Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Friday, October 14, 2011
Destruction of Copts Is Islamically Correct
Coptic funeral, Muslim generals
I am looking at a reproduction of an old engraving of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is in Bat Ye'or's book "The Dhimmi," which collects primary documents from history to chronicle the impact of Islamic law on non-Muslims through the centuries.
What is notable about the image, which is based on an 1856 photograph, is that the church, said to be at the site of Jesus Christ's crucifixion and burial, has no cross and no belfry. Stripped of its Christian symbols, the church stood in compliance with the Islamic law and traditions of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, which ruled Jerusalem at the time.
I went back to the book to find this image for a reason. It had to do with last weekend's massacre of two dozen Coptic Christians in Cairo by Egyptian military and street mobs, which also left hundreds wounded. The unarmed Copts were protesting the destruction of yet another church in Egypt, St. George's, which on Sept. 30 was set upon by thousands of Muslim men following Friday prayers. Why? The trigger was repair work on the building – work that the local council and governor had approved.
Does that explanation make any sense? Not to anyone ignorant of Islamic law. Unfortunately, that criterion includes virtually all media reporting the story.
Raymond Ibrahim, an Islam specialist, Arabic speaker and author of "The Al Qaeda Reader" (Broadway, 2007), catalogs the key sequence of events that turned a church renovation project into terror and flames. With repair work in progress, he writes online at Hudson New York, "It was not long before local Muslims began complaining, making various demands, including that the church be devoid of crosses and bells – even though the permit approved them – citing that 'the cross irritates Muslims and their children.'"
Those details drove me to re-examine the de-Christianized 19th-century image of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – no cross, no bells. It becomes a revealing illustration of Islamic history repeating itself in this "Shariah Autumn," the deadly but natural harvest of the grotesquely branded "Arab Spring."
Given our see-no-Shariah media (and government), we have no context in which to place such events. That context is Shariah society, advanced (but by no means initiated) by "Arab Spring," where non-Muslims – "dhimmi" – occupy a place defined for them by Islamic law and tradition. Theologian, author and Anglican pastor Mark Durie elaborates at markdurie.com: "Dhimmi are permitted to live in an Islamic state under terms of surrender as laid out in the 'dhimma' pact." Such terms, Durie writes, "are a well-established part of Islamic law and can be found laid out in countless legal text books." When non-Muslims violate these terms, they become subject to attack.
To place the dhimmi pact in comparable Western terms is to say the West has its Magna Carta, Islam has its Pact of Umar. Among other things, this seminal pact governing Muslim and non-Muslims relations stipulates, Durie notes, the condition that Christians "will neither erect in our areas a monastery, church or sanctuary for a monk, nor restore any place of worship that needs restoration."
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
The Trouble With Muslim Democracy
The ultimate symbol of Muslim Democracy may not end up being the purple fingers of the Iraqi ballots but the smoke from burning churches and dead Coptic Christians in Egypt. While Iraq was tenuously balanced between Shiites and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds, there is no such balance in Egypt. The average Egyptian is a Sunni Arab and thinks Christians are dogs. Church burnings are as close as Egypt is ever likely to get to democracy and we should be happy for that.
The Muslim world is so enthusiastic about democracy because it allows the majority to slap around the minority-- at least more so than it's already doing. And when there isn't a clear majority to sit in the driver's seat, they throw in musical chairs coalitions of different ethnic and religious factions in between bouts of civil war.
That's the situation in Lebanon and in Iraq, but those countries are lucky because the minority there is a sizable enough to have a shot. That's more than can be said for Egypt's Christians who are big enough to be targets, but not big enough to take on the majority. Egypt and Iraq were the region's last bastions of Pan-Arabism, which allowed Christians Arabs a limited stake in the country, but an Iraq and Egypt defined by an Islamic identity are countries incompatible with a non-Muslim minority.
Minorities may do better under Muslim tyrannies than Muslim democracies, because dictators find a minority group with few options other than the regime to be useful. Libya's Africans did better under Khaddafi. Egypt's Christians did better under Mubarak. Dictators like a little divide and conquer because it keeps their people off balance. Democracies are another matter.
Democracy is a great slogan for Westerners who approach it from their own blinkered perspective and assume that it means the same thing to the people using it thousands of miles away as it does to them. To Americans, democracy is the unexamined assumption that popular power goes hand in hand with freedom. To Muslims it's the equally unexamined assumption that democracy is the national will to unite a country by purging it of all its divisive elements.
American pundits on the left and right made the fallacious assumption that democracy equates to tolerance for minorities when they thoughtlessly endorsed Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. An assumption that was not founded on history or reason, but on wishful thinking. The modern state which provides maximum political representation to minorities is if anything quite undemocratic and brought into being through mainly undemocratic institutions.
The same unexamined assumption that led Bush to frame the problem as one of tyranny standing against democracy, led his successors who despised his legacy and ideas, to go ahead and follow a variation of the same path. But tyranny need not be the opposite of democracy, if it is what most of the people want. And Islamism need not contradict democracy.
Women can vote in Iran, they just can't vote to change their status. Christians can vote in Egypt, they just can't vote themselves equal rights. Islamism can function as a democratic tyranny, so long as the majority of the population agrees with their basic premises. And if the population doesn't, then elections are rigged, the bullets start flying and the prisons fill up.
Saddam's chief Shiite oppositionist cleric, Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, (father-in-law of the troll of Sadr City) came up with an Islamist democracy by treating the public as the guardians of Islam. The obvious motivation for that was to deny the legitimacy of Saddam and his Sunni allies by moving the point of legitimate authority from the rulers as the guardians of Islam, to the Shiite majority.
That selectivity also delineates the borders of Islamic democracy. The Koran is still the Constitution and the people derive their power from the Koran, rather than the other way around. And this form of democracy can only empower Muslims to enforce Islam. If they deviate from Islamic norms, then they have lost the right to govern themselves. Non-Muslims cannot serve as guardians of Islam at all.
Treating popular democracy as a means of enforcing Islamic norms may seem progressive to the same sort of people who lecture enthusiastically on Mohammed's enlightened treatment of women, but it's really just a way for the Islamists to displace the dictators who may be brutal bastards, but aren't particularly interested in enforcing veiling or flogging men who don't grow beards.
It may make a small degree of difference to us how the population of a place thousands of miles away chooses to be oppressed, but for the minor fact that their Islamist rulers hate us quite a bit more and their hatred has global ambitions.
The Bush era assumption that the hostility was driven by dictatorships was one of the odder canapes served at diplomatic dinner parties. While dictatorships certainly did everything they could to spread hate toward America and the West, they were riding on the backs of an existing hatred. Much as the attacks on Christians in Egypt today are not populist in planning, but are populist in execution.
The problem with Muslim democracy is at the heart of all the fallacious assumptions that said it could be fixed through a change of government. The problem did not originate with governments. And that means it will not go away with a change of government. A change of government is fine for removing a Saddam or a Khaddafi, just so long as it's not done on the assumption that what will follow will be a happy place full of frolicking bunnies and the Bill of Rights in Arabic.
Our collision with Islamic democracy is a result of their dysfunction and ours. They cannot justify any course of action without resorting to the Koran and national pride. We cannot justify any course of action without turning it into a humanitarian mission to make the world a better place.
Our response to September 11 shifted from getting those responsible to creating women's rights in Kabul and civil rights for the Shiites in Sadr City. Ten years and thousands of deaths later, the former is as likely to survive our departure as an ice sculpture in the desert, and the latter has empowered our enemies.
Instead of dreaming of Bin Laden's head on a platter, we began entertaining lunatic visions of the patron saint of democracy climbing down the Muslim chimney to leave presents of civil rights under the big Eid tree. And the root cause of that fallacy is that we thought that if we made them like us, there would no longer be any reason to fight them.
