A radical preacher who allegedly inspired the Fort Hood gunman has a large following in Britain and counts prominent mainstream Muslims among his supporters.

The FBI is investigating communications between Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at the Texas army base last week, and Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric now based in Yemen. Mr al-Awlaki, 38, who described Major Hasan on his blog as “a hero”, has been a regular visitor to Britain and delivers frequent lectures to British audiences by video or via the internet.

Counter-terrorism sources said yesterday that Mr al-Awlaki was barred from entering Britain on security grounds while the anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation said he was “perhaps the most influential pro-jihadist ideologue preaching in English today”

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[After the Fort Hood shooting eruption] a shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan ”” before the real evidence was in ”” of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

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Gunmen shoot a priest and two seminary students in the back. Federal police storm a Mass to capture a suspected drug kingpin. Priests pray with the families of murdered men, then face killers in the confessional.

Mexico’s Roman Catholic clergy, increasingly caught in the middle of the nation’s drug war, are meeting this week to draft a strategy for coping with the violence, aided by advice from colleagues who faced similar threats in Colombia and Italy.

“We have become hostages in these violent confrontations between the drug cartels living among us,” said Archbishop Felipe Aguirre, who works in Acapulco, located in Guerrero state where the priest and seminary students were killed in June.

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THE Grahamstown community is reeling in shock at the mystery murder of an Anglican priest who survived a gruesome attack by two men on a countrywide killing spree in 1991.

Clive Newman, 45, a lecturer at the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown for the past four years, was found murdered in his room at the college residence yesterday morning.

Newman was attacked in his car in Bluewater Bay 18 years ago. His throat was slit and one of his vocal chords was severed. His testimony helped convict Antonie Wessels, 31, and his 16-year-old homosexual lover, Jean Havenga. Newman was the fourth and final victim of the pair and the only one to survive.

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Members of Congress are putting pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to say what they knew about Nidal Hassan’s alleged radical views and whether they shared that knowledge with local Army and law enforcement agencies in the weeks and months before the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings.

In response, U.S. investigative officials acknowledged Monday that Hasan, the only suspect in last week’s deadly shootings at Fort Hood came to their attention last December, when they learned he was in contact with an individual “espousing radical views.” Other reports have identified the individual as Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical imam in Yemen who once presided at a mosque in Falls Church, Va., that Hasan attended.

Awlaki, who was released from a jail in Yemen last year, writes a blog that denounces U.S. policies as anti-Muslim. He was a spiritual leader at two mosques where three Sept. 11 hijackers worshiped.

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For a person with old-fashioned values, and an old-fashioned sense of English word meanings, the reports of the Fort Hood massacre were almost as provoking as what happened there. In the larger view of things, they may be more consequential….

Falsehood has more consequences than the revelation of personal insincerity. What happened at Fort Hood was no kind of “tragedy.” It was a criminal act, of the terrorist sort, performed by a man acting upon known Islamist motives. To present the perpetrator himself as a kind of “victim” — a man emotionally distressed by his impending assignment to Afghanistan or Iraq — is to misrepresent the reality.

This man was a professional psychiatrist, assigned to help soldiers cope with traumas. Is this the profile of a man with no control over his own emotions? It appears he had hired a lawyer to get him out of the military before his deployment overseas. Is this consistent with spontaneity?

He reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire on American soldiers. Would that perhaps offer a little hint of the actual motive? He shot about 40 people, over 10 minutes, with two pistols, neither of them military issue. Might that perhaps suggest premeditation?

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As military and law-enforcement investigators waited to interview Major Hasan, a contradictory portrait of him emerged. Neighbors described him as a man who dressed alternately in a military uniform and flowing white robes, and who gave a copy of the Koran to his next-door neighbor a day before the shooting.

