US church sign calls for Qur’an to be flushed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Koran flushedA sign in front of a Baptist church on one of the most travelled highways in North Carolina stirred controversy over religious tolerance and first-amendment rights this weekend.

The sign outside Danieltown Baptist Church, located at 2361 U.S. 221 south, reads “The Koran needs to be flushed,” and the Rev. Creighton Lovelace, pastor of the church, is not apologising for the display.

“I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible teaches it, is wrong,” said Lovelace. “I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up that there would be people who wouldn’t agree with it, and there would be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what’s right.”

Seema Riley, a Muslim, who was born in Pakistan and reared in New York, was one of those upset by the sign. She moved to Rutherford County for the “small town friendly” atmosphere, she said. When she saw the sign on the side of the highway Saturday she felt angered and threatened. “We need a certain degree of tolerance,” said Riley. “That sign doesn’t really reflect what I think this county is about.”

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Italian writer to face trial over anti-Islam book

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Oriana FallaciItalian journalist Oriana Fallaci will face trial for insulting Islam in her latest work, a court in northern Italy ruled Tuesday, May 24.

The court turned down a request by prosecutors to have the case, filed by the president of the Muslim Union of Italy, Adel Smith, thrown out, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP). The magistrates now have until Thursday, May 26, to formally charge the controversial writer, infamous for her provocative style of writing.

Smith said Fallaci’s last book “La forza della ragione,” which translates as The Force of Reason, contains “words that are without doubt offensive toward Islam.” The 74-year-old writer, who lives in New York, wrote that Europe is turning into “an Islamic province, an Islamic colony” and that “to believe that a good Islam and a bad Islam exist goes against all reason.”

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Prayer room at US university sparks clash

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Earlier this year there was a dispute at the University of Flint-Michigan over the use of a prayer room, after one student, named Zea Miller, complained that the room had been monopolised by Muslim students. According to a report in the local paper, there were different views as to the legitimacy of his complaint and the matter was resolved peacefully.

Flint Journal, 23 May 2005

And how does Daniel Pipes cover this dispute? He quotes a Jewish students’ organisation at the university who supported the complaint, but omits to mention that a student Christian group stated “we don’t have a problem sharing that room” and accused Miller of “using that as a basis for his own intolerance”. Pipes reports that “the brave student who initiated the complaint about Islamist aggression, Zea Miller, said he was subsequently stalked, harassed, and insulted”, but ignores the fact that the university investigated Miller’s claims and said they were unfounded.

Pipes’ conclusions? “Islamists are always aggressive” and “Islamists can be beaten back”. And he heads his blog entry “Islamist supremacism in miniature”.

Daniel Pipes’ blog, 23 May 2005

The Qur’an question

Posted on by Bob Pitt

More from Newsweek on its Qur’an desecration story. They spoke to US Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita:

“According to Di Rita, when the first prisons were built for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo in early 2002, prison guards were instructed to respect the detainees’ religious rituals. The prisoners were given Qur’ans, which they hung from the walls of their cells in cotton surgical masks provided by the prison. Log entries by the guards indicate that in about a dozen cases, the detainees themselves somehow damaged their Qur’ans. In one case a prisoner allegedly ripped up a Qur’an; in another a prisoner tore the cover off his Qur’an. In three cases, detainees tried to stuff pages from their Qur’ans down their toilets, according to the Defense Department’s account of what is in the guards’ reports. (Newsweek was not permitted to see the log items.) The log entries do not indicate why the detainees might have done this, said Di Rita, and prison commanders concluded that certain hard-core prisoners would try to agitate the other detainees by alleging disrespect for Muslim articles of faith.”

So copies of the Qur’an were defaced at Guantánamo – by the prisoners themselves! The next thing you know, we’ll be told that the torture at Bagram airbase was all self-inflicted.

Newsweek, 30 May 2005

Little Green Footballs finds Di Rita’s account entirely convincing.

LGF, 23 May 2005

Hijab activists see European campaign a ‘success’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rajnaara AkhtarMarking the end of three months of intense lobbying and painstaking efforts to make their voice heard and gain the support of Members of the European Parliament, Protect Hijab activists see the campaign a “success” and “positive step”.