Such cultural colonialism when consciously practiced is a tool of empire, but we did not practice it consciously because we were no longer aware of our own exceptionalism. Our reality had become universal. We thought that everyone had our rights or wanted them, forgetting that our idea of rights and its accompanying form of government evolved from our centuries of political struggle. They could no more be grafted on to an alien society, than you could convey everything that has made you who you are to a stranger.
Our governments are outgrowths of our culture, so are theirs. Ours depend on unspoken assumptions that we rarely question or that we simply take for granted. So do theirs. And when we tried to graft a government that was more like ours on a culture that was nothing like ours, it was their culture that ended up defining the government more than ours.
The internationalist assumption that laws are more important than cultures, and that global bodies can make law for all is an absurdity from the minds of Western progressives and a few international accomplices. The very idea that legal rationalism is more important than the traditions of culture and religion could only have been conceived of by a certain type of Western progressive, who is also the only type of creature who could believe that anyone outside his or her circle would accept such a thing at face value.
The American assumption that democracy would be issue based, rather than ethnic or religion based hardly passes the smell taste even back in the old 50, where districts are gerrymandered by law to fit certain ethnic and racial groups, and the current occupant of the White House got there more on the color of his skin than the content of his character. But overall we actually do manage to vote on the issues. At least most of us and in most elections.
Over near the pyramids, the driving issue is not the cost of health care or whether there is a right to bear arms, but how to solve all the problems in one neat bundle by unifying the country under some grand philosophy. Either Pan-Arabism or Pan-Islamism. Pick the right national identity and the rest takes care of itself.
Some of that ugly taint was in the air in the last presidential election. A taint that some conservative commentators peculiarly cheered as if tens of millions of people voting on race, rather than issues, was not a perversion of democracy to be ashamed of. It was the engine behind a campaign that was built on the insistence that updating our identity would also fix a constellation of problems. The folly of that had been demonstrated by Tony Blair's reign across the ocean, but few Americans had ever paid attention to him as anything but the neighbor next door who occasionally stopped by to offer military assistance or borrow a cup of steel tariffs.
That's the situation in Lebanon and in Iraq, but those countries are lucky because the minority there is a sizable enough to have a shot. That's more than can be said for Egypt's Christians who are big enough to be targets, but not big enough to take on the majority. Egypt and Iraq were the region's last bastions of Pan-Arabism, which allowed Christians Arabs a limited stake in the country, but an Iraq and Egypt defined by an Islamic identity are countries incompatible with a non-Muslim minority.
Minorities may do better under Muslim tyrannies than Muslim democracies, because dictators find a minority group with few options other than the regime to be useful. Libya's Africans did better under Khaddafi. Egypt's Christians did better under Mubarak. Dictators like a little divide and conquer because it keeps their people off balance. Democracies are another matter.
Democracy is a great slogan for Westerners who approach it from their own blinkered perspective and assume that it means the same thing to the people using it thousands of miles away as it does to them. To Americans, democracy is the unexamined assumption that popular power goes hand in hand with freedom. To Muslims it's the equally unexamined assumption that democracy is the national will to unite a country by purging it of all its divisive elements.
American pundits on the left and right made the fallacious assumption that democracy equates to tolerance for minorities when they thoughtlessly endorsed Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. An assumption that was not founded on history or reason, but on wishful thinking. The modern state which provides maximum political representation to minorities is if anything quite undemocratic and brought into being through mainly undemocratic institutions.
The same unexamined assumption that led Bush to frame the problem as one of tyranny standing against democracy, led his successors who despised his legacy and ideas, to go ahead and follow a variation of the same path. But tyranny need not be the opposite of democracy, if it is what most of the people want. And Islamism need not contradict democracy.
Women can vote in Iran, they just can't vote to change their status. Christians can vote in Egypt, they just can't vote themselves equal rights. Islamism can function as a democratic tyranny, so long as the majority of the population agrees with their basic premises. And if the population doesn't, then elections are rigged, the bullets start flying and the prisons fill up.
Saddam's chief Shiite oppositionist cleric, Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, (father-in-law of the troll of Sadr City) came up with an Islamist democracy by treating the public as the guardians of Islam. The obvious motivation for that was to deny the legitimacy of Saddam and his Sunni allies by moving the point of legitimate authority from the rulers as the guardians of Islam, to the Shiite majority.
That selectivity also delineates the borders of Islamic democracy. The Koran is still the Constitution and the people derive their power from the Koran, rather than the other way around. And this form of democracy can only empower Muslims to enforce Islam. If they deviate from Islamic norms, then they have lost the right to govern themselves. Non-Muslims cannot serve as guardians of Islam at all.
Treating popular democracy as a means of enforcing Islamic norms may seem progressive to the same sort of people who lecture enthusiastically on Mohammed's enlightened treatment of women, but it's really just a way for the Islamists to displace the dictators who may be brutal bastards, but aren't particularly interested in enforcing veiling or flogging men who don't grow beards.
It may make a small degree of difference to us how the population of a place thousands of miles away chooses to be oppressed, but for the minor fact that their Islamist rulers hate us quite a bit more and their hatred has global ambitions.
The Bush era assumption that the hostility was driven by dictatorships was one of the odder canapes served at diplomatic dinner parties. While dictatorships certainly did everything they could to spread hate toward America and the West, they were riding on the backs of an existing hatred. Much as the attacks on Christians in Egypt today are not populist in planning, but are populist in execution.
The problem with Muslim democracy is at the heart of all the fallacious assumptions that said it could be fixed through a change of government. The problem did not originate with governments. And that means it will not go away with a change of government. A change of government is fine for removing a Saddam or a Khaddafi, just so long as it's not done on the assumption that what will follow will be a happy place full of frolicking bunnies and the Bill of Rights in Arabic.Our collision with Islamic democracy is a result of their dysfunction and ours. They cannot justify any course of action without resorting to the Koran and national pride. We cannot justify any course of action without turning it into a humanitarian mission to make the world a better place.
Our response to September 11 shifted from getting those responsible to creating women's rights in Kabul and civil rights for the Shiites in Sadr City. Ten years and thousands of deaths later, the former is as likely to survive our departure as an ice sculpture in the desert, and the latter has empowered our enemies.
Instead of dreaming of Bin Laden's head on a platter, we began entertaining lunatic visions of the patron saint of democracy climbing down the Muslim chimney to leave presents of civil rights under the big Eid tree. And the root cause of that fallacy is that we thought that if we made them like us, there would no longer be any reason to fight them.
Such cultural colonialism when consciously practiced is a tool of empire, but we did not practice it consciously because we were no longer aware of our own exceptionalism. Our reality had become universal. We thought that everyone had our rights or wanted them, forgetting that our idea of rights and its accompanying form of government evolved from our centuries of political struggle. They could no more be grafted on to an alien society, than you could convey everything that has made you who you are to a stranger.
Our governments are outgrowths of our culture, so are theirs. Ours depend on unspoken assumptions that we rarely question or that we simply take for granted. So do theirs. And when we tried to graft a government that was more like ours on a culture that was nothing like ours, it was their culture that ended up defining the government more than ours.
The internationalist assumption that laws are more important than cultures, and that global bodies can make law for all is an absurdity from the minds of Western progressives and a few international accomplices. The very idea that legal rationalism is more important than the traditions of culture and religion could only have been conceived of by a certain type of Western progressive, who is also the only type of creature who could believe that anyone outside his or her circle would accept such a thing at face value.
The American assumption that democracy would be issue based, rather than ethnic or religion based hardly passes the smell taste even back in the old 50, where districts are gerrymandered by law to fit certain ethnic and racial groups, and the current occupant of the White House got there more on the color of his skin than the content of his character. But overall we actually do manage to vote on the issues. At least most of us and in most elections.
