The Council of Europe human rights watchdog said on Wednesday it opposed an all-out ban on full face veils, under consideration by some European states, but also urged Muslims to reject customs that deny women equal rights.

The Council’s Parliamentary Assembly unanimously passed a resolution saying all-out bans on full veils in public would deny a basic right to women who wanted to cover their faces.

It qualified that right by saying veils, also known as burqas and niqabs, could be banned when public security or professional obligations required women to show their faces.

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International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that a Pakistani Christian was imprisoned on June 19 and faces the death penalty after a Muslim man accused him of blasphemy in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Sajid Hameed Bajwa accused Rehmat Masih of blaspheming the prophet Muhammad. According to article 295 C of Pakistan’s penal code, blaspheming Muhammad is punishable by death.

Rehmat’s son, Boota Masih, told ICC that the family is fearful of attacks by Muslim mobs. Female members of the family and their children have already left their homes and moved to other areas because of safety concerns.

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A hulking shell of a department store towers over this city’s Uighur quarter, a reminder of what can be lost here by speaking up.

For years, it was the flagship of the business empire of Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled leader and matriarch of the Uighur people. If Chinese government accounts are accurate, she helped instigate fierce ethnic riots that killed hundreds and injured thousands here last July — an accusation she vehemently denies.

Still a prominent landmark even in its ruin, the Rebiya Kadeer Trade Center was partially confiscated by the government in 2006 when Kadeer’s son was charged with tax evasion, although tenants were allowed to stay. After the riots, it was shuttered and slated for destruction. The government said the building had failed fire inspections, but it seems in no hurry to set a demolition date.

The forsaken structure makes for an effective deterrent. Last summer’s chaos has been replaced with a level of fear that is striking even for one of China’s most repressed regions. Residents are afraid of attracting any attention, afraid of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But they seem most terrified of talking.

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It started as a traffic ticket, issued to a woman at the wheel whose vision police said was dangerously obstructed by a full-face Islamic veil.

Before long, the case expanded into charges of polygamy and welfare fraud lodged against her common-law husband, a French national of Algerian origin. And now, according to Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, it has become a reason to amend the constitution to harden the way French society deals with lawbreakers among a Muslim minority estimated at more than 5 million.

The noisy rise to national concern of a $25 traffic ticket issued to Sandrine Mouleres last April in the port city of Nantes, 220 miles west of Paris, has illuminated the extent of unease in France and other Western European countries over Muslim populations whose customs and visibility often clash with the continent’s secular and Christian values.

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Mr. Malik and Mrs. Jariullah went straight to their cellphones, calling every relative in Lahore; not one answered. From the television, they heard gunfire crackling, grenades exploding, sirens, screams. The screen showed bodies streaked with blood.

At some point, Mrs. Jariullah realized she was quaking, and yet unable to take her eyes off the screen. Eight hours later, the couple’s worst fears were confirmed. An uncle, a nephew and a cousin were dead, another cousin wounded.

And when they drove from their home in Plainfield, Ill., to their mosque in Glen Ellyn, Bait-ul-Jamaay, they discovered their anguish had company. Of the 120 families who belong to the mosque, a dozen or more had lost relatives in the Lahore attacks. All told, 94 people were killed in the assaults by the Punjabi Taliban on Dar-ul-Zakir and another mosque, Bait-ul-Noor, during Friday Prayer.

The thread of grief connecting Lahore to Glen Ellyn was not some ghastly anomaly. At both ends, the afflicted Muslims were members of the Ahmadi (or Ahmadiyya) sect, which claims 10 million worshipers worldwide. Moderate and peaceful in their precepts, the Ahmadis are reviled by fundamentalist Muslims, especially in Pakistan, for their belief that their 19th-century founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was the messiah predicted by the Prophet Muhammad.

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The Islamic extremist group in Somalia that two New Jersey men were seeking to join when they were arrested in New York on Saturday has recruited several hundred foreign fighters to help wage an intensifying civil war in a destitute East African country, American officials said on Sunday.

But interest in the movement, Al Shabab, among American recruits appeared to have waned in recent years as news spread in Somali communities in Minneapolis and other cities that some of the recruits had been killed.

“Since the 2007-2008 period, when foreign fighters were flowing in, you haven’t heard about too many other Americans going there,” said Andre Le Sage, a senior research fellow who specializes in Africa at the National Defense University in Washington.

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Inmates are converting to Islam in order to gain perks and the protection of powerful Muslim gangs, the Chief Inspector of Prisons warns today.

