Free Republic

OSLO (Reuters) - Police in Norway have arrested a Gambian-born man and charged him and his wife with subjecting five of their six daughters to genital mutilation, officials said on Friday. ADVERTISEMENT The practice, also known as female circumcision, is outlawed in Norway and arouses horror among many people in the West but is a rite of passage for young women in many countries, predominantly in Africa. The youngest of the five mutilated girls, all born in Norway, is five years old, police officials said. The others are aged seven, 10, 13 and 14 and live in Gambia, national broadcaster...

Neil MacFarquahar of the New York Times artfully navigates politically sensitive waters with an article on the problem of wife-beating among Muslims in the United States. The general question, simply put, is how to admit a pattern of outrageous behavior by designated victim groups, without provoking a serious reaction of outrage. So the reportage is artfully constructed to imply that solution as well as the problem lie within Islam, and non-Muslims have a minor role, if any, to play. Thus, the article begins with insensitive Americans failing to accommodate the special needs of battered women who happen to be Muslim:...

A manhunt in Texas continued Friday for a father accused of shooting his teen daughters and leaving them to die in a taxi. Yaser Abdel Said, 50, of Lewisville, Texas, is wanted for shooting Sarah Yaser Said, 17, and Amina Yaser Said, 18, in his taxi Tuesday night. Police say they don't have a motive for the shootings, but believe a domestic issue may have led to the deaths. Friends gathered Thursday night for a vigil to remember the sisters. The girls' mother, who has been in hiding since the shootings, attended. The victims' brother made a statement at the...

PARIS - Vandals torched 372 cars as France celebrated the New Year, down on the figure last year after a night the police described as "relatively calm". Cars are burned fairly regularly in France and the image of vehicles in flames in poor suburbs became symbolic of riots in 2005 when angry youths set fire to thousands of cars. There is usually an increase in the number of cars torched on New Year's Eve compared to other days of the year. "The night was relatively calm, without notable incident, there were very few direct clashes with the security forces," said...

TORONTO, Ont. -- A 16-year-old girl has died after allegedly being choked by her father over a dispute with her family over her refusal to wear the hijab, the Islamic headscarf worn by some Muslim women. Peel Regional Police arrested a 57-year-old man Tuesday morning after receiving a 911 call from a suburban home in Mississauga from a man saying he had killed his daughter, according to a Toronto newspaper Web site. According to the National Post, a Toronto newspaper Web site, when police arrived at the house they found the teen on the floor without any vital signs.

News of her death was not an hour old when the words "honour killing" were bandied about. Thanks to freedom, and the fair justice that comes with that, it could be years before we know the exact reason why 16-year-old Asqa Parvez had her life savagely stolen. But we do know her father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, has been charged with her strangulation murder and her brother Waqas, 26, is charged with obstruction of justice. Her schoolmates talk of disagreements over not wanting to wear the traditional hijab and other cultural and religious clashes in her home. Whatever the truth, this...

A British teacher is facing 40 lashes from police in Sudan where she has been accused of insulting Islam after naming a Teddy bear Mohamed. Gillian Gibbons, 54, was being questioned at a police station in the capital Khartoum. She had been working at one of the city's exclusive British schools for the past three months since giving up her job in Liverpool. Police arrived at the old-fashioned brick and stone buildings of the Unity High School on Sunday to arrest Miss Gibbons after a complaint from parents that she had named the bear after Islam's most holy prophet Mohamed....

The teaching of evolution is becoming increasingly difficult in UK schools because of the rise of creationism, a leading scientist is warning. Head of science at London's Institute of Education Professor Michael Reiss says some teachers, fearful of entering the debate, avoid the subject totally. This could leave pupils with gaps in their scientific knowledge, he says. Prof Reiss says the rise of creationism is partly down to the large increase in Muslim pupils in UK schools. He said: "The number of Muslim students has grown considerably in the last 10 to 20 years and a higher proportion of Muslim...

PATTANI, Thailand (Reuters) - A bomb hidden under a bench in front of a food shop killed one person and wounded 10 others in Thailand's Muslim south on Saturday, police said. The remote-controlled device exploded while Buddhist Thais were waiting to give food to monks in the town of Pattani in one of three southernmost provinces where more than 2,500 people have been killed in violence since 2004, police said. Two civilians were seriously wounded while the shop owner was killed, police said. Monks and the soldiers escorting them were also among the wounded. Nobody claims responsibility for the daily...

