Pakistan acquits eight Malala shooting suspects
http://news.yahoo.com/malala-shootin...113448004.html
Eight of the 10 men reportedly convicted and jailed for attempting to murder Pakistani schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai were actually cleared, officials said Friday.
The Nobel-prize winning teenager was shot in the head in October 2012 by Pakistani Taliban militants who boarded her school bus in an attack that also wounded two of her friends and shocked the world.
In April, legal and security officials announced that a court had sentenced 10 men to life imprisonment over the attack, following a trial in Malala’s hometown of Mingora, in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat district.
The suspects had been detained by the army during a major anti-militant offensive and the existence of the trial was kept secret until after its conclusion. No media were present for any hearings.
Salim Khan Marwat, the Swat district police chief, said that contrary to the earlier announcement, the anti-terrorist court had cleared all but two of the suspects.
“Two of them were sentenced to life imprisonment while eight others were acquitted,” he told AFP.
“I have no knowledge where the eight persons are now – either in military custody or released.”
Azad Khan, the deputy inspector general of police for Malakand division, of which Swat forms a part, confirmed the details and said the trial had been held under military supervision.
A senior court official with close knowledge of the case also confirmed the news, which emerged in a report in Britain’s Mirror newspaper.
“Two of them were convicted and eight others were acquitted because of insufficient evidence and no proof,” the official told AFP.
“The two, Israrullah and Izhar were sentenced to 25 years jail term, which is equivalent to life imprisonment.”
A senior security official in Mingora insisted the court had sentenced all 10 men to life imprisonment, accusing the police of lying.
Malala, now aged 17, survived the attempt on her life and in October last year became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history for her courageous and determined fight for children to have the right to go to school.
The man suspected of actually firing the gun at Malala, named by officials as Ataullah Khan, is believed to be on the run in Afghanistan, along with Pakistani Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah, who ordered the attack.
Pakistan’s military announced the arrest of the 10 suspects in September 2014 as part of an operation that involved the army, police and intelligence agencies.
Army spokesman Asim Bajwa said the group had a hitlist of 22 targets in addition to Malala, all ordered by Fazlullah.
- Aspiring PM -
Soon after the attack in 2012, Malala was taken to the United Kingdom for treatment and never returned to Pakistan after recovery. She has resumed her studies in the UK and aspires to become Prime Minister of Pakistan in future.
The Swat Valley was under the de facto control of Pakistani Taliban commander Fazlullah from 2007 to 2009, where it imposed a harsh brand of Sharia law and carried out public floggings and hangings.
Malala rose to fame during that time when she wrote a diary for BBC’s Urdu service using a pen name and later appeared on TV talk shows, advocating for girls’ education in the valley, and for peace.
The militants were driven out by an army operation after a ceasefire broke down, but remain a threat in the region.
Pakistan has been battling a homegrown Islamist insurgency for more than a decade after it agreed to cooperate with US-led NATO forces in their war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Public opinion however has shifted heavily against the Taliban in recent times after a series of brazen attacks on civilian targets, including a school in Peshawar where more than 150 people – mostly children – were killed.
Muslim Youth Leader Ahmed Saleem Arrested In Child Sex Predator Sting; Orlando Activist Worked For Council On American-Islamic Relations
http://www.ibtimes.com/muslim-youth-...tivist-1950388
A Muslim leader who worked with teenagers was arrested Tuesday in a sex predator sting after he reportedly tried to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Ahmed Saleem, a former community organizer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Orlando, was arrested after he attempted to meet up with detectives posing as a girl.
The bust also saw 100 other people arrested after detectives in Polk and Lake counties in Florida posed as children between the ages of 12 and 14. They used a vacant house and chat forums to pose as a child, or someone looking for prostitution. Theme park workers at Universal Orlando and SeaWorld, and a Disney World cast member, were also arrested in the operation named “Operation: L and P” — for Lake and Polk counties.