Over near the pyramids, the driving issue is not the cost of health care or whether there is a right to bear arms, but how to solve all the problems in one neat bundle by unifying the country under some grand philosophy. Either Pan-Arabism or Pan-Islamism. Pick the right national identity and the rest takes care of itself.
Some of that ugly taint was in the air in the last presidential election. A taint that some conservative commentators peculiarly cheered as if tens of millions of people voting on race, rather than issues, was not a perversion of democracy to be ashamed of. It was the engine behind a campaign that was built on the insistence that updating our identity would also fix a constellation of problems. The folly of that had been demonstrated by Tony Blair's reign across the ocean, but few Americans had ever paid attention to him as anything but the neighbor next door who occasionally stopped by to offer military assistance or borrow a cup of steel tariffs.
The mistake that Americans rarely make, is the one that Muslim countries make all the time. The idea of an issue based democracy sounds good to them in theory, but the only issue that really ends up mattering is what role the Koran will play and what to do about all those "outsiders" who are causing all the problems. Attack their embassy and burn their churches. That will show them.
It takes a certain degree of maturity to take responsibility for causing your own problems. And that degree of maturity may also be what is required for representative government to be anything more than a lynch mob with a ballot box.
In the Muslim world problems are external, the work of secret conspiracies, international enemies and witches, not to mention black dogs, women and infidels. Unity comes from identifying that outside source of the problem and uniting against it. Then everyone can smile at a burning church, exchange photos of the Israeli flag being pulled down and feel like they have something in common.
The trouble with Muslim democracy is that democracy is only as good as the demos. When most of the population is unwilling to engage in self-criticism, but eager to create unity through bigotry, then its democracy will be a lynch mob with a ballot box. And no amount of rhetoric will change that. Only responsible people can use power responsibly, and while we are all irresponsible to a degree, the degree of our irresponsibility can be seen in the practice of our politics.
In the final analysis the trouble with Muslim democracy is the Muslims.
It takes a certain degree of maturity to take responsibility for causing your own problems. And that degree of maturity may also be what is required for representative government to be anything more than a lynch mob with a ballot box.
In the Muslim world problems are external, the work of secret conspiracies, international enemies and witches, not to mention black dogs, women and infidels. Unity comes from identifying that outside source of the problem and uniting against it. Then everyone can smile at a burning church, exchange photos of the Israeli flag being pulled down and feel like they have something in common.
The trouble with Muslim democracy is that democracy is only as good as the demos. When most of the population is unwilling to engage in self-criticism, but eager to create unity through bigotry, then its democracy will be a lynch mob with a ballot box. And no amount of rhetoric will change that. Only responsible people can use power responsibly, and while we are all irresponsible to a degree, the degree of our irresponsibility can be seen in the practice of our politics.
In the final analysis the trouble with Muslim democracy is the Muslims.
Egypt's army defends action in protest crackdown
In the worst violence since Hosni Mubarak was ousted and which drew a storm of criticism of the army, activists said armored vehicles sped into a crowd on Sunday to disperse a protest in Cairo over an attack on a church building in southern Egypt.
Online videos showed mangled bodies. Activists said some people were crushed by wheels. Activists and a doctor said some dead had bullet wounds. The generals showed footage they said showed army vehicles avoiding demonstrators.
The violence, which drew criticism from Muslims and Christians alike, cast a shadow over the first election for parliament since Mubarak was ousted. Candidate registration began on Wednesday, while voting starts on November 28.
Generals called for unity between Christians and Muslims.
"The armed forces would never and have never opened fire on the people," said General Mahmoud Hegazy, a member of the council that has ruled since Mubarak, himself a former military commander, was driven out by a popular uprising.
The army was praised when it took control during the uprising for restraint in handling protests. But anger at the army has mounted as the transition to civilian rule has dragged on and for what activists say are increasingly tough tactics.
"We are careful to ensure a secure environment for parliamentary elections," General Adel Emara said.
The generals showed footage of an armored personnel carrier swerving around protesters. They also sought to pin the blame for inciting violence on "foreign elements."
"There has not been a case of rolling over people with vehicles," Emara said. Pointing at footage he showed at the news conference, he said: "They are trying to avoid running into protesters, not rolling over them."
Protesters had complained of people they described as "thugs" attacking the demonstration before the worst violence kicked off. The generals pledged to find the "group or party" that was seeking to derail Egypt's uprising.
"SAW IT WITH MY EYES"
One journalist, Samwel el-Ashay, described his experience to the generals: "There were thugs who tried to intercept the protest ... At a certain point, things got out of hand and the armored vehicles running around were actually rolling over protesters. I saw it with my eyes."
General Emara responded: "We welcome your comments and thank you for your testimony."
Amnesty International said some of the dead had bullet wounds. A doctor at a Coptic hospital had told reporters on Monday that 14 of the 17 dead brought in to his hospital had been hit by bullets. The doctor said three bodies were crushed.
"Egypt's Copts are part of the fabric of this society. All Egyptians are citizens with the same rights and obligations," Hegazy said. "This is a lesson that cannot simply pass us by. We must learn a lesson from this."
Christians, who make up 10 percent of Egypt's roughly 80 million people, had taken to the streets after accusing Muslim radicals of partially demolishing a church in Aswan province last week. They also demanded the sacking of the province's governor for failing to protect the building.
Christians have long complained of discrimination, pointing to laws they say make it easier to build a mosque than a church. Disputes over building places of worship are common in Egypt. But there has been a rise in violence against churches since the ousting of Mubarak, who had repressed Islamist groups.
"Regarding the issue of the church ... I think the issue is being looked into by the judiciary," Emara said.
Christians turned their fury on the army. They said protesters responded with stones and other projectiles only after the military used heavy-handed tactics. Military and other vehicles were set on fire in the violence.
"The power of the Egyptian people is in its unity. Egypt was never more in need of unity than it is now. The armed forces belong to the people whether Christian or Muslim," Hegazy said.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Sharjah TV to broadcast arrest of 30 absconding housemaids
From: gulfnews.com
The raid and how police personnel break into the flat where 30 illegal housemaids hid will be shown on Wednesday
- By Aghaddir Ali, Staff Reporter
Sharjah: The arrest of 30 absconding housemaids will be broadcasting on Sharjah TV on Wednesday at 10.30pm, a Sharjah police official said.
The raid and how police personnel break into the flat where 30 illegal housemaids hid will be shown on Wednesday, said Colonel Sultan Abdullah Al Kheyyal, Sharjah Police's Director of Media and Public Relations.
An agent had informed the headmistress of a Sharjah school on how he was hiring the illegal housemaids and where he hid them. The headmistress called a police programme on Sharjah TV to inform them about the matter, said Colonel Al Kheyyal.
The headmistress told police she was scared to hear such news and she felt that she must inform authorities about the matter to protect the society from the danger of illegal maids, Colonel Al Kheyyal said.
He added that the raid took place with the cooperation of Sharjah Naturalisation and Foreign Affairs Department in addition to a number of Anjad patrols.
The police programme on TV went to the scene of the incident and showed how the illegal maids, belonging to different nationalities, were arrested , Colonel Al Kheyyal said
The raid and how police personnel break into the flat where 30 illegal housemaids hid will be shown on Wednesday, said Colonel Sultan Abdullah Al Kheyyal, Sharjah Police's Director of Media and Public Relations.
An agent had informed the headmistress of a Sharjah school on how he was hiring the illegal housemaids and where he hid them. The headmistress called a police programme on Sharjah TV to inform them about the matter, said Colonel Al Kheyyal.
