“Gunman Kills 4 at a Jewish School in France”

Taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/europe/gunman-kills-3-at-a-jewish-school-in-france.html?_r=1&hp

March 19, 2012

A man opened fire outside a Jewish school in southwest France on Monday morning, killing four people, three of them children, and wounding another, officials said. It was the third killing of unarmed people in the region in little over a week, and the police said the same gun was used in all three attacks.

Witnesses said that a man fled the scene in Toulouse on a motorbike. Last week, a man on a motorbike killed three French paratroopers and critically wounded another in two separate shootings, police officials said. The soldiers were all Arab or black, but were paratroopers from a unit that fought in Afghanistan. According to the police, the gunman initially used a 9-millimeter weapon, but it jammed, so he switched to a .45-caliber gun as he went into the school. The .45-caliber weapon was the one the police said was used to shoot the paratroopers last week.

There has been no claim of responsibility for any of the murders, which the French police are treating as acts of terrorism.

Michel Valet, the local prosecutor, said a rabbi, his two children and another child were killed in the attack and a 17-year-old boy was seriously wounded. The killer “shot at everything he could see, children and adults, and some children were chased into the school,” Mr. Valet said.

The attack is the worst on Jews in France since 1982, when the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris was bombed at lunchtime, killing six people and wounding 22. In 1980, a terrorist group threw a bomb at a Jewish synagogue on Rue Copernic in Paris, killing four people and wounding about 40.

Monday’s shooting brought a climate of fear to the region, with the French state ordering increased surveillance of all religious schools. It also brought immediate condemnations from President Nicolas Sarkozy and from his main rival for the French presidency, François Hollande, both of whom broke off their political campaigns to rush to the scene.

Uniformed police officers were seen leading away stunned survivors after the early morning attack. Other officers set up barricades and sealed off the entrance to the school, located behind high white walls with security cameras at the entrance.

Mr. Sarkozy arrived in Toulouse late Monday morning with officials and Jewish leaders. He called the shooting a “national tragedy” and ordered a minute’s silence to be observed across France on Tuesday at 11 a.m.

The Israeli press identified Monday’s victims as Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and two of his sons, Arye, 6, and Gabriel, 3. The fourth person killed was Miriam Monsonego, 8, who is the daughter of the school principal, Yaacov Monsonego. Rabbi Sandler came to Toulouse from Jerusalem with his family last September to teach religious studies at the school. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the rabbi was a French citizen but that his wife was Israeli and that their children had dual nationality.

Another student, 17, a boy, was said to be wounded and in critical condition at a local hospital.

The French minister of the interior, Claude Guéant, said he was “submerged with emotion” over this “act of anti-Semitism” and ordered the police to intensify security around Jewish schools, according to a press spokesman. France has some 300 Jewish schools, news reports said.

Later, Prime Minister François Fillon was quoted as saying the enhanced security measures would be broadened to include all schools and religious buildings.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Pierre-Henry Brandet, said the shootings occurred outside the Jewish school Ozar Hatorah. Ozar Hatorah is a Jewish society promoting religious education among young people, especially in the Middle East, northern Africa and among the Sephardic Jewish community in France, which has the largest number of Jews in Europe, estimated to be at least 550,000. A promotional video posted in 2010 showed students engaged in academic and religious studies.

The authorities have been hunting for the gunman who killed the soldiers since last week, and the military has told soldiers not to wear their uniforms in public.

The wave of killings has stunned France, prompting tense speculation about its cause. Even before the shooting on Monday, there was discussion about a possible racial or ethnic component to the attacks. “There is a common point to all the victims of this dark series of cold-blooded murders: they are all related to communities,” including both Muslims and Jews, wrote Pierre Haski in a posting Monday on the Rue89 news Web site. “Whether they wore the uniform of the French Army or were children, their ‘difference’ made them targets.”

Speculation over the motives for the killings ranged from anger at Muslims fighting in Afghanistan and anti-Semitism to a hatred of immigrants.

Condemnation of the killings was general. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel condemned the “despicable murder of Jews, including small children,” as “a savage crime.” Speaking to his Likud party, he said: “It is too early to determine exactly what the background to the murderous act was, but we certainly cannot rule out the option that it was motivated by violent and murderous anti-Semitism.”

“Police unable to prevent rising violence against gays, Emo youths in Iraq”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/police-unable-prevent-rising-violence-against-gays-emo-201307745.html

March 11, 2012

Young people who identify themselves as so-called Emos are being brutally killed at an alarming rate in Iraq, where militias have distributed hit lists of victims and security forces say they are unable to stop crimes against the subculture that is widely perceived in Iraq as being gay.

Officials and human rights groups estimated as many as 58 Iraqis who are either gay or believed to be gay have been killed in the last six weeks alone — forecasting what experts fear is a return to the rampant hate crimes against homosexuals in 2009. This year, eyewitnesses and human rights groups say some of the victims have been bludgeoned to death by militiamen smashing in their skulls with heavy cement blocks.

A recent list distributed by militants in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighbourhood gives the names or nicknames of 33 people and their home addresses. At the top of the paper are a drawing of two handguns flanking a Quranic greeting that extolls God as merciful and compassionate.