“If we didn’t get you in this operation, you better be sure we will in the next one,” Polk Sheriff Grady Judd said. “We are after you. Leave our children alone.” He added: “These are very dangerous people and they are after our children.”
Saleem traveled to meet the girl in a car with a license plate that read: “Invest in Children,” the Tampa Tribune reported. Saleem is founder of the Saleem Academy, an organization that seeks to empower Muslim youths. The academy’s website and Facebook page and the CAIR website deleted any mention of him on Wednesday.
“He’s well known as a community outreach leader interacting with teens in and around the Orlando area,” said Judd.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Islamic advocacy group, was created as an “organization that challenges stereotypes of Islam and Muslims,” according to its site. It works on civil rights and anti-defamation cases across the nation.
The state organization released this statement Wednesday: “CAIR Florida is shocked and deeply concerned by the serious crimes Ahmad Saleem is alleged to have committed. We trust in the legal system to hold to full account any and all persons found guilty. CAIR Florida takes the safety and security of the community very seriously and as such we attempt to thoroughly vet any potential employment candidates through standard hiring practices. Ahmad Saleem briefly worked for CAIR Florida as a community organizer for two months earlier this year until he abandoned his position in April. Accordingly, CAIR Florida removed him as an employee from our website and began recruiting a new candidate for the position prior to learning of the allegations against him.”
The Muslim population in the Orlando metropolitan area grew from 2,691 in 2000 to 27,939 in 2010, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. There are roughly 20 Muslim congregations across Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties, reported the Orlando Sentinel.
Saudi who ‘kept maid as sex slave’ denied parole in US for refusing to attend sex offender course
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/saudi-who-k...course-1501295
A Saudi national who was convicted of keeping his Indonesian maid as a sex slave has refused to attend a mandatory sex offender’s course, arguing that his Muslim beliefs do not allow him to look at pictures of scantily-clad women.
Homaidan al-Turki, 45, was jailed for 28 years in 2006 after his maid claimed she had been forced to work 12 hour days with no break and then locked in a cellar and abused regularly by the Saudi, who was in the US on an academic scholarship with his wife and five children.
Al-Turki’s sentence was reduced in 2011 to eight years-to-life but his parole applications have been repeatedly denied because of his refusal to attend a sex offenders course.
Al-Turki told prison officials in 2013 that the sex offender treatment programme “conflicts with [his] Islamic faith”, according to a letter by the then executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, Tom Clements.
His lawyers told the court in the same year that the programme: “would require [him] to look at photos that included women in bathing suits or undergarments as part of the evaluation process”, AP reported.
A Colorado Department of Corrections spokesperson told IBTimes UK: “Our treatment program does not show photos or images of scantily clad women” but that it would involve open discussion and admission of his offenses, which al-Turki has always denied.
Al-Turki’s extremely complex case began in 2004 when he, his wife and the maid – who the family had brought to America from their home in Riyadh – were arrested by US immigration over visa issues. The housekeeper claimed that she had suffered four years of exploitation and abuse by the family, including being sexually abused in a cellar in the al-Turki home.
After a two-and-a-half week trial - where it also emerged that al-Turki was being investigated by the FBI over potential terrorist links - he was convicted and given 28 years for sex offences and unlawful imprisonment. This was reduced to eight years in 2011 with a Colorado judge arguing that the original sentence had been “excessive”.
The case has become a cause célèbre in Saudi Arabia, with Al-Turki’s conviction and subsequent failure in 2013 to persuade the courts to allow him to serve his sentence at home garnering major media coverage.
As well as the refusal to take the mandatory treatment, prosecutors argued that there was no guarantee that the Saudi authorities would not release al-Turki as soon as he landed in Riyadh.
A hashtag in Arabic featuring al-Turki’s name had got over 900 thousands tweets by Thursday, and prominent media figures had made statements calling for his release.
