A coalition of more than 50 Muslim, human rights, and faith organizations is urging House leaders to raise concerns about planned hearings this month on the “radicalization” of American Muslims.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to focus his hearing on homegrown terrorism, including the Fort Hood shooting and attempted Times Square bombing, both plots hatched by American-born Muslims.
Any government in which the Brotherhood has a greater role would be less supportive of U.S. interests, says David Schenker, a Middle East adviser in the Defense Department under President George W. Bush. Senior leaders of the Brotherhood have pledged to end Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, he says.
The organization has been a revolutionary opposition group in Egypt since its founding in the 1920s, opposing corruption and advocating a conservative form of Islam in government. It inspired al-Qaeda and the Iran-backed Palestinian group Hamas, which the State Department considers a terrorist group.
Over the years, radical elements of the Brotherhood have tried to initiate armed rebellion in Egypt. President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a Brotherhood cell, leading to Mubarak’s rise and a crackdown on the group
While I recognize that support for “democracy and freedom” is substantial, within each Arab national society — that the middle class is not a nothing; that each economy depends on it — I doubt this “faction” can prevail. Worse, I think we are watching its final, hopeless bid for power.
The key fact, in Egypt (paralleled in Yemen and elsewhere), is that the Muslim Brotherhood has not declared itself. The Islamists could put vastly more people on the street. They could subvert the loyalties of policemen and soldiers, who already resent the moneyed middle class. They could generate just enough heat to make large districts of Cairo and Alexandria, now simmering, boil over.
But instead, they are playing neutral, watching those policemen and soldiers put the demonstrators down, while most of Egypt remains quiescent.
Demonstrators in Egypt have protested against rising prices and stagnant incomes, for greater freedom and against police brutality. But religion, so often a powerful mobilizing force here, has so far played little role.
That may be about to change.
With organizers calling for demonstrations after Friday prayer, the political movement will literally be taken to the doorsteps of the nation’s mosques. And as the Egyptian government and security services brace for the expected wave of mass demonstrations, Islamic groups seem poised to emerge as wildcards in the growing political movement.
The Temecula center has owned the land for years but didn’t encounter resistance until planning work on the mosque coincided with debate over the New York site, putting 150 Muslim families at the center of a bitter fight, said Imam Mahmoud Harmoush.
Some residents worried the California mosque would be a center for radical Islam and add to traffic woes in the rapidly developing region. The mosque spent more than $17,000 in the past year, which included studies on the 4.3-acre site to address code concerns raised by its opponents, mosque leaders said.
“It’s amazing how people shift their positions and really don’t listen,” Harmoush said. “They say, ‘Maybe somewhere they are mutilating women, somewhere they are beating their wives.’ If somebody did something in Jordan or Pakistan or Iran, that doesn’t mean American Muslims will do it here.”
About 700 people have been arrested throughout Egypt in a crackdown against anti-government protests, security officials say.
The arrests came as police clashed with protesters in two cities following Tuesday’s unprecedented protests.
One protester and one policeman were killed as police broke up rallies in Cairo, and in Suez a government building was reportedly set on fire.
Public gatherings would no longer be tolerated, the interior ministry said.
“Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” Ms. Clinton said.
The secretary’s words suggested that the administration remains dangerously behind the pace of events in the Middle East….
To many viewers, the LDS Church’s “I’m a Mormon” ad blitz seemed hip, refreshing and original.
The campaign, launched last year in nine U.S. cities, generated a lot of national buzz. Its short videos featured regular folks talking about their lives as doctors, skateboarders, tax attorneys, environmentalists, surfers or former felons before announcing that they are Mormons. Nary an Osmond to be seen.
It helped burst stereotypes of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by showing individual and diverse members expressing their spirituality.
Turns out, lots of other faiths take a similar tack.
Now there is someone new at the National Security Council who won’t be getting much sleep: He’s a former Rhodes College professor named Quintan Wiktorowicz, and he’s an expert on, among other things, how some people decide to become terrorists.
