The police force that issued a teenager with a court summons for calling Scientology a cult could face a judicial review over the legality of its policing guidelines.

Although prosecutors last week declined to take the 16-year-old to court, freedom of speech campaigners, Liberty,  are to ask City of London police to explain how the initial decision to issue the summons was made.

Campaigners said they would call for a judicial review if it is found that the force's guidelines for policing demonstrations led officers to confront the schoolboy.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil liberties organisation Liberty, which spearheaded the teenager's defence, said: We want to know who gave the instruction to issue this summons. Curtailing people's freedom of speech is a very serious issue and it's important to know whether this is part of the force's policy or a decision relating specifically to the Church of Scientology. There is the possibility of a complaint to the IPCC or a judicial review.

Chakrabarty said she was concerned the police action could have a "chilling effect" on other protesters who wanted to express their opinions:Some people are very easily intimidated and will be put off exercising their right to free speech by the thought that they may face court action over it. We have to defend that right and show how wrong the police were in issuing this summons.

Hindus have urged the Viacom and its brand Paramount Pictures to post a study guide about Hinduism and guru tradition on their websites and place it in movie theaters worldwide to undo the supposed damage done by their upcoming Hollywood movie The Love Guru.

Bhavna Shinde, representing Hindu Janjagruti Samiti and Sanatan Society for Scientific Spirituality, in a communique to Paramount Pictures said: ...We also feel that the parody on Gurus will contribute to the misunderstanding about the sacred concept of the 'Guru'...

Shinde urged Viacom and Paramount to immediately issue a study guide about Hinduism and the sacred tradition/role of the 'Guru' confirming to Hindu scriptures, post it on the official websites of Viacom and Paramount and 'The Love Guru', and make it available free of cost in printed form at the movie theaters worldwide.

She further said, This guide should also offer the viewers a framework in which to see the film, so that the viewers do not carry any misconceptions about Hinduism and that the characters portrayed in this movie are in no way depicting authentic Gurus from the Hindu and spiritual tradition.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh believes his long nightmare is almost over.

The 24-year-old student, sentenced to death in Afganistan for downloading internet reports on women's rights, is allowing himself to be hopeful for the first time since he was condemned.

The Independent has learnt, however, that the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, has privately assured Kambaksh's campaign team that he will be freed. Senior government figures have also indicated that they believe his sentence, by a court in Mazar-e-Sharif, was based on a mistaken interpretation of the country's constitutional law.

Kambaksh has already discreetly been issued with a passport which will enable him to start a new life abroad if and when he is freed.

A petition by readers of The Independent to secure justice for him has attracted more than 100,000 signatures. Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, said on a visit to Afghanistan yesterday that he would be raising the matter with Karzai.

Kambaksh said from his cell yesterday that he was aware that the Afghan President may save his life. This is very, very important for me. It was a court which said I must die without even hearing my side of the story. There are many judges who are very conservative and say I have insulted Islam without really considering the evidence.

They themselves are also afraid of extremists and this could influence their decision. That worries me. But I am very grateful to the international media, especially The Independent, for taking an interest in my case. I think that makes it difficult for them to just get rid of me.

According to Samay Hamed, the co-ordinator of Kambaksh's campaign team, President Karzai first agreed to pardon the student in March this year. I ... have been told repeatedly by government ministers that [they] want the matter resolved quickly.

A procession of devils, ghosts and zombies through the historic Spanish city of Toledo has been branded blasphemous by the Catholic Church.

Actors from the Morboria theatre company performed a representation inspired by the medieval Dance of Death in Toledo's streets on Saturday, provoking an angry reaction from the cathedral pulpit the following day.

We ask forgiveness for those who yesterday insulted the body of Christ, said Archbishop Antonio Canizares, quoted in newspaper El Pais. He told worshippers the procession made a mockery of the Catholic celebration of Corpus Christi.

A representative of Morboria said the actors had been well received by most passers by except for one small group who told them off and said they would pray for them.

The Departing Mayor of Kirklees launched a blistering attack on a group of Muslims for refusing to pose with her in photographs.

