Free Republic

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Nearly five years ago, the U.S. government exerted high-profile diplomatic pressure on China to secure the return of scholar Gao Zhan, a researcher at American University whom Beijing believed was a spy for Taiwan. Now, the Department of Homeland Security is pushing with equal vigor to have her deported back to China. Gao's case, set for a hearing Monday on the latest twist, became international news in February 2001 when she and her family were arrested by the Chinese on suspicion of espionage. Her husband, Xue Donghua, and the couple's 5-year-old son were released after a month...

Dr. Abdulkarim Soroush, a prominent Iranian-Islamic scholar confessed in a speech in Paris that Islam has no political and civil rights for the people. What you find in the Islamic jurisprudence is only obligations, not rights. Therefore, it is useless to look for democracy in Islam. These remarks are new attestation to the long time proven principle that religion must be separated from politics. This is especially true in the case of Islam. Secularism is the medicine acutely needed in all the Islamic societies, especially in Iran. The experience of Islamic revolution in Iran proved once again that mixture of...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The FBI has launched an inquiry into the dealings of an Orange County grocery store owner who is allegedly the U.S. leader of a little-known radical Islamic group that has been banned in parts of Europe and the Middle East, authorities said. Iyad Hilal, an Islamic author and philosopher, has lived in Orange County for more than a decade and hasn't drawn much attention to his writings or his role in the group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which means Party of Liberation. The group has come under attack since the July 7 bombings in London where British Prime...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A prominent U.S.-based Islamic scholar who exhorted his followers after the Sept. 11 attacks to join the Taliban and fight U.S. troops was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison. Ali al-Timimi of Fairfax was convicted in April of soliciting others to levy war against the United States, inducing others to aid the Taliban, and inducing others to use firearms in violation of federal law. The cleric addressed the court for 10 minutes before his sentencing. "I will not admit guilt nor seek the court's mercy. I do this simply because I am innocent," al-Timimi said. Prosecutors...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - A Massachusetts Institute of Technology literary scholar said he regrets failing to credit some passages in his biography of the poet E.E. Cummings, but denied charges of plagiarism. An article in the Harper's magazine issue scheduled to arrive at newsstands Tuesday accuses Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno of "wholesale borrowing" from the 1980 book "Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings," by Richard S. Kennedy. Sawyer-Laucanno's book, "E.E. Cummings, A Biography," was published last fall. He said in Monday's Boston Globe that he regrets what he called an oversight in documenting his sources, but insisted the mistakes...

http://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article...

Editors' preface: A noted historian of the Middle East has said the following about the legacy of scholars who devoted their careers to the study of the region: The giants of the recent past tend to be largely forgotten as soon as they are dead if not before, especially if what they have written isn't what is now considered fashionable or central … They are criticized when they are in error, but their achievements are forgotten.[1] While this is largely true in the English-speaking countries, it is not true in France, where a few French "giants" of Islamic and Arab...

Academics Defend Pedophilia Daniel J. Flynn Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004 Are pedophiles the next campus “victim” group? A tiny but vocal group of academics are working to make the answer yes. New York University Press’s Lavender Culture calls to demolish the “archaic” notions of “the innocence of children” and “the potential harmfulness of sex.” To do this, an essayist in the text advises readers to “proselytize” to “young gay people with the message that…they should get out of their families as soon as they can.” The danger of not doing this, the author explains, is having “future generations of gay...

1,200-year-old scholar tree discovered in Tianjin Chinese archeologists have confirmed a 1,200-year-old scholar tree in the northern port city of Tianjin is probably the oldest in the entire north China region. Chinese archeologists have confirmed a 1,200-year-old scholar tree in the northern port city of Tianjin is probably the oldest in the entire north China region. The ancient tree is growing in a small courtyard in Xizui village of the centuries-old town of Yangliuqing. It is more than 20 meters tall and 1.5 meters in diameter. Archeologists believe the tree must have been planted in the Tang Dynasty (618 -...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) -- An Egyptian scholar based in London, England, has been delighting Arab audiences with his inquiries into the recondite world of medieval Muslims who wrote about ancient Egypt and had some insights into hieroglyphic writing.</p> <p>Among Western scholars, who have led the field of Egyptology since Napoleon's 1798 campaign and Jean-Francois Champollion's groundbreaking work on hieroglyphics in the 1820s, the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs and Muslims dismissed ancient Egypt as an irrelevant pagan civilization.</p>

An Oxford University professor resigned after being suspended for rejecting a graduate student because he is Israeli. Oxford suspended Andrew Wilkie for telling Amit Duvshani, “I am sure you are perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army.” The penalty the university had imposed — suspension without pay — is Oxford’s severest penalty short of dismissal, the university said in a statement. Wilkie submitted his resignation from Oxford’s Pembroke College on Monday, the day the suspension was announced

I think every so-called "Islamic Scholar" and fundamentalist opposed to the overthrow of Saddam and the establishment of Democratic government in Iraq should be asked this one question: Which version of Iraq do you fear more; one which, under Saddam Hussein, Islam, as well as every other religion, was actively oppressed OR one in which there is free Democratic government and freedom of religion, including Christianity?My guess is that most of these folks would decline to answer the question, but the answer would be obvious I think to anyone who heard the question... Islamic fundamentalists are deathly afraid of the...