Many Saudis consider al-Turki’s conviction to be politically motivated and that his original jailing was the product of anti-Muslim bias in the wake of the September 11 attacks. They point to his original investigation on terrorism charges as evidence that the US government wanted to frame al-Turki anyway it could.
Abdullah al-Mudaifer, a TV presenter at Rotana in Riyadh, said: “The majority of people in Saudi Arabia believe he has been subject to fabricated charges. Even those who believe he is guilty suggest that 28 years [the length of his initial charge] is long for this kind of conviction.”
Speaking from Riyadh, al-Turki’s son, Turki, called on the Saudi government to get involved in lobbying for his father’s release.
“We tried all possible ways through jurisdiction but it cannot offer any solution. I urge the Saudi government to use its political power to put more pressure on the US government to release my father,” he told IBTimes UK.
Homaidan’s friends and family launched a campaign for his release in 2010, releasing a video featuring prominent Saudi celebrities, including authors, clerics, TV presenter and football player requesting President Obama to free him. His son has argued that anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the 9/11 attacks led to his conviction.
“The hate and the misconception created after the attack influenced the jury verdict. Topics like women’s rights in Saudi and Islam were regularly brought up in the court, just to associate my father with negative perceptions,” he said.
He has also argued that the FBI has intervened in his case and even promised that he would be released if he returned to Saudi Arabia and spied for the US.
Al-Turki said: “We are optimistic that King Salman will do the necessary actions to secure the return of my father.”
Female genital mutilation performed in Iran
http://europe.newsweek.com/female-ge...ls-iran-328246
The first in-depth report into female genital mutilation (FGM) in Iran has claimed that the practise is prevalent in “secret pockets” of at least four provinces of Iran and “continues to violate aspects of women’s sexual rights.”
The report, authored by Kameel Ahmady, a research anthropologist based in London was released today to coincide with the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression observed every year on 4 June.
The report exposes the regions of Iran in which FGM is occurring and the “abundance of reasons women use to justify the act” and aims to provide the building blocks for an effective strategy to combat FGM in Iran.
Over a period of 10 years, Ahmady interviewed over 3,000 Iranian women, all of whom had experienced FGM, as well as speaking to 1,000 men who were also aware that the practise went on. His report identifies that FGM, known in Iran as “Khatne” or “Sonat,” is most common in the southern province of Hormozgan but is also found in rural Muslim communities based in Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan.
Ahmady identifies that the ritual, most common in Iran’s small minority of Shafi’i Sunni Muslims, is practised for a number of reasons, for example “to tame girls’ sex drive before marriage.” In many cases, FGM is also seen as a rite of passage for Iranian girls and is primarily encouraged by women and mothers who insist that their daughters are cut to make them “more virtuous than the majority Shia girls”.
Ahmady told the Guardian newspaper that the majority of women he spoke to who were circumcised defended FGM, saying that it is “a tradition that had existed for hundreds of years”.
Hilary Burrage, a consultant sociologist in the UK who has just finished writing a book on FGM, Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation: A UK Perspective told Newsweek of the secrecy surrounding the topic of FGM in rural areas of Iran. “Silence is one fundamental reason FGM remains a problem in Iran; there is, in many countries, simply not a language for women to discuss these matters.”
Burrage explained that this complete lack of discourse surrounding FGM is not only common between men and women, but also between women themselves. Both the lack of vocabulary surrounding the topic of FGM and women’s entitlement to use it “has led to a basic lack of understanding about how people’s bodies work,” Burrage said.
The report identifies that although FGM is not practised in every part of Iran, it is a cultural tradition that predates Islam itself. In fact the practise of FGM is known to date back to Egypt 2000 years ago, as a ritual of the Egyptian aristocracy, according to research carried out by the FGM National Clinical Group.
In 2015 FGM remains prevalent in approximately 30 different countries across Africa and the Middle East. In Africa, it is most common in Somalia, where 98% of girls are cut and Guinea where 96% of girls are cut. It is also prevalent in Oman and Iraqi Kurdistan, where between 72%-78% of girls are cut. The practise can also be found in small immigrant communities within Europe, such as the UK and France.
