab Spring, viewed from a strictly geopolitical perspective, is nonetheless an event that will have consequences that go beyond a regional level. “Transition processes that have been initiated are in mid-stream and there is still a risk that they could be hijacked during their execution,” explained the report.
“Fears are emerging that Islamist parties could acquire greater power following the rebellions. The conflict between security forces, Islamic groups and liberal forces to establish stable and democratic governments will be the element that characterises the post-awakening. “ Therefore, democracy is not a foregone conclusion. That said, “the removal of the debilitating concept of fear that characterised Arab societies has changed the relationship between the elite governing class and its citizens”. The IISS attributed this success “entirely” to the Arab people.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya Crisis Makes Sahel Situation Explosive
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, SEPTEMBER 7 — The existing anti-terrorism agreement laboriously reached between countries in the Sahel region (Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Niger), and with the blessing of the United States and France, could soon be disrupted by the emergence of a new and unexpected element, namely the crisis in Libya, which has crossed the country’s borders and created new flashpoints in the region.
The Sahel countries, together with the representatives of international political and economic organisations, are in Algiers today to discuss terrorism in the area. The age-old problem has changed its name over recent years, and has spread from Algeria (where the Armed Islamic Group, later renamed the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, has been “absorbed” by Al Qaeda) to other nearby countries. The war unleashed against terrorism (and its various manifestations on the ground, which are based on autonomous brigades or ‘katibat’ but act on more widely co-ordinated orders) has earned some results, but at a particularly high cost.
The recent attack in the Algerian town of Cherchell, in which a number of police offers were killed, is an example of this. Since the signing of the agreement between Sahel countries, the daily war being waged against terrorism has changed radically, with borders effectively blurred and the four armies (and four intelligence services) beginning to operate together. This, however, was until the civil war in Libya on the one hand removed a clear enemy of Islamic terrorism in Gaddafi and, on the other, once hostilities were underway, wrestled from the Colonel control over Libya’s arsenal and his men in arms. Though many are not state-of-the-art, large quantities of explosives and weapons are now effectively available. Also up for grabs, though, according to fears being expressed at the Algiers summit, are an unspecified number of men who, having fought for money under Gaddafi’s green flag, could now decide to earn their corn with terror, which in the Sahel is synonymous with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a ferocious organisation that uses its men in lucrative illegal activities in order to fill its coffers. This is all too familiar to the families of hostages still in their hands, as they await the payment of a ransom.
But Islamic fundamentalism, which has recently seen its numbers dwindle, could find a new lease of life in the form of the thousands of desperate people fleeing a burning Libya and facing endless difficulties in returning with empty pockets to their countries of origin. There is a fear that these could be easy pickings for preachers playing on their anger. In terms of tackling terrorism, one of the simplest mistakes possible would be to analyse one facet of the phenomenon. As the Algerian Foreign Minister, Abdelkader Messahel, explains, only an overall vision (taking in political elements as well as intelligence, economic and social factors) can allow the acquisition of all the elements needed to tackle the problem.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Sidi Bouzid: Police Drive Out National Guard Chief
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, SEPTEMBER 07 — The district chief of the National Guard in Sidi Bouzid, who has been accused of being incapable of re-establishing order and security, was removed from his office during a demonstration of police officers and citizens. Waiting for the situation to develop, the TAP press agency reports, the commander of the regional intervention brigade has taken over the task of district chief.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Erdogan Welcome in Gaza, Hope for Historic Visit
(ANSAmed) — GAZA, SEPTEMBER 7 — The possibility that Turkish Premier Recep Tayyp Erdogan may decide to visit the Gaza Strip during the official visit he will make this month to Cairo has given rise to an emotional response in Gaza. “This would be an historic event without any doubt,” Jamal Khoudary, independent Palestinian MP and leader of the popular movement that fights against the Israeli blockade on Gaza, told the press. “Erdogan would receive an unprecedented welcome in Gaza, also for his support to the Palestinian views and his commitment to break the Israeli blockade,” Khoudary added. The member of parliament also praised Erdogan for having said in the past that “Ankara’s fate is tied to the fate of Gaza, and the destiny of Istanbul to Jerusalem’s destiny.” Erdogan said yesterday that he has not taken a final decision on a possible visit to Gaza yet. However, Egyptian media reported in the past days that this visit will not take place. Turkey’s popularity in Gaza started rising in May 2010, when the Turkish passenger ship Marmara tried to break the Israeli naval blockade. Nine Turkish passengers were killed when special forces of the Israeli navy boarded the ship. This incident has left an indelible memory in Gaza.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Hamas Terrorists Planning Bombing Arrested in W. Bank
Cells broken up by Israel in West Bank, east Jerusalem, as Hamas tries to rebuild its forces in the area; terrorists were planning abductions.