Coun Jean Calvert said it proved 'we are no further down the road' of women's rights than when she first became a councillor in 1992. Coun Calvert was referring to her invitation to attend a community cohesion event at Dewsbury Town Hall in March.

It was organised by the North Kirklees Sunni Muslim Council of Mosques and local imams to mark Eid-Milad-Un-Nabi, the prophet Mohammed's birthday.

She said: I attended this event and was horrified to be left on my own in a room full of people that I didn't know. The press wanted to take photographs of the group with the mayor. The photographer was told in no uncertain terms that 'we don't have photographs taken with women.'

That was bad enough but then to stand on my own for a further 15 minutes while photographs were being taken of all the other guests in the room was very upsetting.

An organiser of the community cohesion event said he had contacted the mayor's office in advance to explain Coun Calvert could not appear in photographs with orthodox clerics.

A muslim pharmacist told a couple he couldn't give them emergency contraception because it was against his religious beliefs

A couple went to a Sainburys chemist to buy the morning-after pill but were told they couldn't have it - because the pharmacist didn't agree with it.

Mum-of-two Kaye said: I was absolutely flabbergasted. I'm a 36-year-old woman, not a child. I respect other people's religions, but when it affects my life it's not on. Surely the pharmacist has a duty of care? If religion comes into it he should change his job.

The couple were told to go to Sainsburys in Denton but with 15 minutes from closing time they knew they wouldn't be able to make it.

A spokeswoman for Sainsburys said if the morning-after pill is against a pharmacist's personal, religious or moral beliefs they are within their rights not to supply it: We would ask our pharmacists to do their best to help, to find another colleague to dispense the pill or to direct them to another pharmacy nearby.

Yoga enthusiasts have been warned by a leading Roman Catholic clergyman that they are in danger of being possessed by the Devil.

Father Jeremy Davies, exorcist for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of Catholics in England and Wales, says that activities such as yoga, massage therapy, reiki or even reading horoscopes could put people at risk from evil spirits.

In a new book, he also argues that people with promiscuous lifestyles could find themselves afflicted by demons. And he says that the occult is closely linked to the scourges of drugs, demonic music and pornography’ which are ‘destroying millions of young people in our time.

The 73-year-old Catholic priest, who was appointed exorcist of the Archdiocese of Westminster in 1986. He has carried out thousands of exorcisms in London and in 1993 he set up the International Association of Exorcists with Fr Gabriel Amorth, the Pope’s top exorcist.

In Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism In Scripture And Practice, which is published by the Catholic Truth Society, Fr Davies compares militant atheists to rational Satanists, and blames them for a rise in demonic activity. He adds that ‘perversions’ such as homosexuality, pornography and promiscuity are contributing to a growing sense of moral unease.

He writes: Even heterosexual promiscuity is a perversion; and intercourse, which belongs in the sanctuary of married love, can become a pathway not only for disease but also for evil spirits...young people especially are vulnerable and we must do what we can to protect them.

While a young Christian man was eating lunch in his factory’s cafeteria, some of his co-workers approached him and tried to convince him to embrace Islam. When the young man refused, his co-workers accused him of blasphemy and wanted to have him burned alive and his family stoned to death.

On 20th May, 2008 when Danish Masih was sitting in the canteen  of the factory, Arsalan and his companions came their chasing him, and asked the waiter not to serve Danish and his friend unless they embrace Islam. Danish got furious and asked them to leave, moreover he said that he is the true believer of Christ and believes that all other Religions are false except Christianity.

The conflict escalated. Arsalan and his friends made it a matter of Blasphemy and gathered the whole factory workers saying that this Kafir (Atheist) has committed Blasphemy against the Holy Prophet.

The workers of the factory that comprised mostly of Taliban’s became enraged and decided to burn Danish alive and stone his family to death. The Managing Director of the factory called police and kept Danish in his custody. Later after settling down the situation for the time being he suggested Danish to leave at once from Attock with family.

The US government has cautioned the Maldives over new wording in the constitution in progress which means non-Muslims could lose their Maldivian citizenship, US ambassador Robert Blake said.

[The wording is] in conflict with some international obligations Maldives has already signed up for, Blake said, in a probable reference to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which enshrines freedom of religion.