The headmistress told police she was scared to hear such news and she felt that she must inform authorities about the matter to protect the society from the danger of illegal maids, Colonel Al Kheyyal said.
The police programme on TV went to the scene of the incident and showed how the illegal maids, belonging to different nationalities, were arrested , Colonel Al Kheyyal said
Md. Governor names four Circuit Court judges in Pr. George’s
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) this week appointed four people to serve as Circuit Court judges in Prince George’s County.
Three of the appointees have been serving as District Court judges.
The new Circuit Court judges are former District Court judges Krystal Q. Alves, Daneeka Varner Cotton, and Hassan A. El-Amin.
The governor also appointed John Paul Davey, an attorney who has practiced in Prince George’s for more than two decades, to the Circuit Court bench.
Alves was named to the District Court bench in 2005. She previously worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Prince George’s and also in the county’s Office of Law, which defends the county against civil lawsuits.
Cotton was appointed to the District Court bench in 2006. In the 1990s, she worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Prince George’s for several years, until she was appointed to the position of master in the family division of Circuit Court, a post she held until she was named to the District Court. She is the chairperson of the Domestic Violence Coordinating Council in Prince George’s County.
El-Amin was appointed to the District Court in 2000, becoming the first Muslim named to the bench in Maryland. In March 2009, El-Amin landed in controversy when he released an 18-year-old man charged with murder to the custody of the defendant’s mother. A spokesman for then-State’s Attorney Glenn F. Ivey criticized the judge’s decision. Murder defendants in Prince George’s are rarely released on bond, and when they are, it is often for a high amount, generally no less than $500,000.
In an interview with The Washington Post, El-Amin defended his decision, saying the defendant, Sean Sykes, was entitled to the presumption of innocence and that he did not consider him a danger to the community or a flight risk.
“Our whole bond system is problematical,” El-Amin said then. “It’s barely constitutional.”
Sykes eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in connection with the stabbing of a man in Oxon Hill.
Davey has worked in private practice in Prince George’s for 21 years, officials said. From 1991 to 2003, Davey served as the county’s representative to the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Davey also worked as the county’s chief administrative officer from 1987 to 1991.
Three of the appointees have been serving as District Court judges.
The new Circuit Court judges are former District Court judges Krystal Q. Alves, Daneeka Varner Cotton, and Hassan A. El-Amin.
The governor also appointed John Paul Davey, an attorney who has practiced in Prince George’s for more than two decades, to the Circuit Court bench.
Alves was named to the District Court bench in 2005. She previously worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Prince George’s and also in the county’s Office of Law, which defends the county against civil lawsuits.
Cotton was appointed to the District Court bench in 2006. In the 1990s, she worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Prince George’s for several years, until she was appointed to the position of master in the family division of Circuit Court, a post she held until she was named to the District Court. She is the chairperson of the Domestic Violence Coordinating Council in Prince George’s County.
El-Amin was appointed to the District Court in 2000, becoming the first Muslim named to the bench in Maryland. In March 2009, El-Amin landed in controversy when he released an 18-year-old man charged with murder to the custody of the defendant’s mother. A spokesman for then-State’s Attorney Glenn F. Ivey criticized the judge’s decision. Murder defendants in Prince George’s are rarely released on bond, and when they are, it is often for a high amount, generally no less than $500,000.
In an interview with The Washington Post, El-Amin defended his decision, saying the defendant, Sean Sykes, was entitled to the presumption of innocence and that he did not consider him a danger to the community or a flight risk.
“Our whole bond system is problematical,” El-Amin said then. “It’s barely constitutional.”
Sykes eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in connection with the stabbing of a man in Oxon Hill.
Davey has worked in private practice in Prince George’s for 21 years, officials said. From 1991 to 2003, Davey served as the county’s representative to the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Davey also worked as the county’s chief administrative officer from 1987 to 1991.
By
The revisionist history of Sari Nusseibeh
by Efraim Karsh
The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post
Sari Nusseibeh has done it again. In an article titled "Why Israel Can't be a 'Jewish State,'" published on the Jewish New Year of all dates, the supposedly moderate president of al-Quds University goes to great lengths to explain why Jews, unlike any other nation on earth, are undeserving of statehood.
"[T]he idea of a 'Jewish State' is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications," he wrote. "The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people – and most Israeli citizens, we trust – will not accept these implications."
Not that this should have come as a surprise. For decades, Nusseibeh has tirelessly advanced the "one-state solution" – a euphemistic formula that proposes the replacement of Israel by a country, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority.
This advocacy of the destruction of a long-existing state, established by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination, has hardly dented Nusseibeh's "moderate" credentials. That can be partly explained by the desperate yearning among Jews and their supporters worldwide for Palestinian and Arab peace partners. That desire dates back to the 1920s and the 1930s, despite countless setbacks and disillusionments. It is also a corollary of the narcissist and patronizing mesmerization among educated westerners with the "noble savage" in general, and the Westernized native in particular. With his posh Jerusalem high school education, his Oxford and Harvard degrees and impeccable western demeanor, Nusseibeh, like cultured Arabs and Muslims before him, represents the ultimate product of the "white man's civilizing mission," a contemporary replica of George Antonius, the Cambridge-educated Syrian political activist who was the toast of the British chattering classes in Palestine and beyond during the 1930s.
I was personally privy to this feting during a London meeting in the spring of 1989. I was then a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University's Jafee Center for Strategic Studies, and like many well intentioned Israelis at the time and since, we aspired to lay the ground for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation through secret talks with Palestinian interlocutors, including members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then an outlawed organization in Israel. The group we met was headed by Faisal Husseini, then the PLO's most senior official in the disputed territories, flanked by Nusseibeh and a few prominent London-based Palestinian academics.
The meeting was pleasant and informative enough, with the courteous British hosts going out of their way to keep their Palestinian guests sweet. Yet I was taken aback when Nusseibeh, the celebrated epitome of Palestinian moderation, turned out to be the most extreme member of the group. Dismissing out of hand the two-state solution – Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – he sang the praise of the "one-state paradigm," demanding the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza population into the Jewish state as full-fledged citizens, to be followed by Palestinian "refugees" from the neighboring Arab states and beyond.
In subsequent years, Nusseibeh would pay customary lip service to the two-state solution while consistently questioning the very legitimacy of the state with which he ostensibly wished to make peace. On a few occasions he even let the mask drop, unveiling his true agenda. In the late 1990s, for example, he told an old Oxford friend that "one day, in the near or further future, all this [Israel and Palestine] will be one binational state. It's just a question of how we get there."
In an April 2005 debate at Dartmouth College, Nusseibeh advocated the creation of a bi-national state as the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
"We will have spent 100 years killing and fighting each other, doing our best to avoid a one-state solution, and we will find ourselves in that exact situation in 40 or 50 years," he argued.
IN A 2007 political memoir Nusseibeh missed no opportunity to denigrate and delegitimize the Jewish state through sharp, short, often subtle yet always false readings of history.
He does this in spades in his latest article. A Jewish state cannot exist, he argues, because "no state in the world is – or can be in practice – ethnically or religiously homogenous." But the Jewish state that has existed for over 63 years has never been, nor aspired to be, totally homogenous: unlike the Palestinian Arab leadership which, since the early 1920s to date, has insisted on a Judenrein Palestine. Rather, Israel has been home to diverse religious and ethnic minorities accounting for nearly 20 percent of its total population.
As David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of his own (Mapai) party in 1947, the non-Jews in the Jewish state "will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is, the state will be their state as well."
Nusseibeh claims that a Jewish state must by definition be either a theocracy or an apartheid state, and that its Jewish nature opens the door to legally reducing its substantial non-Jewish minority (whose very existence he previously denied) "to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights)." This, too, flies in the face of Israel's 63-year history, where Arabs have enjoyed full equality before the law, and have been endowed with the full spectrum of democratic rights – including the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.