Excerpt - The death toll from the co-ordinated suicide truck bombings targeting the minority Yazidi sect in Iraq could double from 250 to 500, officials have warned. With emergency services overwhelmed, some families have been digging with their bare hands in the search for bodies. It was one of the deadliest attacks in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. The US military has blamed al Qaeda in Iraq for the atrocity and one commander called it an "act of ethnic cleansing." ~ snip ~

Iran authorities lash man for having bible in car - report Mon. 13 Aug 2007 Iran Focus Tehran, Iran, Aug. 13 – Iranian authorities in Tehran lashed a man on his back earlier this year for having a bible in his car, an Iranian Christian group said in a report on its website on Friday. The man was only identified by the initials A. Sh. On 5 May, the man, driving his vehicle, was involved in a road accident with a car belonging to security guards for a government official in Tehran. A bible and a video of Jesus Christ...

Swedish society is disintegrating and is in danger of collapsing. The "Swedish Model" no longer refers to a peaceful state with an advanced economy, but to a Eurabian horror story of utopian multiculturalism, socialist mismanagement, and runaway immigration. The newspaper Aftonbladet reported that 9 out of 10 of the most criminal ethnic groups in Sweden come from Muslim countries. The number of rape charges in Sweden has quadrupled in just twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six times as common today as they were a generation ago. Most other kinds of violent crime have...

Thousands of civilians have fled their homes in the southern Philippine island of Jolo after deadly clashes between troops and militants, officials say. More than 50 people were killed on Thursday, almost half of them soldiers. Reinforcements have begun to arrive in Jolo, as the military steps up its campaign against Islamist rebels. Troops backed by US military trainers have been fighting militants affiliated to various groups, hiding in the island's mountainous terrain. Thursday's fighting began when a troop convoy was ambushed near the town of Maimburg, leaving 10 soldiers dead. Fifteen more soldiers were killed and 17 were wounded...

LONDON (Reuters) - A Kurdish woman was brutally raped, stamped on and strangled by members of her family and their friends in an "honor killing" carried out at her London home because she had fallen in love with the wrong man. .... Banaz Mahmod, 20, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. Her body was stuffed into a suitcase and taken about 100 miles to Birmingham where it was buried in the back garden of a house. ... In the recordings, transcripts of which were relayed to the court, Hama and his friend...

U.S. law enforcement officials received intelligence reports two weeks ago warning of a possible terror attack in Glasgow against "airport infrastructure or aircraft," a senior US law enforcement officials tells the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The intelligence reports also warned that airports and aircraft in the Czech Republic could be the targets of al Qaeda-connected terrorists. The warnings were kept secret for operational reasons, according to officials. In public, the White House and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff have continued to maintain they know of no specific or credible threats involving the United States, even though the intelligence reports specify US...

JAKARTA (AFP) - Muslim hardliners stormed a church in Indonesia during services, smashing images of Jesus Christ and demanding that it be closed down, the pastor said on Monday. Dozens of churches have had to be closed in the Muslim-majority country in recent years, and Sunday's attack was the second on the small Protestant church in the West Java town of Soreang since 2005. Reverend Robby Elisa, who heads the church, said around 100 hardliners attacked while Sunday school was in session. He said his wife was beaten and that at least four stained glass depictions of Jesus were smashed....

In West Java, Islamic terrorists have forcibly closed another Christian church. Typically, a mob of Islamic militants will invade a church, during services, and desecrate the place, drive the worshipers out, and attack any clergy, all the time shouting Islamic slogans. When the police investigate, none of the known Islamic militant groups will take credit for the attack. In the last three years, at least 30 Christian churches have been forced to close in West Java.

Fundamentalists in Gaza threaten to behead 'immodest' women broadcasters Radical Islamist group Swords of Truth, responsible for internet cafe bombings, threatens specific group for first time Associated Press A Muslim extremist group threatened to behead female TV broadcasters if they don't don strict Islamic dress, leaving the women terrified and marking a further downward spiral in Gaza's anarchy. The threat to "cut throats from vein to vein" was delivered by the Swords of Truth, a fanatical group that has previously claimed responsibility for bombing Internet cafes and music shops. The new threat was the first time the organization targeted a...

GAZA (Reuters) - Hamas's television station defied the Hamas-led Palestinian government on Friday by airing another weekly episode of a show featuring a Mickey Mouse lookalike who urges children to support armed resistance against Israel. "Tomorrow's Pioneers" on Al-Aqsa Television has a central character named "Farfur", an actor dressed in a full body-suit to resemble the Walt Disney cartoon character. Following complaints by Israeli watchdog groups that triggered international scrutiny, Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouthi said he had asked Al-Aqsa to stop the broadcasts so the content could be reviewed. Despite Barghouthi's call, "Tomorrow's Pioneers" went on the air as...

