U.S. Justice Depatment Sues To Force Action On Tennessee Mosque

English: The US Department of Justice (DoJ), Washington DC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

U.S. media is reporting that the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit seeking to force a Tennessee county to act promptly on a controversial mosque’s application for an occupancy permit. According to a UPI report:

NASHVILLE, July 18 (UPI) — The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to force a Tennessee county to act promptly on a new mosque’s application for an occupancy permit. Rutherford County refused to process or issue a certificate of occupancy as a result of a state chancery court order last month in response to a motion brought by opponents of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, the Justice Department said in a news release. The opponents had challenged whether Islam is a religion and made ‘unfounded allegations accusing the Islamic Center of being connected to a terrorist organization,’ a Justice Department memo stated. In the suit, the federal government alleges Rutherford County violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000. The Justice Department complaint states a certificate of occupancy is needed immediately so the Islamic Center can hold worship services at the facility during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which begins at sundown Thursday. ’Our nation was founded on bedrock principles of religious liberty. The Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce civil rights laws that protect religious freedom,’ Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, said in the release. ‘When a faith community follows the rules, as the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has done in seeking to construct its place of worship, it is impermissible to change the rules in a discriminatory way that prevents people of faith from exercising their fundamental right to worship.’ ’The United States Attorney’s Office will zealously protect every citizen’s right to worship and assemble,’ Jerry E. Martin, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said in the release. ‘If we do not protect the rights of these congregants in Rutherford County, then the rights of all people are endangered and diminished.’

Gangsters, Islamic Terrorists, Deathmatch

English: The Muslim population of the world map by percentage of each country, according to the Pew Forum 2009 report on world Muslim populations. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

June 17, 2012: The continuing violence in the Moslem south has led to 5,000 dead and 8,000 wounded in the last eight years. But it has also led to over 200,000 people leaving the area. Most of those fleeing have been Moslem. About 30 percent of the Buddhists in the south (who were 20 percent of the population in 2004) have fled and ten percent of the Moslems. Criminal gangs, whose main business is smuggling drugs and other contraband from Malaysia, have long dominated the area. The gangs agreed to support the Islamic terrorists, since both groups had something to gain by trying to weaken law and order in the area. While the gangs made it more difficult to improve the economy, they were more tolerable than the Islamic terrorists. All this has become too much for most Moslems. The Islamic terrorists wanted to expel all non-Moslems, shut down secular schools, and didn’t care if they made it difficult to improve the economy. This was too much for most of the Moslems the Islamic terrorists were supposed to be representing. Those that don’t flee are increasingly joining pro-government armed defense groups. The gangs and Islamic terror groups refuse to negotiate or quit, so it’s a fight to the death. The gangs will probably turn on their Islamic radical allies eventually, as the criminal organizations are not run by religious fanatics but business-minded entrepreneurs who are not keen on getting wiped out. Then again, the gangsters believe that the Islamic radicals will have to be killed, otherwise the southern gangsters will have some pretty deadly and determined enemies in their own backyard.

Bulletin Of The Oppression Of Women

By Asma Marwan on February 20, 2012

Our latest Bulletin of news and events regard!ing the oppression of women under Islam is now available. You can find archived issues here.

From Saudi Arabia

By Asma Marwan on February 20, 2012

A Saudi court sentenced a local man and his girl friend to 50 lashes each and ordered him to wash 10 dead people after they were caught in a car parked in a deserted place under the cover of night.

The judge also sentenced the man to 15 days in prison and ordered him to memorize 10 Koran verses and 100 sayings by the Prophet Mohammed, according to Sabq newspaper.

***

In Saudi Arabia, girls and women are shut out of competitive sports, according to a just-released report by Human Rights Watch.

There are no national teams for women, and physical education for girls does not exist in state schools (although it does in private schools). Fitness clubs open to women are few and costly. Many of the swimming pools and running tracks that did exist for women were closed by the government in 2009 for being unlicensed, leaving women to search out gyms operating under the radar or to exercise at home.

Baad Is Bad

By Asma Marwan on February 20, 2012

Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls that they complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.

It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as “baad,” was the payment.

Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing. Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader, furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct her.
[ . . .]

“Despite being denounced by the United Nations as a “harmful traditional practice,” baad is pervasive in rural southern and eastern Afghanistan, areas that are heavily Pashtun, according to human rights workers, women’s advocates and aid experts. Baad involves giving away a young woman, often a child, into slavery and forced marriage. It is largely hidden because the girls are given to compensate for “shameful” crimes like murder and adultery and acts forbidden by custom, like elopement, say elders and women’s rights advocates.