In fact, from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their respective communities, to the granting of educational, cultural, judicial, and religious autonomy, Arabs in Israel enjoy more formal prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world.
Small wonder that whenever an Israeli politician proposes the inclusion of some frontier Israeli-Arab settlements in the future Palestinian state, as part of a land exchange within the framework of a peace agreement, the residents of these localities immediately voice their indignation. Moreover, recent surveys show that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem, who are entitled to Israeli social benefits and are free to travel across Israel's pre-1967 borders, would rather become citizens of the Jewish state than citizens of a new Palestinian one.
But Nusseibeh is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the misconception, prevalent among Arabs and Muslims, that Jews are a religious community and not a nation deserving of statehood.
Hence, instead of insisting on being accepted for what it has been for 63 years, or what the UN partition resolution envisaged it to be, Israel should shed its Jewish identity and become "a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism" like many of its Arab neighbors which have Islam as their official religion "but grant equal civil rights to all citizens."
This of course is the complete inverse of the truth.
The Jewish state is a civil, democratic and pluralistic society, something that none of its Arab neighbors can stake a claim to. On the contrary, precisely because Islam is enshrined as state religion throughout the Middle East, the non-Muslim minorities have been denied "equal civil rights" and have instead been reduced to the historic dhimmi status whereby they can at best enjoy certain religious freedoms in return for a distinctly inferior existence, and at worst suffer from systematic persecution and oppression.
And this is the "one-state paradigm" offered by Nusseibeh to Israel's Jewish citizens.
"[T]he idea of a 'Jewish State' is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications," he wrote. "The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people – and most Israeli citizens, we trust – will not accept these implications."
Not that this should have come as a surprise. For decades, Nusseibeh has tirelessly advanced the "one-state solution" – a euphemistic formula that proposes the replacement of Israel by a country, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority.
This advocacy of the destruction of a long-existing state, established by an internationally recognized act of national self-determination, has hardly dented Nusseibeh's "moderate" credentials. That can be partly explained by the desperate yearning among Jews and their supporters worldwide for Palestinian and Arab peace partners. That desire dates back to the 1920s and the 1930s, despite countless setbacks and disillusionments. It is also a corollary of the narcissist and patronizing mesmerization among educated westerners with the "noble savage" in general, and the Westernized native in particular. With his posh Jerusalem high school education, his Oxford and Harvard degrees and impeccable western demeanor, Nusseibeh, like cultured Arabs and Muslims before him, represents the ultimate product of the "white man's civilizing mission," a contemporary replica of George Antonius, the Cambridge-educated Syrian political activist who was the toast of the British chattering classes in Palestine and beyond during the 1930s.
I was personally privy to this feting during a London meeting in the spring of 1989. I was then a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University's Jafee Center for Strategic Studies, and like many well intentioned Israelis at the time and since, we aspired to lay the ground for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation through secret talks with Palestinian interlocutors, including members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then an outlawed organization in Israel. The group we met was headed by Faisal Husseini, then the PLO's most senior official in the disputed territories, flanked by Nusseibeh and a few prominent London-based Palestinian academics.
The meeting was pleasant and informative enough, with the courteous British hosts going out of their way to keep their Palestinian guests sweet. Yet I was taken aback when Nusseibeh, the celebrated epitome of Palestinian moderation, turned out to be the most extreme member of the group. Dismissing out of hand the two-state solution – Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – he sang the praise of the "one-state paradigm," demanding the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza population into the Jewish state as full-fledged citizens, to be followed by Palestinian "refugees" from the neighboring Arab states and beyond.
In subsequent years, Nusseibeh would pay customary lip service to the two-state solution while consistently questioning the very legitimacy of the state with which he ostensibly wished to make peace. On a few occasions he even let the mask drop, unveiling his true agenda. In the late 1990s, for example, he told an old Oxford friend that "one day, in the near or further future, all this [Israel and Palestine] will be one binational state. It's just a question of how we get there."
In an April 2005 debate at Dartmouth College, Nusseibeh advocated the creation of a bi-national state as the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
"We will have spent 100 years killing and fighting each other, doing our best to avoid a one-state solution, and we will find ourselves in that exact situation in 40 or 50 years," he argued.
IN A 2007 political memoir Nusseibeh missed no opportunity to denigrate and delegitimize the Jewish state through sharp, short, often subtle yet always false readings of history.
He does this in spades in his latest article. A Jewish state cannot exist, he argues, because "no state in the world is – or can be in practice – ethnically or religiously homogenous." But the Jewish state that has existed for over 63 years has never been, nor aspired to be, totally homogenous: unlike the Palestinian Arab leadership which, since the early 1920s to date, has insisted on a Judenrein Palestine. Rather, Israel has been home to diverse religious and ethnic minorities accounting for nearly 20 percent of its total population.
As David Ben-Gurion told the leadership of his own (Mapai) party in 1947, the non-Jews in the Jewish state "will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is, the state will be their state as well."
Nusseibeh claims that a Jewish state must by definition be either a theocracy or an apartheid state, and that its Jewish nature opens the door to legally reducing its substantial non-Jewish minority (whose very existence he previously denied) "to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights)." This, too, flies in the face of Israel's 63-year history, where Arabs have enjoyed full equality before the law, and have been endowed with the full spectrum of democratic rights – including the right to vote for and serve in all state institutions.
In fact, from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their respective communities, to the granting of educational, cultural, judicial, and religious autonomy, Arabs in Israel enjoy more formal prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world.
Small wonder that whenever an Israeli politician proposes the inclusion of some frontier Israeli-Arab settlements in the future Palestinian state, as part of a land exchange within the framework of a peace agreement, the residents of these localities immediately voice their indignation. Moreover, recent surveys show that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem, who are entitled to Israeli social benefits and are free to travel across Israel's pre-1967 borders, would rather become citizens of the Jewish state than citizens of a new Palestinian one.
But Nusseibeh is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the misconception, prevalent among Arabs and Muslims, that Jews are a religious community and not a nation deserving of statehood.
Hence, instead of insisting on being accepted for what it has been for 63 years, or what the UN partition resolution envisaged it to be, Israel should shed its Jewish identity and become "a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism" like many of its Arab neighbors which have Islam as their official religion "but grant equal civil rights to all citizens."
This of course is the complete inverse of the truth.
The Jewish state is a civil, democratic and pluralistic society, something that none of its Arab neighbors can stake a claim to. On the contrary, precisely because Islam is enshrined as state religion throughout the Middle East, the non-Muslim minorities have been denied "equal civil rights" and have instead been reduced to the historic dhimmi status whereby they can at best enjoy certain religious freedoms in return for a distinctly inferior existence, and at worst suffer from systematic persecution and oppression.
And this is the "one-state paradigm" offered by Nusseibeh to Israel's Jewish citizens.
The writer is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia) and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.
Iranians charged in U.S. over assassination plot
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. authorities broke up a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in the United States, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the United States would hold Tehran accountable for the plot.
Two men, originally from Iran, were charged in a U.S. court for the plot. One of them, Gholam Shakuri, was described in the criminal complaint as a member of the Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Shakuri is still at large but the officials said U.S. authorities arrested the other man, Manssor Arbabsiar who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on September 29.
U.S. officials said there had also been initial discussions about other alleged plots, including attacking the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, however no charges for that were revealed Tuesday.
Relations were already sour between the Islamic republic and Washington, which accuses Tehran of backing terrorism and pursuing nuclear arms.
Holder declined to say what measures the Obama administration would take, but said they would be coming soon.
"The disruption of this alleged plot marks a significant achievement by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as the close cooperation of our partners in the Mexican government," Holder told a news conference in Washington.
