Pope Francis Sunday visited Christian communities in Iraq’s north, where the Islamic State group carried out its worst devastation, to bring encouragement and solace to those who suffered numerous atrocities and are trying to rebuild their homes and lives. Iraqis are also hoping to rebuild trust and hope for the future.
“The idea is pretty simple,” Roland Stolte, a Christian theologian who helped start the project told The Guardian. “We wanted to build a house of prayer and learning, where these three religions could co-exist while each retaining their own identity.”
Living in an alternate reality.
Shamima Begum, who fled Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State in Syria, has failed to restore her British citizenship after the supreme court ruled she had lost her case.
The judgment on Friday from the UK’s highest court is a critical – and controversial – test case of the UK’s policy to strip the citizenship of Britons who went to join Isis and are being detained by Syrian Kurdish groups without trial.
We are a few kilometers from the Palace of Versailles, but an abyss separates the famed residence of the kings from Trappes, where Louis XIV built the ponds as water reservoirs for the castle park.
In the spotlight ever since a philosophy teacher who paid homage to Samuel Paty must now live under police protection, the French city of Trappes is a laboratory for understanding how thirty years of multicultural ideology in the suburbs does not lead to cultural enrichment, but to the death of Western culture. The weekly Valeurs Actuelles gives us a glimpse of life in Trappes.
“Trappes is known for providing a large contingent of jihadists to the Islamic State. Trappes has 32,000 inhabitants, 70% of them Muslims, 40-50 different nationalities. Most often born here, the residents wear hijab, qami, sarouel, traditional Middle Eastern clothing.
h/t Marvin
A number of former Daesh* brides currently stuck in internment camps in Syria are now suing Sweden in the European Court of Justice for “failure” to bring them “home”, which they consider a “serious violation” of their human rights.
“We believe that Sweden’s failure to bring Swedish women and children from the camps in northeastern Syria violates their human rights. As representatives of a number of women and children in the Roj camp, we therefore complain to the European Court of Justice and claim that Sweden has a human rights obligation to bring them home to Sweden”, the head of their legal team, Percy Bratt, wrote in an opinion piece in the legal newspaper Dagens Juridik, calling their situation “life-threatening”.
The family of a 12-year-old girl in Pakistan who was chained up in a cattle pen for more than six months, after allegedly being kidnapped and forced to marry her abductor, have attacked the authorities for refusing to act.
The case is among those now being examined by a government inquiry into the forced conversions of religious minority women and girls, after police released the man, saying they believed the girl had married him of her own free will.
The child was taken from her home in Faisalabad last June and had been held at the home of 29-year-old Khizer Hayat, where she was made to work clearing animal dung. Her family are angry that no further action has been taken against the man.
Keeping up with the abuse of Christian girls by Muslims in Pakistan has become exceedingly difficult. Hardly does one story of abduction, enslavement, rape, forced conversion, torture or murder appear, before another follows it — and another, and another. Although of course, needless to say, not all Muslim men regard non-Muslim girls and women this way, unfortunately many there still seem to. Some recent examples include:
The bloated bodies of two Christian sisters who had long rebuffed the advances of their Muslim employers, were found in a sewer in January 2021. Earlier, on November 26, the sisters, Sajida (28) and Abida (26), who were both married and had children, were reported as missing. The two Muslim men for whom they worked had regularly pressured them to convert to Islam and marry them. Even though the young women “made it clear that they were Christian and married, the men threatened them and kept harassing the sisters.”
Few relationships feature one party that freely gives and another party that only takes as blatantly as the relationship between the West and Islam. Thus, according to a Feb. 1, 2021 report, “The British taxpayer has shelled out over £15,000 to the widow of the mastermind behind the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, while the families of victims were denied similar financial support.”
During that attack, Zahrah Rehman’s husband, Khuram Butt, and two other Muslims, killed eight people and injured another 48, by running over them with a van and stabbing them with knives. If police had not managed to shoot and kill the three terrorists, many more passersby would likely have been killed.
Canada is no stranger to welcoming imams with radical ideas across our borders. Many prominent imams, scholars and teachers started their careers in their country of origin and continue to spread their teachings here in Canada with the blessings of our government. Teachings that include killing of apostates, killing of gays, polygamist marriages, implementation of sharia, return of the caliphate, the denigration of the Jewish community, hate for Israel, just to name a few.
Khairi Saadallah, 26, shouted “Allahu akhbar” as he fatally stabbed friends James Furlong, 36, Dr David Wails, 49, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, on June 20 last year. Three other people – Stephen Young, 51, Patrick Edwards, 29, and Nishit Nisudan, 34 – were also injured before Saadallah threw away the eight-inch knife and ran off, pursued by an off-duty police officer.
A man who stabbed three people to death in a minute in an alleged terrorist rampage had viewed material about a notorious Isis executioner, a court has heard.
Khairi Saadallah murdered three men in a park in Reading on 20 June as they enjoyed a summer’s evening.
A hearing at the Old Bailey to determine if the attacks were terrorist acts and therefore subject to a higher sentence, was told that Saadallah viewed extremist material in the days before the attack and had a longstanding interest in extremism.
Three men who stripped and dragged an elderly Christian woman through an Egyptian village over rumours that her son was having an affair with a Muslim woman have been acquitted by a court.
Soad Thabet, now 74, was the victim of the sectarian attack in 2016 which saw her paraded naked by a mob of vigilantes in Al-Karm.
The attack was accompanied by the torching of Coptic Christian homes and villagers angrily calling for the religious minority to be expelled.
The message from ISIS supporters was directed at jihadists in America, Russia, France, Belgium and “the lions everywhere” asking them “what they are doing to support [their] brothers” as “the war is getting worse,” HS Today reported. It was released with an audio reminding ISIS followers that “there are their festive days on the doors — kill them like killing insects” with several verses from the Quran, HS Today reported.
Macron argues the legislation is needed to shore up France’s staunchly secular system but the plan has further stirred up social tensions over the consequences for Europe’s largest Muslim community.
All of Europe mourned the victims of the Islamist terrorist attack in Vienna. Hundreds expressed this mourning by laying candles for the victims on the spot, leaving a veritable sea of lights. But a Turkish woman was probably affected by completely different feelings: she went rioting across the memorial on Sunday and simply kicked over the lovingly placed candles of the mourners!
