Thursday lunchtime update

I have just looked through some open Firefox tabs that I had not commente on and there seemed to be a connection between some of them, here's a few:

1) The New York Times reports that:

'QALQILYA, West Bank — It is hard to imagine that a dingy Internet cafe buzzing with flies in this provincial Palestinian town could have spawned a blogger who has angered the Muslim cyberworld by promoting atheism, composing spoofs of Koranic verses, skewering the lifestyle of the Prophet Muhammad and chatting online using the sarcastic Web name God Almighty.

...

While Mr. Hasayin has won some admiration and support abroad — a Facebook group has formed in solidarity, along with several online petitions — others on Facebook are calling for his execution.
In his hometown, the reaction seems to be one of uniform fury. Many here say that if he does not repent, he should spend the rest of his life in jail.
“Everyone is a Muslim here, so everyone is against what he did,” said Alaa Jarar, 20, who described himself as not particularly pious. “People are mad at him and will not respect the Palestinian Authority if he is released. Maybe he is a Mossad agent working for Israel.”

...

Palestinian human rights groups in the West Bank have so far remained silent about Mr. Hasayin’s arrest. But Majed Arouri, a human rights expert in Ramallah, said he believed that the way in which Mr. Hasayin had been detained and his correspondence recorded “contradicts human rights principles and existing Palestinian laws” regarding individual privacy.

...

Palestinian human rights groups in the West Bank have so far remained silent about Mr. Hasayin’s arrest. But Majed Arouri, a human rights expert in Ramallah, said he believed that the way in which Mr. Hasayin had been detained and his correspondence recorded “contradicts human rights principles and existing Palestinian laws” regarding individual privacy.'

 Free speech in Muslim countries seems a little behind that in the West but it is good to se that whilst questionning Islam is haraam, looking at pornography is not.
 
2) AFP report that:

'Christians affected by the devastating floods in Pakistan face "systematic discrimination" in the distribution of aid, the news agency of a Vatican missionary body reported Thursday.
The Fides news agency, a branch of the Vatican's Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, said aid was handled either by Muslim relief organisations or by government officials close to fundamentalists.
Both discriminated against Christians and other minorities in distributing aid essential to survival, it said.
About 200,000 Christian refugees in the Punjab province and about 600,000 Christians and Hindus in the Sindh province are affected by the phenomenon, Fides said, citing NGO sources on the ground.
"The Christian refugees are often ignored. They are purposely not identified and registered. Thus, they are automatically excluded from any health care or food, as they supposedly do not exist," said a local NGO worker cited by Fides....'

 It is interesting that whilst the West is often accused of discriminating against Muslims, when the opposite sems to be true,  in the Islamic Repulblic of pakistan it is fine to discriminate against Christians.


3) AFP report that:

'A Filipina maid and her Bangladeshi lover will each receive 100 lashes and be deported for having sex out of wedlock in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, a newspaper said on Monday.
The Sharjah Sharia Court ordered the woman to be lashed and deported for "unlawful sex", the Gulf News reported.
The man would be lashed 100 times for adultery and jailed for a year for entering the house belonging to the maid's sponsor without permission.
He will then be deported....
The report said Muslim foreigners who commit adultery are lashed and deported, while non-Muslims are jailed and deported.
Both the Filipina and the Bangladeshi are Muslims, it said....'

 The wonders of Sharia Law and yet I have not heard a Western human rights organisation criticise such a senetence, they seem to prefer to concentrate on the misdeeds of western governments.


4) CNS News report on the TSA security related news that:

'The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has issued a travel warning to Muslim airline passengers on U.S. aircraft in response to the Transportation Safety Administration’s  “enhanced pat down” policy that went into effect in late October.

CAIR said Muslims who object to full-body scans for religious reasons should know their rights if they are required to undergo a pat-down, including asking for the procedure to be done in a private place. In addition, CAIR offered a “special recommendation” for Muslim women who wear a hijab, telling them they should tell the TSA officer that they may be searched only around the head and neck.

In the “special recommendations for Muslim women who wear hijab,” it states: “Before you are patted down, you should remind the TSA officer that they are only supposed to pat down the area in question, in this scenario, your head and neck. They SHOULD NOT subject you to a full-body or partial-body pat-down.”

It also states: “Instead of the pat-down, you can always request to pat down your own scarf, including head and neck area, and have the officers perform a chemical swipe of your hands.”'

 CAIR's attitude to airport security seems rather at odds with the fact that the vast majority of airplane terrorism has been carried out by Muslims. Some profiling would seem in order let alone equality of investigation.