According to The World Health Organization, between 100-140 million girls and women have experienced FGM across Africa and the Middle East. Unicef estimates that without international action to stop the ritual, the number of girls cut each year will grow from 3.6 million in 2013 to 6.6 million by 2050.
Woman pleads for death to escape 30 times rape
In a harrowing interview with BBC World Service, Compassion4Kurdistan activists raising awareness of IS’ persecution of women revealed that Kurdish fighters took a phone call from the unidentified woman.
The peshmerga told the British-based activists that the woman was sobbing as she described her plight and debilitating injuries on the phone.
“If you know where we are please bomb us… There is no life after this. I’m going to kill myself anyway – others have killed themselves this morning,” she was quoted as saying.
“I’ve been raped 30 times and it’s not even lunchtime. I can’t go to the toilet. Please bomb us.”
Kurdish activists in Britain have been resorting to increasingly more controversial stunts to bring attention to their cause, including recreating a ‘sex slave’ market in Westminster.
The protest saw a group of chained veiled women being led in front of the Houses of Parliament, Leicester Square and Downing Street – where costumed men urged the public to bid on them.
A United Nations official yesterday said evidence strongly indicates that the IS group’s assault on Iraq’s Yazidi’s is “an attempt to commit genocide.”
Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic spoke to reporters Tuesday after a weeklong visit to Iraq, where he spoke with at least 30 Yazidis from various parts of the country.
After hundreds of Yazidis were killed as the Islamic State group swept across parts of northern and western Iraq in August, an estimated 7,000 Yazidis stayed and have been forced to convert to the Islamic State group’s harsh interpretation of Islam.
Islamic State fighters have captured, enslaved and sold Yazidi women and children, and claim the act is justified in Islam to prevent men from feeling “tempted” by other, non-enslaved women.
According to a piece in the group’s full-colour magazine, which is published in English and evidently aimed at a Western audience, confirms the long-rumoured atrocities committed by the group in Iraq, where Yazidi women have reported being kidnapped, sold for a few dollars and repeatedly raped.
The latest issue of Dabiq magazine released on Sunday stated, “the enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers.” It added, “the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations.”
Anyone opposing slavery in such circumstances is not a Muslim, the piece says. “Enslaving the families of the kuffar [non-believers] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur’an… and thereby apostatizing from Islam.”
A Human Rights Watch report, which came out on Sunday, claimed hundreds of Yazidi men, women and children from Iraq are being held captive in makeshift detention facilities by the group.
The report follows two UN officials issuing a joint statement on the “barbaric acts” of sexual violence committed by ISIS fighters.
“We condemn, in the strongest terms, the explicit targeting of women and children and the barbaric acts the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ has perpetrated on minorities in areas under its control, and we remind all armed groups that acts of sexual violence are grave human rights violations that can be considered as war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Nickolay Mladenov, special representative of the UN secretary-general for Iraq and Zainab Hawa Bangura, special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, said.
The statement, reported by Newsweek, cited evidence of “savage rapes” being used as weapons of war against women and teenage boys and girls belonging to the Yazidi, Christian, Turkomen and Shabak minority groups in Iraq.
Academic and Middle East expert Haleh Esfandiari has said IS allow their followers to rape captured girls and women as a “reward”.
“ISIS has received considerable world attention for its savage beheadings, executions of captured soldiers and men in conquered towns and villages, violence against Christians and Shiites, and the destruction of non-Sunni shrines and places of worship,” she blogged for the Wall Street Journal.
“But its barbarity against women has been treated as a side issue. Arab and Muslim governments, vocal on the threat ISIS poses to regional stability, have been virtually silent on ISIS’s systemic degradation, abuse, and humiliation of women.
“To the men of ISIS, women are an inferior race, to be enjoyed for sex and be discarded, or to be sold off as slaves.”