Dame Anne Owers says that some convicted criminals are taking up the religion in jail to receive benefits only available to practising Muslims.

The number of Muslim prisoners has risen dramatically since the mid-1990s ”” from 2,513 in 1994, or 5 per cent of the population, to 9,795 in 2008, or 11 per cent. Staff at top-security prisons and youth jails have raised concerns about the intimidation of non-Muslims and possible forced conversions.

Dame Anne’s report, Muslim Prisoners’ Experiences, published today, says that, although several high-profile terrorists have been jailed recently, fewer than 1 in 100 Muslim inmates have been convicted of terrorism.

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RASHAD HUSSAIN (US Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference): Well, the Cairo speech really set out the framework for””it’s a part of the dialogue that the president started as early as Inauguration Day, when he reached out to Muslim communities. On his second day in office, he appointed Senator [George] Mitchell to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to bring a resolution to the conflict in the Middle East, and it’s something that we have been persistent on, it’s something we’ll continue to be persistent on despite recent events. That event, I think you’ll see, will just redouble our efforts, our attempts to secure a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict. Of course, the president early on””one of the first interviews he did was with al-Arabiya. Then he traveled shortly after that to Ankara, where he made clear that the United States is not at war with Islam, and then in Cairo, where he really set forth the broad framework of dealing with Muslim communities in a comprehensive way and in a manner which addresses not just the political conflicts, one of which you mentioned, but also creates partnerships in a number of areas of mutual interest. And that’s really stemmed from the president’s belief that people all around the world, whether Muslim or non-Muslim or whether they live in a Muslim country or non-Muslim country, all share the same fundamental aspirations, and that is that they want to have access to education, they want to have the ability to pursue economic opportunity, to have health care, to raise their family in a secure way. And so part of the president’s message in Cairo was that we need to establish partnerships in a number of areas, including education, entrepreneurship, health, science, and technology, to have dialogue at the interfaith level, and we’ve continued to do that in a number of ways, and also while reaching out to the domestic Muslim community. The president sent one of his top advisers, Valerie Jarrett, to speak at the Islamic Society of North America, which is the largest gathering of American Muslims. [White House national security and counterterrorism advisor] John Brennan spoke at the Islamic Center at NYU and recently spoke to outreach to Muslim communities as a part of our national security strategy. We had recently an entrepreneurship summit. So this is really an ongoing dialogue, not an ad hoc approach, where we have a concerted effort to engage Muslim communities at all levels.

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Tens of thousands of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa on Tuesday (June 1) continued demonstrations against Israel’s deadly interception of a flotilla of ships trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.

Nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed on the passenger ferry Mavi Mamara when Israeli commandoes boarded the ship early Monday (May 31) morning. The Mavi Mamara was one of six Turkish ships trying to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Across the Arab world and in Israel””where Arabs comprise 20 percent of the population””angry protestors demanded an end to the blockade. Ishmael Haniyeh, the prime minister of Hamas, declared a day of mourning. Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said the attack “indicates Israel is not ready for peace.”

In Rome, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Agence France-Presse that the Holy See feels “deep sadness and concern” over the flotilla incident, which also injured several activists and seven Israeli commandoes.

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It’s a controversial time for British women to be wearing the hijab, the basic Muslim headscarf. Last month, Belgium became the first European country to pass legislation to ban the burka (the most concealing of Islamic veils), calling it a “threat” to female dignity, while France looks poised to follow suit. In Italy earlier this month, a Muslim woman was fined €500 (£430) for wearing the Islamic veil outside a post office.

And yet, while less than 2 per cent of the population now attends a Church of England service every week, the number of female converts to Islam is on the rise. At the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, women account for roughly two thirds of the “New Muslims” who make their official declarations of faith there ”“ and most of them are under the age of 30.

Conversion statistics are frustratingly patchy, but at the time of the 2001 Census, there were at least 30,000 British Muslim converts in the UK. According to Kevin Brice, of the Centre for Migration Policy Research, Swansea University, this number may now be closer to 50,000 ”“ and the majority are women. “Basic analysis shows that increasing numbers of young, university-educated women in their twenties and thirties are converting to Islam,” confirms Brice.

“Our liberal, pluralistic 21st-century society means we can choose our careers, our politics ”“ and we can pick and choose who we want to be spiritually,” explains Dr Mohammad S. Seddon, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Chester. We’re in an era of the “religious supermarket”, he says.

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The home secretary, Theresa May, is facing a stiff test of the Conservative party’s claims to oppose radical Islam after her officials chose to allow a misogynist Muslim preacher into Britain.

