Egyptian General Admits 'Virginity Checks' Conducted On Protesters

From CNN:

A senior Egyptian general admits that "virginity checks" were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.

The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.

At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests."

But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.

The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn't later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

However, Gen. Mamdouh Shaheen, a member of Egypt's Supreme Council of Armed Forces, said the "accusations that we did virginity tests are not acceptable. We denied it then and we deny it now."

This demonstration occurred nearly a month after Egypt's longtime President Hosni Mubarak stepped down amid a wave of popular and mostly peaceful unrest aimed at his ouster and the institution of democratic reforms.

Afterward, Egypt's military -- which had largely stayed on the sidelines of the revolution -- officially took control of the nation's political apparatus as well, until an agreed-upon constitution and elections.

The March 9 protest occurred in Tahrir Square, which became famous over 18 historic and sometimes bloody days and nights of protests that led to Mubarak's resignation.

But unlike in those previous demonstrations, the Egyptian military targeted the protesters. Soldiers dragged dozens of demonstrators from the square and through the gates of the landmark Egyptian Museum.

Salwa Hosseini, a 20-year-old hairdresser and one of the women named in the Amnesty report, described to CNN how uniformed soldiers tied her up on the museum's grounds, forced her to the ground and slapped her, then shocked her with a stun gun while calling her a prostitute.

"They wanted to teach us a lesson," Hosseini said soon after the Amnesty report came out. "They wanted to make us feel that we do not have dignity."

The treatment got worse, Hosseini said, when she and the 16 other female prisoners were taken to a military detention center in Heikstep.

There, she said, she and several of other female detainees were subjected to a "virginity test."

"We did not agree for a male doctor to perform the test," she said. But Hosseini said her captors forced her to comply by threatening her with more stun-gun shocks.

"I was going through a nervous breakdown at that moment," she recalled. "There was no one standing during the test, except for a woman and the male doctor. But several soldiers were standing behind us watching the backside of the bed. I think they had them standing there as witnesses."

The senior Egyptian general said the 149 people detained after the March 9 protest were subsequently tried in military courts, and most have been sentenced to a year in prison.

Authorities later revoked those sentences "when we discovered that some of the detainees had university degrees, so we decided to give them a second chance," he said.

The senior general reaffirmed that the military council was determined to make Egypt's democratic transition a success.

"The date for handover to a civil government can't come soon enough for the ruling military council," he said. "The army can't wait to return to its barracks and do what it does best -- protect the nation's borders."

Go here for CNN video.

Anti-Christian Violence In Faisalabad: Tombs Desecrated, Young Woman Gang-Raped

From Asia News:

Christian tombs were recently desecrated and a young Christian woman was gang-raped for an entire night. In both cases, police refused to file a First Information Report, allowing the culprits to escape justice. These are examples of the ordinary violence visited upon Pakistan’s Christian minority. Whether it involves Christian-owned land and property or individuals who are targeted because they are defenceless, victims will not find justice with the country’s legal system. Gradually, Pakistan’s ‘Islamisation’ slowly progresses, especially in the densely populated province of Punjab.

The Pakistan Christian Post reports that, in Chak Jhumra (Faisalabad), Muslim landowners destroyed and desecrated a Christian graveyard, using a tractor to plough over a number of tombs. Buried coffins were broken and the bones of the dead were brought to the surface. The local police refused to open an inquiry, whilst the landowners utter threats against local Christians to get them to stop legal proceedings.

The Faisalabad chapter of the National Commission for Justice and Peace of the Pakistani Catholic Church has intervened in the affair. A team sent by the commission visited the desecrated graveyard and collected evidence.

However, a local Muslim has filed a claim, saying he owned the land on which the cemetery is located. The first hearing in the case is scheduled for 13 June 2011.

Fr Joseph Jamil, a Faisalabad priest, strongly condemned the anti-Christian violence. “The Church,” he said, “is closing monitoring the issue.”

“Landowners and extremists are actively involved against the Christian minority in Punjab,” he told AsiaNews. “Most attacks happen in the central part of the province.” The government, he said, should “take charge of the situation and defend the minority.”

As additional evidence of the prevailing atmosphere of violence, a story came to light involving a 29-year-old Christian woman who was abducted by a Muslim co-worker, roughed up, drugged and gang-raped.

Afshan Sabir is a factory worker and a mother of three. She was assaulted over night on 27 March in an unspecified area near Gojra. When she woke up, she sought help in a state of disorientation. She later tried to file a complaint with the local police station. However, instead of helping the woman, police officers helped the rapists cover their tracks.

On this occasion, the National Commission for Justice and Peace also intervened, providing the victim with legal counsel and following the case on her behalf.

Journalist Who Investigated Al-Qaeda Infiltration Of Pakistan's Navy Found Murdered

From Jihad Watch:

The work of Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online has appeared many times here at Jihad Watch. You can see here that he was closely monitoring jihad activity in Pakistan -- and given their preference for working under the cover of darkness, it is only natural that they would want him dead.

"Missing Pakistani journalist found dead in Punjab," from AP, May 31 (thanks to Jaladhi):

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani journalist who investigated al-Qaida's alleged infiltration of the country's navy was found dead on Tuesday, and police said there were signs he'd been tortured.

The journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times Online, had been missing for two days. He had told a rights activist in recent months that he feared the country's intelligence agencies planned to retaliate against him over some of his reporting. Shahzad's stories on the alleged infiltration followed a deadly 18-hour militant siege of a naval base earlier last week in Karachi....

Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dayan Hasan said that the 40-year-old Shahzad had told him he feared that the spy agencies were after him, and that he had received a veiled threat in a meeting with a navy officer at the headquarters of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency in October.

Shahzad forwarded notes from that meeting to Hasan, saying in an email that it was for the "record only if in case something happens to me or my family in future." The rights activist also said he was told by some Pakistani government officials that they believed Shahzad was in ISI custody.

A senior Pakistani intelligence official denied allegations that the agency had anything to do with Shahzad's case.

"It's absurd," the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media on the record....

It is not in the least absurd. The ISI is linked to the Mumbai jihad attacks, and to other jihad activity. Why wouldn't it take out a journalist who got too close to things they didn't want known?

The Committee to Protect Journalists says that Pakistan was the deadliest country for journalists in 2010, with at least eight media workers killed in the line of duty. Six of the journalists in Pakistan were killed in suicide attacks, the group said.

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists strongly condemned Shahzad's killing, and demanded a high-level investigation.

"This is tragic," said Amin Yousuf, secretary-general of the union. "We are losing our professional colleagues but the government never unearths who is behind the killing of journalists."

Gee, I wonder why.

Egyptian Sheikh: Jihad Is Solution To Muslims' Financial Problems

From Translating Jihad:

In this short audio file, prominent Egyptian Salafi Shaykh Abi-Ishaq al-Huwayni explains that Muslims' financial difficulties are due to the fact that they have abandoned jihad. The solution? Go on jihadist raids a few times a year, and bring back prisoners, including women and children, which can be sold in the market like groceries to bring in extra income when times are tough. Unbelievable. The subtitled video is below, and the transcript follows that (thanks to Nonie Darwish for sending this one in):

Transcript:

We are in the era of jihad. The era of jihad has come over us, and jihad in the path of Allah is a pleasure. It is a real pleasure. The companions (of the Prophet) used to compete to (perform jihad). The poverty that we’re in—is it not due to our abandonment of jihad? But if we could conduct one, two, or three jihadist operations every year, many people throughout the earth would become Muslims. And whoever rejected this da’wa, or stood in our way, we would fight against him and take him prisoner, and confiscate his wealth, his children, and his women—all of this means money. Every mujahid who returned from jihad, his pockets would be full. He would return with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women, and 3 or 4 children. Multiply each head by 300 dirhams, or 300 dinar, and you have a good amount of profit. If he were to go to the West and work on a commercial deal, he would not make that much money. Whenever things became difficult (financially), he could take the head (i.e. the prisoner) and sell it, and ease his (financial) crisis. He would sell it like groceries. Of those who are--(cuts off)

Egypt's Christians Fear Violence As Changes Embolden Islamists

From the Assyrian International News Agency:

CAIRO -- The headline screamed from a venerable liberal newspaper: Coptic Christians had abducted a young Muslim and tattooed her with a cross. "Copts kidnap Raghada!"