A group from the US House Foreign Relations Committee who visited Maldives in February were also rumoured to have spoken to government on the issue, whilst a 2005 international religious freedom report by the committee said that freedom of religion remains severely restricted in Maldives.

However as the new constitution was developed, the Special Majlis (constitutional assembly) voted to amend wording on citizenship from the current constitution, to add the words: A non-Muslim may not become a citizen of the Maldives.

Information minister Mohamed Nasheed said on his personal blog that this wording will operate to take away the citizenship from citizens of Maldives who may have a faith different from Islam.

The existing constitution stipulates individuals must be Muslim in order to vote in elections, but not in order to be a citizen.

Nasheed said on his blog, It will be very difficult for Maldives mentality to accept Maldives citizens may belong to a different faith. It will be seen as an offense to the state of Maldives and an insult to being Maldivian, thus demanding serious reprisal.

Therefore, he added, No Maldives leader would want to rock the boat by advocating a change to the wording.

A mob has burned to death at least 11 people accused of witchcraft in Kenya.

Their houses were torched. Eight women and three men suspected of being witches died, said Charles Owino, Kenya's deputy police spokesman. Residents in the Kisii district in the west of the country said an enraged crowd had gone from house to house.

Those killed were mainly aged between 70 and 90.

Police drafted extra personnel into the area to prevent revenge attacks in a region already reeling from tribal killings during Kenya's post-election crisis. There is widespread suspicion of sorcery, particularly in west Kenya, which has a long tradition of witch doctors and faith healers.

A human rights group has pledged to take action against a police force which tried to prosecute a teenager for branding Scientology a "cult".

The 16-year-old faced prosecution after refusing to get rid of a placard which said Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult at a protest outside the church's headquarters in London on 10 May.

He was told that his sign breached the Public Order Act, which makes it an offence to display a sign that is threatening, insulting or abusive, but the Crown Prosecution Service said no action would be taken against the teenager.

The human rights group Liberty, whose lawyers have been advising the boy, is now considering action against the City of London Police.

Last week's arrest of Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekshot (not his real name) was an absurd, scary episode that casts a depressing light on the freedoms that formerly characterized the Netherlands.

Nekshot's home was raided by a team of ten police officers who had been dispatched by the Openbaar Ministerie, the federal Dutch DA's office that works in conjunction with the Netherlands Justice Department. The cops confiscated Nekschot's computer, his sketchbooks, and other materials, then took him to a detention facility where he spent 30 hours in a concrete cell before being released without charges — but after he had been made to promise to remove eight cartoons from his website. The drawings had been the subject of a three-year-old complaint by radical Dutch muslim Abdul Jabbar van de Ven and the lefty "anti-discrimination" organizations that basically seek to censor everything that doesn't jibe with the country's official rainbow-worshiping, we-are-the-world ethos. They claim Nekshot's art incites hatred and violence.

Many of his drawings are certainly crass and crude. Sometimes, they can even be pointlessly insulting. The goatfucker references (see particularly the example in the third cartoon) are just tired, gratuitous, feeble slams, in my opinion.

The weekly magazine HP/De Tijd, a respectable news-and-opinion weekly that's been publishing a Nekschot cartoon in every issue for the last few years, has now responded to the affair in the only principled way possible: by printing, in the issue that just hit the stands, the very drawings that got Nekschot arrested.

...See the Forbidden Cartoons

Nigerian islamists under the auspices of a paramilitary force last week destroyed six churches to protest a police rescue of two teenage Christian girls kidnapped by Muslims in this Bauchi state town.

Police recovered the two Christian girls, Mary Chikwodi Okoye, 15, and Uche Edward, 14, on May 12 after Muslims in Ningi kidnapped them three weeks ago in an attempt to expand Islam by marrying them to Muslim men.

The kidnappers had taken the girls to Wudil town in Kano state. Following the rescue of the girls, Muslims under the auspices of the Hisbah Command, a paramilitary arm of Kano state’s Sharia Commission, responsible for enforcing Islamic law, went on a rampage on May 13, attacking Christians and setting fire to the churches.

