I am not an historian, decent author or a journalist, and the chances are that unless there is a link or reference to somewhere else, the perpetrator is yours truly – Renaud Sarda. I created this blog as a focal point, to arm people with arguments and facts that they can perhaps use to counter biased media reporting and anti-Israel propaganda, and to help counter (BDS) campaign. I am a Zionist/Sephardi/Jew who will fly the Israeli flag, and defend whatever Israel does.
Pharmacienne et romancière, Ghada Abdel Aal habite à Mahalla Al-Qobra, ville industrielle du delta égyptien. Pour se rendre au Caire, elle emprunte l'un des innombrables minibus qui sillonnent l'Egypte. "J'achète toujours deux places, pour être sûre de ne pas être harcelée par un voisin", dit cette femme de 35 ans. Auteure d'un roman savoureux (La Ronde des prétendants, Editions de l'Aube, 2012), Ghada Abdel Aal n'a pourtant rien d'une allumeuse. Elle porte le hijab, qui s'est quasiment généralisé dans son entourage, sans chercher à le "compenser" - comme tant d'autres - par un pantalon moulant ou un maquillage outrancier. "Le harcèlement sexuel, je l'ai intégré depuis l'enfance, précise-t-elle. Dès l'âge de 10 ou 11 ans, quand j'apercevais un groupe de garçons ou que je devais passerdevant un café, je changeais spontanément de trottoir."
Le harcèlement peut être qualifié de onzième plaie d'Egypte(regarder vers la 4eminute de la vidéo). En effet, la situation prend une tournure inquiétante : les institutions sont discréditées, la police est absente, l'insécurité augmente, les agressions contre les chrétiens se multiplient, alors que la hausse du chômage, la hausse des prix et la pénurie de gaz ou d'essence provoquent des drames. suite>>
An Istanbul court has sentenced Turkish-Armenian writer Sevan Nişanyan to 58 weeks in prison for an alleged insult to the Prophet Muhammad in a blog post.
The prosecutor had been seeking one and a half years of jail time for Nişanyan on charges of “insulting the religious beliefs held by a section of the society.”
The sentence cannot be converted to a financial penalty, but Nişanyan has the right to appeal.
He was charged with blasphemy after writing a blog post titled, “[We] need to fight hate speech.”
“Making fun of an Arab leader who claimed he contacted Allah hundreds of years ago and received political, financial and sexual benefits is not hate speech,” Nişanyan said in his post last year. “It is an almost kindergarten-level test of what is called freedom of expression.”
On May 22, the day of the sentencing, Nişanyan retweeted his blog post, writing, “Let’s share the article that was sentenced to 13-and-a-half months at the Istanbul 10th Criminal Court for insulting religious bla-bla.”
Yes, in Turkey, defending free speech can be a hate crime.
In his original blog post that got him in trouble Nişanyan also called out Muslim Jew-hatred, saying that Muslim preachers who say that the tiny number of Jews in the world are part of an "abhorrent race" and behind all the evils in the world are "vomiting nonsense" and this is a classic example of a hate crime.
If Bashar al-Assad is toppled, his replacement is likely to be an Radical Islamic regime that implements Sharia law. The Syrian opposition publicly flogged two men in a town in northern Syria this week, according to reports.
Their crime?
In Islamic law, a woman is divorced before she can be remarried (so that there is no doubt as to the parentage of any children she has.
A father in Syria married his daughter to a young man before the three months were complete.
So the Islamists who control the town gave both the father and the groom a public flogging, apparently with electrical wire, after reading their verdict.
Here videotape. More after the video.
The embedded video, from Saraqeb in the Idlib province of northwestern Syria, shows the carrying out of sentences handed down by a rebel sharia field court.
Hundreds of local residents gathered to hear the sentence being pronounced by a rebel. Two residents were found guilty of offences against sharia law and sentenced to 40-50 lashes each.
The elder man was convicted of having his daughter, who had divorced her first husband, married to a second man during the "cooling off" period of three months required by sharia law. He did this ten days before the 3-month period had ended and was sentenced to 50 lashes.
