Tag Archives: Topic: Islam

Assyrian International New Agency: The rapid rise of Germany’s homegrown Islamist movement is sparking fears that it will soon turn Germany into the next European focal point of Islamic terrorism. Two recently failed plots by German Islamists to launch chemical attacks have only heightened those concerns.

EuropeNews.dk (Google Translation): In the southwest of the country is a Christian from a Muslim background kidnapped and beheaded. As the information service Compass Direct reports, Juma Nuradin Kamil was on 21 August was abducted allegedly by supporters of the radical Islamic group Al Shabaab.

The Associated Press: For years, Muslims by the hundreds, dodging foot and vehicle traffic, have unfurled rugs on northern Paris sidewalks and put their foreheads to the ground outside two mosques for Friday prayers — for the simple reason that there’s not enough space inside.

Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News: The future independent Palestinian state will not include a Jewish minority, a top Palestinian official told USA Today on Wednesday, adding that it was in the best interest of both peoples to “be separated.”

Telegraph: Hardline Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned on Wednesday there would be “harsh and grave consequences” if the Palestinians persist with their plan to seek UN membership as a state.

CSMonitor.com: The Iranian judiciary’s denial that the detained US hikers were about to be released may reflect a power struggle between President Ahmadinejad and clerics.

Austin Bay at Townhall Conservative: The generals running Egypt’s military services need to decide what kind of future they want for their country, and they must decide quickly.

Asia News: he National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) of the Catholic Bishops’ conference of Pakistan has released Human Rights Monitor 2011, an annual report on religious minorities in Pakistan that describes in detail the violence they had to endure last year and in the first part of this year. In addition to proving an exhaustive overview of the situation, it also provides proposals to guarantee all Pakistanis more rights and freedom.

NewsOK.com: Judges who will decide whether Oklahoma can ban Islamic law from the state’s courts raised questions Monday about the effect of the ban and why it applies to only one religion.

Yahoo! News: Kurt Westergaard, who lives under round-the-clock protection, declined to elaborate on whether police had passed along a security threat while he was on a book tour in Oslo. Norwegian security police would not comment except to say that Westergaard had been in Oslo on Monday but had left the country.

Religion Clause: Yesterday, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Awad v. Ziriax, a case challenging the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that bans state courts from considering international law or Shariah law.

CNSnews.com: Muslim-majority countries score worst across a range of measures in a comprehensive new study tracking government restrictions on religion as well as social hostilities involving religion around the world.

AFP: Republican Representative Peter King will become the first member of the US Congress to testify before a British Parliamentary hearing this week when he talks to MPs in London about Muslim radicalization, his office said.

Persecution News: “Some parents don’t even tell their children about Jesus, because they are scared they will go to school and say something wrong…When her mother was asked why she did not teach her daughter about Jesus…, she replied, ‘If I tell her too much, she will talk about it on the street, and someone will kill her or charge her with blasphemy.’”

Education News: Faith groups are ramping up protests against Muslim students praying in Toronto public schools as they vow to make the controversial practice an election issue in Ontario.

Daily Mail: Protesters set fire to the U.S. flag outside the American embassy in London yesterday during a minute’s silence to mark the moment the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Centre. A group of 100 Muslim radicals, including members of Muslims Against Crusades, shouted ‘USA terrorists’ and brandished anti-American placards.

Reuters: Some later marched to the opposite bank of the Nile in Giza. Demonstrators used hammers, large iron bars and police barricades to tear down the wall, erected this month by Egyptian authorities after daily protests over the killing of five Egyptian border guards in Sinai. Protesters scaled the embassy building, removed the Israeli flag for the second time in less than a month and burned it.

CBC News: The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada is urging Muslims to speak out against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent remarks about their religion.

Catholic Culture: A young Pakistani Christian was kidnapped an killed as he made a pilgrimage to a Marian shrine in the Punjab province.