Hamas is working to boost its military capabilities in the West Bank, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) warned on Wednesday, revealing that in recent months it had arrested dozens of Hamas terror suspects who belonged to 13 different terror cells operating in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
Iran: Oliver Stone Set to Travel to Iran to Make Ahmadinejad Documentary
Tehran, 7 Sept. (AKI) — American Academy Award winning director Oliver Stone is due to travel to Tehran to film a documentary, semi-official news agency Fars reported.
Stone is expected to arrive in the Iranian capital within the next two or three weeks, according to the report.
In 2007 Stone announced his plan to make a documentary about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but scheduling conflicts prompted him to postpone the project.
Stone’s son Sean is already in Iran scouting locations.
Stone, who turns 65 on 15 Sept., reportedly agreed to Ahmadinejad’s terms, such as not adding fictional scenes and the right to vet the script. The director had said the project was aimed at burnishing the image of Islam and the controversial president.
Stone’s 2003 film documentary “Comandante,” or “Looking for Fidel” about Fidel Castro was shelved by American cable television network HBO in the wake of the Cuban leader’s decision to imprison 75 dissidents and execute three hijackers earlier this year.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Terrorist Bombing at Delhi High Court Leaves 11 Dead
At least 90 people injured when device hidden inside briefcase explodes at main entrance
The vulnerability of India’s capital city to terrorist attacks was dramatically demonstrated on Wednesday when the high court in Delhi was targeted in a bomb attack that left 11 people dead and at least 90 injured.
It was the second time the entrance of the court had been bombed this year, and the eighth terrorist attack in the capital in just over a decade.
The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who is on an official visit to Bangladesh, called for Indians to unite in their efforts to defeat the terrorist threat. “We will never succumb to the pressure of terrorism,” he said. “This is a long war in which all political parties, all the people of India, have to stand united so that the scourge of terrorism is crushed.”
Though it has yet to be authenticated, an email purportedly from Harkat ul Jihad Islami (HuJI), a terrorist group based in Pakistan and in Bangladesh, took responsibility for the attack. The email warned that attacks on Indian courts would continue unless the death sentence against a former Kashmiri insurgent involved in an attack on India’s parliament in 2001 was repealed.
“It is too early to say [if HuJI is involved], but yes, the HuJI is a major terrorist group among whose targets India is one,” said SC Sinha, head of the National Investigation Agency leading the investigation into the court bombing. “As of now there are no clear leads, but we’re working on several theories,” he said.
Police released sketches of two suspects — the first aged 26 and the second 50. Both are bearded.
The improvised explosive device was placed in a briefcase outside the court’s main gate near the reception centre, where scores of people had queued for visitors’ passes. The entrance was especially crowded on Wednesday — a witness said at least 200 people were present when the bomb went off — as the court accepts public interest litigation on Wednesdays.
As police sent the bomb fragments to a lab for forensic analysis, the failure to solve any of the recent bombings in Indian cities — since early last year, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi have all been bombed — was making ordinary citizens angry.
In unprecedented scenes, crowds heckled Rahul Gandhi, son of the ruling Congress party chief, Sonia Gandhi, when he went to a local hospital to console those injured in the blast.
“Shame on you, Rahul,” shouted a mob of excited young men, some of whom may have been opposition party activists…
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US Muslim Outreach … in Sangin
by Diana West
Asif Balbale is a Muslim Navy chaplain and imam. He spent the past month visiting Afghanistan “ to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan through religious outreach engagements across Helmand province,” the Pentagon reports (gushes) at DVIDS. Sangin — bloody, Taliban-riddled Sangin — was his last stop.