Then follows a chilling warning. ”We warn in the strongest terms to every male and female debauchee,” the Shiite militia hit list says. “If you do not stop this dirty act within four days, then the punishment of God will fall on you at the hands of Mujahideen.” All but one of the targets are men.

It’s not clear why the killings have stepped up in recent months. Many Iraqis are religiously conservative and have struggled against the western influence that has infiltrated their once-closed society in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Like many places in the Muslim world, homosexuality is extremely taboo in Iraq. Anyone perceived to be gay is considered a fair target, and the perpetrators of the violence often go free. The militants likely behind the violence intimidate the local police and residents so there is even less incentive to investigate the crimes.

Emo is short for “emotional” and in the West generally identifies teens or young adults who listen to alternative music, dress in black, and have radical hairstyles. Emos are not necessarily gay, but they are sometimes stereotyped as such.

To Iraqis, “Emo” is widely synonymous with “gay.” John Drake, an Iraq specialist for the British-based AKE security consulting firm, said Iraqi Emos are getting their hair cut so they aren’t immediately identified, and therefore targeted, in the wake of the new threats.

In the southern Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora, a mostly-Sunni area, 35-year-old Hassan is afraid to leave his home. He plans on cutting his shoulder-length hair soon, but fears that his hormone-injected breast enhancements will be detected if he is stopped and patted down at one of the ubiquitous security checkpoints across the city. ”Today I went out of my house with a friend but we were severely harassed — some people told us that we need the double blocks,” said Hassan, referring to the cement blocks that attackers use to beat people. “I was scared so we returned home to hide.”

Hassan’s friend, a man who identified himself as 26-year-old Mustafa, called the recent hate crimes “the strongest and deadliest campaign against us.”

Hassan said he is gay but does not consider himself an Emo. He and Mustafa agreed to talk on condition that only their first names be used for fear they would be attacked if identified. One of Hassan’s friends, Saif Raad Asmar Abboudi, was beaten to death with concrete blocks in mid-February in a case that terrified gay Iraqis and panicked human rights watchdogs. “I feel very sorry for him,” Hassan said.

A Feb. 18 police report all but closes the case on Saif’s killing. It shows an initial investigation was completed and “the reason for the incident is unknown at the moment because the criminal is unknown.”

An Interior Ministry official said 58 young people have been killed across Iraq in recent weeks by unidentified gangs who accused them of being, as he described it, Emo. Sixteen were killed in Sadr City alone, security and political officials there said. Nine of the men were killed by bludgeoning, and seven were shot. No arrests have been made.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity, as did many of the people interviewed for this article, in fear of violent reprisals.

The Qur’an specifically forbids homosexuality, and Islamic militias in Iraq long have targeted gays in what they term “honour killings” to preserve the religious idea that families should be led by a husband and a wife. Those who do not abide by this belief are issued death sentences by the militias, according to the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, a human rights watchdog group. The same militias target women who have extramarital affairs.

“There is a strong wave of campaigns by clerics against homosexuals now,” said Ali al-Hilli, chairman of Iraqi LGBT, a human rights group based in London that provides two safe houses in Iraq for gays. “The police do not provide protection for them.” He said an estimated 750 gay Iraqis have been killed because of their sexual orientation since 2006.

Iraqi lawmaker Khalid Shwani, a Kurd, said targeting Emos because of their alternative lifestyles reflects an a growing intolerance of Iraqis’ civil rights. ”Those people are free to choose what they wear, or to believe in, or how they choose their clothes or the way they think,” Shwani said. He called on parliament to address the issue. ”The Emo of today could be any person tomorrow who tries to follow a specific way of living,” he said.

The killings have drawn so much attention that even hardline Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr weighed in Saturday, calling Emos “crazy fools” and a “lesion on the Muslim community” in a statement on his website. However, al-Sadr did not condone the violence, telling his followers “to end the scourge of Emo within the law.”

Iraq’s government has been wary about the Emo allure among its youth for months.

An August 2011 letter from the Education Ministry urges schools to crack down on what it considered abhorrent behaviour, including allowing camera phones in school “because students would use it for dirty movies,” says the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. Similarly, it prohibited students from leaving their classes during school hours “for any reason, because they might gather in the nearby cafes or coffee shops to practice dirty activities.” The letter attributed the social atrocities to “Emo, which is an infiltrated phenomenon in our society began to appear in some of our schools.”

Iraqi police squads who are specifically assigned to protect social minorities say they are almost powerless to stop the threats against gays and Emos. One officer assigned to the so-called social abuse squads said police are meeting with clerics to ask for help in urging the public against killing what he described as “the Emo or the vampires or Satan worshippers.”

The police official said he had no statistics to show how prevalent the violence is. ”It is true that there have been killings in Sadr City targeting these young men,” he said. “It is not right to end their lives in this manner.”

“US soldier kills 16 Afghans, deepening crisis”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/us-soldier-kills-16-afghans-deepening-crisis-164242200.html

March 11, 2012

An American soldier opened fire on villagers near his base in southern Afghanistan Sunday and killed 16 civilians, according to President Hamid Karzai, who called it an “assassination” and furiously demanded an explanation fromWashington. Nine children and three women were among the dead.

