Islam

A woman with links to the Islamic State group who returned to Australia from Syria last year has been charged with being a member of a terrorist organisation and entering a declared conflict zone, police have said.

The 34-year-old arrived in Australia in September along with another woman, police said, and was to appear in a Melbourne court on Thursday.

The announcement comes after two groups of women and children arrived in Australia this month after spending years in the al-Roj camp in north-east Syria where families of IS fighters have been held since 2019.

STIRLING, Scotland (LifeSiteNews) — A video clip has gone viral showing a young boy refusing to bow to Allah during a Beaver Scouts trip to a Stirling, Scotland, mosque as the rest of his troop and adult troop leader followed instructions and fell to their knees.

Reform UK councillors in Birmingham have called for council meetings to be conducted only in English after an Islamic prayer was read aloud in Arabic during a mayoral ceremony in the city.

Newly-appointed Lord Mayor Zaker Choudhry invited imam Muhammad Abdali to recite a verse from the Koran in Arabic as he was sworn in. The verse was later repeated in English.

Several people have been stabbed by a man wielding a knife at a Swiss train station.

Police cordoned off the area of the attack at the Winterthur station, 12 miles outside of Zurich.

At least four people were stabbed by the man wielding a knife who witnesses said was shouting Allahu Akbar, according to local reports.

The arrest of a 22-year-old man in Italy suggests Europe’s terror threat extends well beyond that posed by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Police in Reggio Emilia and Bologna on Monday arrested an Italian man of Moroccan origins, who judicial sources told reporters is accused of recruiting for the purpose of terrorism, including international terrorism.

Investigators discovered that the man had alleged motives to attack people with a knife. He had been in contact with a man believed to be a supporter of the ISIS Islamic terror group, who had offered training and funding.

HUGO Micheron is a French political scientist: a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Institute for Transregional Studies, whose work focuses on the evolution of jihadism in Europe. In particular, he has examined how jihad took root and flourished in specific locations in Europe, where it was propagated by veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war and refugees from training camps for the Afghan resistance in Peshawar after these were shut down by the Pakistan government in 1992. Wherever these activists settled in Europe, hotbeds of extremist preaching sprang up, imparting their zeal to new generations reared in exile. These breeding grounds of jihad cross-fertilised, forming networks across north-western Europe while maintaining contact with the Middle East.

In 1979, comedian icon John Cleese sat across from the Bishop of Southwark and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge on BBC’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning, defending his troupe’s film Monty Python’s Life of Brian against charges of blasphemy. Calm, articulate, and fiercely secular, Cleese argued that religious institutions should never be immune to satire, ridicule, or robust critique. For many years, this battle often defined Cleese’s public persona: a classic British liberal, an iconoclast fighting back against the conservative Christian establishment of the 20th century.

Raymond Ibrahim is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Christianity and Islam. He studied at California State University and also took graduate courses at Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He pursued PhD studies in medieval Islamic history at Catholic University of America. A former associate fellow at Middle East Forum, he is currently a Visiting Fellow at Danube Institute. Ibrahim is the author of several widely discussed books, including Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West, and he has translated and edited important primary sources on jihad and Christian martyrdom under Islamic rule.