Read the rest here.

The honor/shame belief system of the mid-East is the engine that drives the oppression of women in these cultures.  Islam is the fuel that provides the machine with its power.

Muslim Brotherhood Drops the Veil on Belly Dancing

By Asma Marwan on February 20, 2012

An Iranian born professional belly dancer, Farahnaz Raboudan, now living in Canada, talks about her art, its age limitations, and what she found on her last trip to Egypt.

Born in Tehran, Raboudan danced at parties and birthdays as a child. Her family fled Iran in 1989, 10 years after the Islamic revolution.

“Among other rules, women had to wear much more conservative clothing after the revolution and there has been no public belly dancing since then,” she says.

[ . . .]

Just back from Egypt — considered by many to be the longtime centre of belly dancing — Raboudan says the Muslim Brotherhood is dropping the curtain on belly dancing.

“It’s sad,” she says. “I fear Egypt will go the way of Iran. Fortunately, there are many Muslims in Edmonton who understand and enjoy belly dancing.”

Read the article here.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of seeing a belly dance, here is a video of the best belly dancer in the world, Tito Seif, who happens to be a man, dancing with one of his students!  Here  is another video of the Classical Egyptian style belly dance by Zaheea.

Singing and dancing are disputed by various Islamic sects.  However, even some of the most fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan allow dancing at celebrations when it is gender specific and men dance with men, and women dance with women.  Also, some Muslims say that it is permissible for wives to dance for their husbands.  Here’s  a typical discussion about these arts.

“Verified Virgins” in Denmark

By Asma Marwan on February 16, 2012

Young Danish women with immigrant backgrounds – most of them Muslim – continue to flock to private clinics across the country to have their ‘virginity’ restored for a few thousand kroner.

Several years after the little-known procedure became a topic of political debate, doctors are reporting that demand for hymenoplasty operations has not decreased.

Doctors who perform these operations have come under sharp criticism for legitimising the procedure and thereby protecting what critics say is the chauvinism and oppression that underlies the demand that new brides must be verified virgins.

“I don’t have any scruples about helping. The important thing is that these girls have good lives moving forward. You could call it my form of foreign aid,” Dr Christine Felding, who performs 30 to 40 hymenoplasty procedures each year, told Berlingske newspaper.

The procedure involves reconstructing the hymen – the membrane that partially covers the opening to the vagina, and which is presumed to tear and bleed the first time a woman has sexual intercourse. The doctor literally sews bits of the vaginal lining together to narrow the opening. It takes a little over an hour and is done under local anaesthesia. Felding charges 5,000 kroner. Other doctors charge as much as 12,000 kroner.

Felding estimates that three or four women with immigrant backgrounds call her each week asking about the procedure. Most of them, she said, are frightened about what will happen if their fiancés or their families find out that they are not virgins.

Women have been known to suffer rejection, public shaming and even violent retribution at the hands of men in their own families if there is a lack of ‘proof’, in the form of a bloody bed sheet, on the wedding night.

It is more cultural than religious. If the bride is not a virgin and does not bleed on the wedding night, it is a big shame on the family. There have been honour killings in extreme cases,” Dr Magdy Hend, a UK surgeon who performs several hymenoplasties a week, told the UK tabloid Daily Mail.

Doctors in the UK, France, Germany and Belgium also report that the procedure is highly sought after in Muslim communities. The irony, as Time magazine’s Bruce Crumley writes, is that “the increase in the procedure reflects the growing emancipation of women from tradition-rooted communities, but also the ongoing male oppression signified by the obsession with female virginity.”

Read the rest here.

(h/t to NewEnglishReview)

What Links these Stories?

By Asma Marwan on February 16, 2012

Deaf Mute Girl Kept as a Sex Slave in Britain

A woman allegedly imprisoned in a cellar, raped and kept as a virtual slave while a child was stabbed in the stomach for smiling, a jury was told.

The woman, who is deaf and unable to speak, is said to have been subjected to years of abuse after being trafficked into Britain from Pakistan. It is alleged that she was locked in a cellar by Ilyas Ashar, 83, and his wife Tallat Ashar, 66, at their home on Cromwell Road in Eccles, Salford, and forced to sew, wash, cook and clean without pay.

Deaf mute girl allegedly kept in a cellar in Eccles was raped and treated as slave, court told. A jury at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court was told she slept on the cellar’s concrete floor without access to a toilet until she was rescued by police in June 2009.