The killing spree deepened a crisis between U.S. forces and their Afghan hosts over Americans burning Muslim holy books on a base in Afghanistan last month. The burnings sparked weeks of violent protests and attacks that left some 30 dead. Six U.S. service members have been killed by their Afghan colleagues since the Quran burnings came to light, and the violence had just started to calm down.

“This is an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent civilians and cannot be forgiven,” Karzai said in a statement. He said he has repeatedly demanded the U.S. stop killing Afghan civilians.

President Barack Obama called the attack “tragic and shocking” and offered his condolences to the families of those killed. In a statement released by the White House, he vowed “to get the facts as quickly as possible and to hold accountable anyone responsible.”

The violence over the Quran burnings had already spurred calls in the U.S. for a faster exit strategy from the 10-year-old Afghan war. Obama even said recently that “now is the time for us to transition.” But he also said he had no plan to change the current timetable that has Afghans taking control of security countrywide by the end of 2014.

In the wake of the Quran burnings, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, visited troops at a base that was attacked last month and urged them not to give in to the impulse for revenge.

The tensions between the two countries had appeared to be easing as recently as Friday, when the U.S. and Afghan governments signed a memorandum of understanding about the transfer of Afghan detainees to Afghan control — a key step toward an eventual strategic partnership to govern U.S. forces in the country.

Sunday’s shooting could push that agreement further away. ”This is a fatal hammer blow on the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan. Whatever sliver of trust and credibility we might have had following the burnings of the Quran is now gone,” said David Cortright, the director of policy studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and an advocate for a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan. ”This may have been the act of a lone, deranged soldier. But the people of Afghanistan will see it for what it was, a wanton massacre of innocent civilians,” Cortright said.

The attack began around 3 a.m. in two villages in Panjwai, a rural suburb of Kandahar and a traditional Taliban stronghold where coalition forces have fought for control for years. The villages — Balandi and Alkozai — are about 500 yards (meters) from a U.S. base. The gunman went into three houses and opened fire, said a resident of Alkozai, Abdul Baqi, citing accounts from his neighbors. ”When it was happening in the middle of the night, we were inside our houses. I heard gunshots and then silence and then gunshots again,” Baqi said.

Eleven of those killed were members of one family, many of them women and children.

An AP photographer saw 15 bodies in the two villages caught up in the shooting. Some of the bodies had been burned, while others were covered with blankets. A young boy partially wrapped in a blanket was in the back of a minibus, dried blood crusted on his face and pooled in his ear. His loose-fitting brown pants were partly burned, revealing a leg charred by fire. It was unclear how or why the bodies were burned.

Villagers packed inside the minibus looked on with concern as a woman spoke to reporters. She pulled back a blanket to reveal the body of a smaller child wearing what appeared to be red pajamas. A third dead child lay in a pile of green blankets in the bed of a truck.

Some villagers questioned whether a single soldier could have killed so many people. But a U.S. official in Washington said the American, an Army staff sergeant, was believed to have acted alone and that initial reports indicated he returned to the base after the shooting and turned himself in.

Five people were wounded in the pre-dawn attack in Kandahar province, including a 15-year-old boy named Rafiullah who was shot in the leg and spoke to Karzai over the telephone. He described how the American soldier entered his house in the middle of the night, woke up his family and began shooting them, according to Karzai’s statement.

NATO officials apologized for the shootings but did not confirm that anyone was killed, referring instead to reports of deaths. ”This deeply appalling incident in no way represents the values of ISAF and coalition troops or the abiding respect we feel for the Afghan people,” Allen said in a statement, using the abbreviation for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. He pledged a “rapid and thorough investigation” and vowed to ensure that “anyone who is found to have committed wrongdoing is held fully accountable.”

NATO spokesman Justin Brockhoff said a U.S. service member had been detained at a NATO base as the alleged shooter. The wounded people were evacuated to NATO medical facilities, he added.

International forces have fought for control of Panjwai for years as they’ve tried to subdue the Taliban in their rural strongholds. The Taliban movement started just to the north of Panjwai, and many of the militant group’s senior leaders, including chief Mullah Omar, were born, raised, fought or preached in the area. Omar once ran an Islamic school in an area of Panjwai that has since been carved into a new district.

In addition to its symbolic significance, the district is an important base for the Taliban to target the city of Kandahar to the east. Panjwai was seen as key to securing Kandahar when U.S. forces flooded the province as part of Obama’s strategy to surge in the south starting in 2009.

Twelve of the dead were from Balandi, said Samad Khan, a farmer who lost all 11 members of his family, including women and children. Khan was away from the village when the incident occurred and returned to find his family members shot and burned. One of his neighbors was also killed, he said. ”This is an anti-human and anti-Islamic act,” said Khan. “Nobody is allowed in any religion in the world to kill children and women.”

Khan and other villagers demanded that Karzai punish the American shooter. ”Otherwise we will make a decision,” said Khan. “He should be handed over to us.”

The four people killed in the village of Alkozai were all from one family, said a female relative who was shouting in anger. She did not give her name because of the conservative nature of local society. ”No Taliban were here. No gunbattle was going on,” said the woman. “We don’t know why this foreign soldier came and killed our innocent family members. Either he was drunk or he was enjoying killing civilians.”

The Taliban called the shootings the latest sign that international forces are working against the Afghan people. ”The so-called American peace keepers have once again quenched their thirst with the blood of innocent Afghan civilians in Kandahar province,” the Taliban said in a statement posted on a website used by the insurgent group.

