Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Muslims have 'right to punish' French, says Malaysia's Mahathir

 Muslims have 'right to punish' French, says Malaysia's Mahathir

Reuters Staff

2-3 minutes

OCTOBER 29, 20205:32 PMUPDATED 27 MINUTES AGO

In a blog post Mahathir, 95, a respected leader in the Muslim world, said he believed in freedom of expression but that it should not be used to insult others.

“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past. But by and large the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t,” Mahathir said in a blog post, which he also posted on Twitter.

“Since you have blamed all Muslims and the Muslims’ religion for what was done by one angry person, the Muslims have a right to punish the French,” he said.

Twitter said the message violated its rules and it had removed the tweet.

Several Muslim-majority countries have denounced remarks by French officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, defending the use of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a French school classroom. The caricatures are seen as blasphemous by Muslims.

The dispute flared after a French teacher who showed his pupils satirical cartoons of the Prophet during a civics lesson was later beheaded in the street by an attacker of Chechen origin.

French officials said the killing was an attack on the core French value of freedom of expression and defended the right to publish the cartoons. Macron has also said he would redouble efforts to stop conservative Islamic beliefs subverting French values.


Reporting by A. Ananthalakshmi; Editing by Jon Boyle and Toby Chopra

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police

 www.nytimes.com /2020/10/16/world/europe/france-decapitate-beheading.html

By Adam Nossiter

7-9 minutes

The victim was immediately depicted as a martyr to freedom of expression. France’s antiterrorism prosecutors are investigating the attack, which took place in a suburb north of Paris.

Police officers near the scene north of Paris where a man decapitated a schoolteacher.

Credit...Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

Published Oct. 16, 2020Updated Oct. 20, 2020

PARIS — A knife-wielding man decapitated a teacher near a school in a suburb north of Paris on Friday afternoon and was later shot dead by the police, officials said, abruptly hitting France with a national trauma that revived memories of recent terrorist attacks.

A police officer and parents with knowledge of the attack confirmed French media reports that the victim was a history teacher at the school who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression, which had incited anger among some Muslim families.

The teacher, still unidentified by Friday evening, was immediately depicted as a martyr to freedom of expression across the political spectrum. Representatives in France’s Parliament rose to their feet to “honor the victim’s memory,” as the president of the session, parliamentary deputy Hugues Renson, declared. And President Emmanuel Macron hurried to the scene of the attack Friday night.

“This was an attempt to strike down the republic,” Mr. Macron said.

Seizing on the symbolic nature of an attack against a schoolteacher, and reprising anti-Islamist themes he has lately emphasized, Mr. Macron said the teacher had been “the victim of a terrorist, Islamist attack.”

The teacher was struck down “because he taught, because he taught the liberty of expression, the liberty to believe and not believe,” the French president said in a brief televised address.

France’s antiterrorism prosecutors immediately took over the investigation of the attack, which happened at the junction of two adjoining Paris suburbs, Eragny and Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

Much remained obscure Friday night in the absence of an official police narrative. But the underlying themes of what was known conjured up France’s recent history of terrorist attacks: an assailant carefully choosing a victim thought to symbolize an offense against Islam.

President Emmanuel Macron of France visited the scene and spoke with the press on Friday.

Turmoil at the school over the teacher’s method of instruction — Mr. Macron alluded to this in his remarks — had evidently preceded the killing. “We have seen the principal, who in these last weeks has withstood with remarkable courage a great deal of pressure,” Mr. Macron said.

In a video that widely circulated on YouTube before the attack, a Muslim parent at the teacher’s school, College du Bois-d’Aulne, expresses anger that an unidentified teacher had asked Muslims in the class of 13-year-olds to leave because “he was going to show a photo that would shock them.”

The parent asks on the video: “Why this hatred? Why does a history teacher act like this in front of 13-year-olds?”

The assailant is not known to have a connection to the school. French media reported that he was 18 and of Russian origin.

A police union official told the French television station BFM that witnesses had seen the assailant cutting the victim’s throat. The national police were called, officials said, and after having discovered the decapitated victim, confronted the assailant nearby, close to the school. Brandishing a large knife, he threatened the officers, and after refusing to surrender, was shot 10 times, they said.