Was he there to minister to US Muslims in uniform? Hardly. As Balbale himself notes in this interview, he ministers to US Muslims in uniform only “sporadically.” Instead, this was a dog and pony show for Afghan Muslims: to see a Muslim in US uniform, to demonstrate the “tolerance” and “diversity” of the US military. Did the Afghans respond in kind by showing the tolerance and diversity of their own ranks — by featuring, for example, as the Marine Mom who sent me the story put it, a Jewish Rabbi embedded with the Afghan Army?
Haha. Reciprocity has no place in Muslim “outreach.” It’s always a one-way street, a demonstration of ever-deeper fealty to Islamic sense, sensibility, and law. In this case, a US Navy Muslim chaplain, born in India and raised in Kuwait, who immigrated to the United States 11 years ago, was out there on assignment for Uncle Sucker with a purely Islamic message for the mullahs of Sangin. You might think this would have dimmed the beatific glow on the face of the Lt. Cmdr. in the photo above, if not the reporter’s serenity. But no.
That message?
First, the set-up from the story:…
| — Hat tip: Diana West | [Return to headlines] |
USA: 9/11 Anniversary: US and Pakistan ‘Frozen’ In Mistrust, Military Chiefs Warn
Relations between Washington and Islamabad are “frozen” in mutual distrust over the “unauthorised” raid by US Navy Seals which killed Osama bin Laden last May, senior military and political leaders have said.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, they said that despite ten years of co-operation with America in the war on terror, in which an estimated 35,000 Pakistani civilians, 3000 soldiers and senior political leaders like former prime minister Benazir Bhutto have lost their lives, Washington has denigrated its armed forces and undermined its sovereignty. America’s decision to launch the bin Laden raid without informing Pakistan’s leaders, and the killing of two motorcycle gunmen in Lahore by CIA contractor Raymond Davis last January, caused widespread anger and highlighted the need for Islamabad to review its co-operation with Washington and rein in CIA agents it regards as out of control, they said.
The comments, as the country approaches its tenth anniversary as a key US ally in the war on terror, have raised strong questions over how effectively the United States will be able to target al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan without the full support of its military and political leaders. Pakistan further highlighted its vital role yesterday when it announced the capture in Quetta of senior al-Qaeda leader Younis al-Mauritania, who had been picked by Osama bin Laden to plot attacks in America, Europe and Australia. “There’s anti-US feeling prevailing in the country. If we are seen to be moving against the people at the behest of a foreign power it would be a disaster,” said one senior military chief. “They disregard the sovereignty of the country. There’s the feeling of the troops, it puts pressure on these organisations. There’s a concern to reassure the people of Pakistan that these abuses can’t happen again. Any repeat would intensify the feelings against the US. It doesn’t help.”
Another senior officer, Major-General Athar Abbas, spokesman for Pakistan’s armed forces, said the United States had not kept to an understanding to defer to its judgment on waging the war on terror within Pakistan, and had sought to push Islamabad into launching offensives against Taliban strongholds despite its fears that they would cause civilian casualties and drive tribesmen into supporting the militants.
The Pakistan’s army had waged successful operations against militants in South Waziristan, Swat, Bajaur, Orakzai, and Mohmand. The Taliban had not retaken any of their former strongholds, but the United States had still put Islamabad under pressure to launch premature attacks in North Waziristan and other areas. “We isolated the Taliban in the area, bribed some, pushed other groups, so they were isolated. [But] there was impatience to why are we were taking so long,” he said.
Washington has long been frustrated by Pakistan’s reluctance to move against the Haqqani network, a powerful Taliban faction which launches raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan from its safe haven in North Waziristan. The “disregard” of Pakistan’s concerns had highlighted the need for a written agreement to limit the “footprint” of the CIA in Pakistan.
“It’s important for intelligence agencies to have terms of engagement which are defined in writing so there’s no element of confusion or misinterpretation from the respective sides.,” General Abbas said. “It should be known as to the number [of agents], the footprint should be formalised. We do understand there are different frames of reference. The other side will see the problem through their prism, but this is our land, people and problem and we have to sort it out,” he said.
Tariq Azeem, a senior member of Pakistan’s Senate and a minister under former president General Musharraf, said America’s disregard for public opinion against drone attacks, and failure to inform its leaders about the Osama bin Laden raid, had damaged relations and tarnished its image. “There’s little doubt that Pakistan feels very strongly that our best may not be good enough for you, but we’ve given our best. We’ve lost 3,600 soldiers, including a three star general, 35,000 civilians. Hardly a day goes by when Pakistan is not fighting. If a single Nato soldier dies in Afghanistan people talk about the sacrifice, but how come Pakistani blood is not seen as important?” he said.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Italian Helicopter Fired at on Somalia Coast
Pirates plug fuel tank, no one hurt
(ANSA) — Rome, September 7 — An Italian navy helicopter on anti-piracy patrol off Somalia was fired on close to the coast about 400km south of the capital Mogadishu Wednesday, the navy said.