Karzai said he was sending a high-level delegation to investigate.

U.S. forces have been implicated before in other violence in the same area.

Four soldiers from a Stryker brigade out of Lewis-McChord, Washington, have been sent to prison in connection with the 2010 killing of three unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province’s Maiwand district, which is just northwest of Panjwai. They were accused of forming a “kill team” that murdered Afghan civilians for sport — slaughtering victims with grenades and powerful machine guns during patrols, then dropping weapons near their bodies to make them appear to have been combatants.

And in January, before the Quran burning incident, a video that purportedly showed U.S. Marines urinating on corpses of men they had killed sparked widespread outrage.

Obama has apologized for the Quran burnings and said they were a mistake. The Qurans and other Islamic books were taken from a detention facility and dumped in a burn pit last month because they were believed to contain extremist messages or inscriptions. A military official said at the time that it appeared detainees were exchanging messages by making notations in the texts.

“Women, children killed in violence-torn Syria city”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/women-children-killed-violence-torn-syria-city-124812446.html

January 27, 2012

Fresh violence erupted Friday in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, a day after armed forces loyal to President Bashar Assad barraged residential buildings with mortars and machine-gun fire, killing at least 30 people including a family of women and children, activists said Friday.

The violence began Thursday, but important details were only emerging a day later. Video posted online by activists showed the bodies of five small children, five women of varying ages and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the Karm el-Zaytoun neighborhood of the city. A narrator said an entire family had been “slaughtered.”

The video could not be independently verified.

On Friday, heavy gunfire again hammered the city, which has seen some of the heaviest violence of the 10-month-old uprising against Assad’s rule. Activists said at least 11 people were killed across the country, four of them in Homs.

Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded Friday at a checkpoint outside the northern city of Idlib, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, citing witnesses on the ground. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

A “fierce military campaign” was also under way in the Hamadiyeh district of Hama since the early hours of Friday, according to the Observatory and other activists. They said the sound of heavy machine-gun fire and loud explosions reverberated across the area.

The head of Arab League observers in Syria said in a statement that violence in the country has spiked over the past few days. Sudanese Gen. Mohammed Ahmed al-Dabi said the cities of Homs, Hama and Idlib have all witnessed a “very high escalation” in violence since Tuesday.

In an attempt to stop the bloodshed in Syria, the U.N. Security Council was to hold a closed-door meeting Friday to discuss the crisis, a step toward a possible resolution against the Damascus regime, diplomats said. The U.N. says at least 5,400 people have been killed in the government crackdown since March, and the turmoil has intensified as dissident soldiers have joined the ranks of the anti-Assad protesters and carried out attacks on regime forces.

Details of Thursday’s wave of killings in Homs were emerging from an array of residents and activists on Friday, though they said they were having difficulty because of continuing gunfire. “There has been a terrifying massacre,” Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the AP on Friday, calling for an independent investigation.

Thursday started with a spate of sectarian kidnappings and killings between the city’s population of Sunnis and Allawites, a Shiite sect to which Assad belongs and which is the backbone of his regime, said Mohammad Saleh, a centrist opposition figure and resident of Homs.

There was also a string of attacks by gunmen on army checkpoints, Saleh said. Checkpoints are a frequent target of dissident troops who have joined the opposition.

The violence culminated with the evening killing of the family, Saleh said, adding that the full details of what happened were not yet clear.

The Observatory said 29 people were killed, including eight children, when a building came under heavy mortar and machine gun fire. Some residents spoke of another massacre that took place when shabiha — armed regime loyalists — stormed the district, slaughtering residents in an apartment, including children.

“It’s racial cleansing,” said one Sunni resident of Karm el-Zaytoun, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They are killing people because of their sect,” he said.

Some residents said kidnappers were holding Alawites in the building hit by mortars and gunfire in Karm el-Zaytoun, but the reports could not be confirmed.

Thursday’s death toll in Homs was at least 35, said the Observatory and the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of activists. Both groups cite a network of activists on the ground in Syria for their death tolls. The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Syria tightly controls access to trouble spots and generally allows journalists to report only on escorted trips, which slows the flow of information.

The Syrian uprising began last March with largely peaceful anti-government protests, but it has grown increasingly violent in recent months.

It has also seen outbreaks of bloody tit-for-tat sectarian killings. Syria has a volatile religious divide, making civil unrest one of the most dire scenarios. The Assad regime and the leadership of its military and security forces are dominated by the Alawite minority, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.

Also Friday, Iran’s official IRNA news agency said gunmen in Syria have kidnapped 11 Iranian pilgrims traveling by road from Turkey to Damascus. Iranian pilgrims routinely visit Syria — Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world — to pay homage to Shiite holy shrines. Last month, 7 Iranian engineers building a power plant in central Syria were kidnapped. They have not yet been released. The Free Syrian Army — a group of army defectors — released a video on its Facebook page claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and saying the Iranians were taking part in the suppression of the Syrian people. The leader of the group could not be reached for comment.

