Month: September 2011

The “doctors have repeatedly denied the charges [of terrorism], which they say were created by the authorities to punish medical staff for treating people who took part in anti-government protests”: Bahrain Medical Staff Sentenced over Protests (AlJazeera) “The top demand of the protesters was to end the emergency law that allowed authorities to arrest Egyptians…

“I honestly don’t see myself as a hero…  I never had to stand alone in this” — says one of the Irvine 11; “He was just doing his job,” says the father of another. “He’s not the first one and he’s not going to be the last one”: Supporters Rally Around the ‘Irvine 11’ at…

“The king … also announced that women would be appointed to the Shura Council, a currently all-male body established in 1993 to offer counsel on general policies in the kingdom,” but Saudi women will have to wait four years to exercise their new franchise; in the meantime a woman is sentenced to ten lashes for…

Abbas gets political capital among Palestinians and a “rousing ovation” at the UN while Netanyahu gets a cool reaction and Hamas mimics Israel in banning pro-statehood demonstrations: Palestinian Statehood Bid Brings Abbas a Personal Victory (Christian Science Monitor) The “dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, agreed with the university’s punishment noting that speech used to…

As “Obama tries to derail [the] Palestinian U.N. bid,” local and international activists are “setting up neighborhood watch patrols to monitor” and document settler aggression against the indigenous people: Tensions over Palestinian UN Bid Spur New Patrols in West Bank (Christian Science Monitor) Ahmadinejad is at playing at two chess boards at once in the…

Uri Avnery “wrote recently that when he saw some anti-Muslim German blogs, he was ‘shocked to the core. These outpourings are almost verbatim copies of the diatribes of Joseph Goebbels,’ the propaganda minister for Hitler. ‘The same rabble-rousing slogans. The same base allegations. The same demonization’”: Islamophobia: The New Anti-Semitism (Toronto Star) “[I]n this new…

Embarrassed by an expose in Wired, “[t]he FBI on Thursday said it had stopped a training session that called the Prophet Muhammad a ‘cult leader,’ said mainstream Muslims were likely to support violent extremism and described the Islamic principal of charity as a ‘funding mechanism for combat’”: FBI Says It Pulled Anti-Muslim Training Materials (Joan…

NOTES FROM THE IIIT CONFERENCE ON IFTAA AND FATWA IN THE MUSLIM WORLD AND THE WEST: THE CHALLENGES OF AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY AND RELEVANCE #14 [This is the fourteenth in a series of my notes on the International Institute of Islamic Thought conference on iftaa and fatwa held in Herndon, VA. These notes are raw material…

“‘Freedom and democracy and human rights must be a united slogan for the future of our people,’ Erdogan told an audience of Arab foreign ministers and millions more watching on television across the region. ‘The legitimate demands of the people cannot be repressed with force and in blood’” … Turkey’s PM Rallies Arab World in…