“Hostile elements” sprayed gunfire at the ‘copter and caused a fuel leak, forcing the craft to return to the destroyer Doria, part of an international task force against the pirates who have extorted millions of dollars in ransom from merchant shipping over the last few years.
No one on board the helicopter was hit, the navy said.
The Doria has been leading an anti-pirate mission since June 14.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Woman Faced Stoning: Granted Political Asylum in Italy
(AGI) Rome — Kate Omoregbe, who claimed she would face death by stoning if returned to Nigeria, was granted political asylum.
The woman left the temporary detention centre in Ponte Galeria, where she spent 4 years for drug peddling, earlier this afternoon, after being granted political asylum. It was announced by the head of the detainee watchdog of region Lazio, Angiolo Marroni. Omoregbe feared she would face stoning in Nigeria, because, after converting to Catholicism, she refused to marry an older man chosen for her by her parents.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
A Mexican Death Cult is Fuelling America’s Anti-Immigration Backlash. This is About Crime, Not Race.
In September 2008, 11 decapitated bodies were discovered in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. When police arrested the killers, they found an altar in their home dedicated to Santa Muerte — the patron saint of death for Mexican drug cartels. One year later, an illegal immigrant called Jorge Flores Rojas was arrested in North Carolina for running a sex ring. He, too, had built a shrine in his east Charlotte apartment to Santa Muerte. Flores forced his girls to have sex with as many as 20 men a day while he knelt in his living room praying to the skeletal figure of death. In August 2011, the Mexican army stumbled upon a tunnel that ran right under the US border for 300 metres.. It was six feet high and equipped with lights and ventilation. It also housed — you guessed it — an altar to Santa Muerte.
Europeans complain mightily that Muslim immigration has introduced fundamentalism to their secular continent. Yet they tend to look upon Middle America’s fear of illegal Hispanic immigration with contempt, as if its paranoia was motivated entirely by racism. Reporting on new legislation designed to drive illegal immigrants out of the Deep South, The Guardian’s Paul Harris writes that it heralds, “The prospect of a new Jim Crow era — the time when segregation was law — across a vast swath of the old Confederacy. [The legislation] will ostracise and terrorise a vulnerable Hispanic minority with few legal rights.”
Indeed it will, and that is a tragedy. But the debate about illegal immigration isn’t just about competition over jobs or lingering white racism. Many Americans share the European fear that mass migration is subverting their democratic culture from within. In the same way that exotic cells of Jihadists have established themselves in London and Paris, criminal gangs motivated by bloodlust and kinky spiritualism have been found living in the suburbs of Boston and Atlanta. One of its many manifestations is the cult of Santa Meurte. Santa Muerte is part Virgin Mary, part folk demon. The image of a cloaked saint wielding a scythe is supposed to offer those who venerate it spiritual protection. Offerings come in the form of flowers, alcohol, sweets and tobacco. Contraband can be used to invoke protection from the police. For the poor of Mexico — a nation torn between extremes of wealth and injustice — Santa Muerte is a very pragmatic saint. Like the gang leaders who offer hard cash in return for allegiance, she provides material blessings that the Catholic Church can no longer afford to bestow.
Tens of thousands of Mexicans living in America venerate Santa Muerte and have no association with crime. Nor is the cult purely ethnic: in North California, the Santisima Muerte Chapel of Perpetual Pilgrimage is tended by a woman of Dutch-American descent. But the prevalence of Santa Muerte imagery among drug traffickers injects an interesting cultural dimension to the debate over illegal immigration. It accentuates American fears that the drug war in Mexico is turning into an invasion of the USA by antidemocratic fanatics.