"They tied me up with ropes, beat me with shoes, shaved my hair," Raghada Salem Abdel Fattah, 19, declared, "and forced me to read Christian psalms!"

Like many similar stories proliferating here since the revolution, Ms. Abdel Fattah's kidnapping could not be confirmed. But for members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, the sensational headline -- from a respected publisher, no less -- served to validate their fear that the Egyptian revolution had made their country less tolerant and more dangerous for religious minorities. The Arab Spring initially appeared to open a welcoming door to the dwindling number of Christian Arabs who, after years of feeling marginalized, eagerly joined the call for democracy and rule of law. But now many Christians here say they fear that the fall of the police state has allowed long-simmering tensions to explode, potentially threatening the character of Egypt, and the region.

"Will Christians have equal rights and full citizenship or not?" asked Sarkis Naoum, a Christian commentator in Beirut, Lebanon. A surge of sectarian violence in Cairo -- 24 dead, more than 200 wounded and three churches in flames since President Hosni Mubarak's downfall -- has turned Christian-Muslim tensions into one of the gravest threats to the revolution's stability. But it is also a pivotal test of Egypt's tolerance, pluralism and the rule of law. The revolution has empowered the majority but also opened new questions about the protection of minority rights like freedom of religion or expression as Islamist groups step forward to lay out their agendas and test their political might.

Around the region, Christians are also closely watching events in Syria, where as in Egypt Christians and other minorities received the protection of a secular dictator, Bashar al-Assad, now facing his own popular uprising.

"The Copts are the crucial test case," said Heba Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch here, adding that facing off against "societal pressures" may in some ways be ever harder than criticizing a dictator. "It is the next big battle."

But so far, there is little encouragement in the debate over how to address the sectarian strife. Instead of searching for common ground, all sides are pointing fingers of blame while almost no one is addressing the underlying reasons for the strife, including a legal framework that treats Muslims and Christians differently.

Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the 80 million Egyptians, say the revolution has plunged them into uncharted territory. Suppressed or marginalized for six decades here, Islamists entering politics have rushed to defend an article of the Egyptian Constitution that declares Egypt a Muslim country that derives its laws from Islam. Christians and liberals say privately they abhor the provision, which was first added as a populist gesture by President Anwar el-Sadat. But the article is so popular among Muslims -- and the meaning so vague -- that even many liberals and Christians entering politics are reluctant to speak out against it, asking at most for slight modifications.

"Our position is that it should stay, but a clause should be added so that in personal issues non-Muslims are subject to the rules of their own religion," said Naguib Sawiris, a secular-minded Christian tycoon who has started his own liberal party.

He would prefer to remove religion from the laws entirely the way Western separation of church and state does, he said, but that idea could not prevail in Egypt. "Islam doesn't separate them," he said.

The most common sparks for sectarian violence, however, come from Egyptian laws dating from the end of the colonial era. One imposes stricter regulations on building churches than on mosques. Christians often look to get around the restrictions by constructing "community centers" with altars and steeples -- sometimes provoking Muslim accusations of deceit and Christian charges of discrimination.

The other statute is one the church supports, although not all its parishioners agree: it enforces the Coptic Church's near-total ban on divorce, even while Egyptian laws on Muslim divorce have grown increasingly liberal.

Often, Christians who want to divorce convert to Islam -- and try, after the divorce, to convert back. The law has spawned many rumors of sectarian "kidnappings" to abet or prevent such a conversion for some Coptic women. The rumors ignite most outbreaks of Muslim-Christian violence, including at least three riots since the revolution, and many other controversies. In Ms. Abdel Fattah's case, the Cairo police said the account was fabricated, while Ms. Abdel Fattah's mother said her daughter was too traumatized to speak to reporters.

But despite widespread recognition of the law's role as a catalyst of sectarian violence, the idea that civic law should enforce religious morals is so deeply embedded here that almost no one is proposing to alter the rule.

"It is explosive," said Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of the few groups that advocate changing the law to at least allow the choice of a civil, nonreligious marriage.

When Copts held a weeklong sit-in to demand equal legal treatment, many who attended nonetheless insisted on the preservation of separate, binding laws on Christian marriages. "So no one will be able to get around the religion," said Yusef George, a 30-year-old businessman. A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamist group, said it, too, supported the rule.

Some blame their own church for depending too much on Mr. Mubarak. In a pattern common to Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, Coptic leaders cultivated the patronage of Egypt's secular dictator, with Coptic Pope Shenouda III trading political support for favors and protection. As in Iraq, with the leader deposed, the Christians felt exposed.

"Coptic rights were reserved to be discussed between Mubarak and the pope," said Mona Makram Ebeid, a Coptic scholar and former lawmaker who suspended her membership in the liberal Wafd party because its newspaper published the headline about Ms. Abdel Fattah, "and the Copts were left out of it completely."

Church leaders, in turn, blame Islamic fundamentalists they say the revolution has emboldened. "They don't want any Copts present in Egypt," said Father Armia Adly, a spokesman for the church.

The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, has named a Christian as deputy leader of its new political party. "We are calling for a civil state," said Essam el-Erian, a prominent leader of the Brotherhood, adding that the group hoped to promote laws derived from the elements of Islamic law common to other great religions, like "freedom of worship and faith, equality between people, and human rights and human dignity."

Still, many liberals argue the sectarian conflicts prove Egypt should establish a permanent "bill of rights" to protect religious and personal freedoms before holding elections that could give power to an Islamist majority. It would "remove the sense of angst that exists today in Egypt," said a spokeswoman for Mohamed ElBaradei, a liberal presidential contender.

Iraq’s Kristallnacht: 70 Years Later

From Jihad Watch:

Iraq’s Kristallnacht: 70 Years Later
By Robert S. Wistrich

Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses. The grim events of June 1-2, 1941 were the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht, which had taken place some two and a half years earlier across Nazi Germany. The anti-Jewish riots were mainly led by Iraqi soldiers (bitter and frustrated by their defeat at the hands of the British Army), some members of the police and young paramilitary gangs, swiftly followed by an angry Muslim population that went on the rampage in an orgy of murder and rapine.

The pogrom struck at what was the most prosperous, prominent and well-integrated Jewish community in the Middle East – one whose origins went back more than 2,500 years – long before there was any Arab presence in the country. The 90,000 Jews of Baghdad, it should be said, played a major role in the commercial and professional life of the city. However, in the 1930s they already found themselves confronted by an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Iraqi press and among nationalist political groups. This agitation treated the intensely patriotic Iraqi Jews as an alien, hostile minority who had to be ejected from all the social, economic and political positions it held in the Iraqi state.

Iraqi Arab nationalists, like their counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, had been much influenced in the 1930s by the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s National Socialism attracted them as a spectacular, authoritarian model for achieving Iraqi national unity and a wider union of Arabs in the region. It was no accident that the pro-German ideologue of pan-Arabism, Sati al-Husri, exerted a major influence on Iraqi education after arriving in Baghdad in 1921, or that Michel Aflaq, the chief theoretician of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athists had also absorbed German national-socialist ideas while studying in Paris between 1928-1932. The Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education in the 1930s, Dr. Sami Shawkat, was another fanatical ideologue, especially active in instilling a military spirit (resembling the German Nazi model) in Iraqi youth. He also developed radically anti-Jewish ideas which were heavily indebted to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a book published in Baghdad in 1939, These Are Our Aims, Shawkat openly called for the annihilation of the Jews in Iraq, as a necessary prerequisite for achieving an Iraqi national revival and fulfilling the country’s ”historical mission” of uniting the Arab nation.