She is also said to have been regularly beaten, repeatedly raped and assaulted. The couple are on trial and deny any mistreatment.

Read more here.

Afghan woman burnt to death in Iran

The charred body of an Afghan refugee, allegedly killed by her in-laws in neighbouring Iran, was brought to southwestern Nimroz province, the victim’s father said on Monday.  

Abdul Basir told Pajhwok Afghan News his daughter was burnt by her mother-in-law and husband in Iran’s Sistan Baluchistan province five days ago. She had been sprinkled with gasoline before being set on fire, the father alleged.

Basir, who is currently living in Iran, said her daughter was married to a young boy of an Afghan refugee family a year ago. But her mother-in-law would always encourage her son to rough up his wife.

Read more here.

(h/t to the thereligionofpeace.com)

What links these stories? The answer is: the ideology of Islam.

Grand Mufti Of Bosnia Once Again Singles Out Kuwait For Praise

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Kuwaiti media is reporting that Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, has once again praised Kuwait for he calls the Kuwaiti role in supporting Bosnia and its people. According to a Kuwaiti news agency report:

SARAJEVO, Jan 27 (KUNA) — Head of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina Dr. Mustafa Ceric praised the Kuwaiti role in supporting his country and people. Moralistic and financial aid provided by the Government of Kuwait have left good impact among Bosnian people, Ceric said in a meeting with the Kuwaiti Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mohammad Khalaf. He added that his discussions with the ambassador dealt with the Kuwaiti assistance, namely contributions to financing construction of the new Islamic headquarters in Sarajevo, which would manage affairs related to scholars and religious teaching. Ceric admired the deep relations between Kuwait and Bosnia and Herzegovina on different levels. For his part, the diplomat expressed gratitude for Ceric, due to his appreciation for the Kuwaiti efforts, noting that the Kuwait’s position on Bosnia and Herzegovina is based on its foreign policy in aiding nations, especially Muslim countries.

Growing use of Sharia by UK Muslims

By Divya Talwar BBC Asian Network

Divya Talwar explores why the use of Sharia law is increasing in the UK

The use of Sharia, or Islamic religious law, is growing in Britain, with thousands of Muslims using it to settle disputes each year, but women’s groups and some others are objecting.

”You must speak the truth, sister. Because Allah is listening to your every word, you can lie to us but not to Him.”

The bearded sheikh is instructing his first client of the day to explain why she is unhappy in her marriage.

Sitting behind a small desk in the back room of a converted terrace house, Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad is a representative of the Islamic Sharia Council, the largest Sharia body in the UK, based in Leyton, east London.

The woman has come to the council for an Islamic divorce because her husband refuses to grant her one.

”I’m not happy. He’s never at home and I’ve seen messages from other women on his phone. He doesn’t even give money to help support the kids,” the woman tells the sheikh.

Belgium: Muslim executive ‘under control of foreign countries’

Belgium: Muslim executive ‘under control of foreign countries’Via HLN (Dutch):

“Belgian Muslim bodies are definitively under the control of foreign countries. The Muslim Executive will now be led only by people who will prioritze the interests of their land of origin over those of Belgian Muslims,” says the AMDB (Democaratic Alternative of Belgian Muslims), who say they unite ‘all components of the Muslim community’ in Belgium.

SomaliaReport: Al-Shabaab to Change Name to Imaarah Islamiyah

By MOHAMED ODOWA, JD 12/05/2011

Somalia’s al-Shabaab militants agreed to change their name to Imaarah Islamiyah (Islamic Authority) after four days of meetings in Baidabo of Bay region, according to al-Shabaab’s senior officers.

A number of senior Islamic leaders attended the meeting including Ali Dhere, Mukhtaar Robow, Fu’ad Shangole and Hassan Dahir Aweys. Ahmed Godane, the only senior leader who did not attend, sent a message in which he reportedly disagreed with the name change. Upon concluding the meeting, the militants released a statement in which they said they plan not only to change their name, but also their tactics, and called on Somalia’s citizens to fight against the government and its allies. “The Transitional Federal Government is not the right government for Muslims. It is from the western enemy and enemy of Allah.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi now scared, alone and pondering his fate

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, held in a secret location by the men of Zintan who his family fought, must wonder if he will get a fair trial – and then execution.

Saif al-Islam’s fate will linger in the international consciousness for months as he is brought to trial and, most likely, convicted and hange Photo: AFP/GETTY/REUTERS

By Richard Spencer, Zintan

8:00AM GMT 27 Nov 2011

There are no books, and no television. More importantly perhaps, for a partygoer used to shooting weekends at country houses and birthday celebrations, there is no company.