The Mexican conflict has claimed 35,000 lives since it began in 2006. Recently, the violence has spilled over the border and spread throughout the US along narcotics routes that stretch from Arizona to New York. The warring cartels are bound by a perverse ideology, with Santa Muerte as a unifying icon that terrifies opponents into submission. The gang known as Los Zetas marks its territory by mounting severed heads on poles or hanging dead bodies from bridges. Its members are family men who regularly go to church. A splinter group, called La Familia, is fronted by a fellow called El Mas Loco (The Craziest One). Loco has published his own bible, a confused mix of peasant Marxism and passages culled from American self-help books.. The goal of these groups is to undermine democracy and govern autonomous secret societies through family, blood and religion. It’s a global trend. The Lord’s Resistance Army that slaughtered and raped its way across Uganda from 1987 to 2007 was led by a man who claimed to channel the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the culprit behind this apocalyptic criminality was the death of Communism, which deprived thugs and thieves of a secular ideology to justify their actions. Organisations like FARC and Real IRA converted overnight to pushing drugs. But in Mexico, family and religion filled the vacuum left by the failure of socialism.
Whatever its origins, the spread of the cult of Santa Muerde reflects the fact that the debate over immigration in the US is about more than economics. Sadly, Mexicans seeking work get caught in this existential drama and are either swallowed up into the gangs or demonised in the US for crimes they have not committed. Nevertheless, Americans of every ethnicity are legitimately concerned about their country being poisoned by a criminal subculture that blends political corruption with ritualised murder. Europeans should not be so quick to judge their transatlantic friends. Americans face a vicious threat of their own.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Free Speech is in Retreat Throughout the West
There’s a sizzling piece by Mark Steyn in the current issue of National Review, which reveals quite how far democracies have gone in restricting free speech. Citing, among many, the example of a musician on the Isle of Wight who was charged with racism after performing Kung Fu Fighting in the hearing of a Chinese couple, he makes the point that it is no longer possible to infer the legal status of words from the words themselves:
“There were funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown” is legal or illegal according to whosoever happens to hear it. Indeed, in my very favorite example of this kind of thinking, the very same words can be proof of two entirely different hate crimes. Iqbal Sacranie is a Muslim of such exemplary moderation he’s been knighted by the Queen. The head of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal was interviewed on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was “immoral,” was “not acceptable,” “spreads disease,” and “damaged the very foundations of society.” A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard’s “community safety unit” for “hate crimes” and “homophobia.”
Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a “barmy doctrine” growing “like a canker” and deeply “homophobic.” In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for “Islamophobia.” Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for Islamophobia. Two men say exactly the same thing and they’re investigated for different hate crimes. On the other hand, they could have sung “Kung Fu Fighting” back and forth to each other all day long and it wouldn’t have been a crime unless a couple of Chinese passersby walked in the room.
Well worth reading in full.
[JP note: See ‘Gagging us softly’ for the Mark Steyn article.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Gagging Us Softly
In this anniversary week, it’s sobering to reflect that one of the more perverse consequences of 9/11 has been a remorseless assault on free speech throughout the west. I regret to say that, in my new book, I predect this trend will only accelerate in the years ahead. The essay below was written as last week’s National Review cover story:
To be honest, I didn’t really think much about “freedom of speech” until I found myself the subject of three “hate speech” complaints in Canada in 2007. I mean I was philosophically in favor of it, and I’d been consistently opposed to the Dominion’s ghastly “human rights” commissions and their equivalents elsewhere my entire adult life, and from time to time when an especially choice example of politically correct enforcement came up I’d whack it around for a column or two.
But I don’t think I really understood how advanced the Left’s assault on this core Western liberty actually was. In 2008, shortly before my writing was put on trial for “flagrant Islamophobia” in British Columbia, several National Review readers e-mailed from the U.S. to query what the big deal was. C’mon, lighten up, what could some “human rights” pseudo-court do? And I replied that the statutory penalty under the British Columbia “Human Rights” Code was that Maclean’s, Canada’s biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth. In theory, if a job opened up for dance critic or gardening correspondent, I could apply for it, although if the Royal Winnipeg Ballet decided to offer Jihad: The Ballet for its Christmas season I’d probably have to recuse myself.