AINA: Christians in the Upper Egyptian village of Elmarinab in Edfu, Aswan province, have been forbidden to leave their homes or buy food until they remove the dome of St. George’s Church, which was rebuilt in its previous location. Village Muslims, backed by Muslim Salafists from neighboring villages, have threatened to demolish the church on Friday September 9 after prayers and use it as a mosque.

Boston.com: A Shariah court in northern Nigeria has ordered that two men have their right hands amputated for stealing a farmer’s bull.

The Washington Post: An amendment to Oklahoma’s constitution that bans state judges from considering Islamic law will face its next legal hurdle on Monday (Sept. 12) when a federal appeals court considers its constitutionality.

The Washington Post: With a cross on his lapel, it’s easy to spot a military chaplain in uniform. But the same might not be true if the chaplain’s badge displays a prayer wheel, a crescent moon or tiny Torah scrolls. And when the sole, newly commissioned Hindu chaplain starts wearing her symbol — which is still in the design stage — how many will recognize it as the sign of a chaplain?

Thomas S. Kidd at USATODAY.com: The next time you walk into church, or your synagogue or mosque, say a little thanks to God for our founding principles. There’s a lot for which to be grateful, after all, and the freedom to worship is among our greatest blessings. But a new report by Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life has revealed a disturbing pattern . . .

Feisal Abdul Rauf at WSJ.com: News host Bill O’Reilly was right when he insisted that Abders Behring Breivik, who committed mass murders in Norway in July, is not a Christian. Even though Breivik referred to himself often as a Christian, Mr. O’Reilly noted, no one who slaughters innocents can be a follower of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

FrontPage Magazine: While the Western media and governments have been preoccupied with the so called “Arab Spring,” little if any attention has been paid to the increased persecution of Christians in the Muslim Middle East.

AP: A militant Muslim group claimed by video it carried out recent attacks in western China that killed at least three dozen people, a monitoring group said.

The Independent: A small town on the Spanish resort island of Mallorca has banned women from wearing burkas or face-covering Islamic veils in public places, even though only two women living there are known to do so.

ENInews: In a test case of religious intolerance in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, an Indonesian mayor is defying court rulings by pushing for a decree to block Christians from opening churches on streets with Islamic names.

Examiner.com: On September 3rd, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City signed into law the Workplace Religious Freedoms Act, making the municipality the first in the country to institute religious-based protections for public workers.

The Weekly Standard: In Muslim-majority Kosovo last week, as the fasting month of Ramadan came to an end and families prepared for the reopening of public schools, the parliamentary Assembly of the Republic rendered its judgment on a controversy that has agitated the country for more than a year: It voted not to permit the Islamic headscarf (hijab) or any religious instruction in public schools.

Middle East Forum: This series was developed in order to collate some—by no means all—of the foulest instances of Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month. It serves two purposes . . . Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the west, to India in the east, and even throughout 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 of it.

Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today’s News from Egypt: The Saint Mark Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria has announced plans to sue Prime Minister Essam Sharaf for failing to reveal who was behind he New Years Eve church bombing that left 23 Copts dead on 1 January, said a church official on Tuesday.

Catholic Culture: Wealthy Pakistanis, including Christians, are being kidnapped by members of al-Qaida in order to gain ransom money for funding their operations, according to the national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies.

Religion Clause: The Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute yesterday released a new report titled What It Means to be an American: Attitudes in an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years after 9/11. Much of the 41-page report focuses on mixed attitudes of Americans toward Muslims. Here is an excerpt . . .

India Today: Terror struck Delhi when a powerful bomb placed in a briefcase ripped through a crowded reception area at the entrance of the Delhi High Court on Wednesday morning, killing 11 people and leaving more than 80 injured. This is the second blast outside Delhi HC since May.

Vestnik Kavkaza: The president underlined that Muslims living in Austria must follow the local laws. Austria is a secular state, he noted.

PressTV: A northeastern Spain municipality with a 40-percent Muslim population has reportedly banned the Muslim call to prayer also known as Azan.

