When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran’s command to “strike off” the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or “holy war,” and the Quran’s exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year.

Given this violent legacy, religion historian Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.

“Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible,” Jenkins says.

Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy.

Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack.

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Attackers killed 12 people Wednesday morning in a small Christian village in central Nigeria, officials said, cutting out most of the victims’ tongues in the latest violence in a region where religious fighting already has killed hundreds this year.

The attack almost mirrored the tactics used by those who carried out similar massacres in Christian villages last week when more than 200 people were slaughtered.

Under the cover of darkness and a driving rain, raiders with machetes entered the village of Byie early Wednesday, setting fire to homes and firing gunshots into the air to drive frightened villagers into the night, witness Linus Vwi said.

“It was raining. They took that advantage,” Vwi said.

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Q: Many Christians of course, out of fear of this recent spate of violence have packed their belongings and left for the south. Is this a threat for Christianity in the north of Nigeria that so many Christians are living?

Archbishop [Ignatius] Kaigama: Yes, some Christians from the south who live and work in the north return home when there are such crises and this because when their businesses are destroyed, their houses are destroyed they have no reason to stay on, but that does not mean that Christianity is dead in the north because you still have the indigenous population. For instance in Kano, you have the Maguzawa ethnic group. They are Hausas and normally everybody would expect a Hausa man to be a Muslim. They are not. They are adherents to the traditional religion and when they are not adherents of the traditional religion they are Catholics, Anglicans or whatever. So they are there. They don’t migrate. The only problem is that they suffer a lot because of their Christian identity and Christian faith. They are denied education. They are denied government employment of the highest ladders; they are employed as night watchmen, cleaners or things like that but never higher than that. And this is what they suffer for being Christians. And the Church has come helping in a very decisive manner by empowering these people, by starting primary schools, again building bush chapels in order to bring them together to bring awareness, and enlighten them and get them going. And it is working. Now, I can tell you that there are five or more people from those ethnic groups that have become priests and they are working very well. This is to tell you how far we have come and that even though the Catholic Church has been persecuted there are people who live there and still are ready to sacrifice everything in order to proclaim their Christian faith and identity.

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(WCC News) “We need to emphasize time and again the sense of mutuality and interdependence as the basis of relationships between Christians”, said Dr Jenny Plane Te Paa, convener of the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN). This is especially important at a time when “denominations are increasingly worried with internal, identity-centred issues and therefore risk a credibility crisis”, she added.

Te Paa was speaking at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, after a meeting of the APJN members with staff of the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation and the World Student Christian Federation on Monday, 15 March.

“We all tend to claim our differences in ways that prevent us from acknowledging our commonalities, so that within the churches, the fidelity to our denominations becomes more important than our higher fidelity to our oneness in Christ”, said Te Paa. “Only a theology of mutuality can help us to transcend this through a truly ecumenical attitude”, she concluded.

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A video posted on a militant Web site calls for Muslims in Nigeria to use “the sword and the spear” to rise up against Christians in Africa’s most populous nation, according to a translation released Tuesday by a U.S. group that monitors militant sites.

The video on the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum, a Web site sympathetic to al-Qaida, comes in the wake of a series of religious massacres and riots in central Nigeria. The video shows television news footage and graphic images of those killed as a narrator tells viewers “the solution is jihad in the cause of Allah,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

“Negotiations, dialogues and protests will not stop the advancement of the enemies and their massacres,” the narrator says. “Nothing will stop them but the sword and the spear.”

The narrator also says the “crusader West” is interested in Nigeria for its abundant oil reserves. He also refers to President Umaru Yar’Adua, a Muslim from northern Nigeria, as a “tyrant” who allowed for the killing of a sect leader whose group’s attacks on police stations and rioting left more than 700 people dead in July.

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A video posted on a militant Web site calls for Muslims in Nigeria to use “the sword and the spear” to rise up against Christians in Africa’s most populous nation, according to a translation released Tuesday by a U.S. group that monitors militant sites.

The video on the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum, a Web site sympathetic to al-Qaida, comes in the wake of a series of religious massacres and riots in central Nigeria. The video shows television news footage and graphic images of those killed as a narrator tells viewers “the solution is jihad in the cause of Allah,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

“Negotiations, dialogues and protests will not stop the advancement of the enemies and their massacres,” the narrator says. “Nothing will stop them but the sword and the spear.”