A senior U.S. military officer says insurgents in Iraq used two children to help them pass a coalition checkpoint in Baghdad in recent days, and then detonated a car bomb, killing the children. The officer reported the incident during a news conference at the Pentagon, and VOA’s Al Pessin reports. Major General Michael Barbero says this is the first time he has heard of insurgents using what he called this brutal and ruthless technique. “We saw a vehicle with two children in the back seat come up to one of our checkpoints, get stopped by our folks, the children in...

Because of FR rules, we can only link but not excerpt. Summary: At preliminary court hearing, the victims testified that the cab driver ran them over after they disapproved of his statement that Hitler had done the world a great service by attempting to exterminate the Jews. This was the content of the "religious disagreement" mentioned in earlier reports.

Business operators joined around 2,000 people from all walks of life in a march for peace as violence continued in the deep South, and intelligence reports warned of a new flare-up in the region and possibly in Bangkok in the coming weeks. The demonstrators called on the state to provide more arms and communications devices, and funds so communities can strengthen and defend themselves. Made up of people in the hotel and production industries, community and labour representatives, the demonstrators marched from the Yala municipality to the provincial centre to submit their proposals to Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont through provincial...

Extremist Muslims who force vulnerable teenage girls to convert to Islam are being targeted by police, Met chief Sir Ian Blair has revealed. Police are working with universities to clamp down on "aggressive conversions" during which girls are beaten up and forced to abandon university courses. The Hindu Forum of Britain claims hundreds of mostly Sikh and Hindu girls have been intimidated by Muslim men who take them out on dates before terrorising them until they convert. Sir Ian spoke about the problem at a conference organised by the forum. A Met spokesman said: "Neighbourhood officers work with university authorities...

(CBS) LOS ANGELES -- A Los Angeles police officer claims a security guard for the Nation of Islam attacked her during a candlelight vigil for a homicide victim. Emily Delph filed her lawsuit Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging assault and battery and negligent hiring, training and supervision. Delph is asking for unspecified compensatory, general and punitive damages. Delph was off work for about a year because of her injuries, said her lawyer, Marla A. Brown. Delph's lawsuit stems from the same Aug. 25, 2005, event that led to Nation of Islam Minister Tony Muhammad filing litigation against the...

Father killed family for being too western By Nigel Bunyan Last Updated: 2:16am GMT 21/02/2007 Mohammed Riaz A father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle, an inquest heard yesterday. Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages. On Hallowe'en last year he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced home in Accrington, Lancs, and set it alight. Caneze Riaz, 39, woke and tried to...

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) - A suicide bomber killed 15 people - including a judge - after blowing himself up inside a courtroom in a southwestern Pakistani province that has seen intense civil conflict for years, police said. Elsewhere, authorities announced the arrests of three people who they accused of planning similar attacks.

CERSKA, Bosnia (Reuters) -- The 18-year-old gunman who shot five people to death in a Salt Lake City, Utah, shopping mall was a survivor of the siege that ended in the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia's 1992-95 war, a cousin said on Wednesday. Sulejman Talovic, who was killed by police after Monday's shooting spree in which he also wounded four people, fled his village with his family during the Bosnia war to Srebrenica, a U.N.-protected enclave, Redzo Talovic said." "They spent two years in the town, during which Bosnian Serb forces besieged the enclave and Talovic's grandfather was...

Two people have died overnight following clashes in Kosovo between ethnic Albanian protesters and police. They were among four people seriously wounded when United Nations and local police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse some 3,000 protesters...

A Buddhist man in restive southern Thailand was beheaded by suspected Muslim insurgents who left a note by the body warning Buddhists to leave the area that has been gripped by bloody violence for three years, police said. The man and his wife were working at a rubber plantation in Yala province when a group attacked them, shooting the man three times in the chest before beheading him and killing his wife, said police Lt. Kittiphong Phuduangjit. Another Buddhist was killed in a drive-by shooting in a separate attack in Yala, said police Lt. Narasak Chiangsuk, who blamed the attack...

A curious new rule issued by the Taliban sheds light on a taboo pathology that spawns Islamic terror. Boys of the Taliban By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2006Just recently, the Taliban issued a new set of 30 rules to its fighters.Many of the instructions were to be expected: rule No. 25 commands the murder of teachers if a warning and a beating does not dissuade them from teaching. No. 26 outlines the exquisite delicacy of burning schools and destroying anything that aid organizations might undertake -- such as the building of a new road, school or clinic. The essence...