Amnesty International spokeswoman Donatella Rovera, who is in Iraq, told Huffington Post UK that, though the charity had not verified any cases of women suffering sexual abuse at the hands of IS, she said there was evidence that captured women were under “strong pressure to convert to Islam and strong pressure to marry (ISIS) fighters”.
Many of the women and girls have told horrific stories of abuse. One 15-year-old Yazidi girl who escaped from the group said she was trafficked across the border to Syria and sold to a man in Raqqa, before escaping to Turkey.
“They took girls to Syria to sell them,” she said, her body shyly hunched over as she spoke. “I was sold in Syria. I stayed about five days with my two sisters, then one of my sisters was sold and taken (back) to Mosul, and I remained in Syria.”
In Raqqa, she said, she was first married off to a Palestinian man. She claims she shot him, saying the Palestinian’s Iraqi housekeeper who was in a dispute with the man helped her by giving her a gun. She fled, but she had nowhere to run. So she went to the only place she knew, she said — the house where she was first held with the other girls in Raqqa.
There, the militants did not recognise her and sold her off again — for $1,000 to a Saudi fighter, she said. The Saudi militant took her to a house where he lived with other fighters. “He told me, ‘I’m going to change your name to Abeer, so your mother doesn’t recognize you,’” she said. “You’ll become Muslim, then I will marry you. But I refused to become a Muslim and that’s why I fled.”
ISIS: Pigeon Genitals are Offensive to Islam
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgr...sive-to-islam/
The list of things offensive to Islam is never ending.
Opened diet cokes, kites, chess, other religions, women and now pigeons. Especially pigeons flying overhead.
ISIS clerics have banned pigeon breeding, which they say is an affront to Islam.
According to the Daily Mail, the jihadist organization that has taken over parts of Iraq and Syria believes that “the sight of birds’ genitals as they fly overhead is offensive to Islam.”
Anyone caught violating the new edict is in danger of being subjected to public flogging.
Earlier this year, there were reports that 15 young boys were arrested and at least three of them executed in eastern Iraq after they were found to be engaged in pigeon breeding.
The official ISIS edict states that the ban was instituted as a means “to put a stop to the greater criminal act of harming one’s Muslim and Muslim women neighbors, revealing the [pigeon’s] genitals and wasting time.”
Clearly Allah is at fault here for creating pigeons and making them fly overhead. The only sensible thing to do is to declare that Allah is offensive to Islam.
This is Islam. An endless well of insanity from which maddened clerics draw new bans on more lunatic things. Islam licenses rape, but bans pigeon breeding because that’s immoral.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...arabia-in-dock
The Guardian view on the flogging of Raif Badawi: Saudi Arabia is in the dock
Ensaf Haidar, the wife of jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, at the annual meeting of the German section of Amnesty International in Dresden, Germany on 23 May 2015. Photograph: Arno Burgi/dpa/Corbis
The cruel and unjust sentence passed on the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes, has been upheld by the supreme court in Riyadh. Hopes that the court might reduce or even commute the sentence, particularly as the holy fast of Ramadan begins next week, have been dashed. The only remaining appeal now is to the Saudi monarch, King Salman. From Quebec, where she has been granted asylum with their children, Mr Badawi’s wife Ensaf Haidar has said that she fears the public flogging – 50 lashes at a time every Friday after prayers – might resume as soon as this Friday. Mr Badawi had been whipped only once after his sentence was passed, and prison doctors deemed that he was too ill to be flogged again before his appeal was heard. Britain and its allies, conveniently meeting together at the G7 in Germany, must unite and condemn what is almost certainly a life-threatening sentence. They should stand together in defence of their shared values and demand his release.