Zakir Naik, an Indian televangelist described as a “hate-monger” by moderate Muslims and one Tory MP, says western women make themselves “more susceptible to rape” by wearing revealing clothing.

Naik, who proselytises on Peace TV, a satellite television channel, is reported to have called for the execution of Muslims who change their faith, described Americans as “pigs” and said that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.

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The questions on the ads aren’t subtle: Leaving Islam? Fatwa on your head? Is your family threatening you?

A conservative activist and the organizations she leads have paid several thousand dollars for the ads to run on at least 30 city buses for a month. The ads point to a website called RefugefromIslam.com, which offers information to those wishing to leave Islam, but some Muslims are calling the ads a smoke screen for an anti-Muslim agenda.

Pamela Geller, who leads an organization called Stop Islamization of America, said the ads were meant to help provide resources for Muslims who are fearful of leaving the faith.

“It’s not offensive to Muslims, it’s religious freedom,” she said. “It’s not targeted at practicing Muslims. It doesn’t say ‘leave,’ it says ‘leaving’ with a question mark.”

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“There comes a time when you have to say, ‘We can’t do this anymore,’ ” said Jaweed Ansari, a Brentwood physician and spokesman for the Islamic Center of Williamson County.

Every year, hundreds of new houses of worship are proposed around the United States. A growing number face resistance from neighbors and government officials who see places of worship as a nuisance because they don’t pay taxes, often ask for special exceptions to zoning rules and cause traffic congestion. But religious liberty advocates say these objections can trample the First Amendment right to freedom of religion.

Ansari admits the mosque plan wasn’t perfect. Most of the 14 acres is on a flood plain, a problem exacerbated by Middle Tennessee’s recent storms. Only about 4 acres was needed for the mosque, so organizers didn’t see that as a problem. They also felt the site, which borders a park and has neighbors only on one side, would be fairly unobtrusive.

“We realized going into this that nobody wants anything in their backyard, regardless of whether it is a church or a Walmart or whatever,” he said.

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When I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best ”” and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance ”” it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

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Two months after a Muslim soldier complained to the Pentagon about being harassed in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, Spec. Zachari Klawonn said the Army has not followed through on its promises to address problems at the country’s largest military base.

Commanders at Fort Hood, Tex., moved Klawonn, 20, off post for his safety in March after a threatening note with religious slurs was left at his barracks door. But then the military failed to provide him the standard stipend for off-post housing, Klawonn said. In recent weeks, he’s had to take out two loans, borrow an additional $300 from a nonprofit group and pawn his possessions to pay the bills.

Klawonn said he asked for the housing allowance repeatedly, making his appeals up the chain of command. Last week, after a reporter asked about the housing allowance, Klawonn said he was called by his commanders and told he would begin receiving his stipend June 1.

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Hesham Shashaa looked twice at the display on his cellphone, staring at the number. “It’s either a person who needs help or someone who wants to kill me,” he said.

Mr. Shashaa, an imam at the Darul Quran mosque in Munich, follows the strictest form of Islam, Salafi. But the people who want to kill him are Muslims.

“They use the religion for their personal aims and declare war on Jews and Christians, but I want people to follow what Islam really says,” said Mr. Shashaa, who with his beard and traditional clothes has sometimes been likened to Osama bin Laden. But his philosophy is quite different.

A growing number of imams in Europe and the Middle East have denounced suicide missions and terrorist acts. Many of these imams, however, still view Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Hamas as legitimate resistance movements, while Mr. Shashaa openly declares that they are violating the tenets of Islam.

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What with the Fort Hood mass murderer, the Christmas Pantybomber and now the Times Square Bomber, you may have noticed a little uptick in attempted terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland in the last few months.

Representative Lamar Smith did, and, at the House Judiciary Committee, was interested to see if the Attorney-General of the United States thought there might be any factor in common between these perplexingly diverse incidents.

“In the case of all three attempts in the last year, the terrorist attempts, one of which was successful, those individuals have had ties to radical Islam,” said Congressman Smith. “Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?”

“Because of …?”

“Radical Islam,” repeated Smith.

“There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions,” replied Eric Holder non-committally. “I think you have to look at each individual case….”

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In recent weeks, skirmishes in the cultural conflict over the clothes worn by some Muslim women erupted in Belgium’s parliament, in an Italian court and at a traffic stop in France. The burqa and the niqab cover a woman’s body almost completely, but there are also disputes over less comprehensive coverings, including the head scarf.