In Switzerland, U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay said the “fragmentation within the country” was making it harder for the U.N. to update its death toll in Syria. ”Some areas are completely closed, such as parts of Homs, we are unable to verify much of the information that’s coming to us. We are watching the figures, working closely with civil society organizations, and sifting through all the information that’s coming to us,” she said at the Davos Forum. But she expressed “great concern that the killings are continuing and in my view it’s the authorities who are killing civilians, and so it would all stop if an order comes from the top to stop the killings.”

Assad’s regime claims terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy are behind the uprising, not protesters seeking change, and that thousands of security forces have been killed.

International pressure on Damascus to end the bloodshed so far has produced few results. The Arab League has sent observers to the country, but the mission has been widely criticized for failing to stop the violence. Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia pulled out of the mission Tuesday, asking the Security Council to intervene because the Syrian government has not halted its crackdown. The U.N. Security Council has been unable to agree on a resolution since violence began in March because of strong opposition from Russia and China. A senior Russian diplomat said Moscow will oppose a new U.N. draft resolution on Syria because it fails to take the Kremlin’s concerns into account. Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying Friday that the draft worked out by the West and some Arab states fails to exclude the possibility of outside military interference. In Cairo, Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby told reporters that he and the prime minister of Qatar would leave for New York on Saturday to seek U.N. support for the latest Arab plan to end Syria’s crisis. The plans calls for a two-month transition to a unity government, with Assad giving his vice president full powers to work with the proposed government. Syria has rejected the proposal, saying it violates its sovereignty.

Bassma Kodmani, a spokeswoman for the opposition Syrian National Council, said the Arab initiative was a move in the right direction and urged Security Council members to shoulder their “moral and political responsibilities” in bringing emergency assistance to the Syrian people.

“Leno Sued Over Joke That Offended Sikhs”

Taken from: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/man-sues-jay-leno-over-joke-that-offended-sikhs/

January 25, 2012

Just when it seemed that the world was ready to move on from a poorly received “Tonight Show” joke that offended Sikhs – and, perhaps, onto President Obama’s poorly received “spilled milk” joke from Tuesday’s State of the Union address – a man has filed a suit against Jay Leno, the “Tonight Show” host, for what he says are “racist” remarks.

Last Thursday Mr. Leno’s “Tonight Show” monologue included a taped segment about the homes of the Republican presidential hopefuls. When Mitt Romney’s summer house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire was announced the screen instead showed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, a holy shrine to Sikhs and to followers of other Indian faiths.

Vayalar Ravi, India’s Minister of Overseas Indian Affairs, said that the jokewas “quite unfortunate and quite objectionable” and that he would raise the issue with the United States State Department. But Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said “The Tonight Show” bit was free speech protected by the United States Constitution and “satirical in nature.”

Now BBC News reports that Randeep Dhillon, an Indian-American, has filed a lawsuit against Mr. Leno in Los Angeles County Superior Court, saying that the routine “hurt the sentiments of all Sikh people in addition to the plaintiff.” The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, says the joke “clearly exposes plaintiff, other Sikhs and their religion to hatred, contempt, ridicule and obloquy because it falsely portrays the holiest place in the Sikh religion as a vacation resort owned by a non-Sikh.”

Mr. Leno and his “Tonight Show” representatives have not commented on the affair.

“Job bias claims at record level”

Taken from: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/job-bias-claims-record-level-074539480.html

January 24, 2012

Federal job discrimination complaints rose to an all-time high last year, led by an increase in bias charges based on religion and national origin.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received nearly 100,000 charges of discrimination during the 2011 fiscal year, the most in its 46-year history. That’s a slight increase over the previous year, which had 25 fewer complaints.

Charges of religious discrimination jumped by 9.5 percent, the largest increase of any category. Claims of bias based on ancestry or country of origin rose 5 percent.

Experts say the increase reflects the growing diversity of the nation’s work force. ”We’re seeing a greater diversity among minority groups in America,” said Ron Cooper, a former general counsel of the EEOC who now works in private practice. “We’re seeing more workers from India, Pakistan and other countries that bring additional religious complexity to the work force.”

The commission does not specify which religious or ethnic groups filed the most charges.

As in past years, claims based on race, sex and retaliation were the charges filed most often, according to commission data.

Charges of racial bias fell by 1 percent, while sexual discrimination claims fell 2 percent and sexual harassment claims dropped 3 percent.

At the same time, claims of disability bias climbed 2 percent and charges of discrimination based on age rose 1 percent.

“Federal court blocks Oklahoma ban on Sharia”

Sometimes, things are just so gray-area that it becomes an impossible decision…

***

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/10/justice/oklahoma-sharia/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

January 10, 2012

A federal appeals court has blocked an Oklahoma voter-approved measure barring state judges from considering Islamic and international law in their decisions.

The three-judge panel at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier injunction preventing State Question 755 from being certified until the free speech questions are resolved. The decision Tuesday allows a lawsuit brought by Islamic-American groups to move ahead to a bench trial. ”The proposed amendment discriminates among religions,” said the judges. “The Oklahoma amendment specifically names the target of its discrimination. The only religious law mentioned in the amendment is Sharia law.”

A federal judge last summer had issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which had sued to nullify the law completely.