JTA — A member of the Israeli delegation to the Eurovision song contest in Malmo, Sweden, said he and two of his compatriots were threatened on the street.
Despite several dozen anti-Semitic incidents in the city annually, Swedish court system has yet to convict felons
Alon Amir told Sveriges Radio on Tuesday that he and the other two Israelis were accosted by a group of young men. Amir told the men he was from Cyprus “because I knew where it was heading,” he told Sveriges Radio on Tuesday. “They said: ‘Where are the Israelis staying, we want to bomb the place,’” Amir said. “It wasn’t a joke.”
Several dozen anti-Semitic incidents per year occur annually in Malmo, a city of about 1,000 Jews where approximately 30 percent of the population comes from Muslim countries. The Swedish court system did not convict anyone of hate crimes in Malmo in 2010 and 2011 despite registering 480 complaints.
On Wednesday, the chairman of the Malmo municipality’s Culture Committee, Daniel Sestrajcic, said Israel should be boycotted from the Eurovision – a major international event with delegations from 39 countries. “Israel can return when Palestine is free,” he shouted at a demonstration commemorating the Palestinian “catastrophe,” or Nakba – the Palestinian name for the creation of the State of Israel.
In a statement on May 14, Rolf K Nilsson, a Swedish lawmaker, condemned Sestrajcic for making Malmo “once again emerge as an anti-Semitic, anti-Jew and anti-Israeli city.”
The competition in Malmo is scheduled to end Saturday. Hundreds of Jews and non-Jews are planning to walk together that day through the streets of Malmo while wearing kippahs as a sign of their opposition to anti-Semitism.
Malmo’s outgoing mayor, Ilamr Reepalu, has been accused of encouraging anti-Semitism with statements he made, including drawing an analogy between anti-Semitism and Zionism and suggesting Jews distance themselves from Zionism to stay safe.
Last year, assailants set off an explosive device outside the city’s Jewish Community Center and vandalized the building. No one has been indicted for the incident, which police said was not classified as a hate crime.
The narratives of the title reflect the journeys made by a group of 47 female converts to Islam from around the UK, reflecting the ethnic and social diversity of contemporary Britain. These women gathered in Cambridge last year to discuss their personal experiences of religious conversion.
While the report considers the nuances of their individual and personal experiences it also highlights a set of generic issues that affect female converts to Islam regardless of their ethnicities, class, education or social background. The report focuses on a range of issues, some of which have, and some of which have not, been publicly discussed before. Included here are perspectives on dress, marriage, family, the children of converts, sexuality, polygyny, struggles within the faith, the relationship with 'heritage' Muslim communities, political engagement, forms of religious guidance and spirituality.
Non-Muslims are frequently perplexed as to why women, and in particular educated women, choose to embrace Islam. Generally, most people possess less than a rudimentary understanding of the ideals and precepts of Islam and tend to base their assumptions on an unhelpful mixture of ignorance and Islamophobic sentiments.
A more informed understanding requires the enquirer to step outside the parameters of their own frames of reference and see the world from an Islamic perspective. While many values are shared between Muslims and non-Muslims the expression of those values are conveyed in different ways. They may, at times, erroneously appear to conflict. While estimates vary as to the number of converts to Islam in the UK (some estimates are as high as 100,000 converts in Britain) many people will now know a family member, friend or colleague who has embraced Islam and they are struggling to come to terms with what that entails.
Undoubtedly, the most important consideration to emerge from Narratives of Conversion to Islam is the pressing requirement for on-going personal support, particularly during the early stages following conversion. This is frequently characterised by sustained periods of uncertainty and confusion, as well as unsettled relationships with family and friends.
Many converts report feeling isolated and alone, following the initial euphoria that greets their conversions. The existing and often limited provision of services available to them requires urgent development, plus better engagement with members of heritage Muslims communities. Measures can then be designed to help converts become better integrated and assimilated into these existing communities. This is imperative to prevent converts becoming alienated both from their culture of origin and from the Muslim communities that they seek to join.
