Free Republic

A Muslim think tank has found some UK Imams discriminate against women when enforcing Islamic Sharia law. Scholars at the Centre for Islamic Pluralism interviewed 90 Muslims in London, the West Midlands, Lancashire and West Yorkshire. They found some women did not get fair hearings in forced marriage, arranged marriage and domestic violence matters. It comes after an NHS doctor was freed in Bangladesh following claims she was being held there for a forced marriage. Sharia law governs every aspect of a Muslim's life, and Imams or scholars give out rulings on how to live by God's wishes. Some mosques...

SOME Muslim imams condone rape and domestic violence within marriage, exploitation of women, welfare fraud and polygamy, a report has found. The report was based on a study commissioned and funded by the former coalition government and produced by the Islamic Welfare Council of Victoria, Fairfax newspapers report. The report, presented on yesterday at a National Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies conference at the University of Melbourne, alleged that some Victorian imams: * Apply Sharia law only where it benefits men; * Hinder police investigations of domestic violence claims; and * Knowingly perform polygamous marriages, which allow a second...

FIVE Sydney men accused of plotting violent jihad in Australia were Islamic extremists who believed their faith was under attack, a jury has been told. Opening his case against the men, crown prosecutor Richard Maidment SC said circumstantial evidence would show they planned to detonate an explosive device or use firearms in pursuit of their religious, political and ideological cause. Khaled Cheikho, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Ali Elomar, Abdul Rakib Hasan and Mohammed Omar Jamal have all pleaded not guilty in the New South Wales Supreme Court to conspiring to commit an act, or acts, in preparation for a terrorist act....

Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad congratulated US President-elect Barack Obama and called for "fundamental and fair" changes to US policies in the region, Iran's official IRNA news agency said. "I congratulate you for attracting a majority of votes ... I hope you will prefer real public interests and justice to the endless demands of a selfish minority," Mr Ahmadinejad told Mr Obama in a statement published by IRNA. Iranian officials have said Mr Obama's election victory on Tuesday showed the American people's desire for fundamental change in domestic and foreign policy from the policies of President George W Bush, who...

A US publisher has cancelled the publication of a novel about the youngest wife of the Muslim prophet Mohammed amid a growing controversy over the book. The Jewel of Medina, a debut novel by journalist Sherry Jones about Mohammed's child bride A'isha had been due for release in the US last week. But publisher Random House released her from the contract amid the controversy and her agent said Jones was now looking for a publisher in another country to pick up the rights. "Random House made the decision to cancel its US publication of the novel The Jewel of Medina...

PALESTINIAN security forces in the occupied West Bank today arrested dozens of demonstrators calling for the resurrection of the Islamic caliphate, security officials said. Police loyal to president Mahmoud Abbas arrested more than 50 members of Hizb al-Tahrir (the Islamic Liberation Party), a group calling for the replacement of the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments with a greater Islamic state. The group was founded in 1953 and has branches all over the world. When they were arrested the activists were heading to a football stadium in the town of Beit Jalla outside Bethlehem for a demonstration marking the anniversary of...

IRAN today said it "respects" the outcome of Zimbabwe's one-man presidential election which saw veteran incumbent Robert Mugabe stay in power but was denounced as a farce by the West. "We respect the will of the Zimbabwean people expressed in the second round of the presidential elections, whatever it is," foreign ministry Mohammad Ali Hosseini said. "We hope that these results are in the interest of the independence and the development of Zimbabwe," he added, according to the ISNA student news agency. Mr Mugabe was sworn in for a sixth term after being declared the winner of Friday's election runoff...

Suspected Al-Qaeda militants attacked a village in Diyala province north of Baghdad and beheaded five members of a local group fighting the jihadist network, police said. Police Lieutenant Colonel Najim al-Sumaidaie said the militants raided the village of Benizad, south of the provincial capital Baquba, and attacked a newly created outpost of a local anti-Qaeda "Awakening" group. "Five people from the Sahwa (Awakening) group were shot dead and later beheaded by the militants," Sumaidaie said, referring to groups of mostly Sunni Arabs who have allied with the US military to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq. "We set up the outpost with...

ISLAMIC leaders from around the globe are at a two day summit in Dakar, struggling to counter wars in their midst and feeling unloved and unfairly treated by the West. US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, never ending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and strife in Sudan's Darfur region weigh heavily on the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference as its leaders gather in the Senegalese capital. OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told foreign ministers at a pre-summit meeting that the leaders of the 1.3 billion Muslims must work on the "pressing issues confronting" them such as the death and...