The destroyed churches were the Deeper Life Bible Church, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, All Souls Anglican Church, Church of Christ in Nigeria, Redeemed Christian Church of God, and the Redeemed Peoples Mission.

Kidnapping of teenage Christian girls by Muslims has become a recurring practice in Ningi. Muslims have kidnapped at least 13 Christian girls in the town, Christian sources said: These girls are usually kidnapped, forcefully converted to Islam, and then married out to other Muslim men against the will of both the girls and their parents.

City of London Police have been made to look exceedingly foolish following their issuing of a court summons to a teenager for displaying a sign that branded Scientology a “dangerous cult”.

And today the boy’s protest was vindicated when the Crown Prosecution Service ruled the words were neither “abusive or insulting” to the church and no further action would be taken against him.

The unnamed 16-year-old was handed a court summons by City of London police for refusing to put down a placard saying Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult during a peaceful protest outside the church’s headquarters near St Paul’s Cathedral earlier this month.

Police said they had “strongly advised” him to stop displaying the sign but he refused, citing a high court judgment from 1984 in which the organisation was described as a cult. The summons was issued under the Public Order Act on the grounds that the sign incited religious hatred.

A file was passed to the CPS, which today told City of London police it would not be pursuing the boy through the courts.

A spokeswoman for the force said: The CPS review of the case includes advice on what action or behaviour at a demonstration might be considered to be threatening, abusive or insulting. The force’s policing of future demonstrations will reflect this advice.

A CPS spokesman added: In consultation with the City of London police, we were asked whether the sign, which read ‘Scientology is not a religion it is a dangerous cult’, was abusive or insulting. Our advice is that it is not abusive or insulting and there is no offensiveness, as opposed to criticism, neither in the idea expressed nor in the mode of expression. No action will be taken against the individual.

The National Secular Society invite you to write to your MP and suggest signing Roger Godsiff's Early Day Motion (no. 1586) which criticises West Midlands Police for its behaviour over the Channel 4 Undercover Mosque programme. The matter is one of immense public importance going to the very heart of the Justice system.

The motion reads:

That this House welcomes the unreserved public apology given by the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service and the six figure libel settlement paid by them to Channel 4 over the Dispatches programme broadcast on 15th January 2007 which contained covert filming inside mosques in Birmingham and Derby; notes that the comments and allegations made by West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service had already been dismissed by the industry regulator, Ofcom; further notes that the individuals shown in the programme broadcast were using highly derogatory and racist language against a variety of non-Muslim groups which included Christians, Jews, homosexuals, lesbians and women and were in clear breach of existing legislation in respect of incitement to religious and racial hatred; calls on the Home Secretary to launch an immediate investigation into why the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service chose to attack the programme makers at Channel 4 rather than investigating and prosecuting the individuals who were shown in the programme; and asserts that incitement to religious and racial hatred has no place in British society.

A Nato soldier and two civilians were killed in Afghanistan when 2,000 protesters armed with stones tried to break into an airfield in Chaghcharan in protest about a copy of the Koran being used for target practice by a US soldier in Iraq.

The soldier and two of the demonstrators died when they were shot and seven Afghans and ten police were wounded by gunfire.  A petrol station opposite the airfield was set alight during the protest, which was organised by students from a religious school.

The protest was a response to the discovery of a copy of the Koran at a shooting range in Baghdad, which had bullet holes in it. President Bush apologised to Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, and promised to prosecute the soldier responsible. There was no violent response in Iraq.

Members of the Sikh community staged a protest in front of a Bangalore restaurant, objecting to jokes and pictures displayed on menu card which, they said, hurt their sentiments.

The protesters demanded a public apology from the hotel management and lodged a complaint with the police.

Over 50 Sikhs gathered in front of the restaurant, tore a copy of the menu card and set it on fire, shouting slogans against the hotel. They marched from the restaurant to the police station to file the complaint.

Gurudwara Committee president Gursharan Singh said that some words and pictures depicted on the menu card humiliated members of the community. A picture on the card shows the holy Kirpan (sword) and turban kept along with the footwear, which hurts our sentiments. The Kirpan and turbans are highly revered symbols of our religion. The menu card projects Sikhs in a bad light, Singh said.

