Free Republic

Turkey lifted a ban on women wearing the Islamic head scarf in state institutions on Tuesday, ending a generations-old restriction as part of a package of reforms the government says are meant to improve democracy. The ban, whose roots date back almost 90 years to the early days of the Turkish Republic, has kept many women from joining the public work force, but secularists see its abolition as evidence of the government pushing an Islamic agenda. The new rules, which will not apply to the judiciary or the military, were published in the Official Gazette and take immediate effect in...

In an interview with Salon late Tuesday, congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minn., co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, slammed as “disgusting” the GOP’s plan of “passing these piecemeal things” protecting certain high-profile programs while allowing the government shutdown to continue. “It reminds me of that time we voted … [that] people who fly every day, they get to skip the sequester, but kids on Headstart don’t,” Ellison said. “It’s wrong. So Republicans are right now calculating, you know, which shutdown elements are going to give bad press … they want to try to trick the press into thinking that this is...

On Friday, Obama cited a “fatwa,” or religious edict, from Iran’s all-powerful Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, banning the pursuit of nuclear weapons. "I do believe that there is a basis for a resolution [because] Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons,” Obama told reporters. “There is no such fatwa. It is a lie from the Iranians, a deception, and it is tragic that President Obama has endorsed it,” MEMRI Founder and President Yigal Carmon told FoxNews.com.

North Carolina has become the seventh state to prohibit state judges from considering Islamic law in family cases, joining what critics say is a national anti-Muslim campaign. ... North Carolina now joins Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee, according to Religion News Service, in banning Islamic Sharia law. A constitutional amendment seeking the same change in Alabama will be on the 2014 ballot. In Missouri, the governor vetoed an anti-Sharia bill because of its potential impact on international adoptions. But the law in Oklahoma was struck down in court as unconstitutional,

A 42-year-old Wellington man is in the county jail today after his wife told police that he beat her with a television remote and a cable, and that she hadn’t been allowed out of their home in three years. Qasem Alabed faces charges of aggravated battery-causing bodily harm or disability and aggravated battery on a pregnant woman. He was arrested Wednesday around 11:30 p.m. The 30-year-old victim met with Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies at Wellington’s City Hall at 12300 Forest Hill Blvd. Wednesday to report that her husband beat her with the remote control and the cable, according to...

University of Chicago (UC) administrators permanently removed pews from an 88-year old chapel on campus in order to accommodate Islamic prayers, according to a local news report. Chicago NPR affiliate, WBEZ news, reported on May 23, the pews, which are now part of display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, were “removed in order to provide Muslim students a place to pray.” Literature describing the artwork that was created by UC Director of Arts and Public Life Theaster Gates, also describes the removal of the pews as symbol of religious tolerance. “The pews were recently removed from the...

The Afghanistan Parliament recently blocked a bill that would ban the selling of women. The politicians said it was against Islamic Law. ... Afghanistan's parliament has blocked a law banning violence against women in what is being seen as a serious blow to the progress of women's rights. President Hamid Karzai approved the legislation by decree in 2009 but the country's politicians were required to endorse it. ... Among the law's provisions are criminalising child marriage and banning "baad," the traditional practice of selling and buying women to settle disputes.

Executioners wanted urgently! Saudi Arabia is desperately looking for ways to make up for the lack of trained executioners who are skilled at beheading people sentenced to death under Sharia law. According to AsiaNews they seem to be a dying breed as “fewer people are interested in a "career" in executing others, a task that requires a lot of cold blood and a lot of training to be able to swing a sword properly.” But “in reality,” AsiaNews reports, “the lack of trained executioners has not slowed down executions in Saudi Arabia. Since the beginning 2013, at least 40 people...

In its latest effort to protect followers of Islam in the U.S. the Obama Justice Department warns against using social media to spread information considered inflammatory against Muslims, threatening that it could constitute a violation of civil rights. The move comes a few years after the administration became the first in history to dispatch a U.S. Attorney General to personally reassure Muslims that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is dedicated to protecting them. In the unprecedented event, Attorney General Eric Holder assured a San Francisco-based organization (Muslim Advocates) that urges members not to cooperate in federal terrorism investigations that the...

Signs that Canadian citizens were involved in the attack by hostage-taking Islamist militants on a remote gas plant in Algeria are of great concern to American authorities, U.S. intelligence officials said on Thursday. While Algerian authorities apparently have not yet provided Western governments with cast-iron proof, a senior U.S. intelligence official said: “We’re taking very seriously the reports of the two Canadians’ involvement.” ... Confirmation that Canadian citizens were involved in the attack on the In Amenas facility in the Algerian desert would raise concerns about a worrying nexus between North America and North African militants. At least 38 plant...