The number of rapes in the Norwegian capital Oslo is six times as high as in New York City. I’ve written about the issue of rape and Muslim immigration so many times that I am, quite frankly, a bit tired of the subject. But as we all know, problems don’t disappear just because you are tired of talking about them, so here goes. There has been an explosive increase in the number of rape charges in the city of Oslo, but both the media and the authorities consistently refuse to tell us why. They did do so, however, in 2001,...

ATHENS, Greece - Muslims across Europe are confronting a rise in "Islamophobia" ranging from violent attacks to discrimination in job and housing markets, a wide-ranging European Union report indicated Monday.

One man in group allegedly attacked by angry Muslims - Jerusalem -- A group of gay Palestinian Americans canceled a planned pride march in East Jerusalem on Friday after one of them was beaten unconscious by a local man who said he was from the Waqf Muslim religious authority. The beating incident occurred on the same day an Israeli gay pride rally went ahead as scheduled, though without a planned march through city streets. The march had been called off after threats by religious and right-wing opponents to mount huge counterdemonstrations. Only minor violence marred the event. East Jerusalem was...

THREE Christian high school girls were beheaded as a Ramadan "trophy" by Indonesian militants who conceived the idea after a visit to Philippines jihadists, a court heard yesterday.The girls' severed heads were dumped in plastic bags in their village in Indonesia's strife-torn Central Sulawesi province, along with a handwritten note threatening more such attacks. The note read: "Wanted: 100 more Christian heads, teenaged or adult, male or female; blood shall be answered with blood, soul with soul, head with head." Javanese trader Hasanuddin appeared in Jakarta Central Court yesterday charged with planning and directing the murders in October last year....

Three convicted of boy's race-hate murder By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent Last Updated: 4:54pm GMT 08/11/2006 MP's quest to bring killers to justice Three members of a violent Asian gang have been jailed for life after being found guilty today of the racist abduction and murder of a 15-year-old schoolboy. Kriss Donald: wrong place at the wrong time Kriss Donald died because of the colour of his skin, and because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The teenager, described by his family and friends as a loving and gentle boy, was playing truant from school when...

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Marauding youths torched hundreds of vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor North African immigrants and mainstream France. A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said. Six police were injured and 47 people were arrested, ministry officials said. Still the Interior Ministry described the night...

Seventeen people have been killed during fighting between Sunni and Shia tribesmen over ownership of a shrine in northwest Pakistan, security officials said yesterday. The tribes exchanged gun, rocket and mortar fire after the dispute erupted several days ago over the holy site in the restive Orakzai tribal district, a senior security official told AFP. "We have a large presence of security personnel over there and we are trying to restore order," the official said on condition of anonymity. Officials said the trouble broke out when clerics from the rival sects both tried to occupy the shrine, with each side...

Extra police are being drafted into the Windsor area today after three nights of violent clashes between white and Asian youths. Gangs have fought battles in the streets using baseball bats and pitchforks. A Muslim-run dairy which wants to build a mosque was petrol bombed. Dozens of officers have been deployed to stop and search youths and mounted police are being brought in. The Queen usually spends weekends at Windsor Castle and no decision has yet been taken over whether she would change her plans. A senior source said: "We are aware of what is happening and all appropriate security...

AP) BANGKOK, Thailand The military has agreed to hold talks with Muslim rebels involved in a bloody insurgency in southern Thailand, the powerful army chief said Thursday, reversing a policy of the elected government deposed in a coup last month. Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratkalin, who led the bloodless Sept. 19 coup against former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, said that officials from certain rebel factions had contacted a top army officer and requested talks. He did not indicate if any date had been set. "I have agreed to the talks," Sondhi said. "I stress that these will be talks, not negotiations." Wan...

Zawahiri Attacks Bush in New Video Posted on Web Friday , September 29, 2006 CAIRO, Egypt — The deputy leader of Al Qaeda called President Bush a failure and a liar in the war on terror in a video statement released Friday, and he compared Pope Benedict XVI to the 11th century pontiff who launched the First Crusade. "Can't you be honest at least once in your life, and admit that you are a deceitful liar who intentionally deceived your nation when you drove them to war in Iraq,"

It is this reporter's opinion that, like it or not, we are at war with the Islamic fascists/Islamic fundamentalists. They have declared war on the West, and they are dead serious! Any number of politicians, including President Bush, claim (contrary to all reason and evidence) that Islam is a "religion of peace." But we are speaking of the religion founded by the violence-prone Muhammad. It was he who established the practice of CONVERTING at the point of a sword. Only now the method of conversion has changed. (Recall that recently, two journalists kidnapped at the barrel of a gun were...