The amendment would require Oklahoma courts to “rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and “forbids courts from considering or using” either international law or Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, which the amendment defined as being based on the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

In bringing suit, CAIR argued that the amendment violates the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. The group’s local leader, Muneer Awad, has said the amendment passed in November 2010 under a campaign of fear and misinformation about Islam. ”This is an important reminder that the Constitution is the last line of defense against a rising tide of anti-Muslim bigotry in our society, and we are pleased that the appeals court recognized that fact,” Awad told CNN after Tuesday’s announcement.

The appeals court said voter initiatives normally should be given great deference by the courts but concluded the Oklahoma measure would be applied selectively.

Ballot supporters “do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve,” said the 37-page ruling. “Indeed, they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma.”

State Question 755, also known as the “Save Our State” measure, was approved by a 7-3 ratio. It was sponsored by Oklahoma State Reps. Rex Duncan and Anthony Sykes, both Republicans. ”The fact that Sharia law was even considered anywhere in the United States is enough for me” to sign on, Sykes told CNN last year. “It should scare anyone that any judge in America would consider using that as precedent.” Sykes said his concern was compounded by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s comments during her confirmation hearings in June 2010 that she would be willing to consider international law when hearing cases before the court.

As written on the ballot, the measure states it would amend a state constitution section dealing with the state courts, making them “rely on federal and state law” when deciding cases, forbidding them “from considering or using international law” and “from considering or using Sharia Law.” The ballot then briefly described international law, which “deals with the conduct of international organizations and independent nations, such as countries, states and tribes,” and Sharia, which is “based on two principal sources, the Koran and the teaching of Mohammed.” ”Shall the proposal be approved?” the ballot read, instructing voters to respond “yes” if they’re for the proposal and “no” if they’re against it.

Saleem Quraishi, president of the American Muslim Association of Oklahoma City, runs the Islamic Center at the Grand Mosque of Oklahoma City. He said there are more than 5,000 Muslims in the city. While there are no exact numbers for the Muslim population in the state, it is not among the larger communities, said Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR. “It’s just fear-mongering; it’s nothing,” Quraishi told CNN. “What’s Sharia law have to do with Oklahoma?”

The Oklahoma controversy stems from a New Jersey legal case in which a Muslim woman went to a family court asking for a restraining order against her spouse, claiming he had raped her repeatedly. The judge ruled against her, saying that her husband was abiding by his Muslim beliefs regarding spousal duties. The decision was later overruled by an appellate court, but the case sparked a nationwide firestorm. The issue spread to Oklahoma, prompting the ballot initiative.

Tuesday’s ruling deals only with the injunction stopping certification and enforcement of 755. There was no indication when the federal district judge would hear the larger merits of the Oklahoma case and issue a ruling, but that could be some months away. The losing side could then try again at the federal appeals court, then possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Israel’s ‘Rosa Parks’ refuses to take back seat”

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/19/world/meast/israel-rosa-parks/?iref=obnetwork

December 19, 2011

When Tanya Rosenblit boarded an inter-city bus bound for Jerusalem from her native Ashdod Friday morning, she did not anticipate the storm it would spark within Israel.

The public bus she boarded normally carries ultra-Orthodox passengers and travels to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. As a matter of custom women sit in the back portion of the bus, because the ultra-Orthodox avoid mingling of the sexes according to their beliefs. She was the first passenger that morning on the bus and took a seat behind the driver. As the bus took on more passengers along its route, an ultra-orthodox man demanded she should sit in the back of the bus as is the custom on that route.

“I heard him call me ‘Shikse,’” Rosenblit wrote on her Facebook page, referencing a Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman. “He demanded I sit in the back of the bus, because Jewish men couldn’t sit behind women (!!!). I refused.”

“This is my home town of Ashdod, I live in an Israeli democracy, people cannot tell me where to sit on a bus.”

An argument ensued and ultimately the bus driver called the police to intervene, but not before a crowd of black-clad ultra-orthodox men had gathered outside the bus. ”I was starting to get scared, to tell you the truth,” Rosenblit recalled. “There were like 20 of them, all wearing black. Most of them were just curious, but they were definitely on his side.” Rosenblit snapped throughout this disruption, and said she was comfortable knowing that Israeli law was on her side. In a case brought by an Israeli woman earlier this year, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that involuntary separation between the sexes on public buses was against the law.

The responding police officer tried to talk to everyone and calm things down. Rosenblit said he asked if she was willing to show respect for the objectors and move to the back of the bus. She refused and, after a 30-minute delay, the bus moved on to Jerusalem with her sitting up front.

A day after posting the account on Facebook, Rosenblit’s story was picked up by the Israeli media, which has been devoting a lot of coverage to the public outcry over the growing political power of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, and fears they are forcing the generally secular Israeli public to adopt their religious standards.

Israel’s largest circulation newspaper put her story on its front page with the headline, “They Won’t Tell Me Where to Sit,” and compared Rosenblit to the American civil rights movement’s legendary Rosa Parks.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought up her story in his weekly cabinet meeting. ”Up until this day we have agreed to live in peace with mutual respect by all sectors of the Israeli society,” he told his government ministers. ”In recent days we witness attempts to break this coexistence apart. Today, for example, I have heard of an attempt to move a woman from her seat on a bus. I oppose this unequivocally. I believe we must not allow margins groups to break our common denominator and we must keep our public spaces open and safe for all of our citizens. We must find the uniting and mediating ground rather than the things that divide and separate us.” Netanyahu said.