"In addition to holding these individual conspirators accountable for their alleged role in this plot, the United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions," he said.
Last month hopes were raised of improved ties when Iran released two U.S. hikers accused of spying when they were arrested on the Iran-Iraq border in 2009. Holder said there was no link between the hikers' case and the alleged plot.
SAUDI AMBASSADOR
Officials said that the Saudi ambassador, Adel Al-Jubeir, was never in danger. President Barack Obama was briefed in June about the alleged plot and through a spokesman expressed gratitude for it being disrupted.
The assassination plot began to unfold in May 2011 when Arbabsiar approached an individual in Mexico to help, but that individual turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The confidential source, who was not identified, immediately tipped law enforcement agents, according to the criminal complaint. Arbabsiar paid $100,000 to the informant in July and August for the plot, a down payment on the $1.5 million requested.
Shakuri approved the plan to kill the ambassador during telephone conversations with Arbabsiar, the complaint said.
After Arbabsiar was arrested in New York, he allegedly confessed and provided U.S. authorities with more details about the Iranian government's alleged involvement, Holder said.
The men are charged with one count of conspiracy to murder a foreign official, two counts of foreign travel and use of interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire and one count each of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism.
Authorities said no explosives were acquired for the plot and the weapon of mass destruction charge can range from a simple improvised device to a more significant weapon. They face up to life in prison if convicted.
(Reporting by Basil Katz in New York, James Vicini, Mark Hosenball, Tabassum Zakaria and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by David Storey)
Horrific ordeal of bride in forced marriage who was knocked out with chloroform and raped by husband she had just met
- Rapist regarded wife as a 'chattel' says judge
- Husband is jailed for eight years
The 35-year-old man tied the woman to a bed and knocked her out using the 'obsolete Victorian anaesthetic' on at least two occasions during their six weeks of marriage.
The woman, a Bangladeshi immigrant who was 21 at the time, had repeatedly refused to have sex with her new husband because she was too nervous.
The husband, who cannot be named for legal reasons, poured the chloroform onto a towel, pressed it over her face, then tied her up before raping her at his home in Poplar, east London.
Judge Timothy King said the rapist had regarded his wife as a 'chattel' he could use as he wanted.
He said: 'The victim was a vulnerable young woman, she had made her unwillingness abundantly clear and you would not take no for an answer.
'Her views were of no consequence as far as you were concerned.
'Given that you used chloroform to rape her, this was very much a contrived and premeditated act in which you subdued her capacity to resist.'
Prosecutor Richard Hearnden then revealed the man had already been found guilty of carrying out the attack in November 2009, but that the conviction was overturned.
Forced marriage: The Bangladeshi immigrant had repeatedly refused to have sex with
her new husband at his home in Poplar, east London (pictured), because she was too nervous
Mr Hearnden described chloroform as an 'obsolete Victorian anaesthetic' which is no longer used in any British hospitals, although it is still available and used as an industrial strength cleaner.
CAMERON 'TO CRIMINALISE' FORCED MARRIAGE
Forcing someone into marriage could be made a criminal act under possible changes to British law, David Cameron said yesterday.
Alongside moves aimed at cracking down on sham marriages used to cheat immigration rules, Mr Cameron said he has asked interior ministry officials to discuss creating a new offence aimed at those who force people to marry against their will.
Currently, a potential victim of forced marriage can apply to a court for a protection order, which is intended to stop intimidation or violence and prevent someone from being sent overseas.
Although anyone breaching the order can be jailed for two years, the sanction is made under civil - not criminal - law and is rarely imposed.
Only one person had been imprisoned under the legislation, which was introduced in 2008.
Mr Cameron said: 'Forced marriage is little more than slavery
'To force someone into marriage is completely wrong, and I strongly believe this is a problem we should not shy away from addressing.'
Alongside moves aimed at cracking down on sham marriages used to cheat immigration rules, Mr Cameron said he has asked interior ministry officials to discuss creating a new offence aimed at those who force people to marry against their will.
Currently, a potential victim of forced marriage can apply to a court for a protection order, which is intended to stop intimidation or violence and prevent someone from being sent overseas.
Although anyone breaching the order can be jailed for two years, the sanction is made under civil - not criminal - law and is rarely imposed.
Only one person had been imprisoned under the legislation, which was introduced in 2008.
Mr Cameron said: 'Forced marriage is little more than slavery
'To force someone into marriage is completely wrong, and I strongly believe this is a problem we should not shy away from addressing.'
The victim married her husband in a 'simple Islamic ceremony at his flat in Poplar' on 12 April 2009, the court heard.
'She says she was forced to marry him, and it certainly seems that the period of time between the defendant first meeting her and the marriage ceremony was extremely short,' said the prosecutor.
On the night of their marriage, the husband tried to have sex with his wife, but she refused, saying it was normal to wait two days before sleeping together.
When he tried again 48 hours later, she tried to put him off again with another excuse.
'The defendant would not take no for an answer,' said Mr Hearnden.
'On at least two occasions between the day of the marriage ceremony and 9 May, the defendant had sexual intercourse with her without her consent.
'The method, we say, was the same each time. He would tie her hands up with a scarf in the bedroom and he would make her senseless by putting some of the chloroform onto a towel, wetting it, and holding it against her mouth.
'It would make her totally helpless during the rapes,' he said. 'She could feel pain and burning.'
The situation continued until 9 May, when a blazing row broke out at the marital home and the woman was badly beaten.
Police were called to the flat, at which point the woman took them to her bedroom and showed them the bottle of chloroform, which was large enough to hold around a litre of the drug.
She indicated what had been done to her in broken English and sign language, the court heard.
When her husband was questioned, he initially said they had never had sex and then said they had slept together but it was consensual.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047806/Horrific-ordeal-bride-knocked-chloroform-raped-husband-just-met.html#ixzz1aVNThnDm
IAEA expected to give details on Iran atom bomb fears
From: jpost.com
By REUTERS
VIENNA - The UN atomic watchdog is expected to spell out in more detail soon the reasons for its growing concern that Iran may be working covertly to develop a nuclear missile, diplomats say.
Such a move by the International Atomic Energy Agency, possibly in a new quarterly report on Iran due early next month, could raise pressure on Tehran and offer more arguments for Western powers to tighten sanctions on the major oil producer.
The United States and its allies have urged IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano to declare plainly whether he believes that there have been military aspects to Tehran's nuclear activities and whether such work may still be going on.
It remains to be seen whether the report's conclusion will be sufficiently clear-cut to prompt the agency's 35-nation board of governors to take action at a Nov. 17-18 meeting, possibly by reporting Iran once again to the UN Security Council.
"Many countries have called on Amano to give his best possible assessment of the possible military dimension of Iran's nuclear program," one Western envoy said.
But it is hard to know now what Amano will say and it is "much too early to make a judgment" on whether it could provide the basis for referring the issue to the Security Council in New York, as happened in 2006, the diplomat added.
A divided board decided in June to report Syria, Iran's ally, to the Security Council for stonewalling an IAEA probe into a suspected reactor site that was bombed by Israel in 2007.
Russia and China opposed the US-led diplomatic crackdown on Syria, highlighting big power rifts that the West would want to avoid in any similar IAEA board vote on Iran.
"Russia and China appear to be in no mood for imposing additional pressure on Iran without a pressing reason for concern," said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the Federation of American Scientists think-tank.
Such a move by the International Atomic Energy Agency, possibly in a new quarterly report on Iran due early next month, could raise pressure on Tehran and offer more arguments for Western powers to tighten sanctions on the major oil producer.
The United States and its allies have urged IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano to declare plainly whether he believes that there have been military aspects to Tehran's nuclear activities and whether such work may still be going on.