Mr Badawi’s sentence is a brutal exercise in public intimidation. He has challenged Saudi Arabia’s autocratic and religious state, and even though his arguments could not be more carefully and modestly expressed, to hold them at all is incompatible with the regime under which he lives. His offence was to start a website, the Saudi Free Liberals forum, that argued for secularism and free speech. He carefully avoided direct criticism of the Saudi royal family, but – like many Arab thinkers before him –he is convinced that a separation of faith and state is the best course if his country is to have a future of what he calls “modernisation and hope”. In an expression of his convictions posted five years ago, he wrote: “States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear.” For this belief he faces a punishment from a state that was one of the handful never to endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that that document violates the precepts of Islam.
As this newspaper has argued before, Saudi Arabia ought to be treated as a global pariah. It is a source of a particular strain of jihadist poison, of fanatical preachers, and of young men, like the 9/11 hijackers, who threaten both the west and the whole Middle East by their readiness to fight, often in the cause of Wahhabist Islam. For the past month, a Saudi blockade has been imperilling thousands of innocent Yemenis, and aerial bombardment by Saudi jets is killing scores more. Yet the kingdom continues to be treated with honour by western powers. Britain buys Saudi oil and courts Saudi trade. Even free speech in the UK has been curtailed in order to avoid giving offence to so rich and powerful an ally. Of all the European powers, only Sweden has been prepared to jeopardise relations and its arms trade by taking a stand.
Mr Badawi will never have doubted what a challenge he posed to the kingdom. He will have understood the retribution that it was likely to bring down on his head. It is the kind of courage that demands to be recognised and honoured by everyone who respects human rights. We are and we remain Raif Badawi.
Malaysia’s dark journey toward an Islamic State
13 — In a global environment that reveres economic parameters more than the living condition of the human beings behind them Malaysia’s steady fall into a spiral of religious fundamentalism has successfully dodged serious international condemnation for years. A strong economy, particularly when compared with its Asean neighbours, has provided the government in Putrajaya with the necessary leverage to ignore fundamental human rights and continue to truncate what is left of them. Anwar Ibrahim’s recent conviction based on a law that must not exist in the first place might have been a slight temporary hiccup as hardly anyone doubts that it was more than a political campaign to weaken the opposition. Soon, however, it will have left the international conscience and at its current rate Malaysia’s societal and humanitarian decline will further accelerate.
Perhaps more than ever before the political elite surrounding Prime Minister Najib Razak are incapable of representing the population of Malaysia as a whole and in many instances reluctant to even try. Najib’s constant reminders that Islam is the official state religion often feel awkward and forced as if this regular reiteration of his litany was required to keep a dying patient alive.
They also expose the underlying quandary of the Malaysian government: if there somehow were a magical solution, it would not hesitate to change Malaysia from its current multi-ethnic, multi-opinion nature into a monolith of pious Muslims who blindly follow their religious and political leaders. When former Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi recently said — in the context of a commendable advice not to give in to the threats of extremism — that in his eyes Malaysia was “still a model of how a multiracial, multi-religious and multicultural country should be”, it might have felt like a failed attempt at humour if the topic at hand were less serious. In fact, the recent announcement by the Pew Research Centre that Muslims can be expected to constitute 72.4 per cent of the Malaysian population in 2050 must have been good news for many a policymaker across the states of Peninsular Malaysia: it would appear that things are going to become much easier for them.
However, at least two caveats need to be considered in order to evaluate this prognosis. Firstly, it seems to imply that average ethnically Malay citizens, the heart of Malaysia’s Muslim population, will remain comparatively poor, a factor classically associated with higher fertility rates. As the government has already succeeded in partly eradicating the economic disparity across ethnicities with controversial laws for decades, it can be assumed with some careful optimism that this aspect might further lose its relevance for demographic prognostications.