The narrator also says the “crusader West” is interested in Nigeria for its abundant oil reserves. He also refers to President Umaru Yar’Adua, a Muslim from northern Nigeria, as a “tyrant” who allowed for the killing of a sect leader whose group’s attacks on police stations and rioting left more than 700 people dead in July.

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Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.

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Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.

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Nigerians this week buried the victims of a massacre near the central city of Jos. Many of the pre­dominantly Christian villagers who were killed were women and children.

Mechanical excavators were used to prepare mass graves for those who had been killed in three villages in the small hours of Sunday morning. Reported numbers of dead varied between 100 and 500.

Residents of the village of Dogo Nahawa, about 15 km south of Jos, say that herders from hills near by had attacked their village, shooting into the air before using machetes to cut down those who came out of their homes, one report said.

The Archbishop of Jos, the Most Revd Benjamin Kwashi, wrote in a pastoral letter that the attacks showed a new dimension, “revealing a system of well-trained terror groups. . . God knows which com­mun­ity will be next. Their merciless precision and fearlessness should give any government serious con­cern.”

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Nigerians this week buried the victims of a massacre near the central city of Jos. Many of the pre­dominantly Christian villagers who were killed were women and children.

Mechanical excavators were used to prepare mass graves for those who had been killed in three villages in the small hours of Sunday morning. Reported numbers of dead varied between 100 and 500.

Residents of the village of Dogo Nahawa, about 15 km south of Jos, say that herders from hills near by had attacked their village, shooting into the air before using machetes to cut down those who came out of their homes, one report said.

The Archbishop of Jos, the Most Revd Benjamin Kwashi, wrote in a pastoral letter that the attacks showed a new dimension, “revealing a system of well-trained terror groups. . . God knows which com­mun­ity will be next. Their merciless precision and fearlessness should give any government serious con­cern.”

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Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.

The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.

“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”

His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.

“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.

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Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.

The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.

“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”

His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.

“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.

Read it all.

Warning–the content is very difficult to listen to in terms of the description of what happened. Watch and listen to it all (a little over 12 minutes)–KSH.

Update–There is a great deal more here.

What bothers my heart are a few questions:

Ӣ It was curfew time when these attackers came in and carried out their heinous activities. Who are responsible for these areas? What happened to those who should enforce the curfew? The purpose of the curfew is to stop events like this.

Ӣ Failure of government to provide full security for its citizenry leaves a people with very little option but to provide for their own kind of security. History has shown that these kinds of security are bred in vengeance, retaliation, bitterness, hatred and malice. This gives birth to an almost endless cycle of senseless violence as can be seen in many nations of the world today. Where is our government in all the levels of governance? Where were they on this night? Where were they on 17th January? Shall we continue to have the ugly sight of mass burials? Are there no leaders who fear God, who will swallow their pride and choose to be humble before God for the sake of those faces of slaughtered children?

Ӣ The new dimension these attacks are assuming is revealing a system of well-trained terror groups who rights now have attacked these villages, and only God knows which community will be next.

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Pastor Yohanna Gyang Jugu, of Church of Christ in Nigeria, sat outside his burned-down church, tears in his eyes.

“We were sleeping and we heard gunshots all around,” he said. “I woke up and went outside. There was nowhere to pass. Fulani men had surrounded the village. They caught my wife and killed her, and my daughter. They were cutting people down with machetes.”

During the burial service, Solomn Zang, the commissioner for works and transport in Plateau State, where Dogo Nahawa is located, said that the military was not sufficient for protection.

“God willing, we will do something about this,” he said. “Next time if this happens you shouldn’t call the police or the military, call on your neighbors to come and fight.”

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Iraq election workers began tallying votes from 47,000 polling stations across the country Monday, a day after the country pulled off a landmark vote despite scattered dozens of explosions that went off in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.

At the bustling headquarters of the Iraqi High Electoral Commission (IHEC), cheers went up as the first boxes of tally sheets from individual polling stations arrived. The boxes, from polling sites from the Rasafah district of Baghdad, were put through metal detectors before dozens of IHEC employees began unsealing the envelopes.

The IHEC said 62.4 percent of eligible Iraqis voted. That’s down from an official figure of 79.6 percent in the last parliamentary elections, when Shiite Arab and Kurdish voters turned out in huge numbers, but represents the first national parliamentary elections with wide Sunni Arab participation.

