Israeli organ donations soar after soccer star dies
Organ donations in Israel rocketed in January after the death of an Israeli soccer star prompted a religious debate on brain death into the headlines.
Former Israel and Liverpool defender Avi Cohen sustained severe head injuries in a motorcycle crash in December. He was pronounced brain dead and put on a respirator. Cohen had signed an organ donor card, but his family refused to give away his organs. Newspaper reports said rabbis had appealed to the family not to donate. Cohen’s widow said the decision against donation was her own.
Some influential rabbis teach that taking organs from a person who is brain dead is tantamount to murder. “The number one reason people give for refusing to donate organs is religious. Jewish law is perceived, mistakenly, as being against it, when as you know in Judaism it depends which rabbi you ask,” said Professor Jacob Lavee, head of Israel’s Transplant Centre’s Steering Committee.
In general, most ultra-orthodox rabbis are against organ donation while others adopt a more liberal interpretation of Jewish ritual law.
Rabbi Reem Hacohen, head of Otniel Yeshiva in the occupied West Bank teaches that a person is obliged by Jewish law to sign a donor card. “Organ donation is a great Mitsvah, or good deed,” Hacohen said. “If pronounced in keeping with Israeli law, brain death is in fact death.”
Read the full story by Maayan Lubell here.
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Kenya investigates Islamic group crackdown on soccer and films
Kenya has deployed security agents to its border with Somalia after Islamic clerics announced they had clamped down on the public broadcast of soccer and films, a security official has said. Clerics in the frontier town of Mandera said on Monday they had confiscated a number of satellite TV dishes in a football-obsessed nation ahead of the World Cup because public film dens were corrupting youths.
“Two groups, an undercover team from National Security Intelligence Service and (an) anti-terrorist unit, arrived here on Tuesday night to investigate,” a senior local security source who did not wish to be named told Reuters late on Thursday. Another team has been dispatched to Dadaab refugee camp which is home to some 270,000 mostly Somali refugees in the mostly Muslim region.
Local residents from Mandera, located just a few kilometres from the porous border, claimed al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab rebels in Somalia had made phone calls to congratulate the clerics, he added.
Read the full story by Noor Ali here.
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Amid the prayers, some haj pilgrims talk football
The haj is supposed to be a spiritual highlight in a Muslim’s life, but everyday issues can sometimes intrude. In between prayers and visits to various sites, pilgrims often discuss all kinds of current issues. Among Algerians and Egyptians on the haj here this year, the buzz is about the public row sparked by a soccer game to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. Algeria won that match 1-0.
The football rivalry has caused considerable bad blood between the two countries. Egypt has recalled its ambassador from Algiers after the play-off, accusing Algerian fans of post-match thuggery at the game’s venue in Khartoum. Egypt had earlier complained when Algerian fans trashed the Algiers headquarters of Egypt-based Orascom Telecom’s Djezzy mobile subsidiary. Before that, Algeria was irked after Egyptian fans pelted the Algerian team’s bus with stones and some fans were hurt in scuffles on game-day in the first round of the qualifier in Cairo.
“We are brothers … This should have never happened and I blame the media in the two countries for instigating ill feelings among the most foolish of us,” said Khaled Salam Abdallah from Cairo.
Mohamed Lab’haj, an Algerian pilgrim, agreed. “We are more than brothers … The real criminals are the Arab governments. They play with us like they do with a ball … If football had much use in it, they would not have kicked the ball with their feet,” he said.
The haj, a duty for every able Muslim, emphasises the unity of all Muslims. This year’s pilgrimage has offered the first big encounter between Algerian and Egyptian masses since the football showdown. Some 2 million Muslims have come to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Abdulwahhab Alyousha, an Algerian pilgrim, said he was outraged that such a spat erupted between two countries that shared a significant part of their modern history. “Egyptians helped our Algerian revolution. I don’t think this dispute will mar bilateral relationships for good,” he said, referring to the movement which led to Algeria’s independence from France in 1962.
Some refused to talk about the issue. “Soccer is a matter of earthly life, we are here to work for our afterlife,” Egyptian pilgrim Adel Abdul-Shafi said.