Islam is a communal faith and Islamic ideals inculcate a regard for one another. These encompass a sense of solidarity, embodied in a loving concern for the well-being of every Muslim. Converts need to see these principles applied through supportive action and acknowledgement from heritage Muslim communities, which alongside established groups of converts can work together to find better solutions.
In this regard the New Muslims Project, based in Leicestershire, has supported those new to Islam over the past 20 years. It offers a variety of services designed to meet the specific needs of this diverse community. Such support has included counselling and advice, educational and social programmes, a Meeting Point newsletter, Qur'anic Arabic tuition, trips to Muslims countries and pilgrimages to Hajj and Umrah. It has also provided the infrastructure to develop a network of regional support groups.
Latterly, the New Muslims Project has become engaged in research, such as the new report launched today. In 2010-11 it initiated a study into the challenges faced by converts to Islam in Leicester, 'Between Isolation and Integration: A report on the Muslim Convert Community in Leicester,' and is currently involved in a number of on-going research projects.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- For some, it was a barbaric way to treat animals. For others, it was great business.
Until January, slaughterhouses across Poland - a deeply Catholic nation - were the unlikely venues for the Islamic and Jewish slaughter of animals, which in both religions involves a swift cut to the throat of a conscious animal and death by bleeding.
Millions of euros were being made exporting the halal and kosher meat to countries like Egypt, Iran and Israel, as well as to Muslim and Jewish markets inside Europe.
In a victory for a growing animal rights movement, activists succeeded in getting a ban on such religious slaughter. But with economic decline deepening and exports seen as a possible salvation, the government faces pressure to get the practice reinstated legally - and is scrambling to do so.
Though Poland's own cuisine is heavy in pork, a meat banned by Jewish and Islamic laws, the country has cut out this niche business for itself in one example of the economic savvy Poland has shown since joining the European Union in 2004. Kosher and halal meat exports have grown between 20 and 30 percent per year in recent years as the largely agricultural country has capitalized on its low labor costs and a reputation for healthy farm animals.
"God gave us good food, good soil and good farm animals, and he gave the Muslim countries what they have under the surface - black gold," said Mufti Tomasz Miskiewicz, the top Muslim leader in Poland. "There are nations with big populations - like Egypt, the Arab countries, Indonesia - that need this food and don't have enough cattle to produce enough meat themselves."
The business has been overseen and encouraged by Poland's Jewish and Muslim communities, minorities that are very small but with a presence going back many centuries. Polish Jews once made up the world's largest Jewish population; though nearly wiped out in the Holocaust, the community is growing. Tatars, a Muslim people, also settled here centuries ago, and have been joined recently by Arab diplomats, businessmen and students.
The kosher and halal business had boomed until January, when the ban took effect following a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal. Though the actual slaughter was carried out by specially trained Muslim and Jewish officials, the industry also created thousands of supporting jobs for others.
Animal rights activists argue that killing animals without stunning them first causes unnecessary suffering to the animals. Jewish and Muslim leaders strongly disagree, and insist that their method is actually more humane, in part became it causes the animals to lose consciousness very fast. They argue that standard industrial slaughter involves pre-stunning that is sometimes not effective, leading to even greater suffering.
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, says Jewish tradition has always been concerned with the welfare of animals, noting, for instance, that it bans hunting and any senseless suffering.
"For close to 3,000 years, Jewish slaughter practices have been followed that minimize pain to the animal," Schudrich said.
Polish meat industry officials are hesitant to take sides on which slaughter method causes more suffering, with their focus firmly on economics.
The pro-market government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is also eager to get the business going again and has recently drafted a law that would reinstate religious slaughter while also adding some new protections for animals.
The law's fate now rests with parliament, which is due to debate and vote on it in the coming weeks. It is expected to pass since the government enjoys majority support in the assembly, but probably not without some heated debate. Lawmakers are under pressure from all sides, including from an animal rights movement that has grown stronger as the ex-communist country grows increasingly Westernized.