While the issue of the moment is about Muslim dress, Islam is hardly the only religion that connects modesty to faith. Mormons wear special garments. Amish women adopt plain clothes and cover their heads – men, too. Some Jews and Christians either encourage or require modest appearance, and many faiths have rules about hair – again both male and female.

Is this tradition or scripture? What kinds of problems do these practices present in a largely secular world?

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“What we’re facing here is not an episodic series of terrorist events. What we’re facing is a group of people who see themselves as revolutionaries,” Phillip Mudd said.

Until he retired a few months ago, Mudd was the senior intelligence advisor to the FBI and its director. He is an authority on homegrown terrorism and believes the recent activity has been poorly organized and executed by lone wolfs or clusters of individuals who aren’t part of an organized network or a terrorist cell. Instead, they see themselves as part of global movement that is being facilitated by the Internet.

“The Internet often is not the initial spark, but it helps them go down a path,” he explained.

Asked what they are seeing on the web, Mudd said, “They’re seeing images, for example, of children and women in places like Palestine and Iraq, they’re seeing sermons of people who explain in simple, compelling, and some cases magnetic terms why it’s important that they join the jihad. They’re seeing images, and messages that confirm a path that they’re already thinking of taking.”

And according to Mudd, they are seeing all of this in English.

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If confirmed by the Senate, Kagan would take the seat of longtime Justice John Paul Stevens, whose legacy is marked by his commitment to the rule of law, individual rights and civil liberties. Kagan would be the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

“We call upon Ms. Kagan, if she is confirmed, to follow in the footsteps of Justice Stevens in his commitment to preserving individual freedoms, checking executive power, and upholding the rule of law which have made America a better place for over 35 years,” [Haris ] Tarin said today.

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“A Muslim has no nationality except his belief,” the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb’s “children” are everywhere now; they carry the nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was another.

Qutb was executed by the secular dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. But his thoughts and legacy endure. Globalization, the shaking up of continents, the ease of travel, and the doors for immigration flung wide open by Western liberal societies have given Qutb’s worldview greater power and relevance. What can we make of a young man like Shahzad working for Elizabeth Arden, receiving that all-American degree, the MBA, jogging in the evening in Bridgeport, then plotting mass mayhem in Times Square?
The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the failures of the Islamic world but brought the ruin with them. They mock national borders and identities. A parliamentary report issued by Britain’s House of Commons on the London Underground bombings of July 7, 2005 lays bare this menace and the challenge it poses to a system of open borders and modern citizenship.

The four men who pulled off those brutal attacks, the report noted, “were apparently well integrated into British society.” Three of them were second generation Britons born in West Yorkshire. The oldest, a 30-year-old father of a 14-month-old infant, “appeared to others as a role model to young people.” One of the four, 22 years of age, was a boy of some privilege; he owned a red Mercedes given to him by his father and was given to fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing. This young man played cricket on the eve of the bombings. The next day, the day of the terror, a surveillance camera filmed him in a store. “He buys snacks, quibbles with the cashier over his change, looks directly at the CCTV camera, and leaves.” Two of the four, rather like Faisal Shahzad, had spent time in Pakistan before they pulled off their deed.

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The suspect in the attempted Times Square bombing appears to have been acting out of anger toward the United States that had accumulated over multiple trips to his native Pakistan, culminating in a lengthy recent stay in which he committed to the bombing plot while undergoing training with elements of the Pakistani Taliban, U.S. officials said Thursday.

U.S. officials said Faisal Shahzad’s radicalization was cumulative and largely self-contained — meaning that it did not involve typical catalysts such as direct contact with a radical cleric, a visible conversion to militant Islam or a significant setback in life.

U.S. officials said they are assembling a portrait of Shahzad — based in part on the account he has given interrogators — that may help explain why he attracted scant scrutiny during his transition from student and young father in the Connecticut suburbs to the man accused of parking a vehicle packed with explosives in Times Square.

Shahzad’s transition “was a gradual thing that started years ago,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official with access to interrogation reports from the probe. “It wasn’t suddenly, ‘I found God, and this is the right path.’ There is a combination of religion and anger.”

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There are two conventional narratives of Mr. Awlaki’s path to jihad. The first is his own: He was a nonviolent moderate until the United States attacked Muslims openly in Afghanistan and Iraq, covertly in Pakistan and Yemen, and even at home, by making targets of Muslims for raids and arrests. He merely followed the religious obligation to defend his faith, he said.

“What am I accused of?” he asks in a recent video bearing the imprint of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?”

