Writing in El País today, Moisés Naím condemns the silence of the Muslim world in the face of Chinese repression of the Uighurs and contrasts it with the indignation produced the the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark. Readers will be able to figure out for themselves the relevance of all this for the themes with which this blog mainly concerns itself. The following is my translation of Naím’s article.
Continue reading ‘Deaf, Dumb and Blind: Muslim Reactions to the Uighur Tragedy’
This is a guest post by Modernity.
I recently commented on this blog that I am against the State enforcing dress codes and Ben kindly asked me to elaborate.
I should say, from the outset, that I am a secularist, as well as being an atheist and a lover of French history (if I could ever finish that volume by Colin Jones!)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy: “We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity. The burqa is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”
And there’s this too:
Continue reading ‘Sarkozy: “The Burqa is a Sign of Subservience”’
Here’s André Aciman in the New York Times:
“The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.”
Here is a snippet:
The HRC’s promotion of what are, in effect, blasphemy taboos is a logical extension of its internal policy. The HRC is run like an oligarchy governed by Orwellian speech codes, with any criticism of the body’s behavior immediately stifled in session. In March 2008 testimony to the HRC, for instance, Roy Brown mentioned that the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam-passed and ratified by the OIC in 1990-took sharia as its legal premise and was inimical to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Brown was challenging a claim made by Masood Khan, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, who had told the council, on behalf of the OIC, that the Cairo Declaration was a “complement” rather than an alternative to the Universal Declaration. Immediately, Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, the HRC delegate from Pakistan, issued a point of order, silencing Brown, and announced: “It is insulting to our faith to discuss sharia here in this forum.” The president of the council at the time, Doru Costea of Romania, ceded the point to Siddiqui.
Read the rest, by Ibn Warraq and Michael Weiss, here.
The Economist is always a useful journal to visit if you need a reminder that the Middle East is much more than just the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “As Shia clerics weighed in with calls for an end to what they called systematic persecution, Sunni extremists accused the rafida, an abusive term for Shias, meaning rejectionists, of acting as a fifth column for Iran. ‘Today they besiege the religious police,’ howled one website commentator. ‘Tomorrow they will encircle the Eastern Province along with the Shias of Bahrain and with Iranian backing.’”
Last March, the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders released a film about Islam entitled Fitna, an Arabic term which refers to civil strife. Unable to find a broadcaster because of the film’s blanket condemnation of Islam, Wilders ended up posting it on the internet. As Elif Kayi reported at the time, there were angry demonstrations around the world, including in Afghanistan, where Dutch troops were stationed with the NATO force. But the apocalypse did not come.
I have already commented on the first three posts of a series by Samuel Fleischacker on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute currently appearing over at Normblog here, here, and here. The fourth in the series appeared yesterday and I don’t really have any comments to make on this occasion because I agree with practically all of it.
Continue reading ‘A Response To “A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict 4”’
A new survey of global attitudes on subjects ranging from minorities to gender to terrorism makes grim reading. In Europe, malign sentiments towards Jews and Muslims are on the rise. In the Middle East and in the wider Muslim world - from Egypt to Turkey to Indonesia - opinions about Jews are overwhelmingly negative.
Subscribe to the Z Word blog via RSS - click on the orange button below. For more information on using RSS, please read this helpful guide.