In an anonymous concrete house, in the back streets of the mountain stronghold of Zintan, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi sits alone, with no access yet to a lawyer, friends, or even the four men captured with him.

“For sure, he is just sitting there, thinking about his fate,” Osama Jueili, the head of the Zintan Brigade and the man responsible for Saif al-Islam’s security, told The Sunday Telegraph.

He does have 20 brigade men on permanent station to guard him. It is doubtful they have much in common with the man who pursued the bright lights of Europe in white tie and tails and once thought he was destined to rule over them.

The capture of the late dictator’s son was a happy moment for Libya. A clean operation, it was performed without the bloodlust attendant on his father, Muammar, and brother, Mutassim.

Yet unlike their deaths, Saif al-Islam’s fate will linger in the international consciousness for months as he is brought to trial and, most likely, convicted and hanged. Endless questions will be raised – not least by his own lawyers – about his character, his relationship to his father, and his close contacts with politicians and businessmen like Tony Blair, and fellow partygoers Peter Mandelson, Nathaniel Rothschild and Oleg Deripaska.

The process will be a test too of the stability of the new Libya, and of whether a country held in thrall to the whim of one man can unite to the difficult cause of building peaceful, prosperous institutions.

His immediate concern will be the interrogation that awaits him at the hands of a committee of investigators being established by the Attorney General’s office in Tripoli, according to both Mr Jueili and the head of Zintan’s civilian council, Taher al-Tourki, an urbane lecturer in engineering recently returned from completing a PhD at De Montfort University in Leicester.

Wahhabist Militancy in Bosnia Profits from Local and International Inaction

Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 9 Issue: 42

November 17, 2011 03:28 PM Age: 4 days

Category: Terrorism Monitor, Global Terrorism Analysis, Home Page, Featured, Europe

By: Nenad Pejic

Ali Pasha’s Mosque, constructed in Sarajevo during 1560-61

Though the United States once took the lead in international efforts to save the Muslims of Bosnia during the bitter conflict that struck that nation in the 1990s, it is now under attack by the Salafist/Wahhabist community that began to flourish there after foreign jihadists were allowed to settle in Bosnia after the conflict. The current Wahhabist perception of America has even found its way into song:

America and other adversaries should know
that now the Muslims
are one like the Taliban
listen, brothers,
believers of the world
with dynamite on their chest
lead the path to dzennet (heaven)

The above lyrics were written by Bilal Bosnic, a Wahhabi community leader from the city of Bihac in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) (radiosarajevo.ba, November 4). [1] Bosnic sings it at weddings and other kinds of social gatherings. How, then, did America become the enemy of radical Islam in the Balkans after undertaking two military interventions aimed at protecting Muslim civilians (Bosnia in 1994 and Kosovo in 1999)?

Many claim that Islamic extremism established itself among Bosnian Muslims thanks to the “inaction” of the West when the 1991 UN arms embargo left Muslims defenseless and when the West failed to secure UN protection zones in Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde during the war. The failure to protect these zones led to what some termed the first post-WWII genocide in Europe. This “inaction” gives a partial explanation but not a complete one. There is another “inaction” of local origin that contributed much more to the growing influence of Islamic extremists in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

There are countless examples of local authorities in Bosnia failing to act properly against Islamic extremism. The majority of these criminal cases have not been resolved and when the terrorists are identified the trials take years. There are some claims that “inaction” in Bosnia had its roots nearly 20 years ago when Bosnian authorities granted 50 passports to foreign mujahideen, most of whom were Salafist/Wahhabis (Oslobodjenje [Sarajevo], November 3). This “inaction” is not related to the police or court capacity or poor equipment, but rather to the ethnically divided BiH police and judiciary that has political sponsorship.

Separating religion and state in Bosnia | TransConflict

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With the role of religion having remained largely ignored in post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina, there is a need to promote a process of secularization by upholding the separation of religion and state.

By Dusan Babic

Bosnia and Herzegovina (henceforth, ‘Bosnia’) is now more than ever burdened by the legacy of war and the contradictions of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). Post-Dayton Bosnia is a unique country in many respects, particularly its complex, irrational and inefficient administrative structure. This can, in part, be attributed to the ethnic concept of governance which is – by all relevant parameters – a failed concept; yet one which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Whilst many obstructive elements – including the paternalism and hegemonism of neighbouring Croatia and Serbia – have been identified, the role of religion has remained entirely ignored.