Free Republic

A lawyer defending al Qaida-linked suspects standing trial for the 2003 suicide bombings in Istanbul told a court that jihad, or holy war, was an obligation for Muslims and his clients should not be prosecuted. "If you punish them for this, tomorrow, will you punish them for fasting or for praying?" Osman Karahan -- a lawyer representing 14 of the 72 suspects -- asked during a nearly four-hour speech in which he read religious texts from an encyclopedia of Islam. The November 2003 blasts targeted two synagogues, the British Consulate and the local headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank, killing...

Imam Mohamed Lunat helps debunk common myths about his religion The image of Imam Mohamed Lunat as he walks in the doors of the Islamic Center of Elizabethtown looks like one from the evening news. He is medium height and thin, with dark, intense eyes and a fist-length beard with no mustache. He has a prayer cap on his head, an ankle-length robe and sheds his shoes as he enters. Based solely on appearance he could, to biased eyes, be mistaken as the cliché of any of the Middle-Eastern terrorists who scream into shoddy video cameras around the world about...

~The Koran & Jihad~ Arab militants from the military wing of Islamic Jihad movement hold the Koran as they march during a protest in Jabally refugee camp north Gaza Strip June 10th, 2005. An Arab Muslim militant from the military wing of Islamic Jihad movement holds a Koran as he marches during a protest in Jabally refugee camp north Gaza Strip June 10TH, 2005. Members from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement marched through the streets of Jabally after Palestinian accusations that guards had ripped pages of the Koran, while Israeli prison officials said preliminary checks found no evidence an Islamic...

IT sounds like something out of the satirical journal Annals of Improbable Research: a team of Swedish neuroscientists scanned people's brains as they smelled a testosterone derivative found in men's sweat and an estrogen-like compound found in women's urine. In heterosexual men, a part of the hypothalamus (the seat of physical drives) responded to the female compound but not the male one; in heterosexual women and homosexual men, it was the other way around. But the discovery is more than just a shoo-in for that journal's annual Ig Nobel Prize - it raises provocative questions about the science and ethics...