It remains to be seen whether the report's conclusion will be sufficiently clear-cut to prompt the agency's 35-nation board of governors to take action at a Nov. 17-18 meeting, possibly by reporting Iran once again to the UN Security Council.
"Many countries have called on Amano to give his best possible assessment of the possible military dimension of Iran's nuclear program," one Western envoy said.
But it is hard to know now what Amano will say and it is "much too early to make a judgment" on whether it could provide the basis for referring the issue to the Security Council in New York, as happened in 2006, the diplomat added.
A divided board decided in June to report Syria, Iran's ally, to the Security Council for stonewalling an IAEA probe into a suspected reactor site that was bombed by Israel in 2007.
Russia and China opposed the US-led diplomatic crackdown on Syria, highlighting big power rifts that the West would want to avoid in any similar IAEA board vote on Iran.
"Russia and China appear to be in no mood for imposing additional pressure on Iran without a pressing reason for concern," said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the Federation of American Scientists think-tank.
Vatican: Pope urges freedom for Indonesia's Christians
Vatican City, 7 Oct. (AKI) - Pope Benedict XVI on Friday appealed for religious freedom and tolerance for Christians in Indonesia, where Muslim extremists have carried out attacks on churches, opposed their construction and tried to shut them down.
"Indonesia's constitution guarantees the fundamental human right of freedom to practice one's religion," the pontiff told a delegation of Indonesian bishops visiting the Vatican.
"The freedom to live and preach the Gospel can never be taken for granted and must always be justly and patiently upheld. Nor is religious freedom merely a right to be free from outside constraints," Benedict said.
"It is also a right to be authentically and fully Catholic, to practice the faith, to build up the Church and to contribute to the common good," he added.
The pope urged the bishops to foster inter-religious dialogue in overwhelmingly Muslim Indonesia, where Christians are a religious minority.
"Your country, so rich in its cultural diversity and possessed of a large population, is home to significant numbers of followers of various religious traditions", he said.
Muslims form 86.1 percent of the population , protestants 5.7 percent, Roman Catholic 3 percent, Hindus 1.8 and other religions 3.4 percent of the population in the ethnically diverse nation of 245.6 million people, according to the last census in 2000.
"By doing everything possible to ensure that the rights of minorities in your country are respected, you further the cause of tolerance and mutual harmony in your country and beyond," Benedict concluded.
Egyptian leaders vow probe, anti-discrimination push after deadly clashes
The National Justice Committee meeting comes on the heels of clashes Sunday night involving army troops and pro-Coptic Christian protesters that left at least 25 people dead and 272 wounded, a health ministry official said Monday.
Reports indicated the death toll could be as high as 29 in violence that an army spokesman speculated may have been guided by a "hidden hand" associated with neither side.
Many of those killed were crushed by speeding military vehicles, said Dr. Adel al-Dawi of the ministry.
Those at Monday's meeting deemed the incident shocking and said it marked a "serious escalation" in tensions in Egypt, according to a statement from Prime Minister Essam Sharaf's office. It urged political and religious leaders to together take responsibility for the nation's security, while alluding to possible threats from conspiracies and sedition.
Specifically, the committee established a fact-finding commission that will look at the incident and punish those responsible. It also set a two-week deadline to establish a framework for a law to mandate a uniform process for permitting and construction of houses of worship -- regardless of religious denomination.
The committee also said the government would institute a law imposing jail time and a fine on anyone found guilty of discriminating against others based on religion, language, gender or ethnicity.
Hours earlier, Sharaf acknowledged the divisions, and mounting security concerns, in a speech on state television.
Tensions remained high Monday, as hundreds of Coptic Christians rallied outside a hospital, chanting, "The army has its tanks, but we have our prayers." Some Muslims attended the rally in an expression of solidarity with Christians.
Egyptian security sources said stones were thrown at the rally, but a CNN reporter saw no evidence of that.
Elsewhere in Cairo late Monday, another crowd of Muslim demonstrators gathered, chanting, "Muslimiya! Muslimiya!" to express their unhappiness with the Copts.
Sunday's violence was an escalation after months of rising sectarian tension between Muslims and the Coptic Christian minority. September 30 destruction at a Coptic church site in southern Egypt heightened emotions. The Copts protested Sunday to demand that the military provide equal protection for Coptic places of worship.
How the violence broke out was unclear. Some protesters said stones were thrown by people in civilian garb who were carrying sticks and machetes. Alla Mahmoud, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that some protesters began "firing live ammunition at the army."
Demonstrators said they were marching peacefully toward the Egyptian state television building when the violence erupted.
"Suddenly, we were attacked by thugs carrying swords and clubs," protester Magdi Hanna told CNN on Sunday.
The January 25 youth revolution coalition, which has been involved in various anti-government protests, including Sunday's demonstration, denied that any participants shot at the Egyptian forces.
Samir Bolos, one of the demonstrators, added Sunday that "some unknown people may have fired at the army, but not us."
Witnesses said the army fired on the protesters near the state television headquarters. Meanwhile, military trucks could be seen burning on the street.
Sherif Doss, head of Egypt's association of Coptics and a spokesman for the Coptic Church, said 17 civilians died and 40 were wounded in the altercation. He said the church's highest official, Pope Shenuda III, denounced the violence and blamed it on outsiders. "Strangers infiltrated the demonstration and committed the crimes for which the Copts have been blamed," the church said in a statement.
Twelve army troops were killed and more than 50 were wounded, according to Lt. Col. Amr Imam, a military spokesman. He said this was "first time protesters fired at the army."
"There must be a hidden hand behind this," Imam said. "Egyptians don't do that."
Doss said he and other Coptics "demand that the army checks the bullets used on the killed soldiers. They are probably military bullets. We do not have weapons."
Though individual Muslim women outside a hospital wiped tears from the cheeks of Coptic women whose relatives died Sunday, it was unclear whether -- at a state level -- the military-run government has the will to address the problem or the wherewithal to run a country of nearly 90 million people.
In May, during another outbreak of sectarian violence, a National Justice Committee was formed to mitigate sectarian strife. Several committee members resigned in protest, saying they government has done too little to address the mounting problems.
Since then-President Hosni Mubarak's ouster in February, the country remains unstable. The economy is struggling, tourism has yet to rebound and the stock market has dropped.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. President Barack Obama, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and British Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed concern about Sunday's violence.
"Now is a time for restraint on all sides so that Egyptians can move forward together to forge a strong and united Egypt," the White House press secretary said in a statement. "As the Egyptian people shape their future, the United States continues to believe that the rights of minorities -- including Copts -- must be respected, and that all people have the universal rights of peaceful protest and religious freedom."
The statement noted that Sharaf has called for an investigation. "These tragic events should not stand in the way of timely elections and a continued transition to democracy that is peaceful, just and inclusive," it said.
Ashton said Monday that she was "extremely concerned by the large number of deaths and injuries," while Hague condemned the loss of life.
Coptic Christians, an ancient sect, make up about 9% of Egypt's population, according to the U.S. State Department.
They have suffered serious violence in recent months.
A Coptic church in the city of Alexandria was bombed on New Year's Day, killing 23 people -- the deadliest attack on Christians in Egypt in recent times.
Clashes involving Coptic Christians in May left at least 12 dead.
Egypt's Coptic Christians base their theology on the teachings of the Apostle Mark, who introduced Christianity to Egypt, according to St. Takla Church in Alexandria, the capital of Coptic Christianity.
The religion split with other Christians in the 5th century over the definition of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent bipartisan federal agency, added Egypt this year to a list of countries named as the worst violators of religious freedom.