Rosenblit also received a call from Israel’s opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, who offered her support and called her a symbol of determination against “anti-democratic radicalization that pushes women away from the public space.”

A spokesman for Egged, the transportation company that runs the bus line, told CNN in a statement that it “does not deal with seating arrangements” on its buses and that “even if there are population groups that prefer to sit separately due to their beliefs, it is a voluntary choice and does not bind the other passengers.”

Rosenblit describes herself as secular and said she did not ride the bus looking for a confrontation. She said what motivated her to write about her experience was not “not to declare the Orthodox Jews as pure evil and the oppressors of human rights and liberties,” but to point out what she sees as societal problem in Israel. ”There are a lot of lovely things about religion, but forcing people to choose religion is wrong,” she said. ”It is wrong to use religion as an excuse to eliminate people’s basic rights: the right for freedom and the right for dignity.”

“Illinois Catholic Charities Loses Fight To Exclude Gay Couples From Adoption”

Taken from: http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=9271&MediaType=1&Category=26

August 21, 2011

An Illinois judge has ruled the state can deny Catholic Charities state funds to run its foster care and adoption services. The state decided after four decades against renewing contracts with Catholic Charities in Joliet, Peoria, Springfield and Belleville.

Catholic Charities policy turns away openly gay parents. The issue became heated in June when a civil unions law that recognizes gay and lesbian couples approved last December went into effect. Noting the teachings of the Catholic Church, which defines marriage as a heterosexual union, Catholic Charities told the state that it could not accommodate prospective foster parents in a civil union.

The foster care and adoption agency argued it was exempt from the law under its religious protections clause. The state, however, argued that the law’s religious exemptions only apply to clergy who refuse to officiate at civil unions.

Sangamon County Circuit Judge John Schmidt ruled against Catholic Charities on Thursday. “No citizen has a recognized legal right to a contract with the government,” he wrote. But Schmidt’s ruling narrowly focused on whether the state violated the property rights of Catholic Charities when it refused to sign new contracts and avoided the religious freedom issue.

Catholic Charities has about 2,200 children in its care. The group said it would likely file an appeal.

“Religious Complaint Over Planned Temple At UTEP”

Taken from: http://www.kvia.com/news/29731391/detail.html?hpt=us_bn5

November 9, 2011

EL PASO, Texas – It’s no secret that a lot of the buildings one sees on the University of Texas at El Paso campus look remarkably like those of the small Asian kingdom of Bhutan.

Stored away in the university’s warehouse sits an even more authentic dose of the state’s architecture: a small Bhutanese temple. Originally constructed as an exhibit at the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festivtal in Washington, D.C., the temple will soon find a permanent home in the center of the UTEP campus.

That’s a natural fit, if you ask university executive vice president Richard Aduato. ”It’s part of our heritage,” he told ABC-7. Adauto said UTEP will raise money to reconstruct the temple near the campus geology building. He told ABC-7 he expects it to be erected within the next six to 12 months.

The small temple is designed in the same style as buildings constructed by Buddhist monks in Bhutan in the Seventh Century. The university adopted the architecture more than nine decades ago, at the suggestion of the wife of the university’s first dean.

El Pasoan Cheryl Hernandez said the temple is “just too much,” adding that she worries it promotes Buddhism at UTEP, a public university. ABC-7 has learned Hernandez sent a letter of complaint to UT Board of Regent Paul Foster and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. ”What it really amounts to is that there is religion being put into the campus,” she told ABC-7. “We’re being forced to separate church and state; we’re being forced to remove prayer from schools and universities, yet they’re going to put a temple of Buddha.”

Adauto said UTEP’s ties to Bhutan are cultural, not religious. ”Nobody is asking (students and staff) to practice anything other than looking at the architecture,” Adauto told KVIA. “And actually, it is quite beautiful.”

“Ohio Amish leader: Beard-cutting religious matter”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-amish-leader-beard-cutting-religious-matter-232845934.html

October 11, 2011

BERGHOLZ, Ohio (AP) — The leader of a breakaway Amish group said an attack on fellow Amish in which a man’s beard was cut off was a religious issue stemming from long-standing resentment of his group’s treatment. Sam Mullet, 66, said the goal was to send a message to Amish in Holmes County that they should be ashamed of themselves for the way they were treating Mullet and his community.

“We’d like to get up in the morning, be left alone, live like normal people,” Mullet said Monday. “They won’t leave us be.” Mullet said he didn’t order the hair-cutting but didn’t stop two of his sons and another man from carrying it out last week on a 74-year-old man in his home in rural eastern Ohio. ”I didn’t order anything like that,” he said, and added: “I didn’t tell them not to, I’m still not going to tell them not to.”

Mullet said the Holmes County group changed the rulings of the church and were trying to force his community to change. ”We know what we did and why we did it,” he told The Associated Press outside his house on the outskirts of Bergholz, a village of about 700 residents. “We excommunicated some members here because they didn’t want to obey the rules of the church.”

Mullet said he’s upset that his group, about 120 people living on several small farms, has been called a cult by detractors. He said he moved the members of his group about 100 miles from Richland County to the hilly area in 1995 just to be by themselves.