A contrasting version of Mr. [Anwar al-]Awlaki’s story, explored though never confirmed by the national Sept. 11 commission, maintains that he was a secret agent of Al Qaeda starting well before the attacks, when three of the hijackers turned up at his mosques. By this account, all that has changed since then is that Mr. Awlaki has stopped hiding his true views.

The tale that emerges from visits to his mosques, and interviews with two dozen people who knew him, is more complex and elusive….

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The French government will defy official advice and put forward a draft law next month to ban the burka, or full-body veil, from all public places.

Despite warnings that such a law would be open to constitutional challenge, President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted yesterday that a ban on the burka, and its Arab equivalent the niqab, was needed to protect the “dignity of women”.

The debate on the law, to be completed by July, will scramble the normal political boundaries between right and left. It will also divide France’s 4,000,000 to 5,000,000-strong muslim community.

Although the full-length veil is worn by only 2,000 women in France, its gradually increasing presence is seen by politicians on both the right and left as an affront to the official republican values of liberty and equality. Other politicians, on both right and left, say that a law is unnecessary, probably unconstitutional and likely to embitter race relations.

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The central Nigerian city of Jos is at the crossroads of the country’s Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian and animist south. In recent months, renewed clashes between Muslim and Christian communities there have left hundreds dead.

Nigerian authorities are under mounting pressure to prosecute those behind the unrest. Nighttime curfews and an increased military and police presence are maintaining order ”” for now.

But observers warn that while religion may be the fault line for a decade of periodic fighting, underlying grievances in Jos go much deeper. The area is plagued by poverty, joblessness and fierce competition over land and scarce resources.

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The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to take the case of a Muslim defendant in Colorado whose lawyer was barred from questioning a prospective juror who, during jury selection, expressed concern that he might be biased against Muslims.

The trial judge refused to allow the defense lawyer to closely question the prospective juror about his possible anti-Muslim prejudice. The judge also refused a request that the individual be excluded from the jury.

Instead, the man became one of 12 jurors who heard evidence in a trial infused with anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim themes and comments, according to court documents.

The defendant, Homaidan Al-Turki, was convicted of having unlawful sexual contact with a live-in housekeeper, of failing to pay her for all her work, and for keeping her in slave-like conditions. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

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The US government has authorised the capture or killing of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, currently based in Yemen, officials have confirmed.

The cleric, who is a US citizen, is being targeted for his involvement in planning attacks on the US.

Mr Awlaki was linked to the attempted bombing of an airliner bound for the US and a shooting on a US Army base.

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Muslim and Sikh groups praised the Transportation Security Administration for rolling back screening rules on passengers arriving from 14 primarily Islamic countries, even as some worry that profiling will continue.

The new rules had been enacted after a Nigerian Muslim man tried and failed to explode a bomb onboard a Northwest Airlines jet bound for Detroit on Christmas Day. Civil liberty groups said the rules amounted to ethnic and religious profiling.

The suspect in that case, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had not been subjected to extra screening despite being listed in a government database of suspected or known terrorists.

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The Metro Tabernacle Church, a storefront with metal shutters, sits gutted, black smoke stains on the concrete pillars bearing witness to the intense fire that destroyed the property.

The attacks on this and more than a dozen other houses of worship in January, followed in February by the caning of three Muslim teenagers for extramarital sex and a kerfuffle this month over an insulting act during a Christian service have prompted some soul-searching in Malaysia.

Though religious tensions have occasionally simmered in this multicultural society, these were the first attacks in recent memory, and left some Malaysians wondering how committed their nation remains to its relatively tolerant brand of Islam and what the cost could be to its global image, foreign investments and tourism trade.

“It hurts your international reputation,” said Kharis Idris, director of the MyFuture Foundation, which promotes multicultural engagement. “Church burning doesn’t sound good in any country. If it goes on, it will be bad for the economy. And if someone were to kill someone, all hell could break loose.”

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Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton New York. (Been there many times. About one hour south of Ithaca and Cornell University.) One of the few growing and thriving Episcopal parishes in the diocese heck in the state. They left the Diocese of Central New York. They tried to keep their property. They were sued. They lost.

The family was abruptly evicted from the parsonage. The church building was closed. (People who came looking for the soup kitchen hoping for something to eat had to look elsewhere. That is an important point. I will come back to this.)

The Episcopal Church sold the building to Muslims.

Who paid one third what the Church of the Good Shepherd was offering. (There is some question about whether they had the funds to make that offer but that is not the most important issue here.)

To Muslims.

See those nasty traditional Anglicans do not believe in same-sex relations. They do not believe in women in ministry. Oh wait they do because the rector’s wife was associate pastor so I guess they do believe in women priests….

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