French media, quoting witnesses, said the assailant was heard to yell “Allahu akbar” at the moment of the knife attack. A photograph of a corpse lying in the middle of a leafy suburban street appeared on French television not long afterward.

The attack came three weeks after a knife-wielding assailant wounded two people in Paris near the site of the former Charlie Hebdo office — the scene of a 2015 terrorist attack targeting the satirical newspaper for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

French officials of all political stripes rushed to denounce the teacher’s killing. The interior minister, in charge of the police, cut short an official trip to Morocco and flew home to Paris.

“The assassination of a history teacher is an attack on freedom of expression and the values of the republic,” the president of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand, said on Twitter. “To attack a teacher is to attack all French citizens and freedom.”

“Frightful. Huge emotion and anger in the face of this terrorist barbarism,” a leading Socialist parliamentarian, Boris Vallaud, wrote on Twitter.

“So this week, he allowed himself to tell them, the Muslims, Muslim students raise your hands,” the parents says. “So they raised their hands, and he said, ‘right, leave the class.’ So my daughter refused to leave and asked him, ‘why?’ And he said he was going to show a photo that would shock them. And then he showed them a naked man, telling them it was the prophet.”

Another parent, Carine Mendes, 41, whose child had attended the class, offered a more nuanced view of what happened. She called the teacher “a very sweet person, in his words, in his expressions.”

Ms. Mendes said the teacher had suggested to Muslim students who did not want to see the cartoon that they leave the classroom temporarily, and had asked those who remained not to tell their Muslim classmates about the cartoon in order not to offend their faith.

“He really tried to do things with respect, he didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said.

But in a second class where the teacher gave the course, a shocked student refused to leave the room and told her father about what happened. He was the father who later complained in the video posted online.

The next day, the teacher apologized to his students and the principal sent an email message to parents to try to clear up the situation. The teacher’s suggestion to leave the classroom, the principal said, had been insensitive.

“Without wanting to offend anyone, it turned out that by offering this possibility to the students, he still offended the student,” the principal’s email read.

Ms. Mendes said that what happened “was awful.”

“He was just giving a course on freedom of expression,” she said.

“A teacher was killed just for doing his job,” Sophie Venetitay, a teachers’ union official, told BFM.

Constant Méheut and Antonella Francini contributed reporting.


Adam Nossiter is the Paris bureau chief. Previously, he was a Paris correspondent, the West Africa bureau chief, and led the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 17, 2020, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Man Kills Teacher In Paris Suburb, Decapitating Him. Order Reprints | Today’s 

Friday, October 18, 2019

Terror Attacks in France: A Culture of Denial

www.gatestoneinstitute.org /15019/france-terrorism-denial
Alain Destexhe
7-9 minutes

Pictured: Police block a bridge near Paris Police headquarters, after a terrorist murdered four police employees on October 3, 2019 in Paris, France. (Photo by Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)

On October 3, 2019, a knife-wielding Muslim employee of the Paris Police Department Intelligence Directorate stabbed to death four other employees at police headquarters in the center of Paris, before a trainee police officer shot and killed him. While it was not the deadliest terror attack France has experienced in recent years, the fatal stabbings that took place at the Paris police headquarters were perhaps the most worrisome. Its author (a French public servant employed by the police), its highly sensitive target, and the catastrophic handling of the aftermath of the attack reveal the failure of the French institutions.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Where did the reformist just re-elected as Indonesia’s president go?

print-edition iconPrint edition | AsiaSep 26th 2019
5-6 minutes
NOT SINCE 1998, when huge crowds demanding reformasi brought down Suharto, Indonesia’s late dictator, have university students taken to the streets in such numbers. In cities across the archipelago and, above all, outside the parliament in Jakarta, tens of thousands have gathered in the past few days. Despite tear-gas, water cannon and beatings, their numbers are growing. Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, the recently re-elected president, faces an unexpected test.

