The West has been terrorised into silence
Art and Islam often seem like oil and water. Other times, they behave like matches and gasoline.
It is hard to believe that more than 30 years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses — longer ago than the fall of the Berlin Wall. I also experienced the combustion created when art meets Islam, back in 2004.
ISIS bride Shamima Begum is said to be ‘very frightened’ that she will be executed if found guilty of terrorism offences.
The 22-year-old, whose British citizenship was removed in 2019, is reported to be facing the prospect of being prosecuted after officials requested an investigation into her links to ISIS, also known as Islamic State.
Offending a small minority is no justification for censoring a film
Protesters have spent the last week calling for a film to be pulled from cinemas in the UK. These were not blue-haired students upset over a new Dave Chappelle biopic, but Muslim activists calling for Cineworld to remove what they labelled a “blasphemous” film.
Boston-area Jewish groups are sounding the alarm about a “truly vile perpetration of hate against the Jewish community” as a new pro-Palestine website puts a bullseye on local Jewish organizations, schools and others.
The “Mapping Project” interactive map went live last week, naming and listing the addresses for scores of Jewish groups — including the Anti-Defamation League, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, JCRC of Greater Boston, Synagogue Council of Massachusetts, Jewish Arts Collaborative, Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston, and many more.
OUAGADOUGOU, June 13 (Reuters) – Armed men killed at least 100 civilians in a rural district of northern Burkina Faso close to the border with Niger over the weekend, a security source said.
The attackers targeted men but appeared to spare women and children in Seytenga district on Saturday night, the security source and two other sources said, all speaking on condition of anonymity.
No group immediately claimed responsibility, but the assault happened in borderlands where militants linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State are waging an insurgency.
PFLP-tied “Canadian” Khaled Barakat complained that Hezbollah, Hamas and PFLP were seen by Canada as terrorist organizations.
Canada’s list of terrorist organizations should be abolished, said Khaled Barakat — The subject of controversy in Canada for his alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization — at the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) in Canada’s 5th assembly at the Ottawa city-owned Foster Farm Community Centre on June 3.
“It has to be abolished,” Barakat said at the event. He complained that Hezbollah, Hamas and PFLP we officially recognized by Canada as terrorist organizations.
“Canada is listing Palestinians and Arab organizations on the so-called terrorist list,” he said.
London: The UK government on Saturday dismissed a Muslim cleric from his role as an official adviser, accusing him of fomenting protests against a new film about the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.
Alleging “The Lady of Heaven” is blasphemous, Muslim groups protested outside UK movie houses this week, forcing the world’s second-largest cinema chain to cancel all screenings.
Cineworld’s announcement came after Qari Asim, an imam and lawyer in the northern English city of Leeds, posted on Facebook on Monday that the film had “caused much pain and hurt to Muslims”.
Last Sunday, June 5, 2022, Islamic terrorists stormed St. Francis Catholic Church in Ondo State, Nigeria, and massacred more than 50 Christians who were peacefully worshipping their God. Videos, according to one report, “showed church worshippers lying in pools of blood while people around them wailed.”
As terrible as this massacre might seem, it is just the proverbial “tip of the iceberg”: over the years, Muslims have assaulted, shot up or torched countless churches in Nigeria.
Islamic terrorism against Christians abroad is a subject that leaves the Biden administration cold. In late 2021, President Joe Biden took anti-Christian Nigeria off the State Department list of countries hostile to religious freedom — a move that puzzled the U.S. government’s own Commission on International Religious Freedom, which noted the large number of “militant Islamists” in the country. Biden’s policy now looks even worse in light of the Islamic terrorist act on Pentecost Sunday in southwestern Nigeria that left over 80 people in a Catholic church dead.
Moroccan cinema authorities have banned the controversial British film Lady of Heaven, after it was condemned by the country’s religious council.
The film claims to tell the story of Lady Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad.
The Supreme Ulema Council said the movie was a “flagrant falsification of the established facts” of Islam.
Authorities in India’s Uttar Pradesh state have demolished the homes of several people accused of involvement in riots last week triggered by derogatory remarks made by ruling party figures about Islam’s Prophet Mohammad, officials said on Sunday.
In Indian Kashmir, police arrested a youth for posting a video threatening to behead the ruling party’s former spokeswoman who had made some of the remarks, officials said. The video, circulated on YouTube, has been withdrawn by authorities.
Muslim protesters brutally thrashed in a police station in Uttar Pradesh state, which is ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP.
— Raqib Hameed Naik (@raqib_naik) June 11, 2022
#WATCH | Uttar Pradesh: Demolition drive at the "illegally constructed" residence of Prayagraj violence accused Javed Ahmed continues in Prayagraj. pic.twitter.com/s4etc8Vz25
— ANI UP/Uttarakhand (@ANINewsUP) June 12, 2022
Terrorists seek to divide—to scare, to hurt, to break. They fail when we choose unity. They fail when we choose light over darkness—when peaceful justice prevails over anger and fear. And in April, in a ninth-floor federal courtroom in northern Virginia, light, and justice won.
The Alexandria courtroom provided the setting for the much-anticipated so-called “Beatles” terrorism trial, which saw British Islamic State member El Shafee Elsheikh, otherwise known as Jihadi Ringo and captured in early 2018 by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), tried on eight counts, ranging from hostage-taking to conspiracy to providing material support to terrorists. His co-defendant, Alexanda Kotey, had earlier pled guilty. Both had been extradited to the United States in 2020 after the U.S. government agreed to remove the possibility of the death penalty.
By giving in to those protesters, the elites have shown that they do not consider British Muslims to be ‘like us’.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine that, this week, a group of hardline Christian conservatives started protesting outside cinemas up and down the country, demanding that a ‘blasphemous’ film be banned. What do you think the response would be? They would be rightly ridiculed by politicians and commentators from across the political spectrum. They would be told in no uncertain terms that, no, we do not live in a theocracy and, yes, they should kindly piss off. And if the protesters doubled down, if they carried on intimidating cinema workers and patrons, if they started making thinly veiled threats even, the authorities would step in to keep the protests peaceful and stop activists shutting screenings down by force. Because in a liberal, secular society you do not allow religious bigotry and mob rule to override freedom of expression.
New Delhi: Suspended BJP leader Nupur Sharma, at the centre of the ‘blasphemy controversy’ that has caused some unease in India’s diplomatic relationships across West Asia, is being publicly shunned by her party. However, she has found a spokesperson in one of Europe’s most polarising political figures.
Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who has long advocated a ban on the Quran and action to limit Muslim immigration, has made multiple appearances on Indian media, in Sharma’s support.
“I support Nupur Sharma because I believe that nobody should be punished or apologise for speaking the truth. We might like it, we might dislike it, but she spoke the truth about Muhammad,” said Wilders in an interview to India Today Wednesday.
The decision to prosecute a recent attack on a Mississauga mosque as a terrorism offence is an unusual step that may be difficult to prove in court, terrorism experts say.
Proving that 24-year-old Mohammad Moiz Omar committed a terror offence when he allegedly attacked worshippers at the Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre earlier this year will require prosecutors to argue a complex and “rarely used” clause in the Criminal Code. That clause, which has been in place since 2001, “essentially requires proof of a political or religious motive and attempts to intimidate a population,” said Kent Roach, a University of Toronto law professor and policing expert.
Still no info on what exactly has given police cause to make the terrorism case.