“A number of years ago, before he went into government, he did some of the most path-breaking work not only on who was susceptible to being radicalized, but most importantly, who was the most resistant to being radicalized,” says Christine Fair, an expert on terrorism and radicalization at Georgetown University. “And the findings that he came up with based upon his work really shattered some of the stereotypes we have about Muslims and radicalization.”
As part of his research, Wiktorowicz interviewed hundreds of Islamists in the United Kingdom. After compiling his interviews he came to the conclusion that ”” contrary to popular belief ”” very religious Muslims were in fact the people who ended up being the most resistant to radicalization.
Forty years after following the hippy trail to South Asia, John Butt is still living in the region, and still spreading a message of peace and love – though now as an Islamic scholar.
As our car turned around the bumpy Indian road, a gleaming white marble minaret came into view. My fellow passenger, John Mohammed Butt, could barely contain his excitement.
“Can you see it?” he asks. “It’s like the Oxford University of Islamic learning. For me these minarets and domes are just like the spires and towers of Oxford.
[LUCKY ] SEVERSON: Bill Martin is a senior fellow in religion and public policy at the James Baker Institute at Rice University. He says the Gülen movement is different from fundamentalist Islam because they respect all faiths and believe religion is compatible with science.
WILLIAM MARTIN (Senior Fellow, James Baker Institute at Rice University): I think it’s fair to say that Islam has had difficulty in coming to terms with modernity, and in that I think that the Gülen movement offers a much more positive picture of what Islam can be.
Being a radical atheist to the left of Richard Dawkins, I don’t take sides in religious matters, but I was depressed by the news that three Anglican bishops, appalled by the possibility of women becoming bishops, have switched to being Catholic priests.
Firstly I find it baffling that, among all the wrongs of the world, the issue of bishops’ genders should assume such importance ”“ mind you, that’s probably just me. I realise that if I were a narrow-minded sectarian bigot with no sense of perspective, I might see things differently.
But the worst thing is that this issue threatens to destroy the Church of England, or at least to diminish it until it becomes an irrelevance ”“ well, OK, even more of an irrelevance.
As a Christian and an Egyptian, I was heartbroken by the New Year’s Eve terrorist attack on the Coptic Church of Alexandria that killed 21 of my countrymen. Whether this heinous act was carried out by Egyptians or by terrorist groups from outside the country, the intention was surely the same: to sow discord between Muslims and Christians in a country long known for its religious tolerance.
The attack seems to fall within a larger pattern of violence against Christians elsewhere in the Middle East. Indeed, extremist groups that target Christians in Iraq explicitly stated their intention to bring their war against Christians to Egypt.
But while the recent attack led to an outpouring of anger among Copts, Egypt””unlike other countries in the region””has been remarkably immune to the scourge of sectarianism.
Had Baroness Warsi sought my advice, I would have counselled her not to make the speech which has been trailed in The Daily Telegraph today.
I would have told her that the Muslim faith was not discussed over the dinner tables of England, nor in the saloon bars, before large numbers of Muslims came here to our country. Then I would have told her to go to our Christian churches and listen to what was said about her religion and those who practise it, then to the Mosques to hear what is said in some of them about the Christian faith and those who practise it (or about Buddhists, Jews, or even those who have no faith at all).
After that, I would say, she might consider who is in need of her homilies on prejudice.
Islamophobia has “passed the dinner-table test” and is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial, Baroness Warsi will say in a speech on Thursday.
The minister without portfolio will also warn that describing Muslims as either “moderate” or “extremist” fosters growing prejudice.
Lady Warsi, the first Muslim woman to attend Cabinet, has pledged to use her position to wage an “ongoing battle against bigotry”.
So why is it that the young folk revolted by contemporary excess don’t simply make for the local CofE, or Catholic church, and rediscover the religion of their grandmothers, rather than getting their spirituality via Islam? It is, I think, something to do with the real malaise of contemporary Britain which I wrote about in a little essay in The Spectator concerning the film Eat, Pray, Love. It is the notion that what exists abroad, or what is foreign to your own background, is somehow superior to what you’ve grown up with, what’s under your nose. In the case of EPL, the heroine finds her spiritual identity in Buddhism. It would have been a good deal more interesting if she could have discovered it in her local Episcopalian church.