A convicted Saudi felon who was sentenced to 28 years in prison after being convicted by a Colorado jury for imprisoning his housekeeper and holding her as a sex slave could soon be released from prison. Homaidan al-Turki, a Saudi citizen whose 2006 case made headlines and triggered national outrage when he was arrested for imprisoning and sexually abusing his maid in the basement of his Aurora home, has asked to be repatriated to Saudi Arabia under the terms of a bilateral treaty. If the Hickenlooper administration agrees to the request, al-Turki could return to Saudi Arabia after serving less...

The Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, al Qaeda in Iraq's affiliate in Syria, led an assault today that resulted in the takeover of a major dam on the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Additionally, the terror group claimed credit for a suicide assault on an intelligence headquarters in the city of Palmyra. The Al Nusrah Front spearheaded today's assault on the "strategic" dam in Thawra in Raqqa province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Nusrah Front led "other factions" of the insurgency to take control of Thawra, which "is considered one of the...

A 15-year-old girl in the Maldives whose stepfather is accused of repeatedly raping her and killing the resulting baby risks being flogged for “fornication” with another man under the nation’s strict Islamic law. In the course of inquiries into the rape case, police investigators say they unearthed evidence of the girl having had consensual sex with another man, which is an offence in the Indian Ocean holiday destination, a police source said. Women, including minors, having consensual sex outside marriage can be charged in the Maldives, where convicts can be publicly flogged. Minors receive the punishment when they reach 18,...

A Saudi court on Monday referred a rights activist to a higher court for alleged apostasy, a charge that could lead to the death penalty ... ... Sharia Islamic law strictly applied in Saudi Arabia stipulates death as a punishment for apostasy, but defendants are usually given the chance to repent and escape being beheaded. Saudi blogger Hamza Kashgari was deported in February from Malaysia to the kingdom and is being held in jail to face charges of blasphemy over Twitter comments deemed insulting to the Prophet Mohammed. Kashgari's comments triggered a wave of calls to execute him, although he...

Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz on Saturday demanded a UN resolution condemning insults on monotheistic religions after a low-budget film produced in the US sparked deadly protests last month. "I demand a UN resolution that condemns any country or group that insults religions and prophets," he said during a meeting at his palace with religious figures and heads of hajj delegations in the Mina valley where pilgrims were performing final rituals of hajj. "It is our duty and that of every Muslim to protect Islam and defend the prophets." A low-budget film produced in the US, Innocence of Muslims, triggered...

While Obama’s connection to his Muslim family in Kenya is an acceptable topic for discussion in the Arab world, it is viewed as a ‘great taboo’ in the United States. Why is that so? This ‘taboo’ should be considered unfair at best, purely prejudiced at worst. Is it fair that we censor such discussions just because Obama’s relatives are ‘Muslim’? The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) should condemn the media for keeping a tight lid on the subject. Isn’t it time to go beyond what is disclosed by President Obama in his Dreams from My Father or Wikipedia’s limited...

CAIRO — The elections that followed the Arab uprisings elevated Islamists out of decades of repression and into the region’s most powerful posts. Here in Egypt, a former prisoner became president. But to Salafists, adherents of a puritanical form of Islam who have embraced the country’s new freedoms with gusto, the emerging Islamist order has a serious flaw: It isn’t nearly Islamist enough. “They say that the people do not want sharia,” said Gamel Saber, a back-slapping Salafist activist who said he dreams of a day when his country’s courts will fully implement Islamic law. “But that is not true....

The American Left used to champion free expression. We were lectured -- correctly -- that the price of being repulsed by occasional crude talk and art was worth paying. Only that way could Americans ensure our daily right to criticize those with greater power and influence whom we found wrong and objectionable. When 1950s comedian Lenny Bruce titillated his audiences with the F-word and crude sex talk, liberals came to his defense. They reminded us that vulgar speech is not a crime: The First Amendment was not just designed to protect uplifting expression, but also rarer blasphemous and indecent speech....

With the Innocence of Muslims director under arrest for rather thin parole violation charges, many on the right have wondered where the Left has been on free speech. Should the ACLU, who regularly champion flag burners, step in to protest the backlash against clearly protected speech? Where are the Hollywood elites whose livelihoods depend on churning out offensive films? Nowhere, of course, and one cannot fully blame them; people who go against jihadists often find themselves with severed heads. There is another reason – to the Left, free speech has always been a canard to promote progressive change. The ACLU...

A recent Egyptian TV program showed how Islamic Sharia law’s many prescriptions do not merely clash with modern-day concepts like free speech and religious freedom, but even with medicine and science. On September 16, popular TV persona Wael El-Ibrashi hosted Dr. Zaghlul al-Naggar, a prominent Islamic thinker and Chairman of Egypt’s Committee of Scientific Notions in the Quran, on the topic of medical science and Islam. Inevitably the idea of drinking camel urine as a form of therapy—first proposed in the 7th century by Muslim prophet Muhammad—came up. Not only did Dr. Naggar promote this practice, but he made the...