And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse-and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of “racism” for some remarks about Islam’s treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world. The Rev. Stephen Boissoin was convicted of the heinous crime of writing a homophobic letter to his local newspaper and was sentenced by Lori Andreachuk, the aggressive social engineer who serves as Alberta’s “human rights” commissar, to a lifetime prohibition on uttering anything “disparaging” about homosexuality ever again in sermons, in newspapers, on radio-or in private e-mails. Note that legal concept: not “illegal” or “hateful,” but merely “disparaging.” Dale McAlpine, a practicing (wait for it) Christian, was handing out leaflets in the English town of Workington and chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a “public order” charge by Constable Adams, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community-outreach officer. Mr. McAlpine had been overheard by the officer to observe that homosexuality is a sin. “I’m gay,” said Constable Adams. Well, it’s still a sin, said Mr. McAlpine. So Constable Adams arrested him for causing distress to Constable Adams.
In fairness, I should add that Mr. McAlpine was also arrested for causing distress to members of the public more generally, and not just to the aggrieved gay copper. No member of the public actually complained, but, as Constable Adams pointed out, Mr. McAlpine was talking “in a loud voice” that might theoretically have been “overheard by others.” And we can’t have that, can we? So he was fingerprinted, DNA-sampled, and tossed in the cells for seven hours. When I was a lad, the old joke about the public toilets at Piccadilly Circus was that one should never make eye contact with anyone in there because the place was crawling with laughably unconvincing undercover policemen in white polonecks itching to arrest you for soliciting gay sex. Now they’re itching to arrest you for not soliciting it.
In such a climate, time-honored national characteristics are easily extinguished. A generation ago, even Britain’s polytechnic Trots and Marxists were sufficiently residually English to feel the industrial-scale snitching by family and friends that went on in Communist Eastern Europe was not quite cricket, old boy. Now England is Little Stasi-on-Avon, a land where, even if you’re well out of earshot of the gay-outreach officer, an infelicitous remark in the presence of a co-worker or even co-playmate is more than sufficient. Fourteen-year-old Codie Stott asked her teacher at Harrop Fold High School whether she could sit with another group to do her science project as in hers the other five pupils spoke Urdu and she didn’t understand what they were saying. The teacher called the police, who took her to the station, photographed her, fingerprinted her, took DNA samples, removed her jewelry and shoelaces, put her in a cell for three and a half hours, and questioned her on suspicion of committing a Section Five “racial public-order offence.” “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark,” declared the headmaster, Antony Edkins. The school would “not stand for racism in any form.” In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said they took “hate crime” very seriously, and their treatment of Miss Stott was in line with “normal procedure.”
[…]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Muslim Persecution of Christians: August: 2011
by Raymond Ibrahim
This series, developed to collate some—by no means all—of the most extreme instances of Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month, serves two purposes:
1) To document that which the mainstream media does not: habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.
2) To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic, interrelated, and ultimately rooted in a worldview inspired by Sharia Law.
As will become evident, whatever the of persecution that took place, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam; apostasy and blasphemy laws; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya, the additional tax that can be imposed on by Muslims on non-Muslims in a Muslin state; overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis, or second-class “protected” citizens; and simple violence. Oftentimes it is a combination of the aforementioned.
Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales —even in the West, wherever there are Muslims—it is clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Sharia, or the supremacist culture borne by it.
Categorized by theme, August’s batch of Muslim persecutions of Christians includes (but is not limited to) the following events, listed according to theme and in alphabetical order by country, not necessarily severity of the event:
Attacks on Christian Symbols: Churches and Bibles
Indonesia: Two churches were set aflame; officials downplayed these cases of arson by arguing that the buildings were “only made of board” and not real churches. A mayor also proclaimed that churches cannot be built on streets with Muslim names.
Iran: Officials launched a Bible burning campaign, confiscating and destroying some 7,000 Bibles; many were publicly burned. Likening their tiny Christian minority to the “Taliban and parasites,” the regime also “cracked down” on Christians (who make up less than 1% of the entire population), arresting many; their whereabouts remain unknown.
Iraq: Two churches were bombed: the first attack damaged the church and wounded 23; the second damaged the church (a third church was targeted but the bomb was defused before detonating).
Nigeria: Two churches were bombed, including a Baptist church no longer in use due to previous Muslim attacks; when officials arrested Islamist leaders, a third Catholic church was torched.
Apostasy and Forced Conversions
Eritrea: At least eight Christians have died in prisons, most under severe conditions and torture, simply for refusing to recant Christianity.
India: A female who was formerly stripped and beaten by a Muslim mob for converting to Christianity, continues to receive severe threats to return to Islam or die; likewise, Muslims held three Christian women “threatening to beat and burn them alive if they continued worshipping Christ.”