Reports from the shooting suggested that soldiers may have heard him shout something like “Allahu Akbar” ”” Arabic for “God is great!” ”” just before he fired two automatic handguns. He was shown on a security video tape from a local convenience store wearing white robes just hours before the shooting. And family members said that he had complained about being harassed expressly because he was a Muslim, and that he had expressed deep concerns about deploying.

Acquaintances said Major Hasan was upset about his future deployment in a war zone, and heatedly opposed United States foreign policy in discussions with fellow soldiers. Earlier this year law-enforcement officers monitoring Islamic Web sites identified a man of the same name as a blogger who posted comments on suicide bombings in which he equated such acts to those by soldiers who use their own bodies to shield fellow soldiers from exploding shrapnel.

Read the whole thing.

North Texas Muslims called for calm and civility after shootings Thursday by an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood.

Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was identified as Muslim ”“ a detail that sent some in the Muslim community into a defense mode.

“I am so sad,” said Nia McKay, the Indonesian-born president of Peacemakers, a Dallas-based nonprofit dedicated to events centered on peace. “Islam means Salaam. Its root word means peace. There are nonviolent resolutions.” Others in the 150,000-strong Muslim community of North Texas called the Fort Hood situation evolving and full of nuance.

“A major is a big-deal officer, and there is something complicated in this situation and we need to let investigators do their work,” said Mohamed Elibiary, president and CEO of the Carrollton-based Freedom and Justice Foundation. The nonprofit group works on public policy issues related to the Muslim community from state legislation to national security.

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Major Hasan was not speaking to investigators, and much about his background ”” and his motives ”” were unknown.

General Cone said that terrorism was not being ruled out, but that preliminary evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism. Fox News quoted a retired Army colonel, Terry Lee, as saying that Major Hasan, with whom he worked, had voiced hope that President Obama would pull American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, had argued with military colleagues who supported the wars and had tried to prevent his own deployment.

As a parade of ambulances wailed to the scene of the shootings, officials said the extent of injuries to the wounded varied significantly, with some in critical condition and others lightly wounded. General Cone praised the first-responders and the medics who acted quickly to administer first aid at the scene.

“Horrible as this was, I think it could have been much worse,” the general said.

Utterly horrifying. Please join me in praying for the families of those killed and injured and also those who will minister to them.

Surrounded by glass and steel government buildings, some of them bombed-out shells from long ago, St. George’s Church in downtown Baghdad has always seemed like something of an oasis.

Ever since the United States started using high explosives diplomacy with Iraq, the little Anglican church has had one close call after another.

Built in 1936 by the British military during their occupation of Iraq, the church lost some of its famous stained-glass windows when the United States military bombed a nearby building in 1992, and more were destroyed during the invasion in 2003, leaving only three examples remaining. They were mementos of British regiments stationed there.

Sunday the last three stained glass windows were blown out by the suicide bomb blasts that destroyed three Iraqi government buildings nearby, according to the church’s lay pastor, Faiz Georges.

Read it all (the pictures are wonderful).

Every few months, more than 100 security volunteers at the Rock Church in Point Loma run through drills to prepare for a gunman attack, a kidnapping at the nursery or disorderly outsiders.

That church isn’t alone in fearing violence and vandalism.

Once deemed sacred sanctuaries off-limits to criminals, religious institutions are becoming vulnerable targets to shootings, thefts and protests because of their low-tech security and open environment.

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The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city’s public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.

The plan comes too late for Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member, the police said.

The killing, captured on cellphone video and broadcast on YouTube, among other places, has once again caused widespread grief over a seemingly intractable problem here. Derrion, a football player on the honor roll, was the third youth to die violently this academic year ”” and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or severe beatings on their way to and from school.

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Watch it all–makes the heart sad–KSH.

U.S. and international officials say the situation in Sudan’s war-torn region of Darfur is improving, but that is little comfort to Darfuris, who have a very different perspective. The situation in Darfur now may not qualify as war, but many say it doesn’t look like peace, either.