Significantly, it was also in Baghdad that the first official Arabic translations of parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in 1934. In order not to offend Arab sensibilities the final translation “edited” out Hitler’s racial theories about inferior “Semites” – making it clear that anti-Semitism related only to Jews, not to Arabs. The Iraqi translator of Hitler’s “magnum opus” was Yūnus al-Sab’āwī, a young Nazi enthusiast and extreme anti-Semite. A close confidant of nationalist officers in the Iraqi army, Al-Sab’āwī came to play an important role in Iraqi politics. From April to June 1941 he even served as Iraqi Minister of Economics. Al-Sab’āwī was indeed one of the architects of the Farhūd in which his anti-Semitic para-military youth group also took part. Al-Sab’āwī had earlier established a close connection with Nazi Germany’s Ambassador to Iraq in the late 1930s, Dr. Fritz Grobba. The latter was a distinguished Orientalist (fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) who eventually convinced Hitler that helping Arab nationalists to throw off British control of Iraq should be part of German strategy. Grobba also contributed much through the networks he had established in Iraq, towards spreading the idea that Iraqi Jews were a “fifth column” of Great Britain – sworn enemies of Germany and of the Arab nation. Equally, Palestinian nationalists, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had had fled to Baghdad in the late 1930s), conducted an especially vicious campaign to incite a jihad among the local Arab population against Great Britain, Zionism and the Jews of Iraq. The Mufti – a close ally of Hitler during the four years he spent in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 – would also exert a particularly toxic influence on the pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose successful anti-British coup had forced the unpopular Hashemite Regent Abd al-Ilāh to flee the country. The coup brought to power on April 1, 1941 some of the most rabid Jew-baiters in Iraq. Anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda now reached a zenith that greatly contributed to the violence that burst forth two months later.

Ironically enough, it was the decisive victory of the British and the return of the Regent on June 1 that immediately provoked the pogrom, an act of unparalleled revenge by the Muslim masses against the Jews of Baghdad that expressed their deep disappointment at the fall of the popular Rashid Ali regime. The British Army, now encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, could easily have intervened but it chose not to do so, dubiously claiming this would have damaged the prestige of the (pro-British) Regent in the eyes of his own people. The British behaved in a similar fashion on several occasions in Mandatory Palestine, in Libya (November 1945) and in Aden (December 1945) – standing by as Arab mobs killed defenseless Jews. In fact, for most Iraqi Muslims in 1941, the British were perceived as oppressive colonizers, the Jews as their “agents” and the German Nazis as “anti-imperialist” saviors! But German military assistance, when it finally came, was too little and too late to save the Rashid Ali regime.

The Farhūd has been incomprehensibly ignored or downplayed both in Zionist historiography and even more in general histories of the Middle East. Arab historians have been silent or else falsified the facts and there are even Israeli and Jewish writers who have unconvincingly tried to dismiss its importance. Yet this traumatic event was indeed of seminal importance. It proved beyond reasonable doubt the strength of Arab nationalist anti-Semitism and of Nazi-style incitement on a Muslim population that had come to see in its patriotic Jewish minority “the enemy within.” The Jews of Iraq, seventy years ago, suddenly found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of murderous anti-Semitism – that of the German Nazis, the Palestinian exiles in Baghdad led by Amin el-Husseini, and Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists. Ten years later, the government of Iraq under the pro-British Nuri es-Said, expropriated, dispossessed, disenfranchised and brought about the forced emigration of nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews, thereby cruelly terminating the oldest of all Diaspora histories. This was not only a crime against humanity but an insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust. The Farhūd exposed with shocking clarity just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were and what their fate was likely to be under any decolonized Arab regime in the future, especially if there was a breakdown of law and order.

Despite the “Arab Spring” not much has changed for other minorities in the Middle East in the last 70 years. As for the Jews, from Morocco to Iraq and Iran they would be “ethnically cleansed” after 1945 by their Muslim rulers. The Farhūd already represented the writing on the wall for those willing to read it. The reinforcement of a strong Israel was and still remains the only viable long-term answer to the repetition of such horrific atrocities in the future.

Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/) and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010). This article is a condensed version of a recent lecture on the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad hosted by the Center in Jerusalem.

Orthodox Christian Shot To Death In Mosul

From Asia News:

Iraq’s Christian community has been the victim of another targeted killing. This morning, an Orthodox Christian was killed in Mosul, northern Iraq. The dead man had been the victim of two attempted ransom abductions in the past, but in both cases, he was able to escape from his attackers. This time, the murderers waited for him as he went to work, firing at him several times in cold blood.

Sources, on condition of anonymity for security reasons, told AsiaNews that Arkan Jihad Yacob was an Orthodox Christian, and the vice director of a cement factory.

Born in 1948 in Mosul, the married father of four was the victim of two previous abduction attempts, ostensibly to extort ransom from his family. In both cases, he was quick enough to thwart his attackers.

This morning however, the men who went after him meant to kill and they succeeded. Arkan Jihad Yacob was shot several times as he made his way to work in an execution-style cold-blooded murder. His killers used a silencer.

The local community took part in Arkan’s funeral in Mosul’s Syro-Orthodox cathedral. With his death, Iraqi Christians find themselves again under attack from Muslim extremists.

The previous incident goes back to 16 May, in Kirkuk, when the body of a Christian man was found. He had been killed after being abducted, his body mutilated, because his family could raise US$ 10,000 to pay for the ransom (see “Kirkuk: young Christian abducted, tortured and beheaded,” in AsiaNews, 16 May 2011).

Speaking to AsiaNews, sources in Iraq say that Christians continue to endure an atmosphere of tensions and fear, as they continue to be targeted for abductions, which end in blood when they are unsuccessful.

Egypt: Coptic Christians Jailed For "Unlicensed Church," Weapons Charges

From Jihad Watch:

Gee, what would a Copt need with weapons in peaceful, tolerant, post-revolutionary Egypt? Note that the church was approved, until it was suddenly unapproved, and note the appalling hoops Christians have to jump through to get permission for a building project involving a church. Those only reflect Islamic law. As Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveler), a manual certified as reliable by Egypt's own al-Azhar University states, non-Muslims are:

... "forbidden to ring church bells or display crosses, recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays, and are forbidden to build new churches" - o.11.5 (6,7)

"Egypt sentences Copts over church scuffle," from Agence France-Presse, May 29:

AFP - An Egyptian military court on Sunday sentenced two Coptic Christians to five years in jail for violence and trying to turn a factory into an unlicensed church, judicial sources said.

The two men, also convicted of possessing weapons, were arrested on May 18 after clashes between Christians and Muslims in Cairo's Ain Shams district as the Copts planned to hold prayers in the building.

A Coptic-led group that took part in a reconciliation meeting between the two sides says the two men are innocent and their lawyers will try to appeal the ruling.

Sameh Abdel Satar, a member of the Egypt Lovers and Peace Society, said the Coptic Church had obtained permission in January to convert the building, which it had purchased in 2006, into a church.

"The first prayer was meant to be held on January 30, but the revolution happened," he said of mass protests that began on January 25 to overthrow president Hosni Mubarak.

The military prosecution said the building was registered as a garment factory and that the two men assaulted workers inside.

Copts, who held a sit-in earlier this month after Muslim mobs attacked to churches elsewhere in Cairo, said the government had promised to reopen closed churches, including the one in Ain Shams.

Since Mubarak's ouster on February 11, the country has seen a spike in religious violence that killed at least two dozen people in March and May.

Copts, who make up about 10 percent of the country's 80-million people, complain of state sanctioned discrimination in the form of a law that requires them to obtain presidential permission before building churches.

The decision is delegated to governors, who consult security services on whether a proposed church would anger Muslim neighbours.

The caretaker government has said it will draft a law to ease restrictions on building churches.

"Ease," not abolish.

FBI Ignored Warnings On Headley's Jihadist Career

From The Hindu:

CHICAGO: Federal Bureau of Investigation detectives disregarded multiple warnings that the Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley was working with the Lashkar-e-Taiba — two of which came from his own wives.

The FBI, intelligence sources have told The Hindu, instead chose to believe Headley's claims that he had only made contact with the jihadist group to further his work as a counter-narcotics informant.

FBI officials, the sources said, were long aware of Headley's links with jihadists in Pakistan's north-west, and even interviewed him for information in the weeks after 9/11.

But they believed Headley was working for the United States' Drug Enforcement Agency, which he developed a relationship with, after being arrested in 1988 for smuggling heroin from Pakistan.

In 1997 Headley was arrested by the DEA again, and this time secured his freedom by becoming a key informant. In a 1998 letter, prosecutors said he “helped the DEA infiltrate the very close-knit Pakistani narcotics dealing community in New York.”