The protesters carry a rattlebag of demands tied together by attempts by the political elite and the security forces to roll back two decades of democratic change. They call their movement reformasi dikorupsi, or reform corrupted. That Jokowi has come into the movement’s sights is significant. He swept to power in 2014 because Indonesians loved his reputation for clean government and because he was outside the intermarried elites that have long dominated politics, the security services and business.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

China’s repression of Islam is spreading beyond Xinjiang

www.economist.com
ChinaSep 25th 2019 | DUANJIAPING
10-13 minutes
AS DARKNESS BEGINS to settle on Duanjiaping village, a few men in white skullcaps head towards a large mosque. It is time for the Maghrib, the fourth of the five daily prayers of devout Muslims. It is clear even before they reach the building’s high yellow walls that all is not right. The prayer-hall’s four minarets, topped by golden crescent moons, are still a towering landmark. But they are covered in scaffolding and green netting (see picture), and they are not due for repair.

Friday, February 3, 2017

Syrian army says it will press on against Islamic State near Aleppo

WORLD NEWS | Thu Feb 2, 2017 | 9:08am EST

Reuters

By John Davison and Tom Perry | BEIRUT
The Syrian army signaled on Thursday it would press on with operations against Islamic State northeast of Aleppo, in a veiled warning to Turkey which backs a separate military campaign in northern Syria.

Syrian government forces have rapidly driven Islamic State back in the last two weeks, advancing to within 6 km (4 miles) of the city of al-Bab that the jihadists are fighting to hold.

The army's gains risk sparking a confrontation with Turkey, which has sent tanks and warplanes across the border to support Syrian insurgents who are trying to seize al-Bab in a separate offensive.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Islam, interment and Greece


Burying drowned migrants is part of a broader Greek problem
Apr 20th 2016, 12:55 BY M.TZ. AND ERASMUS | MYTILENE
Timekeeper
The Economist

THE newly established graveyard, a short drive west of Mytilene port, is a desperately sad place. In the middle of an olive grove, there are dozens of mounds of crumbly earth, some created only a month ago, with markers offering perfunctory information about the people who lie underneath: a name, a date of death or discovery and a date of interment. Sometimes the name is not known.

Friday, February 12, 2016

Πρόσφυγες ή εισβολή;


Του Α Ανδριανόπουλου

Ισλαμ σε μια χωρα επιδρα στις εξελιξεις ευθεως αναλογα με τους αριθμους των μουσουλμανων που βρισκονται εκει. Αν οι αφοσιωμενοι οπαδοι του Μωαμεθ δεν ξεπερνουν το 1% του πληθυσμου τοτε οι μουσουλμανοι ειναι φιλησυχοι, αγαπουν την ειρηνη και δειχνουν ετοιμοι να ασχοληθουν αποκλειστικα με την καθημερινοτητα τους. Αυτο ισχυει απολυτα σε χωρες οπως οι Ηνωμενες Πολιτειες η Αυστραλία η ο Καναδάς με ποσοστο μουσουλμανων απο 0,08 έως 1,8% .

Friday, June 13, 2014

Can Iraq Survive?

By: Daniel Benjamin
The Boston Globe
Opinion | June 12, 2014
The news from Iraq has been so bad for so long, it has become difficult to distinguish the merely depressing from the genuinely disastrous. But the fall of Mosul, the country’s second largest city, to jihadi forces this week provided a shock well above and beyond the quotidian misery — one that looks like a turning point, or even an end point, for post-Saddam Iraq.

Friday, April 19, 2013

With Boston Manhunt, Media Is Part of a Story It Is Covering


The New York Times
April 19, 2013
By BRIAN STELTER
Reporters, camera crews and ordinary citizens with cellphone cameras were squarely in the middle of the manhunt in Boston that gripped the nation on Friday, and the result was some of the most startling, and at times unnerving, news coverage in years.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The blasphemy law in Pakistan


Contemptuous
For once, the government pushes back on intolerance
Sep 8th 2012 | ISLAMABAD | from the print edition
The Economist

Friday, March 23, 2012

The Toulouse killings


Murders in the Midi-Pyrénées
A ghastly killing spree interrupts the presidential campaign
Mar 24th 2012 | PARIS | from the print edition
The Economist
AFTER a 32-hour siege, in which a heavily armed police squad surrounded his house in Toulouse, Mohammed Merah, who is suspected of killing four adults and three children in a series of terror attacks in south-west France, died when police stormed the building on March 22nd. The news capped days of drama that rocked the country and—temporarily—put its presidential election campaign on hold.