Secondly, the prognosis relies on the assumption that the currently religion-fuelled legal and political environment of Malaysia will not change during the next thirty-five years; concretely, that being a Muslim will continue to be an obligation, rather than a choice for those who happen to be born into a Malay family. In fact, it is this second caveat that exemplifies a factor that might determine whether the thin ice underneath the feet of open-minded Malaysians — regardless of ethnicity or religion — will break or not. To be born to Muslim parents in Malaysia means to live outside a modern world where individuals freely choose their religion or lack thereof — and this has serious implications on an individual’s social and personal life. The looming possibility of an implementation of hudud law, a Sharia-related piece of sexist and antediluvian jurisdiction encompassing corporal punishment for “crimes” like consensual sex between unmarried people or apostasy, two personal decisions that must never be penalized, in Kelantan, which has long been Malaysia’s most reactionary state in the political sphere, corroborates fears of an emerging Islamic state. The fact alone that such a policy can enter the political landscape as more than just a nightmarish phantasmagoria shows the negative potential for Malaysia to sink deeper and deeper into fundamentalist quagmire. The hackneyed argument that this is “what people want” seems to be at odds with the high number of laws created to ensure that what said people “want” perfectly coincides with what benefits the interests of the ones holding political and religious power.
The assurance that hudud — just like other laws affecting personal life decisions – will only apply to Muslims does not attenuate the severity of the problem in the slightest given that Islam is not a choice. Those who believe in Allah, but disagree with the increasingly overwhelming intrusions into their lives become ostracised or see no other way than to leave their homeland altogether. In a country as prosperous as Malaysia it is a strange anachronism that such a large percentage of the population appears to be blindly following the religious institution of Islam.
Yet, stabilising such a religious climate is crucial to those currently in charge of the country’s future not only in Malaysia: the truth that many individuals are essentially bullied into government-sanctioned versions of Islam might be one of the main reasons for the religion’s growth rate around the globe and the way by which several ideology-driven governments seem to be purposely isolating their respective populations from an increasingly interconnected world in the social and cultural domain. As it is always the case when religion enters politics, whether or not somebody believes is not at all a relevant question.
The religious institution is merely an instrument to enforce the continuation of the given power structures within a society. While policymakers struggle with unimportant questions like whether Muslims should be allowed to drink beer or touch dogs, the real problem lies at the very core of the political system: in the fact that Malaysia is a country with a state religion, namely Islam; and that said religion has been meddling with politics since the nation’s inception.
Although Islam is by far the most politicized religion of our times, the problems of political Islam do not derive from the specifics of this very religion, but from the simple fact that religion and politics never work well together. Any attempt to align an ancient institution that is out of touch with modern times with the specifics of contemporary democracy, which oppose many fundamental concepts of Islam or any other religion, is doomed from the start.
Basic psychological models have shown for decades that religious institutions will always lead to ostracism of those who do not comply and by definition this would be every non-Muslim and also every Muslim who questions the status quo alongside, due to the deeply engrained patriarchy and misogyny at the core of any institutionalized religion, women in general. The fact that, if anything, political Islam has become stronger in government and opposition in recent years is a red flag for everybody who still hopes that Malaysia can turn around and truly embrace its diverse heritage, making “1Malaysia” more than just a cringe-worthy propaganda campaign.
The political elite of Malaysia have created a nation unsettlingly resembling Apartheid South Africa or the pre-Civil Rights Movement United States. Instead of using its economic strength in order to realise its potential as a catalyst for open-minded, inclusive and humanitarian development within Asean — a role that now perhaps falls on the shaky shoulders of the new Indonesian president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) – Malaysia appears to be on a dangerous path toward a future more reminiscent of contemporary Saudi Arabia where rich and oppressive father figures have created what is essentially every misogynist’s wildest dream come true.
Although it is hard to imagine given the most recent manoeuvres in government and opposition, which both receive most of their legitimacy and power from Islamic drivel, maybe it is not too late yet for a political U-turn. A functioning and just society can only be created if religious institutions are kept out of politics and awareness of the inadequacy of political Islam seems to be on the rise within certain parts of the intellectual elite. Without fundamental change the religious and ethnic divide across the country’s population will only worsen and even literally tear the country apart as the dissatisfaction with the federal government keeps growing in the eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak.