He was still on probation when he travelled to Pakistan in 1999 for his arranged marriage with Lahore resident Shazia Geelani — setting off events which would lead to his second brush with the FBI.

Following a domestic violence incident in 2005, Ms. Geelani — with whom Headley has four children, Haider, Osama, Sumya and Hafsa — said her husband had trained with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. She told authorities that he often bragged of successfully deceiving the FBI.

Headley was briefly detained by police in New York on domestic violence charges, but not prosecuted. FBI detectives looked into Ms. Geelani's allegations, but decided no action was needed.

Later, in 2006, Headley ran into fresh trouble with police — and this time ended up spending eight days in custody at Lahore's Race Course police station. The arrest, a credible Pakistani media source told The Hindu, was made after a Lahore-based Moroccan medical student complained that Headley had reneged on a promise to marry her. Extra-marital sexual relations are a crime in Pakistan.

Bailed out by Ms. Geelani's father Javed Ahmed, Headley married Ms. Outhalla weeks later — though his first wife was never informed of their relationship.

In April 2007, Ms. Outhalla accompanied Headley to Mumbai. Less than a month later, Headley enjoyed a holiday in Dubai with Ms. Geelani.

Later though when Ms. Outhalla discovered that Headley was already married, she visited the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and informed them of his links to jihadists. “Indirectly,” she told The New York Times last year, “they told me to get lost.”

The United Kingdom's domestic intelligence service, MI5, finally sparked off action against Headley when it reported to the FBI that he had made contact with two jihadist suspects in the town of Derby.

Ukraine: Muslim Girl Stoned To Death For Participating In Beauty Contest

From Jihad Watch:

The fact that this was an extrajudicial killing doesn't let Sharia off the hook. The fact that stoning is prescribed for adultery (as often as apologists might also try to deny it for non-Muslim consumption), where the murderers in this case apparently decided for themselves her actions were tantamount to adultery, doesn't let Sharia off the hook, either.

No, the simple fact that this punishment exists in Islamic law, and Muhammad himself participated in it, means Sharia's inherent defects where human rights are concerned have a direct bearing on this case. So does the broader sense that originates in Qur'an 4:34 that violence is an acceptable recourse against "disobedient" women.

The murderers' consciences were informed by these ideas, hence the lack of regret expressed below. "Muslim girl, 19, 'stoned to death after taking taking part in beauty contest'," by Will Stewart for the Daily Mail, May 30 (thanks to Ian):

A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under 'Sharia law' after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine.

Katya Koren, 19, was found dead in a village in the Crimea region near her home.

Friends said she liked wearing fashionable clothes and had come seventh in a beauty contest. Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared.

Police have opened a murder probe and are investigating claims that three Muslim youths killed her claiming her death was justified under Islam.

One of the three - named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev - is under arrest and told police she had 'violated the laws of Sharia'.

Gaziev said he had no regrets about her death because she had violated the laws of Islam.

Nigeria Hit By Multiple Blasts After Inauguration Of Christian President

From the Associated Press:

Multiple blasts rocked Nigeria's restive Muslim north and a city near the capital following the inauguration of the country's southern Christian president, officials said Monday.

The most powerful of the blasts tore through a bar in a military barracks in the northern city of Bauchi on Sunday, killing 15 people just hours after the swearing-in ceremony, said an official who participated in the rescue efforts.

Bauchi state police chief Mohammed Indabawa said Sunday's blast in the city of Bauchi hit an outdoor bar at about 8 p.m., just hours after the inauguration of President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria's capital of Abuja.

Indabawa said 10 people were killed, but the official who helped emergency workers take victims to the hospital and to the mortuary said 15 people were killed and 35 injured. He said he didn't want his name used because the military has said that this is a military affair.

An Associated Press writer who was about 1,300 feet (400 meters) from the Shadawanka Barracks when the blasts went off said he heard three consecutive loud noises at two- to five-minute intervals.

The multiple blasts illustrate the challenges facing Jonathan. The southerner was sworn in Sunday for a full four-year term and is now faced with the task of uniting a country that saw deadly postelection violence despite what observers called the fairest vote in more than a decade.

A spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency, Yushau Shuaib, said stringent security measures had been taken to prevent such attacks on inauguration day.

"Telecommunications operators blocked service in Abuja yesterday and government took so many other measures to prevent this, but it is unfortunate that this still happened," he said. "The Agency moved in quickly, otherwise this would have been even worse."

One bomb went off Sunday at a beer garden in Zuba, near Nigeria's capital, killing two people and wounding at least 11, Shuaib said.

Another explosion in the northern city of Zaria on Sunday also targeted a bar hours after the inauguration, police spokesman Aminu Lawal said. He said police were still looking into how many may have been wounded in that blast.

And on Monday, two teenagers were injured after stepping on explosives in Zaria, Lawal said.

In the northeast city of Maiduguri, a bomb targeted on Monday an army patrol vehicle, Lt. Abubakar Abdullahi said, adding that there were no casualties and five arrests were made after the incident.

No one has claimed responsibility for any of the blasts.

"For now we are trying to gather intelligence on the perpetrators, make sure the victims are attended to, and investigate the matter," national police spokesman Olusola Amore said of the blasts around the country.

The nation of 150 million people with more than 150 ethnic groups is broadly divided between the Christian-dominated south and the Muslim north. Postelection violence spread quickly across northern states after early results showed that Jonathan, a Christian from the south, was winning.

Many northerners believed someone from their region should be the next leader after the Muslim president died in office. Late President Yar'Adua had been expected to rule for another term, but his death left the presidency in the hands of a southerner. An unwritten agreement in the ruling party calls for its presidential candidates to rotate between the country's Christian south and Muslim north.

Bauchi city has a history of sectarian violence and was a scene of rioting and destruction after the April elections.

Bauchi is also a stronghold of a radical Muslim sect locally known as Boko Haram. Its members are accused of a rash of killings in the area in recent months which have targeted police officers, soldiers and political and spiritual leaders.

Boko Haram, which means "Western education is sacrilege" in the Hausa language, has asked pushed for the implementation of Sharia law in northern states.

Authorities blame the group for an explosion at a hotel in April that killed three people and wounded 14 others in Maiduguri, a city close to Bauchi, only days before the state's gubernatorial election.

Tensions in Nigeria are fueled by poverty and unemployment in a country where an unreliable power supply has led to the closure of factories and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the textile industry alone over the last few years, especially in the Muslim north.

Picture of the Week: Schoolmaster's Skull Fractured, Face Slashed By Muslims Who Said He "Mocked" Islam

This is a follow-up on this story.

From The Religion of Peace:

The Religion of Peace is making a concrete difference in Britain.

Egyptian Christians: "We did not risk our lives to bring Mubarak down in order to have him replaced by Salafists"

From Jihad Watch:

Yet it looks as if that is what is happening. I tried to tell you. "Christians worry Egypt being hijacked by Islamists," by Sami Aboudi for Reuters, May 26 (thanks to Kamala):

CAIRO (Reuters) - Last January, Nazih Moussa Gerges locked up his downtown Cairo law office and joined hundreds of thousands of fellow Egyptians to demand that President Hosni Mubarak step down.

The 33-year-old Christian lawyer was back on the streets this month to press military rulers who took over after Mubarak stepped down to end a spate of sectarian attacks that have killed at least 28 people and left many afraid.

Those who camped out in Tahrir Square side by side with Muslims to call for national renewal now fear their struggle is being hijacked by ultra-conservative Salafist Islamists with no one to stop them.

For Reuters, an "ultra-conservative" is someone who wants to impose Sharia on a society, and simultaneously an "ultra-conservative" is someone who opposes the imposition of Sharia on a society. Hence a politician like Geert Wilders is routinely described as "far right," even though he opposes these "ultra-conservatives."

"We did not risk our lives to bring Mubarak down in order to have him replaced by Salafists," Gerges said. "We want an Egypt that will be an example of democracy and freedom for the whole world." [...]

Egypt's military rulers have vowed to punish those behind sectarian clashes, banned demonstrations outside places of worship and promised to give Christians equal rights.