It may be that the British young don’t embrace Christianity because they simply don’t encounter it, at least not through the kind of religious education-as-anthropology they get in state school, which is about as opposite as it is possible to be from the Sunday School teaching which their grandmothers would have got. Actually, the death of the Sunday School pretty well marked the end of any practical instruction in Christianity for most children. No wonder they’re susceptible to the certainties of Islam, when they encounter it.
Ian Mabey is to be succeeded as rector of Collie’s All Saints Anglican Church by another Ian ”” Father Ian Bailey. He grew up in a Christian family but deserted the church as a young adult. However the spiritual impulse was not to be denied and he came back to the Christian faith via Buddhism.
Ian Bailey is excited about the opportunity to live in Collie, a place he has never even visited. Next month he will be arriving from New South Wales to become rector of the Collie’s All Saints Anglican Church.
From what he has seen on the internet, he is impressed.
How can there be a God when people are suffering through floods and fires? How can God sit back and allow bad things to happen to good people?
A new online resource from the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne offers answers to these and other difficult questions as the Church seeks to engage directly with the rising “New Atheism” phenomenon.
“It’s not surprising that Christians will be asked hard questions like these as we watch the devastation of the Queensland floods,” said Bishop Barbara Darling, chair of the Christianity and Atheism Committee for the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne. “We should not be afraid of such questions, but should welcome the opportunity to talk with those who ask them”.
An off-duty policeman opened fire aboard a train Tuesday in southern Egypt, killing one Christian and wounding five less than two weeks after the New Year’s Day bombing at a church in Alexandria that killed 25 Coptic Christians, according to the state news agency.
There were few details on the incident and it was unclear whether the shooting was sectarian related. The state news agency, MENA, quoted an Interior Ministry official as saying a Muslim police officer boarded a Cairo-bound train in the town of Samalut in Minya province and began firing a handgun. The official said a 71-year-old Coptic man was killed and his wife and four other Christians ”” three women and a man ”” were wounded.
Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack ”” carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad ”” as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.
Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.
Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.
Nevertheless, Harris’s project to articulate a standard of morality, though it does not fully succeed, is especially important in light of the moral weakness that so frequently holds hands with today’s atheism. He quotes Joshua Greene, a neuroscientist, who argues that “there is sufficient uniformity in people’s underlying moral outlooks to warrant speaking as if there is a fact of the matter about what’s ”˜right’ or ”˜wrong,’ ”˜just’ or ”˜unjust.’” Greene claims that articulating a natural-law theory, even if it could be done, is pointless. Most of us, he reasons, believe in the same moral ideas, so we don’t need to articulate them so formally.
As we are locked in an open-ended battle with terrorists and leaders for whom Greene’s “sufficient uniformity” of morality is a fiction, we must not only do good but also defend good. To his credit, this is not lost on Sam Harris. He describes an encounter with a current member of President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, who lectures him on the Taliban. “You could never say that they were wrong,” she says, for they are entitled to their own valid beliefs. That Harris strains to counter such relativism with charts, graphs, and cat scans is a moral, if ineffective, undertaking in itself.
–Aaron Rothstein in a review of Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values” in the January, 2011, Commentary, p.56
When New York Rep. Peter King, the new chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called for congressional hearings on radical Islam in America this fall, the reaction from the official Muslim community was swift. Ibrahim Hooper, president of the Council on American- Islamic Relations, said he feared the hearings would become an “anti-Muslim witch hunt.” Abed A. Ayoub of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee asserted that Mr. King’s proposal had “bigoted intentions.”
While Mr. King has a reputation for adopting polarizing positions””particularly when it comes to immigration””his hearings deserve serious consideration. “There has to be an honest discussion of the role of the Muslim community””what they are doing, what they’re not doing,” he explained to the New York Observer in a Nov. 30 article. “I talk to law enforcement people across the country; they will tell me. . . . They don’t feel any sense of cooperation.”