French Muslim soccer team refuses to play gays
An amateur Muslim soccer team has provoked an outcry in France after refusing to play against a team which promotes homosexual rights and has gay players.
The Creteil Bebel Muslim team pulled out of its planned tie with Paris Foot Gay (PFG) at the weekend, saying it went against their religious beliefs to play against homosexuals.
The PFG said they would sue Creteil Bebel for homophobia, but the team defended the pullout, saying religious convictions were much more important than any sporting event.
“As a Muslim, I have the right not to play against homosexuals because I don’t share their ideas,” Zahir Belgarbi, one of the team directors, told France Bleu radio.
Read the full article here
What do you think about this? Should players’ beliefs make any difference on the field?
UPDATE: Creteil Bebel agreed several days later to play against Paris Foot Gay after all. “In no way is this a Muslim team,” said Creteil Bebel’s lawyer Bénédicte Puybasset. “Some members are Muslims but none are fundamentalists and some are not Muslim. It’s just a bunch of friends who like to play football after work.”
Christians have the right NOT to play muslim teams too, by the same token. Muslim beliefs are not permissable by Christians, and I dare any authority to say otherwise. This is not about race, before you liberal minded sickos get on your high horse. If it is good enough for muslims not to play a homo-friendly football team, then by the same token, it MUST be permissable for a Christian team not to play against muslims, as Halal methods of slaughter are not permissable by christians. Nor is the subjugation of women, smiteing the heads of infidels, whipping women for showing too much flesh, cutting off of the hands of thieves (including children), hanging homosexuals, shall I go on???
Muslims angry at German soccer club over song
German Muslims have inundated one of the country’s top soccer teams, Schalke 04, with complaints about a verse in the club’s anthem which, they say, is disparaging towards the Prophet Mohammad.
The club has its home in Gelsenkirchen in Germany’s industrial heartland and immigrants make up about a third of the town’s population. Most of them have a Turkish background. Germany’s biggest mosque was opened in nearby Duisburg last year and many Schalke supporters are Muslims, as chat rooms like this one point out.
The lines in question are: “Mohammad was a Prophet who doesn’t understand football” although the words that follow seem positive: “But from all the beautiful colours he came up with blue and white.” Schalke’s colours are blue and white.
The club, which plays in Germany’s Bundesliga top league and has some of the country’s most ardent fans, is taking the complaints seriously. A spokesman has said Schalke has asked an Islamic expert to analyse the text.
But what is most striking is that the song is not new. Some say it dates back to 1924. So why has it suddenly started to offend Muslims?
The answer may lie in the mounting resentment in Germany’s Muslim community after politicians were slow to condemn the murder of an Egyptian woman in a court in eastern Germany about a month ago, which we blogged about at the time. The crime was widely viewed as racially motivated.
Germany’s Central Council of Muslims has summed up the situation. “Many Muslims in Germany no longer have a sense of security. Nerves are wearing thin,” General-Secretary Aiman Mazyek was quoted as saying in Bild daily, adding he did not believe the club had malicious intentions.
Euro 2008: do Catholic countries have the edge?
“Do Catholic countries have better football players?”
I was surprised to see this headline on the Austrian Catholic website kath.net today… and even more surprised to see they seemed to mean it seriously.
“A look at the participants in the final round of the European football championship in Switzerland and Austria suggests this,” kath.net writes in a report from Vienna. “In seven of the 16 participating countries, Catholics are clearly in the majority: Poland (95 percent of the population), Spain (92 percent), Italy (90 percent), Portugal (90 percent), Croatia (77 percent), Austria (69 percent ) and France (51 percent). Only one Protestant stronghold confronts them, Sweden. Of the 8.8 million inhabitants of the northern European country, 80 percent are Lutherans.”
There’s no hint of analysis of why this should be relevant, or mention of the personal faith — or lack thereof — of the players on these national teams. This purely statistical view (sports fans love stats, don’t they?) goes on to point out which participating countries have large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants (Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands).
The article notes that only 32 percent of all Czechs call themselves Christians, making the Czech Republic the most “de-churched” participating country, i.e. the country where religion has retreated the most. Even there, though, the Catholics make up the largest group among the believers (26.5 percent of the population). So maybe they still have a chance after all.
