Israel targets top rabbis for anti-Arab incitement backing “King’s Doctrine”
Israeli police briefly detained a leading rabbi Sunday as part of a widening probe into a treatise suspected of inciting the murder of Arabs. The investigation has pitted authorities in the Jewish state against far-right West Bank settlers and has led to scuffles outside government institutions in Jerusalem and a sit-down protest that choked off the main highway to Tel Aviv.
Rabbi Yaacov Yosef was seized by detectives on his way back from morning prayers, witnesses said, in a tactic similar to the arrest last week of a senior West Bank rabbi whose followers responded with street protests. ”They commandeered the car and took it away, together with my dad, to an undisclosed destination,” Yosef’s son Yonatan told Israel Radio. The rabbi was freed after an hour, police said.
The clerics had ignored a police summons to be questioned over endorsements for “The King’s Doctrine,” a book written by a more obscure settler rabbi offering justifications from scripture for killing innocent gentiles during religious war. ”Revenge, including strikes on the blameless and on babies, is necessary and important in fighting and defeating evil,” read a passage excerpted on Israel’s top-rated television news.
Israeli security officials fear such edicts could fuel Jewish attacks designed to scupper the eviction of settlers from occupied land they regard as theirs by biblical birthright but where Palestinians, with international support, seek statehood.
A police spokesman said Yosef had been interrogated in connection with “incitement to racism and violence” before being let go. Dov Lior, chief rabbi for the hardcore settlement of Kiryat Arba, was similarly questioned and released last week.
Sarkozy party: Islam debate undercuts French far-right
France’s ruling conservative party held a controversial debate on the practice of Islam on Tuesday, rejecting charges of bigotry and saying that airing the issue could help stem the rising popularity of the far-right. President Nicolas Sarkozy called for the discussion on Islam and secularism to address fears that some overt displays of Muslim faith, including street prayer and full-face veils, were undermining France’s secular identity.
With his popularity at record lows a year before a presidential election, Sarkozy has been accused of seeking to woo back right-wing voters increasingly drawn to the National Front party under its telegenic new leader Marine Le Pen. Even before it began, the debate had been tarnished by criticism from religious leaders, a boycott by France’s largest Muslim group and the absence of Prime Minister Francois Fillon.
“Everything possible has been done to stop this meeting taking place…but we have not yielded to those pressures… because it is the French people who are calling for it,” said Jean-François Copé, secretary-general of Sarkozy’s UMP party. “One less problem is one less electoral argument for Marine Le Pen,” he said.
The talks included ministers, French Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim and representatives of other faiths, but no Muslim clerics. “We did not ask for this debate,” Bernheim said. “But there was no question for us of boycotting it and stigmatising a political party, even if it is a ruling party.”
Muslim groups accuse the UMP of targeting their faith, which is France’s second largest religion after Roman Catholicism with some 5-6 million members, according to government figures. “This debate has only one purpose and that is to keep the UMP in the media in the year before the election,” said Hassan Ben M’Barek of “Banlieues Respect” which plans to hand out five-pointed green stars in protest at Islam’s singling-out. “Clearly, this will feed into Islamophobia.”
Read the full story by Nicholas Vinocur here.
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French far-right sees boost from planned Islam debate
France’s far-right National Front said on Friday that a planned national debate on Islam and secularism would boost its support and improve its chances in the presidential election next year. Party leader Marine Le Pen, who took over last month from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, mocked the planned debate as a new opinion poll showed she could score a strong 20 percent in the first round of the presidential vote.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government wants the debate, due in April, to discuss whether France’s five-million-strong Muslim minority supports the official separation of church and state.
Le Pen said it could end up backfiring on Sarkozy and his ally Jean-Francois Cope, the UMP party leader who announced on Wednesday that the debate would start in April.
“The last time (Sarkozy) used that, there was a debate about national identity and the National Front scored 15 percent in the regional elections,” she told France Info radio (with link to audio in French).
“So keep it up, Mr Cope — a little debate here, a little blah-blah about Islam and secularism there, and I think we’ll end up winning 25 percent in the presidential election.”
Critics said Sarkozy’s government-sponsored debate on national identity in 2009-2010, which led to a ban on full face veils in public, turned into a public forum to air complaints about Muslims and make the minority feel stigmatised.
Defence Minister Alain Juppe, a senior Sarkozy ally, also warned about a debate. “We have to steer and master this debate, because it can get out of hand,” he told the daily Le Figaro.
British police avert clashes at Luton anti-Islamist rally
About 1,500 far-right protesters marched through the centre of the British city of Luton Saturday to rally against “militant Islam,” requiring a heavy police presence to avert clashes with 1,000 anti-fascist demonstrators. A sixth of Luton’s population is Muslim, and past marches by the English Defence League have led to conflict with their opponents. The city centre turned into a virtual ghost town before the rally, with shops boarded up and pubs closed.
But police and community activists averted large-scale violence, making only eight arrests on a mix of assault, drugs and weapons charges. There were no serious injuries.
Tensions ran high as EDL leader Stephen Lennon told marchers to reject the influence of Islam in British public life. “Every single one of you are on the forefront of the fight against militant Islam,” he said, as supporters chanted the EDL’s name and nationalist songs based on those more usually associated with English football games.
