Turkish PM raps France for face veil ban, militants online urge punishment for Paris
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan accused France of violating the freedom of religion on Wednesday after Paris began enforcing a law barring Muslim women from wearing full face veils in public. He told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that Turkey was the only Muslim country that had copied the French law on secularism, or separating church and state.
“It’s quite ironic to see that secularism is today under debate in Europe and is undermining certain freedoms,” he said. “Today in France, there is no respect for individual religious freedom,” he said. The Strasbourg-based Council of Europe monitors human rights across the continent. Read the full story here.
Meanwhile, the face veil ban has triggered calls on militant online forums for armed retaliation against the country, a U.S.-based terrorism monitoring service said on Wednesday. Some contributors to the messages seen on the password-protected, invitation-only militant chatrooms this week called on al Qaeda’s North Africa arm to “deter” France by staging armed attacks, the SITE service said.
The anonymous threats, presented by the sites as comments by individuals, carry none of the weight of published audio or video statements by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda or similar established armed groups seeking to attack Western targets. But Western security officials are concerned that sermons, discussions and videos published on online forums and social networking sites are increasingly used by militants to encourage sympathisers to attempt attacks.
“Sarkozy, leave our sisters alone or we will truly be obligated to act on our words,” wrote one participant with the online identity of “Jabeen of Abdullah Azzam”, writing on the Arabic-language Shumukh al-Islam forum, SITE reported. “Declare a war against crusader France!” wrote “al-katebat al-khdra” (the green battalion) on Shumukh al-Islam. “France with such action brought destruction and woes on itself.”
.
Tibetan monk burns to death in China protest, support group says
A Tibetan Buddhist monk burnt himself to death in western China Wednesday, triggering a street protest against government controls on the restive region, a group campaigning for Tibetan self-rule said. The self-immolation appeared to be a small repeat of protests that gripped Tibetan areas of China in March 2008, when Buddhist monks and other Tibetan people loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama, their traditional religious leader, confronted police and troops.
The 21-year-old, named Phuntsog, was a monk in Aba, a mainly ethnic Tibetan part of Sichuan province that erupted in defiance against Chinese control three years ago. The monk “immolated himself today in protest against the crackdown,” said Kate Saunders of the International Campaign for Tibet, a London-based organisation.
“He shouted some slogans about freedom when he did it,” said Zorgyi, a researcher for the organisation, who is based in northern India, where many exiled Tibetans live. “We’ve also received widespread information about a protest with nearly one thousand monks and lay people that came after,” Zorgyi said.
Read the full story by Chris Buckley here.
.
Tunisian Muslims worship freely after revolution
For 23 years, Tunisians prayed in fear. They limited their visits to the mosque. They talked to no one. Women could not wear the veil on the street and men could not wear long beards for fear of arrest. On Friday, for the first time since the overthrow of secular ex-president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisians attended their weekly sermon without fear that this public expression of piety would cost them their jobs or their freedom.
“We couldn’t pray freely before,” Abdel Kouki, 57, said outside the Quds mosque in the Tunisian capital as hundreds of men, most in suits or jeans, streamed into the small mosque.
Some spilled out onto its courtyard, where they knelt on straw mats. Women, their heads covered, crept in through a side entrance to their gallery to pray.
Like many Arab leaders, Ben Ali styled himself as a bulwark against the spread of Islamic extremism and al Qaeda and enjoyed good ties with the West until the last days of the Tunisian uprising that unseated him this month. Many said that under Ben Ali, plain clothes police infiltrated the mosques and filed reports on those who seemed to be praying too often or too ardently.
“In Tunisia, if you want to get a permanent job, you have to go through a security check on your political views, whether you are leftist, Islamist, nationalist,” Rida Harrathi, a self-proclaimed Islamist, told Reuters as he entered the mosque. “I was expelled from work and when I asked why they said your problem is with the interior ministry… If you are honest about yourself, and especially if you are an Islamist, you will lose your job or you will not be confirmed in it.”