Yesterday the Belgian authorities decided to give police protection to people working in the Brussels prisons of Vorst and Sint-Gillis. The decision was taken after two jailers, on their way to work, were attacked on a Brussels tram. Immigrant youths called them “assassins” and threatened them with knives. All the prison employees are now escorted by the police on their way to the car park or to the nearby train station. According to the youths the jailers “murdered” Fayçal Chabaan, a 25-year old Moroccan criminal, who was an inmate in Vorst Prison. Chabaan, died last Sunday after having been given...

Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) - Hezbollah has begun replenishing its ranks after more than a month of war with Israel by recruiting the children of its fallen fighters, according to the Egyptian weekly Roz Al-Yusuf. The newspaper reported that in recent weeks Hezbollah has organized more than 2,000 children aged 10-15 into armed militias. The Mahdi Boy Scouts, a Hezbollah-affiliated youth movement, has been tasked with training the youngsters to sacrifice their lives attacking Israel. Today these children are referred to as "future suicides," the report said, adding that they can now be seen wearing "camouflage army uniforms, [painting] their faces...

ANKARA: An attack by Islamists on a young Turkish woman wearing a bikini on a beach has reopened the question of the direction that the country, overwhelmingly Muslim but traditionally secular, is now taking. The incident happened earlier this month at the resort of Karaburun, near Izmir in the west of the country, the most Europeanized part. The young woman had asked a group of headscarf-wearing women and their families not to soil the beach with the used diapers of their children, only to be called a prostitute because she was wearing a bikini. She was then attacked by the...

..snip... “My wife wanted to call the baby Nasrallah, but I wanted Hezbollah — to commemorate the entire resistance,” he said smiling. “My friends said with this name he won’t be able to work, or travel abroad. I have business in Israel as well — but you know, there is a nationalist spirit in me,” he said. Ghurani said he also tried to change his 6-year-old son’s name from Islam to Nasrallah, but “couldn’t find the right papers.” “The next son — we’ll call him Ahmadinejad,” Ghurani said, in honor of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the...

Three of the alleged ringleaders of the foiled airplane bomb plot have been identified by western intelligence agencies involved in unraveling the plot. Two of them are believed to have recently traveled to Pakistan and were later in receipt of money wired to them from Pakistan, reportedly to purchase tickets for the suicide bombers. Sources identify the three, who are now in custody, as: --Rashid Rauf --Mohammed al-Ghandra --Ahmed al Khan

Seattle police were protecting temples and mosques Saturday after a suspected hate killing prompted fears of the Middle East crisis spreading to the United States. Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said a Muslim gunman killed a woman and wounded five others at a Jewish center in Seattle, Washington, Friday afternoon, and police were protecting mosques as well as synagogues out of fears of retaliation. A U.S. citizen, Naveed Afzal Haq, has been arrested and booked on a charge of murder and five charges of attempted murder. (Watch armed police take aim as panicked women run -- 1:44) The 31-year-old Muslim of...

PRIZREN, Kosovo -- Being a monk is never easy. But Brother Benedict, a friendly 29-year-old with the ever-present beard that characterizes Orthodox Christian clerics, cheerfully welcomed three foreign visitors to his humble abode. Unfortunately, any Serb who travels outside of few remaining enclaves does so at his own risk. At the quasi-border dividing Serbia from Kosovo (which nominally remains part of Serbia), drivers routinely replace their Serbian license plates with ones marked Kosovo to disguise their identities. To do otherwise would risk not only their cars but their lives. Even foreigners are at risk. Some British tourists recently were roughed...

A 'cycle' on nonsense By Thomas Sowell Tuesday, July 18, 2006 Now that Israel has responded to rocket attacks and the abduction of its soldiers by terrorists by making military strikes into areas controlled by those terrorists, much of our media are deploring another "cycle of violence" in the Middle East. For reasons unknown, some people seem to regard verbal equivalence as moral equivalence -- and the latter as some kind of badge of broadmindedness, if not intellectual superiority. Therefore, when Palestinian terrorists ("militants" in politically correct Newspeak) attack Israel and then Israel responds with military force, that is just...

Tehran, Iran, Jul. 16 – Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described Israel on Sunday as “satanic and cancerous” and praised the Lebanese group Hezbollah for its “jihad” against the Jewish state. “This regime is an infectious tumour for the entire Islamic world”, Khamenei said in a speech that was aired on state television. He rejected the demand by U.S. President George W. Bush that Hezbollah disarm, vowing, “This will never happen”. He also described the Bush administration as the “most hideous” U.S. government in recent years. Meanwhile, prominent Lebanese politician Walid Jumblat said on Sunday that Lebanon had become...