The outgoing commander of the international peacekeeping force in Darfur, Nigerian Gen. Martin Agwai, said in late August that the war there is essentially over. The new U.S. envoy to the region, Scott Gration, says he has noticed encouraging changes as well.

Gration says the fighting has lessened significantly between militias loyal to the Sudanese government and rebel groups. The war that has reportedly killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions is now dormant.

Read or listen to it all.

(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, currently visiting the Anglican Church in Japan, today took part in an Act of Remembrance at the epicentre of the atomic bomb blast in Nagasaki. During the Act of Remembrance, Dr Williams laid flowers at the memorial and spoke about the pressing importance of working for a world free from nuclear weapons:

“There are no victories in human history without their element of tragedy. Victory in human affairs always means that someone has lost …sometimes the victory has been gained at the price of such violence that we have to say that everyone has lost. Those who have won the conflict have lost some dimension of their own life, their own welfare and integrity.”

“To see the effects of the use of the atomic bomb here in Nagasaki is to see how this degree of slaughter and violence leaves everyone defeated. The wholesale killing of the innocent and the destruction of an entire environment, natural as well as cultural, the long-term effects, physical and psychological, on those who survived – all of this constitutes a would that affects the attackers as well as the victims.”

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A Muslim mob torched a church and the homes of a number of Christians in the Punjab last week, following claims that local Christians had committed blasphemy by desecrating the Koran.

The Sept 11 attack in the village of Sambrial, approximately 20 miles west of the city of Sialkot near Pakistan’s border with Kashmir, marks the fourth time in two months that Muslim mobs have attacked Christian neighbourhoods over alleged insults to the Koran, reports Aftab Mughal of Minorities Concern of Pakistan.

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani have condemned the attack and have asked Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to investigate the incident. Press reports from Pakistan report that President Zardari has called for calm, and promised the government would rebuild the church.

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An attack on the village of Wernyol in the Jonglei State in South Sudan has left 47 dead, including the Archdeacon of Wernyol, the Ven Joseph Mabior Garang.

On the morning of Aug 28 approximately 1,000 gunmen attacked the village “coming to take the cattle, and to loot and steal,” Maj Gen Kuol Diem Kuol of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) told Al-Jazeera.

“There was only a small police force based in Wernyol, and they were soon overrun, but nearby SPLA platoons heard the shooting and rushed to the area” and restored order, Gen Kuol said.

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An increased presence on the streets has helped North Charleston police seize hundreds of illegal guns.

With gun arrests now slowing, police wonder if they have finally made a dent in the firearms pipeline that drove violence to record heights.

After recording a total of 55 killings in 2006 and 2007, police launched a number of efforts to get a handle on crime, including a boost in patrols and traffic stops. Police conducted nearly 49,000 traffic stops last year, compared with about 30,300 just two years earlier.

Police Chief Jon Zumalt said he doesn’t think it’s any coincidence that gun arrests and violent crime fell last year during this blitz. That trend continues. Through July, the number of shootings in the city was down 17 percent, following an 18 percent drop in 2008, police said.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Twenty-six students were arrested after a melee broke out Wednesday afternoon at North Charleston High, a struggling school facing intense scrutiny and pressure to improve this year.

ity police officers and Charleston County sheriff’s deputies rushed to the school’s temporary home — a former middle school on Leeds Avenue — and found students from rival neighborhoods fighting in the cafeteria about 1:30 p.m., said Spencer Pryor, public information officer for North Charleston police.

They broke up multiple fights, and one student was taken to a hospital after complaining about stomach pains.

Officers charged 13 juveniles and 13 adult-age students with disturbing school, but North Charleston police would not release the names of the adults who were arrested.

Yuck–this one was blaring out at me on the front page of the morning local paper. Read it all.

One of Sudan’s most senior church leaders has warned that violence in the south is threatening the peace deal that ended the 21-year civil war.

Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul Yak said recent clashes had been called “tribal conflicts” over cattle but were really deliberate attempts to cause unrest.