Pope seeks Mideast religious liberty, bishops criticise Israel
Pope Benedict called on Islamic countries in the Middle East on Sunday to guarantee freedom of worship to non-Muslims and said peace in the region was the best remedy for a worrying exodus of Christians.
He made his a appeal at a solemn mass in St Peter’s Basilica ending a two week Vatican summit of bishops from the Middle East, whose final document criticized Israel and urged the Jewish state to end its occupation of Palestinian territories.
In his sermon at the gathering’s ceremonial end, the pope said freedom of religion was “one of the fundamental human rights that each state should always respect.” While some states in the Middle East allowed freedom of belief, he added, “the space given to the freedom to practice religion is often quite limited.”
At least 3.5 million Christians of all denominations live in the Gulf Arab region, the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the most conservative Arab Muslim societies in the world.
In their concluding message after two weeks of meetings at the Vatican, bishops from the Middle East said on Saturday they hoped a two-state solution for peace between Israel and the Palestinians could be made a reality and called for peaceful conditions that would stop a Christian exodus from the region.
what are the states where religion is practiced freely(and, of course, belief)?
Christians in Arab Gulf face hurdles to worship
Every Friday in the Muslim Gulf Arab state of Kuwait, 2,000 worshippers cram into a 600-seat church or listen outside to the mass relayed on loudspeakers, prompting their Roman Catholic bishop to worry about a stampede. “If a panic happens, it will be a catastrophe … it is a miracle that nothing has happened,” said Bishop Camillo Ballin.
These churchgoers represent only the tip of the iceberg. Ballin reckons his flock in Kuwait numbers around 350,000 out of a total of half a million Christians in the country.
At least 3.5 million Christians of all denominations live in the Gulf Arab region, the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the most conservative Arab Muslim societies in the world. The freedom to practice Christianity — or any religion other than Islam — is not always a given in the Gulf and varies from country to country. Saudi Arabia, which applies an austere form of Sunni Islam, has by far the tightest restrictions.
This week, Saudi media said 13 Filipinos had been charged with proselytizing after a raid on a Riyadh hotel where nearly 150 people had been attending a private Catholic Mass.
Christian leaders fret that their ability to worship is often compromised by lack of access or space, an issue they will raise at the Vatican next week during a synod of bishops called to discuss the fate of Christian minorities in the Middle East.
Read the full story by Diana Elias and Raissa Kasolowsky here.
German Chancellor Merkel honours Mohammad cartoonist at press award
Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute to freedom of speech on Wednesday at a ceremony for a Dane whose cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad provoked Muslim protests that led to 50 deaths five years ago.
Merkel, who grew up in Communist East Germany, recalled her joy over the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “Freedom for me personally is the happiest experience of my life,” Merkel, 56, said at the conference on press freedom in Potsdam near Berlin.
“Even 21 years after the Berlin Wall fell the force of freedom stirs me more than anything else,” she said. She called press freedom a “precious commodity”.
Honoured at the event was Kurt Westergaard, who drew the most controversial of 12 cartoons of Mohammad which angered Muslims worldwide after appearing in a Danish paper in 2005. Most Muslims consider any depiction of the founder of Islam to be offensive, and Westergaard’s cartoon portrayed Mohammad with a turban resembling a bomb. At least 50 people died in riots by enraged Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Aiman Mazyek of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany said in a statement: “Merkel is honouring the cartoonist who in our view trampled on our prophet and trampled on all Muslims.”
use this “Freedom” ideology for “holocaust” & “911″ and abot their interogation.. why double standard..wait ofr the time when we becom standard and benchmark of ytthe world , so your treacherous,cunning, twisty long-term, slow poisonous policies,to keep muslims undermined, submisive ,sorry for itslf..tiem never remains the same and yes history repeats itself you are one” we muslims are “One again” INSHALLAH!!
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