Fox Nation: Muslim youths hacked a Christian family of eight to death in Nigeria’s volatile Plateau state on Sunday, local officials said, continuing a week of violence that has pitted gangs from the two faiths against each other and civilians.

Iran Human Rights: Articles 108 and 110 of the Iranian Islamic Penal code are part of the chapter covering the punishment of “Hadd” for “sodomy”. Article 108 says: “Sodomy (or Lavat) is sexual intercourse between men”, and article 110 says:”Punishment for sodomy is killing; the Sharia judge decides on how to carry out the killing”.

AP: The New York Police Department collected intelligence on more than 250 mosques and Muslim student groups in and around New York, often using undercover officers and informants to canvass the Islamic population of America’s largest city, according to officials and confidential, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.

EuropeNews: NORWAY: “Christian converts from Islam flee in fear from muslims at asylum reception center” Dagen.No: Muslims at the asylum center told him: “This is Jihad, holy war, and we are waiting for at fatwa (licence to kill) from the local imam at the mosque in Sandnes”

Spiegel: In mosques or tearooms, Muslim elders dispense verdicts that keep their communities in line. They mediate between aggrieved immigrants, sometimes at the expense of German justice. Some say the arbitrations ease caseloads in court, but others see the creeping advance of Sharia law. | Eugene Volokh comments at the Volokh Conspiracy

Religion Clause: A state court trial judge in Wichita, Kansas has sentenced Wichita pastor Mark Holick after a jury last month convicted him on charges of loitering and disrupting a local business

AP: The violence began Monday in Jos, a city on the volatile dividing line between Nigeria’s largely Christian south and Muslim north. A group of rioters on Monday attacked Muslims praying over the end of Ramadan in a primarily Christian neighborhood, using knives, machetes and bows and arrows, Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency said.

Religion Clause Blog: The Tennessean and the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal report that a Tennessee state chancery court judge this week denied a motion to reconsider his decision handed down in May dismissing challenges (other than an open-meeting law challenge) to the …

Islamist Watch: First, any ADGC analysis should be taken with a rather hefty grain of salt, considering that Dalia Mogahed directs the center. In addition to her well-documented history of promoting Islamists, whitewashing Shari’a, and beclouding Islamic terrorism, a 2008 book-length study by Esposito and Mogahed was criticized for using creative accounting to downplay Muslim radicalism . . .

The American Muslim (TAM): Yet another research report has been released that paints a different picture of the American Muslim community than the negative view spread by Islamophobes. A 132 page survey report “Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future” was just released by Gallup.

LoHud.com: A melee broke out Tuesday afternoon at Playland Amusement Park when Muslim visitors became angry that the park was enforcing its ban on headgear by prohibiting the women from wearing their traditional head coverings on some rides.

Catholic Culture: A 13-year-old Christian boy disappeared from a church in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and his family fears that he was abducted while attending Mass, in the latest of a series of kidnappings of young Christians.

VOA Breaking News: Tens of thousands of Muslims gathered in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for worship Tuesday on Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

The Washington Post: The role of religion in the public sphere is another key concern – at least in the media – both nationally and internationally. According to Gallup data, there may be some benefit in reconsidering this focus. Egyptians (Christians and Muslims alike) are generally receptive of other religions; after Lebanese, they are the most likely population in the Middle East and North Africa to welcome a neighbor of another faith.

Religion Clause: AFP, reporting yesterday on these developments, points out that Kosvo is 90% Muslim, but has a tradition of moderate Islam.

William McGurn at the WSJ.com: The other defense is more telling. Were religious leaders included, the mayor’s office would have to choose which leaders to invite and which not to invite. That, of course, is true of every invitation list. In this case, however, it may be just a clever way for a mayor whose reputation is not what it once was to avoid a fight over including a Muslim leader at the 9/11 ceremony.

AP: More than half of Muslim Americans in a new poll say government anti-terrorism policies single them out for increased surveillance and monitoring, and many report increased cases of name-calling, threats and harassment by airport security, law enforcement officers and others.