The United Nations estimates that at least 255 women died in honour-related killings in Kurdistan, home to one fifth of Iraqis, in the first six months of 2007 alone.

The murder of women who are deemed to have disobeyed traditional codes of morality is even more common in the rest of Iraq where government authority has broken down since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

A surprising reason explaining the massive increase in the number of honour killings is the availability of cheap mobile phones able to take pictures. Men photograph themselves making love to their girlfriends and pass the pictures to their friends. This often turns out to be a lethal act of bravado in a society where premarital or extra-marital sex justifies killing.

The first known case of sex recorded on a mobile leading to murder was in 2004. Film of a boy making love with a 17-year-old girl circulated in the Kurdish capital, Arbil. Two days later she was killed by her family and a week later he was murdered by his.

Since then there has been a sharp increase in the number of women suffering violence – it is almost always the women rather than the men who suffer retribution – as a result of some aspect of their love life being pictured on mobile phones.

In 2007, at least 350 women, double the figure for the previous year, suffered violence as a result of mobile phone "evidence", according to Amanj Khalil of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, citing figures compiled by women's organisations and the police directorate in Sulaymaniyah.

The true figure is probably much higher. Bodies are buried in the mountains. Violence is concealed. Whole extended families and clans feel a genuine sense of shame because of some supposed act of immorality.

The position of women in Iraqi society has deteriorated dramatically since the start of the occupation. Despite the horrific number of honour killings, their status may be improving only in Kurdistan, where the government is secular, in contrast to Baghdad where the religious parties hold power.

A popular Japanese cartoon is sparking off outcries in the Muslim world.

Shueisha Inc, a Japanese publisher involved in the production of the cartoon JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and its animation version, suspended sales of some of the original comics and the DVD series, but said the material was not intended to be offensive.

At issue is a 90-second segment from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which depicts Dio Brando, a villain, picking up a Quran from a bookshelf and apparently examining it as he orders the execution of the hero and his friends.

After a viewer posted negative comments and the still scene, it sparked off more protests. Eventually responses were carried on more than 300 Arab and Islamic Web forums with some accusing Japan of insulting the Quran.

Sheikh Abdul Hamid Attrash, chairman of the Fatwa (religious edict)
Committee at Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni authority based in Cairo, dismissed the cartoon as an insult to Islam: ‘This scene depicts Muslims as terrorists, which is not true at all. This is an insult to the religion and the producers would be considered to be enemies of Islam.’

In responding to the accusation, the Shueisha official explained that it was a simple mistake. Neither the original comic nor the animation intends to treat Muslims as villains. But as a result, the cartoon offended Muslims. We apologize for the unpleasantness that the cartoon may have caused and will carefully consider how to deal with religious and culture themes.

Gamal Qutb, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar suggested that Muslims would boycott Japanese products unless Japan takes action against the controversial video.

A Dutch town has moved two paintings of nude women after complaints from Muslims and other people, stoking criticism that the Netherlands is curtailing artists’ freedoms.

The town of Huizen east of Amsterdam confirmed media reports that it had moved two paintings of naked women by Dutch artist Ellen Vroegh from a waiting room in the town hall to a less public position nearby.

Visitors and some staff complained, not just Muslims but others too, a town spokeswoman said: We are against censorship...BUT...there are people who have different opinions about nudity and nakedness and we wanted to give citizens a choice.

The artist said she was the latest victim of heightened sensitivity in the Netherlands about Islam after a cartoonist was briefly arrested last week on suspicion of offending Muslims due to his provocative drawings.

In his meeting with the bishops of Thailand on their five yearly visit to the Vatican, Benedict XVI insisted on the need for Thai Catholics to promote education in Catholic-run schools.

At the same time he stressed the need for working together with Buddhists to preserve and improve Thailand’s cultural traditions, opposing through inter-faith cooperation one of the negative effects of globalisation, namely prostitution-related trafficking in women and children, which is itself a consequence of the trivialisation of sexuality by the media and the entertainment industry.

Benedict turned his attention to the scourge of the trafficking of women and children, and prostitution.