ONE OF Denmark's biggest newspapers republished the controversial drawing of Muslim prophet Mohammed less than a day after a plot to kill the cartoonist was foiled. The cartoon depicting the prophet with a bomb under his turban has appeared on the homepage of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper – as well as being published three times on a page featuring the story of the plot to kill Kurt Westergaard. Yesterday, three men accused of conspiring to kill Westergaard were arrested by Danish authorities. Westergaard produced one of a series of drawings of Mohammed published by the newspaper in 2005, sparking outrage around...

THE brother of Trooper David Pearce says the slain soldier had wanted to go to Afghanistan, but urged mourners at his funeral not to forget his mates still there. Prime Minister John Howard and Labor leader Kevin Rudd were among mourners today at the funeral for Trooper Pearce at St Stephen's Cathedral in Brisbane. Trooper Pearce was killed by a roadside bomb while driving a light armoured vehicle in Afghanistan's Oruzgan Province last week. The 41-year-old father of two from the Gold Coast was posted to the Brisbane-based 2nd/14th Light Horse Regiment in October 2006 and was serving with the...

CANDICE Buchan was dancing and having an "awesome time" with friends when a series of bomb blasts ripped through Bali's Sari club, killing both her parents. After being left an orphan at the age of 15, she spoke publicly for the first time today about the death of her mum and dad Gerardine and Stephen in the 2002 Bali bombings. "I still remember being in the Sari Club that night for (a friend's) birthday with a big group of us having an awesome time," Ms Buchan, now 20, told a ceremony at Coogee in Sydney to mark the fifth anniversary...

AL-Qaeda called on Islamists to sow terror in the West to create a climate of fear, in a third video marking the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, which was posted on the internet today. Called "reasons and motives for the attacks on New York and Washington," the video features a montage of images of the burning World Trade Centre towers and scenes from Islamist training camps. "We must take Islamist terrorism to Western countries so that it becomes a normal part of life like natural disasters," a voiceover says. "In that way, we will have acts of mass...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says it's suffering a decline in membership and fundraising and blames the Justice Department for listing it as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Texas case against a charity accused of ties to terrorists. CAIR asked a U.S. District Court in Dallas to strike it from the list of more than 300 other Muslim groups named as unindicted co-conspirators in the government's case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The case is being tried in Dallas. "The public naming of CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator has impeded its ability to collect donations...

A VICTORIAN mosque plans to bestow awards on Australians they believe are Islamophobes -- politicians, community leaders or media identities they categorise as hostile to Muslims. The Brunswick-based Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah Association has unveiled what it calls its annual "Islamophobia Award for the worst Islamophobes in Australia". Likely to be near the top on the group's list of nominees is Pauline Hanson, who has come under fire from the mosque and other Muslims for her recent call for a "moratorium on any more Muslims coming into Australia". Mosque leader Sheik Mohammed Omran, who teaches a fundamentalist minority form of...

AT least 10 militants have been killed and another 15 injured in a commando raid today on a radical mosque in the Pakistani capital, the military said. “We have reports of ten militants dead and 15 injured,” Major General Waheed Arshad told a private television channel.

THE leader of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Iraq has vowed to attack Iranians unless Iran cuts off its support for the Iraqi government within two months. "We give the ... Persians in general, and leaders of Iran in particular, two months to withdraw their support and presence in Iraq," Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, said in the 50-minute audiotape posted today on an Islamist website which has often carried al-Qaeda statements. In the first such threat by his group, Baghdadi said that unless Iran meets his demands, the group will wage a "brutal war"...

A senior Al Qaeda figure in Iraq warned a British cleric back in April of plans to attack British targets, telling him "those who cure you will kill you", The Times is reporting. The claim comes as police question eight suspects, all of whom appear to be doctors or have medical links, in connection with the botched car bombings in London and Glasgow. Canon Andrew White told the newspaper that he met the unnamed Al Qaeda leader, who had travelled from Syria, on the sidelines of a religious reconciliation meeting in Amman, Jordan. Canon White said that he had passed...

PAKISTANI intelligence officers have busted a gang of Islamic militants supplying suicide bombers and explosive devices to Taliban fighters in neighbouring Afghanistan, police said. The eight-member gang led by former fighters of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group was based in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province, a senior police official said. They used to collect materials and volunteers from the central province of Punjab, the official said, requesting anonymity. The suspects were arrested in Punjab over the past few days. "During the interrogation they confessed to having carried out a series of suicide bombings and bomb blasts against foreign...

MUSLIMS are outraged that prospective citizens will have to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian tradition as the basis of Australia's values system. Australia's peak Muslim body said the proposed citizenship question -- revealed in the Herald Sun -- was disturbing and potentially divisive. Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Dr Ameer Ali said the "Abrahamic tradition" or "universal values" would be less divisive ways of describing the nation's moral base. Dr Ali said use of the term Judeo-Christian was the result of "WWII guilt", and before 1945 Australia would have been called only Christian. "That question must be rephrased," he said. Dr...