In the meantime, industry leaders warn that millions of euros and thousands of jobs could be lost if Poland doesn't re-legalize religious slaughter soon.
"Banning ritual slaughter was a cardinal mistake with huge consequences," said Witold Choinski, the head of Polskie Mieso, or Polish Meat, an organization that represents the interests of meat producers.
Choinski said there are no official figures on the financial losses so far, but the number is high: the industry is worth about 500 million euros ($650 million) per year to the Polish economy and it has been largely frozen for nearly half a year. About 100,000 tons of kosher or halal beef and 100,000 tons of poultry were exported annually before the ban - making up between 20 and 30 percent of Poland's beef exports and about 10 percent of poultry exports, Choinski said.
He says there is currently no production at all of the religiously slaughtered meat, though Miskiewicz and others say there is some small-scale production taking place in a legal gray zone.
Many of the Polish meat facilities which handle kosher and halal meat - usually in addition to traditional slaughter - have had to limit their overall production because of the ban, while major contracts with traders from the Middle East have been suspended, Choinski said.
Poland had been close to sealing major long-term contracts with Saudi Arabia, but these were abandoned because of the unclear legal situation. Meanwhile, many Polish companies that produce halal and kosher meat are on the verge of bankruptcy, and up to 6,000 workers could lose their jobs, he said.
"Poland can't afford this. Most meat production facilities are in small places without other places for people to work and this is dooming the economic prospects of people," he said. "But I think there will be a resolution because no government can allow 6,000 people to get laid off during an economic crisis."
For now, business is being picked up by producers in nearby countries, including Latvia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Miskiewicz said.
Bosnia is also working hard to position itself as an exporter of halal products. The country opened its first halal fair Wednesday in Sarajevo, welcoming representatives of the Islamic world to take a look at Bosnian products. Erdal Trhulj, Bosnia's regional industry minister, said the halal industry is growing worldwide, and that his country "aims to become a hub for halal industry in this part of Europe."
The debate surrounding the issue has lacked any overt anti-Jewish or anti-Islamic tones, though religious rights are also pressing concern for the minorities and a government that wants to maintain good ties with them.
Miskiewicz says there is a degree of unfairness in banning Jewish and Islamic slaughter when so many Polish Catholics follow a similar practice themselves at Christmas, when carp are slaughtered in homes across the nation without any pre-stunning.
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Associated Press writer Aida Cerkez in Sarajevo, Bosnia, contributed to this report.
Point of No Return exclusive (with thanks: Levana)
The Israeli Knesset is expected to confirm 30 November as the Memorial Day for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Moroccan-born MK Shimon Ohayon (pictured) this week tabled a bill stipulating the Memorial Day as part of "the Rights of Jewish Refugees who were uprooted, expelled or fled from Arab countries with the establishment of the state of Israel or in the wake of it."
The date chosen, 30 November, is the day after 29 November 1947, which marks the passing of UN Resolution 181 on the Partition of Palestine.
The subsequent furore in the Arab world that year led to antisemiticunrest in Egypt and Libya, and pogroms in Syria, Aden and Bahrain. November was traditionally a notorious month for anti-Jewish disturbances in Arab countries coinciding with the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
The Israeli Ministry for Tourism will be responsible for the observance of Memorial Day, working together with the Ministries for Education, Culture and Sport. The Israeli Foreign ministry will also be expected to organise special events outside Israel. If 30 November falls on a Friday or Saturday, the Day will be observed at the start of the following week.
Although the idea of a Memorial Day has long been in the pipeline, it was heavily promoted by Danny Ayalon, deputy foreign minister in the last government.
Shimon Ohayon is a new arrival in the Knesset, where he represents Yisrael Beytenu. Next week he is due to meet representatives of the organisations of Jews from Arab countries and the heads of the Israeli delegation to the World Jewish Congress held last week in Budapest.