Undoubtedly poverty is a factor underlying these phenomena, he said. And the Church does what it can to counter this problem: But there is a further aspect which must be acknowledged and collectively addressed if this abhorrent human exploitation is to be effectively confronted. I am speaking of the trivialization of sexuality in the media and entertainment industries which fuels a decline in moral values and leads to the degradation of women, the weakening of fidelity in marriage and even the abuse of children.

Playboy has said it will review how its products are sold in the UK after one retailer placed its branded stationery near merchandise for children.

The shop display prompted an angry reaction from the Reverend Tim Jones, who pulled it down and complained the firm was selling directly to children.

Jones says his protest at a branch of Stationary Box in York was prompted by anger at finding Playboy goods next to items bearing pictures of Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh. He said it was "wicked" to groom children for their commercial exploitation by the sex industry.

Playboy Enterprises said goods bearing its famous bunny logo were aimed primarily at 18 to 34 year olds.

Playboy said it was surprised the goods were inappropriately positioned. We will be reviewing this situation immediately.

By making their brand acceptable they're making everything they do acceptable, including the pornography they promote through their TV channels, said Beatriz Concejo from the pressure group Object: They are normalising pornography by making their brand a household name.

Google's Adsense advertising program has sneaked in a wide range of ads that are found to be offensive in Arab and African states.,

These adverts said to trash Arab and African women are being displayed potentially on millions of sites worldwide..

Advertisements such as "Meet Sexy Arab Women - Thousands Sexy Women Online Free!" and Hot Sexy Older Women - Meet Sexy Single Older Women, View Private Photos and Profiles have started appearing on Arabic languages on the Mathaba News Network, whilst English language pages target Muslims with dating services.

As Google are expert in search technology, they know full well that they are allowing ads which are offensive to Arab and African culture which holds women in high respect, unlike the so-called western world, where women are regarded as sex objects, according to Libya's leader Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi.

Sites that work hard to generate quality content, such as Mathaba News, are hit in the face by offensive advertising that turn visitors away, whilst being unaware of exactly which ads are being served to their visitors.

Google claim that the ads will target the readership and be based upon the content of the page. This is shown to be a lie by the fact that Mathaba is an international news agency with serious content, and its readership do not come to the site to look at sex adverts.

Mathaba has responded by posting a See Nasty Ads - Please Help Us notice on the bottom left of all 60,000 news pages, but it is a losing battle as recently these nasty ads have proliferated to be the norm.

The suspicion is that the few independent news sites like Mathaba may be being targeted with poor quality ads as the revenue has fallen catastrophically over the past year to unsustainable levels, made worse by the collapse of the US Dollar, the only currency Google pay publishers in.

However, Arab men as well as Asian men from Muslim backgrounds are infamous for using the Internet to view "sexy women" and to try to "chat up white women" who are regarded by many of them as "cheap sex objects", spurned to this simplistic view by the proliferation of western women in pornography. This market must be hard for Google to ignore.

Comment: Fair's Fair

And one of the Google ads on the Matahaba news page did in fact read:

Hot Black Women
Find Black Singles Online. Join Our Free Chatrooms, IM & Photo Gallery!
www.BlackSinglesConnection.com

Well if they will include the word 'sexy' so often in their content, what do they expect?

A vicar was so incensed to see Playboy stationary stacked on a shop shelf next to children’s merchandise that he decided to take direct action, and pulled down the display.

The Reverend Nutter Tim Jones said the pornography empire deliberately aims the bright pink pencil cases and note books, branded with the distinctive bunny logo, at young girls.

So, he decided to take a stand and threw the offending merchandise from shelves in the York branch of Stationery Box, after getting the full backing of the store manager.

Rev Jones said: "I told the assistant manager, who was on duty, I was going to be launching a protest at the shop, and I went over to where the Playboy material was on the shelf alongside the Winnie The Pooh and Mickey Mouse items.

I started tossing it on the floor away from where people were. I also encouraged customers to sign a petition against the intrusion of commercial brands such as Playboy into goods and services targeting children.

The long-term intention of their strategy is to encourage children to see the Playboy bunny as a friendly brand appropriate for children, preparing them for early commercial acceptance of Playboy pornographic merchandise.