But Christians say no one has been tried yet for the burning of a church in Helwan, south of Cairo, in March or for violence in the Cairo suburb of Imbaba on May 7 that left 15 people dead. At least 13 died in clashes after the Helwan incident.

The army has said 190 people will face trial over the Imbaba clashes, which began when a group of Salafists demanded to look inside a church where they suspected a female convert to Islam was being held against her will.

IRON FIST?

When Christians gathered to worship in the eastern Cairo district of Ain Shams last week, they said Salafists and other local Muslims blocked access to the church and pelted them with cinder blocks.

The Christians said they had to abandon their attempt after security forces arrested eight of them.

"The General has said he will strike with an iron fist. Where is the iron fist?" said Marcelino Youssef, a spokesman for a Christian youth group that has been leading protests against sectarian attacks. He was referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads Egypt's ruling military council. [...]

Some blame leaders of Egypt's Coptic church for cultivating fear of Muslims, in turn stoking sectarian tension by making the Christian community more defensive.

"The Church has promoted a fear of Muslims, arguing that the Egyptian people lack awareness and that democracy will not work in our context," Muslim political scientist Amr Shobaki wrote in a column in newspaper al-Masry al-Youm on May 14. [...]

Gerges recalls bitterly the time when he applied to join the prosecutor's office in southern Cairo soon after graduating from Ain Shams University with distinction.

He said he was told by the recruiting official that his qualifications made him the ideal candidate.

"Then he looked at my family name and shook his head."

For Gerges, the message was clear: a Muslim gets priority over a Christian when it comes to government jobs.

Egyptian Christians say discrimination against them starts in school.

"Coptic history has been removed" from textbooks, said Imbaba priest Sarabamon Abdo Rizeq. "How is a Muslim going to love me if he doesn't know anything about my Christianity?"

At a sit-in outside state TV headquarters by the Nile in central Cairo, protesters posted a list of what they called "The Copts' Demands."

They included giving Christians equal access to government jobs, recognizing Egypt's Coptic history by making it part of the school curriculum, and easing restrictions on the construction of churches.

Christians complain that under laws inherited from Ottoman rule, Copts are required to obtain special permits from the head of state to build or repair a church.

"Our demands are actually basic rights," said Malak Maher, 33, one of the protesters. "We want equality."

Yet Sharia mandates inequality for dhimmis, making it unlikely that Malak Maher will get what he wants.

Mumbai Massacre Terrorist Tells Court Of Second Scheme To Hit Danish Newspaper

From The Globe and Mail:

Not long after his schemes led to the deaths of more than 160 people in Mumbai in 2008, David Headley had a dream.

It was early 2009 and he envisioned the Prophet Mohammed’s tomb, with his own final resting place “not next to the prophet’s grave itself, but a little distance away.”

Mr. Headley, now 50, concluded that his vision meant great heavenly rewards awaited him – if he were successful in a new attack. The plan?

Get gunmen to shoot up the Denmark offices of Jyllands Posten, so that he could avenge Islam against the newspaper that affronted God’s messenger with a cartoon.

So testified Mr. Headley in a Chicago court Thursday, where the 50-year-old convicted terrorist is giving evidence against a peripheral player, Tahawwur Rana, to save himself from the death penalty.

Mr. Headley, who has pleaded guilty to several terrorist offences but has not yet been sentenced, has now concluded a week’s worth of testimony in the trial of his lifelong best friend. An understated government witness who often gives the impression that he believes his actions to be unfailingly logical, he revealed himself as a man stitched together from irreconcilable contradictions.

Final Jihad Suspect Convicted Of JFK Airport Bombing Plot

From BBC:

A former leader of the Shia Muslim community in Trinidad has been convicted of taking part in a failed plot to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at JFK airport in New York.

Kareem Ibrahim was convicted of five conspiracy counts in the plot, which officials say was meant to outdo 9/11.

Russell Defreitas and Abdul Kadir are serving life sentences after also being convicted for their roles.

Ibrahim, 65, also faces life in prison. His sentencing is due on 21 October.

Prosecutors said the men had wanted to kill thousands in New York and shake the US economy by blowing up fuel tanks and pipelines that run under a neighbourhood near the airport.

The scheme was uncovered when an informant recorded a discussion about the planned attack between Kadir and Defreitas, who began preparations for the attack in 2006.

Defreitas, a 68-year-old former cargo handler, and Kadir, a former member of Guyana's parliament, were convicted on conspiracy charges in August 2010.

'Religious instruction'

Federal prosecutors on Thursday accused Ibrahim, who was previously found too ill to stand trial, of offering religious instruction and operational support in the plot, after joining Defreitas and Kadir in May 2007.

The imam admitted that he advised Kadir and Defreitas to use operatives ready for suicide missions at the airport.

"They must be able to fight out. Kill who you could kill and go back to Allah," Ibrahim said.

But during closing arguments, Ibrahim's defence lawyer, Michael Hueston, told the jury his client did not intend to carry out the attack.

"I just went along and hoped it would fizzle out," Ibrahim testified.

The imam was convicted on five charges, which include conspiracy to attack a public transportation system and conspiracy to destroy international airport facilities.

In August 2010, Defreitas and Kadir were also accused of seeking the help of militant Muslims and at least one al-Qaeda operative in the Caribbean.

A fourth man, Abdel Nur, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in January.

Want to Avoid Sex Pests? Stay At Home, Says Turkish Mayor

From Un:Dhimmi:

Sit in your homes if you don't want to be raped, killed or molested - advice from a Turkish AKP Party Mayor (note the extra-large 'women's refuge' sign on the building in the background)
Sagacious, um, advice to women on Muslim sexual harassment, widespread in Turkey:

Women complaining about sexual harassment on the streets of the eastern province of Muş should deal with the problem by simply staying at home, the province’s mayor has said.

“Do not walk around, sit in your homes,” 71-year-old Justice and Development Party, or AKP, Turkish Mayor Necmittin Dede recently told Muş representatives of the Women’s Center, or KAMER, when they told authorities that high employment in the city had resulted in men spilling out of the overcrowded teahouses in the area to verbally harass female passersby.

KAMER representatives said they had enjoyed success in cooperating with local police on women’s issues, but added that public institutions, such as the one led by the mayor, remained indifferent to their cause.

“We have appealed to the authorities time and time again, yet they do not allow us into the schools to conduct training sessions about women. So we visit households instead. We conducted surveys in 700 households until now that show the rate of domestic violence stands around 70 percent,” said Necmiye Boz of KAMER.

Muş municipality does maintain a women’s shelter in the area – although the building is prominently identified by a large sign, allowing potential attackers to find women seeking refuge in the building.

A total of six honor killings have been committed in the province over the past two months although some of the deaths have been passed off as suicides, according to Boz and another KAMER representative, Ayşegül Söylemez.

In previous comments, Dede said, “If women were man enough, they would have become prophets.”

Among state authorities, local police have led the way in trying to combat domestic violence, releasing preparing a report titled “Survey Report on Cases of Domestic Violence.” Law enforcement officers have also rented billboards to create awareness about the problems facing women. One such billboard features the portrait of a happy family, with text underneath saying, “Not everything is what it seems.”

KAMER was officially founded in 1997 and continued to grow and strengthen itself in the following years. At the moment, the group is trying to expand its activities in 23 provinces of eastern and southeastern Anatolia to more districts, villages and remote areas.

Since 1984, thousands of women have joined the group, which advocates for and extends aid to victims who face attack, arrest, torture and even death around Turkey.

The group also aims to provide analysis on the people who are convicted of beating, stabbing or raping women.

In the most convoluted and perverse sense, perhaps the Turkish Mayor Mr. Dede is right. In 2002, the year the Islamist AK Party came to power, the number of female deaths in what could be attributed to ‘domestic violence’ was 66.

In the first seven months of 2009 (the most recent statistics), a total of 953 women were slaughtered.

That’s a 1400% increase since the AKP came to power. We feel no further comment is necessary.

[Source: Hürriyet Daily News/our own research]

Coptic Christian Banned From Entering Egypt, Has Egyptian Citizenship Revoked

From Al Masry Al Youm:

The Administrative Judicial Court on Sunday ordered the withdrawal of Egyptian nationality from Morris Sadek, a Coptic Christian lawyer living in the United States, and banned him from entering the country.