“If we look at the number of Written Declarations (WDs) that have been put before the European Parliament this year, from eight WDs only two got more signatories than ours,” Vice-Coordinator of the London-based Assembly for the Protection of Hijab (Protect Hijab), Rajnaara Akhtar, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, May 24.

She was referring to a Written Declaration on Religious Rights and Freedoms, which was tabled by Protect Hijab and MEPs to the parliament February 21 as a preliminary step towards a binding resolution obliging European countries, particularly France, to lift ban on hijab in state-run institutions like schools.

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An essay in imperial villain-making

Posted on by Bob Pitt

William_Dalrymple“By the end of the 90s, the hardliners calling for regime change in the east found that they had a powerful ally in government. This new president was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled global power. It was best, he believed, simply to remove any hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the west.”

William Dalrymple reports.

Guardian, 24 May 2005

Islam not the only religion marred by violence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don’t ‘lash out in homocidal rage when their religion is insulted’? Would that it were so. Unfortunately, even a cursory scan of the headlines from the past few years, or even this past week, shows how wrong it is.”

Tom Regan replies to Jeff Jacoby’s article in the Boston Globe portraying Islam as a uniquely violent religion.

Christian Science Monitor, 23 May 2005

Update:  Robert Spencer denounces this egregious example of “Dhimmitude at the Christian Science Monitor”.

Dhimmi Watch, 26 May 2005

Release Jose Padilla

Posted on by Bob Pitt

May 8 marked the third anniversary of the illegal imprisonment of Jose Padilla. Padilla was apprehended at O’ Hare Airport in 2002 by Federal officers under the shaky “material witness” provision and trundled off to prison. In a conspicuous effort to poison public opinion, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on national TV that Padilla was conspiring to set off a “dirty bomb” (radioactive device) within the United Sates. To date, the government has never produced a scintilla of evidence to corroborate their spurious claims. Simply put, Padilla is innocent of all charges.

Information Clearing House, 22 May 2005

Muslim world turned into a tinderbox

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim world turned into a tinderbox

Haroon Siddiqui says US is fooling no one over use of Qur’an as instrument of torture

Toronto Star, 22 May 2005

Iraq. Uzbekistan. The Qur’an. These issues in the news expose American double standards, hypocrisy and outright lies. They also help explain how George W. Bush has turned the Muslim world into a tinderbox.

It is his policies, not a Newsweek item on the desecration of the holy book at Guantánamo Bay, that sparked the anti-U.S. protests that killed 17 people. What the magazine reported, albeit sloppily, is not new.

Four Britons, one Moroccan, one Kuwaiti and at least one Afghan released from the American base last year have said, separately, that the Qur’an was routinely stomped upon, ripped apart and strewn about toilets. They spoke of three hunger strikes in protest.

The International Red Cross has confirmed it repeatedly told the Pentagon, starting in 2002, that detainees were complaining of Americans using the Qur’an as a tool of torture.

Whom are Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and others fooling, other than their pliant half of the American electorate, with phony pronouncements about how America would never tolerate such criminality?

The Qur’an episodes are but one part of a broad offensive of violating the religious sensibilities of Muslims in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Some had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Qur’an; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families,” said The Times of London.

Physicians for Human Rights also cited forced nudity, masturbation and other transgressions of religious and cultural norms.

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‘Closing the book on Koran abuse’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paul Sperry dismisses the ludicrous stories about desecration of the Qur’an at Guantánamo.

“Despite what rioting Islamic fanatics around the world want to believe, the US did not authorize any interrogators to desecrate the Koran to rattle Muslim detainees at Gitmo – at least not according to a military intelligence memo I’ve obtained. Distributed in early 2003 by an Army JAG officer, the sensitive internal document lists approved techniques for interrogating Taliban and al-Qaida detainees at the for interrogating Taliban and al-Qaida detainees at the US military prison in Guantánamo, Cuba, and none of those techniques include defiling the book Muslims hold sacred. No flushing it down the commode or laying it in the toilet seat; not stomping or spitting on it.”

Front Page Magazine, 23 May 2005

So that’s all right, then. It didn’t appear in the handbook, so it didn’t happen. Presumably the same argument applies to those other ridiculous tales about torture and murder of prisoners at Bagram and Abu Ghraib.