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Certainly, religion is one of the many dividing lines in Jos and elsewhere in Nigeria. But it is not the main one.

In Jos, as elsewhere, the cause of fighting has, more often been the struggle for resources than it has religion. In Jos, my AFP colleague Aminu Abubakar reports that the original cause of the latest clash was the alleged theft of cattle, blamed by a group of settler-farmers on a group of cattle herders. Often the fighting in the north is between the semi-nomadic cattle herders (who happen to be mostly Muslim) and settler-farmers (who happen to be mostly Christian), fighting about the diminishing access to land.

“For all those who will go out and fight their Muslim or Christian brothers on the streets, there are many more (Nigerians) who will take them into their home to protect them, when fighting breaks out,” a Nigerian Islamic law student once told me, attending an animist festival in the south.

The reason these conflicts turn deadly in Nigeria is not any greater degree of religious animosity there than elsewhere, however much exists. The reason is poor government: one that fails to send in troops early enough to quell trouble when it flares and never jails those responsible when it is over. Mediation of disputes is too often left to others, too.

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Rioters armed with machetes slaughtered more than 200 people overnight Sunday as religious violence flared anew between Christians and Muslims in central Nigeria, witnesses said. Hundreds of people fled their homes, fearing reprisal attacks.

The bodies of the dead – including many women and children – lined dusty streets in three mostly Christian villages south of the regional capital of Jos, local journalists and a civil rights group said. They said at least 200 bodies had been counted by Sunday afternoon.

Torched homes smoldered after the 3 a.m. attacks that a region-wide curfew enforced by the country’s police and military should have stopped.

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As the attention of the public and Congress has been drawn away to other global hotspots, the Interfaith Sudan Working Group hopes U.S. lawmakers will assist Sudan in grappling with an upcoming election, a recent cease-fire agreement with a Darfur rebel group and a referendum on independence for southern Sudan.

“Political milestones such as the upcoming election, cease-fire agreements and referendum carry great promise and great peril,” said Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service. “That’s why we need the U.S. government’s focused attention now. If the agreements and peace process fall apart, they can’t just be put back together, again.”

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(Warning–the content may not be suitable for some blog readers–KSH).

On a morning in April 2006, Eva was in her kitchen baking cookies. She was going to send them to Margaux, who was finishing her freshman year. Then the phone rang.

Eva remembers the call: “I had never heard such a desperate, just a truly desperate sound in her voice. She was just sobbing hysterically. And she kept saying ‘Mom, Mom, Mom. Mom, Mom,’ over and over. And finally I said, ‘Margaux, please, tell me what’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ And she said, she said: ‘I’ve been raped.’ ”

Margaux says, “I just remember, I was laying in my bed in my dorm. I had been out of control all week and crying and just laying in bed crying. But it was like a wailing, loud cry. The girl next door would come by my room and be like, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m not a big crier, so when I do cry, my parents know something’s really wrong.”

Margaux’s story is fairly typical for the many women who are sexually assaulted on college campuses. And what’s also common is the failure of even the best-intentioned colleges and universities to investigate a criminal matter like rape ”” and then punish it.

I caught this on the morning run. I would rather not think about it also, but it is an issue that has to be faced. I highly recommend the audio (not far under 8 minutes) as it is far more powerful (and detailed) than the written piece. Read or listen to it all.

An American-born imam has emerged as a key figure in the story of the Christmas Day bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The Muslim cleric’s name is Anwar al-Awlaki.

He has admitted to knowing Abdulmutallab, but the relationship is much deeper, intelligence officials say. They suspect he may have directed Abdulmutallab to Yemen for training by al-Qaida operatives before the young Nigerian tried to bring down a Detroit-bound trans-Atlantic airliner on Dec. 25.

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A year before [Umar] Abdulmutallab arrived, Maher was at the Regent’s Park Mosque on a very important night in the Muslim calendar ”” the night Muslims believe the Quran was revealed. He remembers that the mosque was packed that evening. Worshippers were flowing out of the mosque and into the courtyard.

It happened to be the same night that U.S. forces launched the Fallujah offensive in Iraq. It was 2004. As the crowd grew, members of Maher’s group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, began making fiery, anti-American speeches.