Iran: A Christian pastor in Iran remains behind bars, where he is being tortured; he is awaiting execution for refusing to recant Christianity.
Malaysia: religious police raided a church when it “found evidence of proselytisation towards Muslims” and “receiving information that there were Muslims who attended a breaking-of-fast event at the church”; a Facebook campaign created to support the raid and to “prevent apostasy” has already drawn support from 23,000 people.
Norway: A Muslim convert to Christianity was tortured with boiling water and told by fellow Muslim inmates “If you do not return to Islam, we will kill you”; if deported to Afghanistan, he risks death by stoning for leaving Islam.
Pakistan: Muslims openly abducted a 14-year-old Christian girl at gunpoint saying she had to convert to Islam. Another Christian woman who was abducted, drugged, and tortured for two years—all while being informed that she had converted to Islam—happily made her escape. In both cases, the police, as is usual, are siding with the Muslim abductors. Most recently, two Christians returning from church were attacked by Muslims and beaten with iron rods for refusing to convert to Islam or pay “protection” (jizya) money.
Sudan: A 16 year old Christian girl finally escaped from her Muslim kidnappers, who “beat, raped and tried to force her to convert from Christianity to Islam.” Whenever she tried to pray, she was beaten again and called an “infidel”; when her mother went to the police, they told her to convert to Islam before they returned her child.
Uganda: In accordance with Islam’s Hanafi School of law, a Muslim father locked his 14-year-old daughter in a room for several months without food or water simply because she embraced Christianity; when rescued, she weighed 44 pounds.
General Oppression, Violence, and Murder of Christians
Bangladesh: Church leaders, including an elderly pastor, were severely beaten in a police station for protesting that Muslims had illegally seized and occupied a Christian home. A previously tortured Christian activist is in hiding in Honk Kong, even as his wife and children face death threats from Muslims in the neighborhood.
Egypt: Soon after breaking their Ramadan fast, thousands of Muslims rampaged throughout a predominantly Christian village, firing automatic weapons, looting and throwing Molotov Cocktails at several homes. They beat a priest, then plundered and torched his home. Another Copt was murdered in his home, which was then ransacked. Separately, a Copt was savagely attacked by seven Muslims in front of a police station; he lost one eye and required 20 stitches to his head. Girls leaving church were sexually harassed by Muslims, who hurled stones at the church; they shattered five windows.
Nigeria: In what is being called a “silent killing,” ten Christians were slain by Muslims seeking to expunge Christianity from northern Nigeria; eyewitnesses insist that the army is assisting and enabling the slayings.
Pakistan: A Christian family consisting of 26 people, including women and children, lived in slavery for over 30 years, forced to labor on a farm belonging to a wealthy Muslim landowner; they only recently managed to regain their freedom, through the aid of the Catholic Church. A Muslim mob attacked a group of Christians watching a movie about Jesus, and destroyed the projector. A Christian man was beaten unconscious for celebrating Independence Day. He was told by Muslims, “How can you celebrate when you are Christian? Convert to Islam if you want to join the celebration.”
Somalia: Al-Shabab (“The Youth”) is intentionally preventing food aid from reaching the nation’s miniscule Christian minority: “Any Somali that the Islamists suspect to be a Christian, or even a friend of Christians, does not receive any food aid.”
Sudan: A “humanitarian crisis is unfolding” in Sudan’s border region where Christians and their churches are being targeted in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing by North Sudan’s Islamist regime.
United Kingdom: A Muslim family was terrorized and threatened with death because their daughter married a Christian — an act considered a crime according to Sharia. Note: a man marrying a non-Muslim woman is permitted.
Uzbekistan: Authorities continue to pressure churches and Christians, fabricating evidence to punish or limit Christians’ ability to practice their faith, and subjecting them to excessive fines, false accusations, as well as confiscating their Christian literature.
* * *
These are just some of the assaults to which Christians have been subjected under Islam that made it to the non-mainstream media last month.
Then there are the countless atrocities that never make it to any media—the stories of persistent, quiet misery that only the victims and local Christians know—such as the recent revelation that a 2-year-old girl was savagely raped in Pakistan because her Christian father refused to convert to Islam: it took five years for this story to surface.
How many never surface?
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