The action was taken against Sadek for a number of alleged crimes, including calls for war against Egypt.

A lawyer leading the case against Sadek said he had insulted Islam, showed allegiance to Judaism, called for the killing of Arabs and requested the United States and Israel to interfere in Egypt’s domestic affairs.

“I will not appeal the verdict,” Sadek said. “I will use it to show the world how the Islamists control the Egyptian judiciary.”

Translated from the Arabic Edition

Pakistan: Anti-Americanism Rife In Military

From Jihad Watch:

Why is the U.S. showering billions on these two-faced Islamic supremacists? "Anti-Americanism rife in Pakistan army institution: Wikileaks," by Zeeshan Haider for Reuters, May 25 (thanks to JCB):

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Officers received training biased against the United States at a prestigious Pakistan army institution, according to Wikileaks, underscoring concern that anti-Americanism in the country's powerful military is growing amid strains with Washington.

A U.S. diplomatic cable said the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, found officers at the National Defense University (NDU) were "naive and biased" against the United States, a key ally which gives Pakistan billions of dollars of aid to help fight Islamist militants.

Fears the military could be harboring militant sympathizers have grown since U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden this month in a Pakistani garrison town, where the al Qaeda leader had probably lived for several years.

Pakistan's military also controls the country's nuclear arms, and a series of attacks against military installations has heightened fears about the safety of those weapons.

"The elite of this crop of colonels and brigadiers are receiving biased NDU training with no chance to hear alternative views of the U.S.," the Wikileaks cable, which was published in the Dawn newspaper, quoted Patterson as saying. [...]

Anti-Americanism runs high among many of Pakistan's mainly Muslim people but it has deepened after bin Laden's killing in a secret U.S. raid which many Pakistanis see as breach of sovereignty. [...]

Dawn said dozens of cables from U.S. embassies around the world also showed that the United States continued to intensely monitor Pakistan's nuclear and missiles programs. [...]

"We will protect these weapons from dangers from foreigners," Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Many Pakistanis believe the United States and India would like to confiscate their nuclear weapons.

Sounds like a good idea.

Eight US Soldiers Killed In Afghan Blasts

From The Times of India:

Eight soldiers killed in a bombing in southern Afghanistan were Americans, the Pentagon confirmed, in one of the worst single incidents in recent months.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said the soldiers were killed by two successive blasts on Thursday in the same location in Shorabak district in Kandahar province.

Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban, and fighting there in the coming months is likely to prove a key test of foreign forces' ability to hold ground in the south taken from insurgents last year after a troop surge.

Local border police commander Tafseer Khan Khogyani said the attack, which also killed two Afghan policemen, took place as coalition and Afghan forces were on patrol about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the Pakistan border.

"As they approached a container, explosives that had been placed inside went off, causing a huge explosion," he said.

Kandahar border police chief General Abdul Razeq said that the container was used as an ammunition store by Taliban fighters smuggling weapons across the border from Pakistan.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the blast, which was initially announced by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The bombing brings to 199 the number of foreign troops who have been killed in Afghanistan this year, according to an AFP tally based on that kept by the independent website iCasualties.org.

Of those, 148 were from the United States. The total international force death toll for last year was 711.

The blast caused ISAF's highest death toll in a single incident since April 27, when nine Americans -- eight troops and a contractor -- were killed by an Afghan officer who opened fire at a Kabul military training centre.

It also brought the death toll of foreign troops in a single day to nine -- earlier Thursday, a NATO helicopter crashed in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan, killing one.

There are around 130,000 ISAF service personnel in the war-torn country, around 90,000 of whom are from the United States.

Much of Afghanistan's worst fighting takes place in the south of the country, particularly in the provinces of Kandahar and Helmand which border Pakistani areas where insurgents have hideouts.

While international forces insist they have been taking the fight to insurgents throughout the winter, the Taliban announced the start of their spring fighting season at the end of April.

The commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, US General David Petraeus, warned in a memo released Saturday that they could face tough times ahead.

"It is likely that our enemies will pursue high-profile attacks this summer in an attempt to demonstrate continued capability," he said.

This should be expected because of the "progress" made in "important areas" since last year, he added.

There has been a rash of insurgent attacks against forces loyal to President Hamid Karzai's government in recent days, including a suicide attack on a Kabul military hospital Saturday which killed six medical students.

It is nearly 10 years since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks to topple the Taliban, who had been harbouring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden -- killed by US forces in Pakistan this month.

Court: Detroit Suburb Violated Evangelist's Rights During Arab-American Fair

From USA Today:

DETROIT — A Detroit suburb violated the free-speech rights of a Christian evangelist by barring him from handing out leaflets at an Arab-American street festival last year, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

The 2-1 decision comes less than a month before the next festival in Dearborn, which draws thousands of people to Warren Avenue in the heavily Arab community.

The festival had offered George Saieg of Anaheim, Calif., a free booth in 2010, but said he and his followers could not freely walk sidewalks with literature about converting Muslims to Christianity.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the restriction was unreasonable, especially when vendors and pedestrians were allowed on sidewalks during the festival.

Dearborn and its police department "violated Saieg's First Amendment right to freedom of speech," judges Karen Nelson Moore and Eric Clay said. "Absent an injunction, Saieg will continue to suffer irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy at law."

Saieg had no problems for years at the Arab festival until 2009 when Ron Haddad became Dearborn police chief. Haddad has defended the policy as a way to control foot traffic.

Mayor Jack O'Reilly said he's "fine" with the court decision but is concerned about the cost of cleaning up leaflets dropped on the ground.

It's the second time the appeals court has intervened. In 2010, a federal judge in Detroit upheld the city's restrictions. But the court stepped in on the eve of the festival and said Saieg could at least distribute information on the perimeter....

Taliban Seize District In Eastern Afghan Province

From BBC:

Officials in Afghanistan say insurgents allied to the Taliban have taken another district in a strategically important province in the north-east.

Nuristan Governor Jamaludin Badar told the BBC that 10 insurgents and three policemen had been killed.

Nato-led forces now say they and Afghan troops provided air support on Wednesday.

Local officials say they are trying to re-take the western district of Doab which Nato denies is in Taliban hands.

At least three districts in Nuristan are now under Taliban control. In others, the government presence is either weak or limited.

"We had intelligence reports that close to 500 Arabs, Chechen, Pakistani and Afghan fighters wanted to attack and take the districts," Mr Badar told the BBC.

"The fighting is still going on. Our weapons are no match to those of the insurgents. We have no hand grenades, mortars or heavy machine guns.

"We have asked for help from the defence ministry but they have not responded to us."

The insurgents control key routes into the provincial capital, Parun, allowing them to impose a blockade on the city.

Nuristan is a remote mountainous region and communications are poor. There are concerns that the blockade could mean food shortages for the local population but that is hard to confirm.

The central government did recently promise military reinforcements but the sense within Afghanistan is that Nuristan has inadequate security forces and is not getting the help it needs.

It is not traditionally a stronghold for the Afghan Taliban. But it does have a history of tribal extremism and militancy.

Nuristan borders Pakistan's tribal areas and there seem to be growing alliances between local leaders and Pakistani Taliban groups.

That makes Nuristan strategically important in the wider conflict as an entry point into Afghanistan - and a potential haven for Pakistani militants.

It also shares an interior border with Kunar province to the south. That too lies along the border with Pakistan and is important in the battle against the insurgents.

The United States has invested heavily in building infrastructure in Kunar and will be keen to protect it.

Nuristan is hard to defend and has not so far been a priority for the central government.

Afghan intelligence officials in Nuristan say that they have repeatedly warned the government and Nato about the worsening security situation.

"If you don't come and deal with this mess. You will be dealing with another Waziristan and al-Qaeda's next home inside Afghanistan," one official told the BBC.

Spencer: Netanyahu Shines In Speech To Congress

From Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

In FrontPage this morning I discuss Netanyahu's excellent speech to Congress yesterday:

The most riveting moment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-applauded address to Congress on Tuesday was his declaration that “the hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us: a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.” He was speaking of Iran, but then he broadened his scope, adding: “Militant Islam threatens the world. It threatens Islam.”