The EDL, which says it is not a racist organisation, welcomed a speech by Prime Minister David Cameron earlier Saturday, where he told international leaders that his country had been too tolerant of British Islamists who rejected Western norms. Multiculturalism has failed and left young Muslims vulnerable to radicalisation, he said in Munich.
Groups representing some British Muslims criticised Cameron for making the speech on the same day as the EDL march, and for implying that unwillingness to accept freedom of speech and equal rights was widespread among Muslims.
“British Muslims abhor terrorism and extremism and we have worked hard to eradicate this evil from our country, but to suggest that we do not sign up to the values of tolerance, respect and freedom is deeply offensive and incorrect,” said Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation.
Read the full story by Georgina Cooper here. Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld
“About 1,500 far-right protesters”
So protesting against militant Islam makes one belong to the “far-right”. Give me a break. The media is crooked.
In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers
A call to prayer goes up from a loudspeaker perched on the hood of a car, and all at once hundreds of Muslim worshippers touch their foreheads to the ground, forming a sea of backs down the road. The scene is taking place not in downtown Cairo, but on a busy market street in northern Paris, a short walk from the Sacre Coeur basilica. To locals, it’s old news: some have been praying on the street, rain or shine, for decades.
But for Marine Le Pen — tipped to take over from her father this weekend as leader of the far-right National Front party — it is proof that Muslims are taking over France and becoming an occupying force, according to remarks she made last month.
Her comments caused a furore as she seized on the street prayers to drive home the idea that Islam is threatening the values of a secular country where anxiety over the role of Muslims in society has deepened in the past few years.
More than two thirds of French and German people now consider the integration of Muslims into their societies a failure, pollster IFOP said in a survey published on Jan. 5. In France, where Islam is the second-largest religion after Catholicism, 42 percent saw it as a threat to national identity.
“This has become a key political issue,” said Frederic Dabi, IFOP’s head of research. “Street prayers and the perceived growing influence of Islam are seen as impinging on French values of secularism, communal living.”
French far-right star compares praying Muslims to Nazi occupiers
Marine Le Pen has put paid to the idea she would put a softer face on France’s National Front for elections in 2012 with anti-Muslim comments that have aroused a storm of criticism. Le Pen, the likely next far-right challenger for the French presidency, compared overflowing mosques in France with the Nazi occupation — remarks indicative of a drift to the right in parts of Europe that could let the National Front eat into support for the ruling conservative UMP party in 2012.
Le Pen, the frontrunner to succeed her father Jean-Marie Le Pen as head of the party, made the comments on a television show last Thursday with about 3.4 million viewers watching. On Monday she dismissed any suggestion of a gaffe. “My comments were absolutely not a blunder, but a completely thought-out analysis,” she told a news conference, adding she was merely saying out loud what everyone thought privately.
Given support of 12 to 14 percent in recent opinion polls, Marine Le Pen is regarded as more electable than her father, who was convicted in 1990 for inciting racial hatred. But her remarks suggest that far from moderating the party line, she will go all out to outgun conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to secure the slice of the French electorate that opposes high immigration.
“The National Front has changed: it’s more dangerous than before,” said an editorial in the left-leaning Liberation daily after mainstream politicians and Muslim leaders slammed Le Pen’s comments. “Given a lick of paint by Marine, xenophobia is back in the spotlight.”
On Thursday, she told a party meeting that after a steady rise in the number of Islamic veils and burqas worn in France, home to five million Muslims, the crowds praying outside mosques were akin to an occupation.
Her remarks chime with a growing right-wing mood among voters in Europe, where far-right parties are taking up worries that high immigration facilitates Islamic fundamentalist terror cells and makes tight labour markets even tighter. Since France banned burqas, which cloak a woman’s face and body, calls for bans have been heard elsewhere in Europe, most loudly in the Netherlands where populist politician Geert Wilders wants to tighten rules on immigration and ban the Koran.
“France’s anti-racist group MRAP filed a lawsuit against Marine Le Pen for incitement to racial hatred.”
FAIL!
Muslims are no more a race than Nazis, so good luck with that case.
Germans more negative towards Muslims than other Europeans
Only about one third of Germans think positively of their Muslim neighbors, a much lower proportion than in other western European countries, according to a new poll published on Thursday. In contrast, 62 percent of Dutch and 56 percent of French people responding to the TNS Emnid survey indicated they had positive attitudes toward Muslims.
Detlef Pollack, a Muenster University sociologist who led the study, attributed Germans’ views to their lack of contact with Muslims compared to people in other nations surveyed. “The more often you meet Muslims, the more you view them as generally positive,” he said.
The survey broke down the German results into western and eastern responses, reflecting continuing divisions in the once-divided country. Only 34 percent in the west and 26 percent in the east had positive impressions of Muslims, it said.
Contact with Muslims also showed regional differences, with 40 percent of westerners but only 16 percent of easterners saying they occasionally met Muslims. French people appear to have the most contact with Muslims, 66 percent of those responding saying they had such contacts.