Malaysia might for now continue to be a nation with a promising economic future, but with regard to its societal, humanitarian and cultural development its outlook remains depressingly bleak.
Islamic jihadists are ‘pornography-obsessed w******’, says Boris Johnson
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/mayor...-10012523.html
London Mayor Boris Johnson has branded religious fundamentalists recruited by terror groups such as Islamic State (IS) as “w******” who are obsessed with pornography.
Mr Johnson took aim at Islamic extremists in an interview with The Sun newspaper, suggesting they were young men who were low on self-esteem.
According to the paper Mr Johnson said: “If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally w******. Severe onanists.
“They are tortured. They will be very badly adjusted in their relations with women, and that is a symptom of their feeling of being failure and that the world is against them. They are not making it with girls and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort - which of course is no comfort.
“They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong - like winners.”
He also said he felt efforts to tackle extremism should come from within Muslim communities but claimed clerics had not been “persuasive in the right way with these people”.
More than 500 Britons are thought to have gone to Iraq and Syria to fight with IS, while a report this week found many Western women in IS were “desensitised” to violence carried out by the militants and encouraged it on social media.
It is not the first time Mr Johnson has been outspoken on terrorism - on a recent visit to the Kurdish regional capital Irbil, he called on the Government to supply sophisticated weaponry to Kurdish peshmerga fighters battling IS terrorists.
But he suggested that ministers were nervous about doing so because they feared they could be used by the Kurds to establish their own separate state, independent of the Iraqi government in Baghdad.
14 year-old girl kills 35 year-old husband
Repost from Coffeeshop talk:
An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
Gezawa (Nigeria) (AFP) - A packed Nigerian court heard testimony on Monday that a 14-year-old girl admitted to killing her 35-year-old husband with rat poison, and signed a police confession with a thumbprint because she cannot write.
Wasila Tasi’u, from a poor and deeply conservative Muslim family, has been charged with murdering her husband Umar Sani days after their marriage in northern Kano state.
Because she did not understand English, homicide investigator Abdullahi Adamu translated her statement from the Hausa language dominant in the region and gave her the document to sign.
She could not write her name, so “she had to use a thumbprint,” he told the court during his testimony on the last day of the prosecution’s case.
The state’s lawyers, who are seeking the death penalty, also called to the stand Tasi’u’s “co-wife”, a term referring to the woman – identified as Ramatu – whom the deceased farmer had married previously in a region where polygamy is widespread.
Ramatu said she got along well with Tasi’u and that the two had prepared the food together on April 5, the day Sani died.
She testified that because it was Tasi’u’s turn to share a bed with Sani, Tasi’u was also entitled to serve him his meal.
“After putting the food in the dish I didn’t see anybody put anything in it,” Ramatu said.
She told the court she saw her husband sometime later being helped back to the house by a neighbour, unable to walk and foaming at the mouth.
As she spoke the court was overflowing, with people peering in through the open windows and a crowd so large it spilled out of the gallery door.
The case has sparked outrage among human rights activists who say Nigeria should be treating Tasi’u as a victim, noting the possibility that she was raped by the man she married.
But others in the region, including relatives of the defendant and the deceased, have rejected the notion that Tasi’u was forced into marriage.
They have said that 14 is a common age to marry in the deeply impoverished region and that Tasi’u chose Sani from among many suitors.
A motion by defence lawyers to have the case moved to juvenile court was rejected, despite claims by human rights lawyers that she is too young to stand trial for murder in a high court.
Further complicating the case is the role of sharia (Islamic law) in northern Nigeria, which allows children to marry according to some interpretations.
While sharia is technically in force in Kano, law enforcement officials have no guidelines concerning how it should be balanced with the secular criminal codes, creating a complex legal hybrid system.
According to Human Rights Watch, Nigeria is not known to have executed a juvenile offender since 1997, when the country was ruled by military dictator Sani Abacha.
The trial has been adjourned until February 16.
http://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-child-...194833359.html
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