“It threatens Islam” — i.e., the real Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists. This unreality is disappointing to see, and will not bode well for Israel insofar as it continues to translate into policy. Nonetheless, even to acknowledge that the threat has any Islamic character at all is a huge advance over Obama, George W. Bush, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, et al.

For it was not until four years after 9/11, in October 2005, that Bush pointed out that the terrorists’ attacks “serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism.” He had never used such terminology before that, generally limiting himself to calling the enemy “terrorists” and “evildoers” — names so general that they can apply to multitudes besides those who are actually warring against the United States today — and hardly ever used it after that.

Obama has been even less realistic. He has again and again reached out to the Islamic world, assuring Muslim countries of his respect for Islam. Again and again he has been rudely rebuffed, but that has not stopped him from making the attempt again and again. After the death of Osama bin Laden, he claimed that Osama was “not a Muslim leader, but a mass murderer of Muslims.” Then he made sure to give this mass murderer of Muslims a solemn Islamic funeral.

John O. Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, summed up the Obama administration’s warmly positive stance toward Islam in an August 2009 address: “Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against `jihadists.’ Describing terrorists in this way–using a legitimate term, `jihad,’ meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal–risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this perception directly and forcefully in his speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is not and never will be at war with Islam.”

That may be so, but Netanyahu’s statement is true as well – at least the first part of it: “Militant Islam threatens the world.” America is not and never will be at war with Islam, but a significant element of Islam is at war with America, Israel, and the rest of the free world – and Netanyahu is much more realistic about that fact than any other Western leader....

There is more.

NATO On Alert For Major Influx Of foreign Jihadists Into Afghanistan

From Jihad Watch:

Speaking of foreign jihadists, "NATO-Afghan force also detained an al Qaeda fighter of Moroccan origin who lived in Germany," and who had entered Afghanistan through Iran.

What should be striking in all of this is the uniformity with which jihadists from places far removed from one another "misunderstand" Islam, and their ability to find common cause even in what are described as "local" or "regional" conflicts. "NATO on alert for influx of foreign fighters in southern Afghanistan," by Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister for CNN, May 24:

Coalition forces in Afghanistan say that a recent security operation in the southeast part of the country suggests an influx of foreign fighters may be underway, just as the Taliban begins its "fighting season" against NATO troops.

And intelligence analysts say it seems a growing number of Europeans are among them.

On the night of May 8, a joint NATO-Afghan force encountered a group of militants in a place called Qalat, a district in Zabul province in southeastern Afghanistan. Ten militants were killed, according to a statement Tuesday from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The combined force "found passports and identification cards from France, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia amongst ten insurgents killed during the operation," the statement said.

The NATO-Afghan force also detained an al Qaeda fighter of Moroccan origin who lived in Germany -- and who provided details about other foreign fighters. The detainee said he had "observed foreigners from many countries converging in Pakistan to conduct attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan," according to ISAF.

ISAF says the captured man had provided "information on the mechanics of getting foreign fighters to Afghanistan." He said he had come through Iran -- a route frequently used by al Qaeda and other jihadist groups - where he had been approached to become a suicide bomber.

The Moroccan was not identified, but news of his presence among militants will heighten worries in Germany about the number of its residents setting off to wage jihad. German authorities believe at least 220 German residents received training in Pakistan in the years after 9/11; around 40 are still suspected of being in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Others have returned to Germany and are under surveillance, according to German counterterrorism officials.

Many jihadists from Germany have joined an al Qaeda affiliate called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The IMU has been active in Zabul, the province where the German-Moroccan was recently captured.

Among them were two brothers of Moroccan origin living in Bonn, who left Germany several years ago.

Yassin and Mounir Chouka first went to Yemen. In a February 2011 internet statement, Yassin Chouka said they had met fugitive preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.

"We benefited a lot from (Awlaki) and spent priceless hours with him," he wrote. The Chouka brothers apparently spent about a year in Yemen before moving on to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

Muslim Street Preacher Jailed For Frenzied Stabbing

From Yahoo News (Australia):

A street preacher who stabbed his former neighbour in a north Canberra takeaway shop leaving him a quadriplegic has been sentenced to nine years jail.

Isa Islam had a long-running conflict with Andrew Dyer who lived in his public housing block at Ainslie Village, and had complained of him stealing his property.

On a Saturday morning in July 2009, Islam had preached outside the Ainslie Shops, then waited for the man to start work at an Ainslie takeaway store.

Soon after he arrived, Islam stabbed the man with a paring knife, smashed his head to the ground, and stomped on his head.

Mr Dyer suffered a stab wound to his spinal cord and is now a quadriplegic.

Islam was acquitted of attempted murder but was convicted of intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm.

Acting Justice Jane Mathews sentenced the 38-year-old to nine years jail with a non-parole period of four years and six months.

Islam has been in custody since the attack and will be eligible for release in 2014.

IAEA: Syria Site Bombed By Israel 'Was Likely Nuclear'

Old news, but the IAEA finally acknowledges that the Syrian desert site bombed by Israel in 2007 was nuclear.

From BBC News:

A Syrian site bombed by Israeli jets in 2007 was "very likely" a nuclear reactor, the UN's atomic watchdog says.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has been investigating US claims that Syria was building a secret nuclear reactor with North Korean help.

The strongest IAEA report yet on Syria came after several years of blocked investigations, and is likely to increase the pressure on Damascus.

Israel bombed the remote desert site of the alleged reactor in September 2007.

Syria says the site - near Deir Alzour in the country's remote north-east - was an unused military facility under construction. It also denied having any nuclear links to North Korea, which has itself denied transferring nuclear technology to Syria.

But the confidential IAEA report, obtained by the BBC, says the bombed building was similar in type and size to a reactor and that samples taken from the site indicated a connection with nuclear activities.

The report's conclusions are likely to raise international pressure on Damascus, says the BBC's Bethany Bell in Vienna.

It opens the door for Western powers to push for Syria to be referred to the UN Security council, an action last taken against Iran in 2006. That step could come at the next meeting of the IAEA's board of governors in June.

Syria is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives it the right to enrich its own fuel for civil nuclear power, under inspection from the IAEA.

But it has also signed a safeguards agreement with the IAEA under which it is obliged to notify the UN's nuclear watchdog of any plans to construct a new nuclear facility.

Pakistan: 'Only Finger' Of Bomber Found After Suicide Blast Flattens Police Station

From Adnkronos:

At least 4 people were killed and 20 others severely wounded early Wednesday in Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan when a truck carrying explosives rammed into a police station destroying the building.

The Pakistani Talibani claimed responsibility of the attack.

Bashir Bilour, the senior member of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly, confirmed that the attack was carried out by a suicide car bomber.

“About 300 kilograms of explosives was used in the attack. The engine of the bomber’s car landed 350 feet away and his body was blown to bits. Only one finger of the bomber has been found,” Bilour told reporters after visiting the site of the attack.

Only two days after militants brazenly attacked Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi’s naval base, the truck crossed through at least 50 checkpoints including red zone areas and targeted the high profile police intelligence office known as the CID centre.

“After Karachi’s incident we relocated all our strength to airports, key strategic installations and military offices. Militants took advantage of the situation and targeted the CID’s office,” the inspector general of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa province told the reporters after blast.

We Were Just Told To Kill, Says Libyan Teen Soldier

From The Australian:

THE young Libyan soldier showed almost no emotion as he described how his unit had raped four sisters, the youngest about 16, after breaking into a home in the besieged port of Misratah.

"My officer sent three of us up to the roof to guard the house while they tied up the father and mother and took the girls to two rooms, two each to a room," said Walid Abu Bakr, 17.

"My two officers and the others raped the girls first," he recalled in a monotone, still dressed in the camouflage uniform he was wearing when he surrendered 12 days ago. They were playing music. They called me down and ordered me to rape one of the girls."

Abu Bakr, from Traghen, a poor southern town, claimed he had been given hashish and was not responsible.

"She did not move much when I raped her," he said, admitting the girl had already been gang-raped. "She said in a low voice, 'There is Allah. He is watching you.' I said, 'Yes, Allah is watching me'."

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Abu Bakr seemed to regard himself as a victim, however. He said he had become his family's breadwinner after his father left his sick mother and his siblings.