‘CHILLING' LESSON FOR LEMRICK JUDGE - Hasidic scholar stabbed in riot By HEIDI SINGER ROSENBAUM Stabbed in riot. May 1, 2003 -- The elderly judge overseeing the Yankel Rosenbaum stabbing trial got a slang lesson yesterday when he asked a Crown Heights resident for the meaning of "chilling." "Can you explain to somebody who is not a brother what that means?" asked federal Judge Frederic Block. The jurors tittered in response - and the judge quickly told them he was just trying to break the tension with a little humor in an otherwise very serious case. The culture clash happened...

Princeton Scholar Dr. Cornell West has a role in both films [The 'Maxtrix Reloaded' and 'Revolutions'] as a Zion elder.Like the first movie the sequels continue to draw on a variety of sources from Japanese Anime to Eastern Philosophy as well as kung-fu films and the Holy Bible, the kinds of concepts that 'Matrix' fans have relished discussing.'All the ideas and concepts are there,' Producer Joel Silver promised, 'Only better.'The same goes for the computer generated images and special effects in Reloaded and Revolutions, said John Gaeta, special effetcs supervisor.

Son of Weathermen is Rhodes scholar Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Tuesday December 10, 2002 The Guardian It is, possibly, a choice that would have the imperialist Cecil Rhodes rolling in his grave: the award of a Rhodes scholarship to the son of two icons of 1970s American radicalism, currently serving life terms for a deadly armed robbery. Chesa Boudin, 22, a final year student at Yale University, hoped yesterday that news of his triumph had filtered through the maximum security of the New York prison systems where his parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert have been jailed since he was...

WASHINGTON –– A burial box that was recently discovered in Israel and dates to the first century could be the oldest archaeological link to Jesus Christ, according to a French scholar whose findings were published Monday. An inscription in the Aramaic language – "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" – appears on an empty ossuary, a limestone burial box for bones.

Bagdad - In Iraq about 500 imams and islamic scholars from around the world called for a holy war against the US, if that country attacks Iraq. "It is the duty of every muslim to scorch the earth under the feet of the US", according the fatwa. This fatwa comes right after an emergency-meeting of the Iraqi parlaiment. This meeting is to be held to the decision of the US Congress to give president Bush full authority to attack Iraq. The Security Council will hold a public debate about Iraq on Wednesday. Baghdad yesterday renewed it's promise to let inspectors...

Scholar says American beauty is a caged beast July 30 2002 at 10:04AM The attack using hijacked airliners against the Pentagon in Washington on September 11 last year could be considered an act of "heroic terrorism" against a legitimate target because the Pentagon is the headquarters of America's "war machine", the renowned African scholar Ali Mazrui said on Monday. And America's "war machine" had itself bombed many countries over the past 40 years, Mazrui said in an address at Pretoria's University of South Africa (Unisa), entitled "Between Racial and Religious Terrorism; From Martin Luther King Jr. to John Ashcroft." Mazrui...

LONDON, July 14 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Missing Muslim scholar Abu Qatada, suspected of being a key Al-Qaeda operative, has sent an e-mail calling on Muslims here to martyr themselves, a British daily newspaper said. The e-mail from the Palestinian-born religious scholar, who disappeared last December, was read out to a meeting of Muslims in London on Friday night, July 12, the Observer said, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. “I have never felt more confident of the victory of almighty Allah and never more certain that the faith will be victorious,” the e-mail read, according to the paper. Qatada, whose...

June 20, 2002 A Scholar Recants on His 'Shakespeare' Discovery By WILLIAM S. NIEDERKORN n 1995 Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, made a startling case for Shakespeare's being the author of an obscure 578-line poem called "A Funeral Elegy." After a front-page article about his methods of computer analysis in The New York Times — and after his reputation was further burnished by unmasking Joe Klein as the author of "Primary Colors" — the poem was added to three major editions of Shakespeare's works. Now, in a stunning development that has set the world of Shakespeare...