“We’re not a cult. We’re just trying to live a peaceful life,” said Mullet, who spoke with occasional bursts of passion for about an hour as children played nearby, a horse tethered to a buggy rested and men and women did chores. “I was hoping I could move here, try to start a group of church people, do things in school and church the way we wanted.” Mullet said he should be allowed to punish people who break the laws of the church, just as police are allowed to punish people who break the laws of the state. ”You have your laws on the road and the town — if somebody doesn’t obey them, you punish them. But I’m not allowed to punish the church people?” Mullet said. “I just let them run over me? If every family would just do as they pleased, what kind of church would we have?”

Amish men typically grow beards as adults and stop trimming them when they marry, and the beards are held in high esteem.

On Saturday, Jefferson County authorities arrested two of Mullet’s sons, 38-year-old Johnny Mullet and 26-year-old Lester Mullet, and another man from the community, 53-year-old Levi Miller, on burglary and kidnapping warrants out of Holmes County. The three men were being held in Jefferson County jail on $250,000 bond each pending extradition to Holmes County and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said Monday he expects two more arrests this week. He said the men hired a driver to carry them to Holmes County and to Carroll County, where a similar attack was carried out. He said the driver didn’t know what the men were doing.

A similar attack happened in Trumbull County in September, Abdalla said.

Five people were assaulted in Holmes County, including women who had their hair cut off, said Abdalla, who disputed Sam Mullet’s account, alleging the group’s leader ordered the punishments. The men entered the home and said, “Sam Mullet sent us here, and we’re here on religious business,” Abdalla said. He said they used scissors and battery-powered clippers in the attack.

“Hertz suspends 34 Muslim shuttle-bus drivers in prayer dispute”

Taken from: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/10/34-muslim-shuttle-bus-drivers-suspended-indefinitley-from-hertz.html

October 7, 2011

Should Muslims have to clock out when they pray? That question arose earlier this week when 34 Muslim shuttle bus drivers were suspended indefinitely by Hertz Rent-A-Car for not clocking out when they went to pray. The suspended drivers, who work for Hertz at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, are all Somali Muslims. The mass suspension occurred Sept. 30 and has caused heated debate in the Seattle area. Now, the story has been picked up by the national news media.

Earlier this week, a couple of dozen people assembled in front of the Hertz office with signs that read “Hertz hurts my faith” and “Hertz: Respect me, respect my religion.”

The company defends its actions. Under Washington state law, employees are entitled to two paid 10-minute breaks during an eight-hour shift. Religious Muslims pray five times a day, and it takes between three and five minutes to perform the prayers. On a normal day, workers would pray once or twice during a shift. In a statement sent to The Times, a Hertz spokesperson wrote: “While the employees, all Muslims, were using the breaks for prayers, the breaks were typically extended long beyond the time necessary to complete religious obligations, which is why the company, to be fair to all of its employees in Seattle, implemented the clocking requirement.” The company said employees were warned in person and in writing that if they did not comply with the clocking rules, they would be suspended.

But Tracey A. Thompson, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local  117 Union (which is representing the workers), said in a statement: “This is an outrageous assault on the rights of these workers and appears to be discriminatory based on their religious beliefs.” The Teamsters said the implementation of the clocking rule represented a sudden policy shift on the part of Hertz management. In the same statement, Maryan Muse, a five-year Hertz employee, is quoted as saying that Hertz managers made fun of her and her Muslim colleagues as they prayed.

Ahmed Jama, executive director of the Somali Community Services Coalition, told The Times that the issue of Muslims praying at work comes up frequently. He expects it might be a couple of weeks before the two sides might come to an agreement.

“School tells girl wearing rosary violates dress code”

Taken from: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/05/school-tells-girl-wearing-rosary-violates-dress-code/?hpt=hp_bn2

October 5, 2011

An Omaha, Nebraska, sixth-grader was told she could not wear a necklace with a cross to school because the rosary has become an identifying symbol for gangs, CNN affiliate KETV reported. Elizabeth Carey told KETV that wearing a rosary is an expression of her faith, but Fremont Public Schools says it is a violation of its dress code. ”I’m wearing a cross necklace, a cross T-shirt and a cross bracelet. I’m thinking of how Jesus died on the cross and how he gave up all his sins for us,” Elizabeth told KETV.

Schools Superintendent Steve Sexton says the issue is about safety, not religion. ”We had information from law enforcement that there were documented instances of gang activity in the area, and we had information that states that the rosary was being used as a symbol of gang affiliation,” Sexton told KETV. ”There are those who want to make this an issue about religion when it’s about a singular goal – to create a safe environment for our students,” he said.

Omaha’s Catholic Archdiocese is disappointed with the school’s decision. ”I don’t think Christians should have to forfeit what is the symbol for the love of Christ because a few people want to misuse that symbol,” Archdiocese Chancellor Rev. Joseph Taphorn told KETV.

The American Civil Liberties Union also has gotten involved. ”We understand the serious concerns about gangs in schools, but Fremont Public Schools should demonstrate there is a concrete gang connection before shutting down a student’s free speech and religious rights,” Amy Miller, the legal director for the ACLU in Nebraska, told KETV.

“If the ACLU has another view, we will gladly listen to it, but the fact is one year ago we were alerted to the fact that wearing the rosary as jewelry had a gang affiliation,” Sexton said. “We took the position that we did after careful discussion with our attorneys.”