These concerns are reasonable. Histrionic objections to them only deter Muslims from fulfilling a fundamental Islamic obligation: Meeting our duty to the society in which we live.
Coptic Christians are preparing to celebrate Christmas Eve amid tight security after a bomb attack on a church in Egypt in which 23 died.
Armed Egyptian police have been ordered to protect churches where Copts are expected to gather in large numbers.
There have been calls for Muslims to hold vigils outside Coptic churches in a gesture of solidarity.
But some radical Islamist websites have urged more attacks, publishing church addresses in Egypt and Europe.
The story of David Epstein, the Columbia University political scientist and Huffington Post blogger now facing criminal charges of incest, has launched a very interesting discussion. What is fascinating about it, and deeply disturbing, is the inability of some commentators to articulate what is morally wrong about the act of incest. It is almost equally disturbing that a legal argument for a “right” to engage in adult, consensual incest stands on surprisingly firm footing, thanks to precedents the United States Supreme Court has already established in other cases on the “autonomy of the person” under our Constitution….
Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric who emerged as the United States’ most enduring foe in Iraq, returned Wednesday after more than three years of voluntary exile in Iran in a homecoming that embodied his and his movement’s transition from battling in the streets to occupying the halls of power.
“Long live the leader!” supporters shouted as a grayer Mr. Sadr made his way from the airport in the holy city of Najaf to his home and then to prayers at the gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, one of the most sacred places in Shiite Islam. Supporters there hailed his return as another show of strength for a movement that is now more powerful than at any time since the United States invaded in 2003.
“We’re proving to everyone that we’re an important part of Iraq and its politics,” said Jawad Kadhum, a lawmaker with Mr. Sadr’s movement.
The Anglican Bishop of Egypt has said all Anglican/Episcopal churches in the country are having to strengthen their security measures following the New Year’s Eve bombing that killed 19 and injured more than 90.
The Most Rev. Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis*, one of several religious leaders to speak out against the bombing at the al-Qiddissin Coptic Orthodox Church, said he was cooperating with a request from the Egyptian Security services.
“We express our deep sadness and mourn the loss of life after the New Year’s bombing at a Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria,” he said in a statement. “We also express our condolences to His Holiness Pope Shenouda III and to the families and friends of the victims of this terrible and inhuman attack.
American Atheists erected a billboard over the weekend in Huntsville, Ala., that claims all religions are scams.
The ad reads, “You know they’re all scams” and pictures some religious symbols including the cross, the Jewish star, and Islam’s crescent moon and star.
The billboard further claims that the group American Atheists has been “telling the truth since 1963.”
Atheists, watch out. Religious people have evolved to produce more children than non-believers, researchers claim, while societies dominated by non-believers are doomed to die out.
A study of 82 countries has found that those whose inhabitants worship at least once a week have 2.5 children each, while those who never do so have just 1.7 ”” below the number needed to replace themselves.
The academic who led the study argues that evolution, credited by atheist biologists such as Richard Dawkins as the process solely responsible for creating humanity, favours the faithful because they are encouraged to breed as a religious duty.
“If this happened in a mosque, the government would be doing something,” yelled one parishioner in an angry street protest after Sunday morning Mass at Saints Church, the site of the bombing, where a crucifix wrapped in a blood-stained sheet stood sentinel. “But this happens to us every year, and every day, and they do nothing.”
The bombing early on Saturday morning climaxed the bloodiest year in four decades of sectarian tensions in Egypt, beginning with a Muslim gunman’s killings of nine people outside another midnight Mass, at a church in the city of Nag Hammadi on Jan. 6, the Coptic Christmas.
I have really nothing much to say about New Year’s Day. But I thought I might offer a little in the way of New Year’s trivia, just to make my small contribution to the day’s festivities, for those disposed to observe them. And, since it is essentially a rather pagan sort of celebration, I thought I would confine my remarks to things pagan.