This constitutes a kind of institutional grooming of children for their commercial exploitation by the powerful sex industry. It is indirect but not accidental. It is deliberate, intentional, cynical and wicked and must be resisted.

Rev Jones has persuaded staff at the Stationery Box branch to remove the entire Playboy range pending a "merchandising review".

City of London police have been cracking down hard on religious intolerance this week and on one four letter word in particular – CULT. And when does the word cult become illegal? Curiously only when it’s applied to the Church of Scientology (CoS) - and in the Square Mile.

Around two-hundred anti-Scientology protesters gathered outside the CoS London base on Queen Victoria Street last Saturday as part of a day of action. Sporting Guy Fawkes masks, many carried signs accusing the organisation of being a cult. They were greeted by a number of City of London Police.

Two officers approached one 15-year-old who was wearing a huge-nosed mask and holding a sign saying Scientology is not a religion – it is a dangerous cult.

He was handed a pre-printed warning by a WPC stating, The sign you are displaying commits an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 .. you are strongly advised to remove the sign with immediate effect.

One cop told SchNEWS’ man on the scene that, the idea is that if somebody gets prosecuted there will be a test case Police were clearly out to protect CoS’s reputation with one officer telling us, Our solicitors at the Crown Prosecution Service have advised us that any signs saying ‘Scientology is a cult’ could be deemed offensive. They are being treated as a religious organisation for the purposes of today.

Ten minutes later and the cops returned. The youth was chased up an alleyway and then forced to hand over his details for a court summons.

So why the sudden desire to defend Scientology so strenuously? Maybe because the scientologists and the City of London Police appear to have a rather cosy relationship, with Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley speaking at the opening of the London HQ in October, saying the science-fiction cultists were raising the spiritual wealth of society.

Update: Barmy

21st May 2008

The case was described as "barmy" and an attack on free speech by Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, the human rights group.

She said: "They will be banning words like 'war' and 'tax' from placards and demonstrations next. This is just barmy."

Human Rights Watch has called on Saudi Arabia to dismiss a death sentence against a Turkish barber convicted of cursing the name of God.

The group said in a statement that an appeals court had upheld a death sentence against Sabri Bogday, a Turkish national who had worked in Jeddah for 11 years as a barber, who was convicted of insulting God during an argument with a Saudi client and an Egyptian neighbour.

The sentence can be still reversed by a higher legal body.

The charges, conviction, and sentence against Bogday show the dangers of criminalising speech on the grounds that it's offensive, said Sarah Leah Whitson, the group's Middle East director, in the statement.

Dr. Robin Sardar a Christian by faith and a medical doctor by profession, has been charged with violating Pakistan's blasphemy laws.

In an interview with Dr. Shamaoun, a nephew of Dr. Robin Sardar, said that Sardar had a close friendship with a Muslim man named Muhammad Yousaf for years. They were often seen together at family gatherings and social events. However, Yousaf became resentful that Sardar, as a Christian, had such a good professional reputation, social status, and financial resources.

Shamaoun said that Yousaf's envy at Sardar's success boiled over when he told police that Sardar had made derogatory comments about the Prophet Muhammad's beard and the Holy Quran. The police reportedly registered a First Information Report (FIR) against Sardar on May 5, 2008.

Shamaoun further stated that a mob of over 200 Muslims wearing green turbans, a symbol of their Islamic orthodoxy, attacked the doctor's house and medical clinic after the FIR had been registered against him. The mob was holding sticks, guns and kerosene oil, and proceeded to force their way into the house, smashing windows and furniture throughout the house and clinic. The mob then turned on Sardar and his family.

Pervaiz Ghori, another of Sardar's relatives, said that the mob would have killed him if the police had not intervened in the nick of time.

Since then, the religious extremists have organized daily demonstrations on the city's roads demanding that Sardar be hanged publicly. Shamaoun said that all the Christians in the area, especially Dr. Sardar's family members, are living in fear because the local Muslim clerics have been regularly using the mosque amplifier to call on people to kill the relatives of the Christian doctor.

Update: Freed But...