AP: President Barack Obama has embraced Indonesia as a crucial U.S. ally in Southeast Asia, but rights groups and critics in Congress say the administration is too eager to trumpet Jakarta as a democratic success story.

Reuters: In contrast to the majority of the general public dissatisfied with the nation’s direction, 56 percent of the estimated 2.75 million American Muslims said they are satisfied, the survey showed. Seven out of 10 view President Barack Obama’s tenure favourably.

EuropeNews:
“Ali” (Not his real name), an Asylum seeker in an immigration centre in Jaeren, Norway, had boiling water poured over him after he converted to Christianity and would not comply with Ramadan fasting rules. He and the other converts at the centre now fear for their lives

DOJ: The Justice Department filed a complaint today against the city of Lilburn, Ga., alleging that the city violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) when it rejected the Dar-E-Abbas Shia Islamic Center’s requests for rezoning to construct a mosque. Both parties have agreed to a consent decree that will be filed on Aug. 29, 2011.

Forbes: In June, he tweeted a cartoon of Minnie Mouse in a burqa, and Islamists worldwide threatened him with death. Now, as Egypt wavers between an Islamist and a democratic future, billionaire telecom scion and art patron Naguib Sawiris wants to be his country’s next leader – and he’s founded a political party – the Free Egyptian Party — as he prepares to do just that.

Religion Clause: Report Traces “Roots of the Islamophobia Network In America“: Last week, the Center for American Progress issued a 130-page report titled Fear, Inc.– The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America . . . The report identifies “five experts [who] generate the false facts and materials used by political leaders, grassroots groups, and the media.” One of those leaders, Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, yesterday posted a strongly worded rebuttal.

Religion Clause: The New York Times reports that on Saturday, Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree returning to minority religious groups hundreds of properties that have been seized since 1936.

Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy: On August 21st, Greek Newspapers reported that new Family Law reforms jettison the practice of allowing Sharía Law to govern family matters for a Muslim enclave of over 110,000 living in Western Thrace.

AP: Somali Islamist rebels have beheaded at least 11 civilians in the capital in the past two weeks, a campaign of terror that residents said Friday is designed to show the insurgency can still act in Mogadishu after withdrawing from their bases there earlier this month.

BBC News: Islamic police in the Indonesian province of Aceh have forced two women to have their marriage annulled and sign an agreement to separate.

Spero News: Mehek Masih was taken from her home in broad daylight and under the threat of a gun. Muslim man intends to “purify her” making her “Muslim and my mistress.” Archbishop Saldanha cases of this type are “frequent,” the law does not protect minorities. One of the many “crosses” that Pakistani …

Religion Clause: According to a press release this week from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Delta Airlines has now give assurances that, even though Saudi Arabian Airlines will join the Sky Team global airline alliance in 2012, Delta does not currently and will not in the future request on behalf of any airline that passengers disclose their religious affiliation

EuropeNews: In Germany, where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, Stuttgart University recently capitulated to pressure from resident Turkish Muslims and canceled an event entitled, “Persecution, Expulsion and Annihilation of Christians in the Ottoman Empire 1912-1922.”

The Cutting Edge News: Islamic extremists are stepping up the creation of “no-go” areas in European cities that are off-limits to non-Muslims.

Fox Nation: Religious leaders are calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to reverse course and offer clergy a role in the ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

BBC News: he number of people involved in forced marriages in the Bristol area has risen “significantly”, police have said.

Spero News: The authorities abandon plans for a new place of worship for Muslims in the capital, which had led to protests and tension. The prefect: the area “not suitable”.

Spero News: A Christian family consisting of 26 persons, including women and children, was enslaved in Pakistan for over 30 years.

AP: A mayor is trying to ban Christian churches on streets with Islamic names, the latest attempt to block construction of a new parish in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

Religion Clause: In Britain, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies is pressing the British government to create a new student loan system that is consistent with Sharia law.