The survey was conducted before former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin plunged Germany into a heated debate over Muslim integration with a controversial best-selling book published in August.
Read the full story by Eric Kelsey here. There plenty more in this study — click here for the English-language press release.
Thilo Sarrazin is of arab descent, the only thing which made him a German was his family adopting the protest religion. The German population is strictly under the control of the church, who pay ten percent of their income to the Church, unless they opt to leave the church. The church in germany is a very powerful institution in Germany and have deliberately kept its followers unaware of Islam, says the former chancellor of Germany Helmuth Schmidt. The xenophobia in Germany saw its climax during the third Reich when Jews became the main group which suffered. There is a lot of improvement in their outlook but certain elements such as the sarrazin keep bringing up Nazi philosophies about different races.
The statistics are misplaced and needs to be qualified.
Rex Minor
“Burqa bans”: First France, then the Netherlands – who’s next?
First the French banned Muslim face veils, now the Dutch have decided to follow suit. With debates about outlawing burqas and niqabs spreading across Europe, a third ban — perhaps even more — may not be far behind.
Only a small minority of Muslim women in Europe cover their faces, but their veils have become ominous symbols for Europeans troubled by problems such as the economic crisis, immigration and Muslim integration.
With Europe’s political mood moving to the right, low-cost, high-symbolism measures such as veil bans have become a rallying cry for far-right parties knocking at the door of power. Their appeal also resonates with those worried by possible security threats from masked people or offended by the blow to gender equality they see when a covered woman walks by.
Raffaele Simone, whose book “The Meek Monster: why the West is not going left” has aroused debate in Italy and France, said the rightward drift fits an individualistic and globalized consumer society that Europe’s left-wing failed to understand. “In aging European populations, modernity has generated a worrying and chaotic jumble of threats and fears only the right and the far right seem able to respond to now,” Simone, a Rome university linguistics professor, told the Paris newspaper Le Monde.
Calls for a “burqa ban” are now heard across Europe, with local politics influencing how close it gets to becoming law. Read the full story here.
There is little doubt that the burqa and niqab is a symbol of gender inequality,the tyranny of men over women.It conjures up stories of “honor killings,” and female genital mutilation.The most despicable of human vices is,in my opinion,the desire of one human being to have control of another,justified more often than not by some perversion of an ideal,usually religious.I congratulate the Dutch,a continuous beacon of reason for centuries.My own family hid Jews from the Nazis in Holland during the occupation,another form of the same dreadful evil.
Far-right anti-mosque video game triggers outrage in Austria
The picturesque Austrian province of Styria is overrun by huge mosques with minarets, if you are to believe an online video game designed for the far-right Freedom Party ahead of regional elections on September 26.
In a shooting range-style game, players have 60 seconds to collect points by putting a target over animated mosques and minarets that emerge from the Styria countryside and clicking a “Stop” sign. They also have the chance to eliminate bearded muezzin who call Muslims to prayer.
The “Bye Bye Mosque” game, which has had over 60,000 visitors since Monday, has drawn sharp criticism from Austria’s Social Democrats, Green Party and Islamic community.
The game is “tasteless and incomprehensible in a country in which up until now people have lived in peace and harmony,” Anas Schakfeh, the leader of Austria’s Islamic community told broadcaster ORF. “This is religious hatred and xenophobia beyond comparison.”
The Green candidate for the Styria election has asked authorities to investigate the Freedom Party for incitement.
The Austrian debate is symptomatic of a wider trend in the United States and in Europe where Islam is becoming a political issue. Geert Wilder’s anti-Islam party doubled its seats in the Dutch parliament after elections last month and Swiss voters backed a ban on building minarets in a referendum last November.
The game ends with the line “Styria is full of minarets and mosques. So vote for Dr. Gerhard Kurzmann and the Freedom Party on September 26 so that this doesn’t happen.”
@ Aliah, prove to me what YOUR saying is right. Show me some key sections from the Koran emphasizing the basis of Islam on peace. Second, show me your research about masons ruling the world.
“No to Islamism” campaign boosts France’s National Front in poll
Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, playing on fears over the spread of Islam, has regained the political initiative in France with a strong result in regional elections that poses a problem for President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Bouncing back from a string of recent reversals, Le Pen’s National Front won a surprise 11.74 percent of the national vote in Sunday’s first round ballot and will dilute support for Sarkozy’s conservative block in crucial run-offs on March 21. Aged 81, Le Pen himself enjoyed a remarkable personal triumph, winning 20.29 percent backing in the southern French Provence-Cote d’Azur region, which has absorbed hundreds of thousands of mainly North African immigrants in recent decades.
A government move in 2009 to organise a broad debate on national identity rekindled interest in the far right by reviving controversies over how to deal with immigrants and Islam in a country that has Europe’s largest Muslim population.
Le Pen, who has said the regional vote will be his last election campaign, proved astute at leveraging concerns over radical Islam, plastering billboards with a poster showing France covered by an Algerian flag, a veiled woman and minarets. “No to Islamism,” read the slogan.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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The National Socialists also thought it was right and necessary to kill the blameless and babies. Remember? How do people reach the point where killing the innocent is part of their doctrine, part of their phylosophy for living a life of service?