No religion story in Europe is complete without a mention of Islam, so the Vienna-datelined article ended up with a comment about Turkey. The Turkish team, by the way, beat Austria’s co-hosts Switzerland 2-1 on Wednesday in Basel and face the “de-churched” Czechs on Sunday in Geneva, aka “the Protestant Rome”.
“The only Muslim-dominated country in the European Championship is Turkey, where 98 percent of the 72 million inhabitants are Muslims. The 120,000 Christians there have a hard time because of much discrimination,” it wrote. “In Europe there are 224.5 million Catholics, 57.8 million Protestants, 39 million Orthodox, 15.7 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews.”
let unite catholic to not accept the allegation of protestant..we soppurt you catholic irish republican army
to fight in liberation in northern ireland..
mabuhay!!!!!!!!
Catholic museum probes soccer’s debt to religion
The museum at Vienna’s Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Stephen has a new exhibition meant to show what it says soccer owes to religion. As my colleague Alexandra Hudson writes from the Austrian capital:
Players such as Argentina’s Diego Maradona are venerated as saints of the modern age, the exhibition explains, and fans frequently set up shrines or collect “relics” of their favourite teams or players.
“There are many parallels between the cult of football and the rituals of the Christian Church,” said museum director Bernhard Böhler.
An ”I belong to Jesus” shirt worn by an AC Milan player and Maradona’s famous “hand of God” goal are cited to show the links between faith and football. The exhibition, entitled Heroes, Saints and Heaven Stormers, runs from May 21 to September 22.
Do you think soccer owes as much to religion as the museum director says?
P.S. Readers of this blog may recall Bernhard Böhler from an earlier and far more controversial exhibition, the show of artist Alfred Hrdlicka’s work that included a painting depicting the Last Supper as a gay orgy (we blogged on it here and here and here). That got him into hot water, with protests pouring in from Austria, Germany and the United States. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear he had been fired, but this soccer story suggests he’s weathered the storm.
That may be true is Argentina and other countries, but here in the US of A, soccor replaces Mass on Sunday, and in my book that is scandalous. Even tho Mass is offered on Saturday evening, parents use the ‘soccor match’ as an excuse to skip Mass in many places. Alas!
German soccer team shies away from cross on jersey
German soccer blogs are not a place I usually go to for a story about religion, but an interesting one has popped up on the forum of the Eintracht Frankfurt team. The team let its fans vote over the Internet late last year to pick a 2008/2009 season jersey among 16 proposed models. Despite the fans’ enthusiasm for this innovation, Eintracht has ignored the result and chosen to use the runner-up design. As the team explained on its website:
After a close examination, we have decided that the winning jersey with the cross unfortunately cannot be used because the symbol on the front has a religious background. Inter Milan, an Italian club with a long tradition, has appeared in the current Champions League competition in a similar jersey and been strongly criticised for it. So after careful consideration, Eintracht Frankfurt has gone back and chosen the second jersey, which came in a close second in the vote.
The runner-up that came out on top has what Eintracht calls “hints of eagle claws on the front and a stylised eagle on the shoulder”. The city’s coat-of-arms has a red eagle that also figures on the Eintracht team logo.
So why the change? It turns out that a Turkish lawyer (and Fenerbahçe fan) asked UEFA in December to invalidate an Inter Milan victory over the Istanbul team in the Champions League last November because the red cross on the Italian jerseys recalled the Knights Templar crusaders. Shortly afterwards, the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia reported that fake FC Barcelona jerseys were on sale in Saudi Arabia with the crossbar removed from the cross on the team’s emblem. Eintracht doesn’t mention this Christian/Muslim angle explicitly, but it takes only a few clicks to find it.
Eintracht’s fan forum erupted with comments. The main thread on the jersey is up to 1,728 and climbing, many defending the loser as simply a better design. Almost 500 fans have signed a petition against the winner. The religious angle seemed irrelevant to most of them.
Do you think that teams should pay attention to possible religious overtones on their jerseys?
i think the designation right own to the team, they can do any design if they don’t encroach the copy right of others. but in the fact, the design should be accepted by the fans of their team
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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However it is up to science to define death and not up to religion.