Some 2,000 people have died in such clashes this year, the UN says – more than in Darfur.

Southern leaders have blamed the north – accusations denied by Khartoum.

In a rare statement, the head of the Episcopal Church of Sudan warned that the 2005 peace deal was in “grave danger” unless more is done to prevent conflict.

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This is not the first time these questions have been raised. Pocket books called Stalags circulated widely in Israel during the Eichmann trial in the 1960s. They depicted American or British pilots being abused by sadistic Nazi female officers, and then taking revenge by raping and/or killing their torturers. Deemed pornographic by Israeli courts, these books were banned.

There is a not uncommon belief that the Torah sanctions revenge. But the precept of “an eye for an eye” is usually cited incorrectly, according to Rabbi Joel Roth, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. It is actually meant to refer to monetary compensation rather than bloodletting. And Leviticus 19:18 says, “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people.”

Rabbi Roth notes that Jews are prohibited from taking “the law into your own hands as a matter of legal punishment.” The scaffolding of legality””a fair trial and conviction””is paramount under Jewish law. Eichmann was the one person to ever receive a death sentence in an Israeli court, and not without much hand-wringing from Jews world-wide.

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When Bishop David Zubik and three of his priests heard about the shootings at the LA Fitness gym in Collier Township, their goal was to be present to the victims and their families.

The bishop went to UPMC Mercy after getting a phone call from Father Matt McClain telling him about the tragedy where three women were killed, nine others were injured and the shooter committed suicide.

“I was so impressed to see how the hospital was handling this, especially in the crowded central lobby,” Bishop Zubik said.

With several shooting victims in surgery, he was able to speak with two of the husbands. “I was inspired by the depth of their faith,” he said.

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Ethel Khurshid Gil gingerly held out the charred Bible she pulled from the rubble of her home, using a swatch of cellophane to keep the scorched pages from scattering in the hot wind. “Look how they’ve destroyed our Bibles!” the 47-year-old Christian Pakistani cried out.

Not far away, charred wood and broken dishes crunched underfoot as Umair Akhlas stepped through his house to point out the blackened bedroom where he and his relatives hid from the mob that firebombed the building, shouting “Burn them alive!”

Akhlas and several relatives escaped. But six, including two children, couldn’t breach the flames and died in that room.

“They were screaming Christians are dogs, that we’re American agents,” Akhlas said. “They look for any reason to do something against Christians.”

Pakistan has had its hands full waging war against a Taliban insurgency. Now another troubling crisis simmers. Last week, riots broke out in Gojra, a city of 150,000 in the eastern province of Punjab, after accusations surfaced that Christians at a wedding ceremony had desecrated a copy of the holy Koran.

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As a school of thought based on love, Sufism has influenced Catholic and Jewish mysticism and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In the U.S., Sufi teachings have attracted a wide swath of followers. In the music video for Madonna’s 1994 song “Bedtime Story,” whirling dervishes dance to Madonna’s Sufi-inspired verse, “Let’s get unconscious.” To Stephen Schwartz, a convert to Sufism and the author of “The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony,” the faith’s emphasis on achieving internal peace can fill the “great spiritual hunger in this country and in the West in general.”

“In Sufism, the focus is on fixing the self rather than fixing others. That concept is inherently pacific, not political,” says Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Sufi practitioner. Ms. Mirahmadi is the general counsel of Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, the popular deputy master of the orthodox Naqshbandi order. In Sufism, many paths lead to God. Other orders include the aloof Nimatullahi, whose meeting house was described above, the progressive Bekstashi and the militant Qadiri.

The problem arises when the spiritual path to God is blocked with violence. Do Sufis, inherently peaceful, take up arms in the name of the very complicated and controversial notion of jihad, or holy war? Ms. Mirahmadi says no, emphatically. She and her Sufi master, Mr. Kabbani, condemn the behavior of the Naqshbandi Army in Iraq.