He joined the army when he was offered 200,000 dinars ($155,000), payable on victory for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, he said. But he had received only a week's training at Yarmouk camp in Tripoli before being sent to Misratah as part of a militia attached to the elite Khamis brigade, named after Gaddafi's youngest son. Their mission was simple. "We were just told to kill," Abu Bakr said. The teenager said he did not keep track of how many times the four girls in the house had been raped. The soldiers in his unit had stolen 12,000 dinars and jewellery from the family, but he had not received a penny, he said.

When rebel forces began closing in on the airport road, the officers sent the family to Zliten, the next town controlled by Gaddafi's troops, and left, ordering Abu Bakr and eight others to guard the house. They never returned.

"The rebels surrounded us and we threw away our guns and surrendered," he said.

Abu Bakr, who is now held in a Misratah school with other former Gaddafi soldiers while the rebels decide what to do with them, said he had decided to speak about the rapes after talking to an Islamic cleric.

Misratah officials said the ruthless assaults by Abu Bakr and his unit had been repeated across the city. Gaddafi's soldiers, they said, had engaged in an orgy of rapes that mirrored their destruction of the city's homes and buildings.

Nothing would have prepared the women of Misratah or their families for the ferocity of the onslaught that occurred when they were trapped amid the fighting, mostly in districts that were controlled by Gaddafi's forces for two months.

The brutality emerged only when the rebels broke through loyalist lines and chased Gaddafi's troops beyond the city limits. In their wake, they found horror stories. Doctors at Hekma hospital found some of Gaddafi's soldiers had recorded video footage of rapes on their mobile phones. "They made the girls identify themselves to the camera and show their faces. Then they raped them," one doctor said. The phones were found on loyalists who had been wounded or killed.

"In one of the videos, there's a woman. She's moaning, 'Oh, no, no, the sixth one, God help me'," said one doctor.

Another video shows a group of Gaddafi's soldiers in camouflage uniform breaking down a door and confronting a frightened family - a man, a woman, five girls whose ages range from about five to early 20s, and a boy aged about 7. The soldiers, shouting and waving their guns, stripped the four older girls in front of the family and took them into the next room where they raped the young women. The girls screamed and cried for mercy, calling on Allah. A soldier at one point yells: "Gaddafi is our Allah."

The video was found on the phone of a loyalist soldier.

A Filipina nurse said her best friends had fled to Tunisia after their four daughters and 13-year-old son were raped repeatedly after the family was trapped in their flat on Tripoli Street, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Misratah.

"I spoke to their mother," the nurse said. "She said the boy was terrible. She said, 'Don't even ask about my girls'."

So horrified is Misratah by the rapes that young rebel soldiers have offered to marry the victims, who face ostracism in this deeply traditional society.

"The rebels feel guilty that they did not arrive in time to save these families from Gaddafi's men," said Ismael Fortia, an obstetrician who estimates that up to 1000 women may have been raped.

Hardly any of those attacked have come forward because a raped woman is regarded as virtually unmarriageable if she is single, or a shame to her family if she is married.

Doctors and psychologists in Misratah have banded together to help. They will check victims for sexually transmitted diseases and offer abortions. One of their concerns is that unless they are treated, the women will suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, and may commit suicide rather than live with their memories.

"The images of their rape will go around and around in their heads, like an endless nightmare, unless they receive counselling and help," said Mustafa Shigmani, a doctor.

The terrible revelation comes as Misratah's rebels fight on three fronts around the city, loyalists try almost daily to mine the port and explosions reverberate day and night.

The people of Misratah have suffered the greatest toll in the Libyan conflict, largely because their city has been so bitterly contested by Gaddafi. It is the only population centre in the west of the country that is under rebel control.

In districts liberated by the rebels, residents described a reign of terror under Gaddafi's soldiers.

"The soldiers ordered our family out of the house while they searched," said Fatima, 47, of the Zreig neighbourhood.

"They said they were looking for weapons, but they took our money, our jewellery, everything they could carry while we waited for three hours."

Families were forced to fly the green flag of the regime. Foot patrols raided homes at all hours. "They would shoot up the television if you were watching anything other than the state channel," said Fawzi Damir, 21.

Men disappeared. "They caught my husband and two of my sons," said Fatima, explaining that the men would usually flee if they spotted loyalists on their street. Two weeks ago, however, they had been taken unawares early in the morning. One son escaped by hiding under her bed.

City officials have said more than 1000 men, women and children have disappeared.

Some residents took to the streets last week to celebrate an end to the shelling of the city centre. They waved flags and shouted with joy. They were the lucky ones. One unforgivable legacy of Gaddafi is that many women of Misratah will never again emerge from their homes and think only of the beautiful sunshine.

Facebook Page Calls For Beating Saudi Women Drivers

From Breitbart:

A campaign has been launched on Facebook calling for men to beat Saudi women who drive their cars in a planned protest next month against the ultra-conservative kingdom's ban on women taking the wheel.

The call comes as activists are demanding the release of Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman who was jailed for defying the ban.

The page, titled "The Iqal Campaign: June 17 for preventing women from driving," refers to the Arabic name for the cord used to hold on the traditional headdress worn by many men in the Gulf, advocating the cord be used to hit women who dare to drive.

It has drawn over 6,000 "likes" on the popular social networking website.

Some on the page proposed distributing boxes of Iqals to youths and encouraging them use them to hit women who participate in the June 17 protest.

One joked about the price of Iqals going up due to men buying them before the protest....

More here.

NGO, At Least 1,100 Killed In Two Months Of Uprising

From ANSAmed:

(ANSAmed) - AMMAN, MAY 24 - At least 1,100 civilians have been killed by Syria's army and security forces since street protests against the regime began two months ago. The figure was released in Amman today by the Syrian human rights organisation Sawasiah.

No Going Back For Egypt's Converted Copts

From the Assyrian International News Agency:

Amid the upheavals in Egypt since January, reports have begun to emerge of a surge in disappearances of Coptic girls.

One priest in Cairo estimates that at least 21 young girls, many as young as 14, have disappeared from his parish alone.

In most cases, when a Christian girl who disappears is found by her family, she has been converted to Islam and married. The Coptic authorities, have even set up a series of refuges in monasteries to handle the growing numbers of girls who wish to return to their families, many of whom are not accepted by their family of origin.

But a worse problem for these women is that their conversion to Islam is irreversible.

Religion is stated on Egyptian ID documents and even though secular law provides for reversions, under the growth of sharia they are very difficult, except for those affording legal advocacy.

This situation is not unique to Egypt. There have been consistent reports of girls being coerced into Islamic conversion and marriage in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

That many of these girls are initially runaways is not in doubt. However, there is also evidence that a huge number are converted and married against their will.

The situation was documented in a controversial report published in 2009 on conversion and forced marriage of Coptic women by Washington DC-based Christian Solidarity International. The authors are Washington academic Michele Clark and Egyptian Coptic broadcast journalist Nadia Ghaly, based in Melbourne.

Between 2005 and 2008 they interviewed and documented 50 Egyptian women, mostly aged between 14 and 25, who had decided to return to their families. All claim to have been tricked, coerced or raped, converted to Islam and married. Most of the interviewees were trying to reconvert to their Christian identity, with limited or no success. The report's conclusions were printed in several major publications, including Forbes magazine.

Since the so-called Arab Spring, and the ensuing riots at Christian churches, the authors are trying to bring the subject of forced conversion and marriage to greater prominence.

Both groups live extremely closed, highly traditional separate lives and the norms surrounding marriage and sex are almost medieval, says Ghaly.

So, for example, it is not unheard of for a young Christian girl from a poor family to run away from an arranged marriage. Yet a high proportion of these women claim coercion, even rape, despite the shame that such a claim will cause if the girl wishes to return.

Many claim they were kept as virtual slaves. Others who were able to leave could not bring their children. Ghaly claims this is more than overt religious oppression, and amounts to "a form of cultural genocide".

She cites a document published by Human Rights Watch in November 2007, which says that even if Coptic women can obtain a divorce from their Muslim husband, those who wish to return to Christianity "meet with refusal and harassment from the Civil Status Department of the Ministry of Interior".

Under sharia law, reconversion is considered apostasy punishable by death.