5) Asia News reports that:

' A group of Christians has complained that Kuwait City's Municipal Council is preventing them from getting land to build a church. "The Municipal Council is the big problem preventing us from getting land; not all of the members, just the Islamic fundamentalists," said Archimandrite Boutros Gharib, head of the local Greek Catholic Church.
Recently the municipal council blocked an attempt by the Greek Catholic Church to acquire land in Mahboula, an area in the Ahmadi governorate south of Kuwait City. The request has been pending for several years.
A new church would reduce over-crowdedness in a villa currently used for worshiping, Fr Gharib said.
According to the Greek Catholic clergyman, both the government and the country's leader, Emir Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, have given their approval and blessing to the Church to have its property built. However, the Council has not followed suit. What is more, "The council did not give us any reason," he added.
"We found the higher levels of government say yes and the lower levels of government say no," said Rev Andrew Thompson, the Anglican chaplain to Kuwait, who stressed that religious fundamentalists controlled the municipality.

...

Fr Gharib noted that his church is paying US$ 6,944 a month for a villa that is also shared by two other congregations. If they did not find land soon, the church would have to close, he said. 

...

Around 460,000 Christians have to share four official churches--two Catholic, an Evangelical and an Anglican--plus the Coptic church under construction.'

 If a Muslim group in the Wet is not allowed to build a Mosque where they want the cry of Islamophobia goes up and human rights grouos get very angry. There does not sem to be the same reaction in Kuwait, I suppose what is sauce for the goose...


 6) Tundra Tabloid reports that:

Sixty faithful who attended Tuesday night's Mass for the dead (All Saints Say) in the church of Saint-Jacques in the district of Viguier Carcassonne, have been targeted by stoning which also damaged a statue of the Virgin at the entrance of building. Two youngsters of the 13 or 14 years came in during the mass and threw stones and pine cones  before being put to flight by a worshipper who tried to capture them but could not catch up.

"This is serious, it's a real desecration," said the abbot Garrouste serving of the parish, which celebrated Mass this evening. A complaint was filed this morning in Carcassonne. A complaint was lodged by the police, which is taking the case very seriously. The desecration of the Saint-Jacques church and the stoning of the parishioners during a public service, is a first in this ghetto and caused a big stir in the Christian community.'

 If a group of Christian youths had stoned Muslim worshippers this would have been headline news on the BBC and elsewhere, however as it was an attack on worshippers at a Church... tumbleweed.

7) Creeping Sharia report on a recent  international poll entitled “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other,” which found that

'Muslim countries generally view Westerners as violent and immoral. Large majorities of even British Muslims think Westerners are “selfish” and “arrogant.”

Above all, foreign Muslims hate American foreign policy, which in a disturbingly large share of their minds justifies terrorism. Fully 57% of Jordanians think it’s OK to attack civilians in jihad. A simple majority of Egyptians agree.

Even so-called moderate leaders are against us. “Yes, Muslims are against the West,” responded Adnan Abu Odeh, 73, former political adviser to Jordan’s King Hussein. “Why? Western foreign policies, especially on two issues: the Palestinian issue and now Iraq.

“These are the issues people talk about day and night. And which the news focuses on day and night. And they come to the eyes and ears of the Muslims who have been surveyed, daily in the bloodiest way — it’s killing, women screaming and yelling, and soldiers frowning. So what they hate is American foreign policy.”

Muslims also blame us for their lack of prosperity. Nearly half of Turks, among the better educated of Mideast Muslims, say Western policies rob them of wealth. This Jordanian pharmacist is typical of respondents:

“There is no prosperity because the United States has seized all our products, all our oil and all our wealth. All of it goes to the United States and the West,” Hassan Omar Abdel Rahman said. “It is not about the internal politics. Look at Saddam, you see what happened to him — did he come out with anything?”

Agreed Mohsen Hamed Hassan, a Cairo doctor: “I believe the American foreign policy is responsible for the greedy image. They support dictatorships because they want their oil.”

A majority of Americans more accurately blame Muslim government corruption and a lack of education for chronic Muslim poverty.

Though they are beneficiaries of $10 billion in direct U.S. aid since 9/11, Pakistanis still hold us in contempt. Pew found that most think we are “selfish, immoral and greedy.” “The West has an expansionist policy and they want to get hold of this portion of the world,” said Sadia Omar, a 34-year-old housewife from Rawalpindi. “They will never be friends with us.”

Laughably, majorities of Muslims in Pakistan and the Mideast think we are less “respectful” of women than they are. But perhaps the biggest divide comes over who’s responsible for 9/11.

Americans overwhelmingly blame Arab Muslims, while Muslims abroad, including 56% of British Muslims, insist someone else carried out the attacks. Denial, as they say, is not just a river in Egypt.

We suspect Pew would find similar hostility among the American Muslim community if it had included it in its survey. A recent Gallup poll of U.S. Muslims found that, despite herculean outreach efforts and remarkable tolerance toward them, “Muslims are the most likely group to report feeling anger compared with the overall population.”'

And yet the West keeps on trying to placate Islamic countries with aid and assistance. At some point will the West realise that whatever we do, they will still hate us?