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The shooting occurred just after 8 p.m. Tuesday, when the gunman walked into LA Fitness Center in Collier with a duffel bag, turned out the lights in a room where a dance class was going on, then opened fire on the women in the room. Three were dead and at least nine wounded before he turned the gun on himself.

The log kept by Sodini shows he planned the shooting for months, and backed out several times. Sodini, a systems analyst at K and L Gates since 1999, entered the club with loaded guns on Jan. 6 but didn’t go through with it. “It is 8:45PM: I chickened out!” he wrote. “I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!”

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[Leslie] Van Houten, who was 19 at the time of the murders, refused to comment for Waters’ article. She said she had no interest in being in a magazine for what she had done, and that she was greatly ashamed by it. Nonetheless, she and the director struck up a friendship.

“[Van Houten is] well read. She’s smart. She cares about people,” Waters says of the woman who has spent the past 40 years in prison for the murders of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca.

Waters says he was so inspired by Van Houten’s patience ”” she has been denied parole 16 times ”” and her intelligence and remorse that he devoted a chapter to her in his upcoming book, Role Models. He recently posted an excerpt of the book in which he argues for Van Houten’s release on the Huffington Post.

This is a must-listen-to (there is much more on the audio than the small text summary). I caught it on the way home last night after an all day meeting and it still haunts me. A very profound illustration of the consequences of one sinful act. Did (could) she contemplate at the time that she would be living with the incredibly serious results of her decisions more than four decades later–KSH?

The Nigerian bishops’ conference is calling for a new beginning so as to save the country from “collapse” in the wake of recent violence.

This was affirmed in a statement distributed Thursday by the Nigerian Catholic Secretariat, signed by Father Louis Odudu, the deputy secretary general.

The statement responded to a wave of violence that claimed hundreds of lives and displaced thousands in the north of the country.

The confrontation began Sunday when a fundamentalist Islamic group called “Boko Haram” staged a raid on a police station in an effort to establish a Taliban-style regime based on a strict observance of Shariah law.

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A week of brutal violence in northern Nigeria has spurred questions over whether an obscure homegrown religious fundamentalist group represents a broader threat to national security in Africa’s most populous nation.

More than 800 people were killed last week during fighting between an Islamic fundamentalist group calling itself Boko Haram, and Nigerian security forces. The clashes spread across several northern states.

A Red Cross worker in the northern city of Maiduguri, where most of the fighting occurred, said that 780 bodies had been collected in the past few days, and that at least 3,600 Maiduguri residents had been displaced. Officials in Bauchi, where the violence began, had earlier confirmed more than 50 deaths.

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These incidents are the latest in the ongoing series of attacks that Christians in Pakistan have had to endure in recent years.

The Revd Patrick Augustine, now a priest of The Episcopal Church in Wisconsin, United States, but himself born in Gojra, where his father and grandfather ministered, writes that in such attacks, ”˜The Muslim attackers have often justified the persecution of Christians in Pakistan on the basis of the draconian Blasphemy Law section 295”“B and 295-C passed in 1982. These two laws make anyone deemed to have insulted the holy prophet of Islam or dishonoured the Holy Qur’an liable for capital punishment and life imprisonment and fines. In its selective application it has provided a pretext for private vendettas, but its victims almost always have been Christians.’

Bishop Mano Rumalshah of Peshawar Diocese in Pakistan commented, ”˜It is horrible to have to say this – but at least these latest incidents have led to somebody ”“ both in Pakistan and outside the country – hearing our cry. Such episodes occur again and again, and their nature is always very similar: false accusations being made against Christians, and Muslim militants being stirred up by the voices of extremist preachers.’

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The recent atrocities against Christians in Pakistan will sear the imaginations of countless people of all faiths throughout the world. As the minister of law in the Punjab has already said, such actions are not the work of true Muslims: they are an abuse of real faith and an injury to its reputation as well as an outrage against common humanity, and deserve forthright condemnation.

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