“There was a lot of anger, a lot of chanting and sloganing, and essentially a lot of recruiting, as well,” Maher says. “On an event like that, what you would do is you would have your speakers giving their talks, but the crowd would be filled with your members. They would be speaking to other people assessing who is there to just listen but doesn’t agree, and those who are listening and getting increasingly interested.”

That is the initial step in the recruiting process: identifying possible recruits. They would be people who are joining in the chanting; people who seem angry.

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Tod W. Burke likes to use examples from current events to illustrate points in his courses. On Thursday, the criminal justice professor at Radford University discussed with students the arrest of a Tennessee teacher who has been charged with the attempted murder, in school, of his principal and assistant principal.

It was “only a matter of time,” he told his students, until a shooting at a college would involve a professor as shooter, not victim.

Burke, who was a police officer before becoming an academic and who writes about workplace violence, said his sadly prescient point wasn’t that professors are more likely than others to be killers ”” he doesn’t believe that to be the case. But he said the issues associated with workplace violence can’t be ruled out in an academic environment. “We tend to forget as college professors that we are in a workplace, even if our institutions are very different from an assembly line or another kind of business,” he said.

That take on the shooting of three biology professors at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, apparently by Amy Bishop, another faculty member, is similar to those of a number of experts on campus security and workplace violence.

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The Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation in Pakistan in a major victory against the insurgents as U.S. troops push into their heartland in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s No. 2 leader behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, two Pakistani intelligence officers and a senior U.S. official said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release such sensitive information.

One Pakistani officer said Baradar was arrested 10 days ago with the assistance of the United States and “was talking” to his interrogators.

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Gerry Adams’s appearance on Channel 4, in a programme following the footsteps of Jesus in the Holy Land, won’t be screened for a week but it’s already caused a stir. Victor Barker, who lost his son in the Omagh bombing, is aggrieved, on the grounds that it makes the Sinn Fein leader seem like a “genuine, peaceful person”. That’s understandable. Yet there will be lots more people with no connection to the Troubles who simply don’t like the idea of someone with IRA connections talking about Christ at all.

You have to wonder whether they’ve ever come across that remark by the Man Himself, to the effect that he came for sinners, not the righteous.

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I’ve learned some new words.

One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it.

Another is “re-rape.” The need for that term arose because doctors were seeing women and girls raped, re-raped and re-raped again, here in the world capital of murder, rape, mutilation.

This grotesque vocabulary helps answer a question that I’ve had from readers: Why Congo?

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Victory or defeat in Afghanistan will be determined by how the United States engages Pakistan this year.

In particular, the US counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan hinges on whether or not the “Afghan Taliban,” a Pashtun movement, maintains sanctuary and support from outside the country.

Currently, the Pakistani government is not denying that sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban, or the “Pakistan Taliban” (also Pashtun). I spent 10 days last month in Islamabad and Peshawar speaking with leaders from across society, including those with direct access to the Taliban.

Conversations revealed that there are three things that the US must understand in order to end the Taliban insurgencies on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border: respect, reconciliation, and religious freedom.

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In a subchapter entitled “A ‘Special’ Act for a Special Evening?” the authors note that “some teens talk about prom night as the night they might have sex for the first time because the night feels special and significant.” Without making any ruling as to the wisdom of such a practice, they invite young people to consider whether to bed their dates by asking themselves: “Will I be able to look this person in the eye the next morning and talk about the experience? If we break up afterward anyway, how will I feel?” The authors conclude: “Sex is the most intimate act between two people, so you should take the time to consider all these questions and answer them coolly and honestly.”

It seems startlingly passive advice, even in an era in which, as a newly retired school principal ruefully told me, “Girls save themselves not for marriage but for the prom.”

Well, of course sex is intimate. It’s also profoundly consequential and, you’d think, something the heirs of Emily Post would be unafraid to tell young people to delay. (“Don’t allow anyone to paw you!”) Alas, no more.

“We’re not prudish by any stretch; we’re more realists than anything else,” Peggy Post explained by phone. “We really made a conscious decision not to try to lecture teens or tell them what to do, but instead give them the tools, questions for them to ask themselves, so that they don’t feel pressure.”

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It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 ”” perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up ”” so she moved in with her uncle.

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Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

Read it carefully and read it all.