News & Analysis (8/15/16)

Seventy percent of Daesh applicants rated themselves  as having a minimal knowledge of Islam and the “group preys on this ignorance”:

• Islamic State Gets Know-nothing Recruits and Rejoices (AP / Yahoo)

An Imam and his assistant were shot dead outside the mosque after prayers. The motives are not yet known:

• Imam Among Two Shot Dead in Queens, New York (BBC)

A militant claims that some of the captured girls were “crippled, … terribly sick…. [or] died during bombardment by the Nigerian military,” as he stands “before a group of more than 40 young women in hijabs, some holding babies”:

• New Militant Video Shows Abducted Nigerian Girls (Christian Science Monitor)

“It is the latest example of long-running tensions between a forceful — some would say inconsistent — commitment to secularism in France and the desire of many Muslims to express, through their attire, traditional values like modesty”

• Cannes, Citing Security Risks, Bans Full-Body “Burkinis” from its Beaches (New York Times)

There is a long, inglorious tradition of the British establishment claiming to take up the cause of Muslim women in order to conceal some other objective”:

• The Guardian View on Anti-Muslim Discrimination: a Terrible Social Injustice (Guardian)

The imam reminds those reading that terrorism is completely haram in Islam:

• Imam: Aaron Driver Doesn’t Speak for My Islam (Ottawa Citizen)

Jeta Luboteni