There has also been mutual support between the minority Christians and majority Muslims in Egypt, with reports of Christians protecting anti-Mubarak Muslim demonstrators when they stopped for daily prayers during the uprising.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Egypt: Destroying Churches, One at a Time
http://www.meforum.org/3065/egypt-destroying-churches
What clearer sign that Egypt is turning rabidly Islamist than the fact that hardly a few weeks go by without a church being destroyed, or without protesting Christians being attacked and slaughtered by the military?
The latest chaos in Egypt—where the military opened fire on unarmed Christians and repeatedly ran armored vehicles over them, killing dozens—originates in Edfu, a onetime tourist destination renowned for its pharaonic antiquities, but now known as the latest region to see a church destroyed by a Muslim mob.
This church attack is itself eye-opening as to the situation in Egypt. To sum, St. George Coptic church, built nearly a century ago, was so dilapidated that the local council and governor of Aswan approved renovating it, and signed off on the design.
It was not long before local Muslims began complaining, making various demands, including that the church be devoid of crosses and bells—even though the permit approved them—citing that "the Cross irritates Muslims and their children."
Coptic leaders had no choice but to acquiesce, "pointing to the fact that the church was rebuilt legally, and any concessions on the part of the church was done for the love for the country, which is passing through a difficult phase."
Acquiescence breeds more demands: Muslim leaders next insisted that the very dome of the church be removed—so that the building might not even resemble a church—and that it be referred to as a "hospitality home." Arguing that removal of the dome would likely collapse the church, the bishop refused.
The foreboding cries of "Allahu Akbar!" began: Muslims threatened to raze the church and build a mosque in its place; Copts were "forbidden to leave their homes or buy food until they remove the dome of St. George's Church"; many starved for weeks.
Then, after Friday prayers on Sept. 30, some three thousand Muslims rampaged the church, torched it, and demolished the dome; flames from the wreckage burned nearby Coptic homes, which were further ransacked by rioting Muslims.
This account of anti-church sentiment in Egypt offers several conclusions:
First, the obvious: animosity for churches, demands that they be left to crumble, demands to remove crosses and stifle bells, are an integral part of Islamic history and dogma. That church attacks in Egypt always occur on Friday, Islam's "holy day," and are always accompanied by religious cries of "Allahu Akbar!" should be evidence enough of the Islamist context of these attacks.
Because there was a lull in this animosity from the colonial era to just a few decades ago, most Westerners, deeming events closer to their time and space more representative of reality, incorrectly assume that church toleration is the rule, not the exception in Islamic history, which has more frequently been draconian to churches, and is back: "the Muslim Brotherhood announced immediately after the revolution that it is impossible to build any new church in Egypt, and churches which are demolished should never be rebuilt, as well as no crosses over churches or bells to be rung."
This is also why Muslim authorities are complacent, if not complicit. According to witnesses, security forces, which were present during the Edfu attack, "stood there watching." Worse, Edfu's Intelligence Unit chief was seen directing the mob destroying the church.
As for the governor of Aswan, he appeared on State TV and "denied any church being torched," calling it a "guest home" (a common tactic to excuse the destruction of churches). He even justified the incident by arguing that the church contractor made the building three meters higher than he permitted: "Copts made a mistake and had to be punished, and Muslims did nothing but set things right, end of story."
Equally telling is that perpetrators of church attacks are seldom if ever punished. Even if sometimes the most rabid church-destroying Muslims get "detained," it is usually for show, as they are released in days, hailed back home as heroes (this, too, goes back to Muslim dogma, which naturally sides with Muslims over infidels).
This year alone has seen the New Year church attack, which left 23 dead; the destruction of the ancient church of Sool, where Muslims "played soccer" with its sacred relics; the Imbaba attacks, where several churches were set aflame; and now Edfu, wherein, as usual "none of the attackers were arrested."
Indeed, three days after Edfu, Muslims attacked yet another church.
Aware that they are untouchable, at least when it comes to making infidel Christians miserable, anti-Christian Muslims have a simple strategy: destroy churches, even if one at a time, safe in the knowledge that, not only will they not be prosecuted, but Egypt's military and security apparatus will punish the infidel victims should they dare to protest.
The latest chaos in Egypt—where the military opened fire on unarmed Christians and repeatedly ran armored vehicles over them, killing dozens—originates in Edfu, a onetime tourist destination renowned for its pharaonic antiquities, but now known as the latest region to see a church destroyed by a Muslim mob.
This church attack is itself eye-opening as to the situation in Egypt. To sum, St. George Coptic church, built nearly a century ago, was so dilapidated that the local council and governor of Aswan approved renovating it, and signed off on the design.
It was not long before local Muslims began complaining, making various demands, including that the church be devoid of crosses and bells—even though the permit approved them—citing that "the Cross irritates Muslims and their children."
Coptic leaders had no choice but to acquiesce, "pointing to the fact that the church was rebuilt legally, and any concessions on the part of the church was done for the love for the country, which is passing through a difficult phase."
Acquiescence breeds more demands: Muslim leaders next insisted that the very dome of the church be removed—so that the building might not even resemble a church—and that it be referred to as a "hospitality home." Arguing that removal of the dome would likely collapse the church, the bishop refused.
The foreboding cries of "Allahu Akbar!" began: Muslims threatened to raze the church and build a mosque in its place; Copts were "forbidden to leave their homes or buy food until they remove the dome of St. George's Church"; many starved for weeks.
Then, after Friday prayers on Sept. 30, some three thousand Muslims rampaged the church, torched it, and demolished the dome; flames from the wreckage burned nearby Coptic homes, which were further ransacked by rioting Muslims.
This account of anti-church sentiment in Egypt offers several conclusions:
First, the obvious: animosity for churches, demands that they be left to crumble, demands to remove crosses and stifle bells, are an integral part of Islamic history and dogma. That church attacks in Egypt always occur on Friday, Islam's "holy day," and are always accompanied by religious cries of "Allahu Akbar!" should be evidence enough of the Islamist context of these attacks.
Because there was a lull in this animosity from the colonial era to just a few decades ago, most Westerners, deeming events closer to their time and space more representative of reality, incorrectly assume that church toleration is the rule, not the exception in Islamic history, which has more frequently been draconian to churches, and is back: "the Muslim Brotherhood announced immediately after the revolution that it is impossible to build any new church in Egypt, and churches which are demolished should never be rebuilt, as well as no crosses over churches or bells to be rung."
This is also why Muslim authorities are complacent, if not complicit. According to witnesses, security forces, which were present during the Edfu attack, "stood there watching." Worse, Edfu's Intelligence Unit chief was seen directing the mob destroying the church.
As for the governor of Aswan, he appeared on State TV and "denied any church being torched," calling it a "guest home" (a common tactic to excuse the destruction of churches). He even justified the incident by arguing that the church contractor made the building three meters higher than he permitted: "Copts made a mistake and had to be punished, and Muslims did nothing but set things right, end of story."
Equally telling is that perpetrators of church attacks are seldom if ever punished. Even if sometimes the most rabid church-destroying Muslims get "detained," it is usually for show, as they are released in days, hailed back home as heroes (this, too, goes back to Muslim dogma, which naturally sides with Muslims over infidels).
This year alone has seen the New Year church attack, which left 23 dead; the destruction of the ancient church of Sool, where Muslims "played soccer" with its sacred relics; the Imbaba attacks, where several churches were set aflame; and now Edfu, wherein, as usual "none of the attackers were arrested."
Indeed, three days after Edfu, Muslims attacked yet another church.
Aware that they are untouchable, at least when it comes to making infidel Christians miserable, anti-Christian Muslims have a simple strategy: destroy churches, even if one at a time, safe in the knowledge that, not only will they not be prosecuted, but Egypt's military and security apparatus will punish the infidel victims should they dare to protest.
Raymond Ibrahim, a widely published Islam-specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)