17th November 2008. See article from compassdirect.org

After a thorough investigation, the court found the accusation to be baseless and freed Sardar. Angry villagers and local Muslim clerics had threatened to kill Sardar if he was acquitted, and he has gone into hiding, as did his family after his incarceration six months ago. A mob bearing sticks and kerosene and chanting death threats had surrounded the family’s house at that time.

Pervez Kambaksh, the Afghan student sentenced to death after being accused of downloading internet reports on women's rights, yesterday pleaded innocent to charges of blasphemy. He told an appeal court in Kabul that he had been tortured into confessing.

Kambaksh, 24, vehemently denied that he had been responsible for producing anti-Islamic literature. He insisted the prosecution had been motivated by personal malice of two members of staff and their student supporters at the university in Balkh, where he was studying journalism.

He was convicted in proceedings behind closed doors in a trial which he said had lasted just four minutes and where he had been denied legal representation.

Yesterday, in the first public hearing of the case, the prosecution claimed that Kambaksh had disrupted classes at the university by asking questions about women's rights under Islam. It also said he distributed an article on the subject after writing an additional three paragraphs including the phrase This is the real face of Islam ... The prophet Mohamad wrote verses of the holy Koran just for his own benefit.

In a highly emotional statement, Kambaksh said: I'm Muslim and I would never let myself write such an article. These accusations are nonsense, [they] come from two professors and other students because of private hostilities against me. I was tortured by the intelligence service in Balkh province and they made me confess that I wrote three paragraphs in this article.

Kambaksh represented himself because his family are having difficulties finding a lawyer to represent him after threats by fundamentalist groups that anyone taking on the job would be killed.

The head of the panel of three judges at Kabul, Abdul Salaam Qazizada, adjourned the trial until next Sunday to allow Kambaksh further attempts to find a lawyer. As of last night they had not succeeded.

Kambaksh's case has been raised with President Hamid Karzai by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

On the 14th of May the Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot was arrested. Gregorius Nekschot is a pseudonym. Gregorius stands for the name of a pope, Nekschot for "shot through the neck", a method used by socialists of various breeds to get rid of unwanted dissidents.

Gregorius Nekschot creates highly controversial cartoons. He himself calls them ‘tasteless cartoons’, and most people agree. By comparison, the Danish cartoons are pure propaganda for Mohammed. Strangely enough, those rather innocent Danish cartoons drew worldwide attention, while Nekschot’s cartoons didn’t.

That is over. On the 14th of this month Gregorius was arrested by a team of no fewer than ten police officers. He was taken into custody, and since the District Attorney deemed his works both highly offensive and commercial, he was kept locked up for two days. After release, he was told: You can forget about anonymity now. They know who you are.

This arrest creates a serious political row. The parliament, to their credit, from left to right, wants an explanation from the minister for Justice, Hirsh Balin. And it better be a good one, for more and more information comes to earth that this is pure political intimidation, if not outright state terrorism.

A broad Lower House majority requested an interlocutory debate on the arrest of cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot. Labour (PvdA), the Socialist Party (SP), the conservatives (VVD), Party for Freedom (PVV), leftwing Greens (GroenLinks) and independent MP Rita Verdonk all backed a request by centre-left D66 for a debate. As well as Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Education Minister Ronald Plasterk will be called to account. He is responsible for culture and media policy.

A Saudi Arabian man is to get 150 lashes and spend eight months in prison after he was caught meeting a woman without a chaperone in a coffee shop.

Muhammad Ali Abu Raziza, a psychology professor in Mecca, was arrested by the Kingdom's feared religious police, the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. He was accused of breaking the Islamic injunctions under the Khilwa code, which restricts the independence of women. It stipulates that women must not meet men alone, other than relatives.

According to The Telegraph, the professor has alleged police entrapment. He claimed a history of personality disputes with the arresting officers, who were once his students. In his defence, Abu Raziza said he had called the woman to ensure she had a chaperone but despite her assurances, she was alone when he arrived. No information has emerged about the fate of the woman since the incident.

Amnesty International has urged Saudi authorities to release the professor.

The most charitable interpretation of the reaction of Anil Patani, the Assistant Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, to the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque is that he was in a state of deep denial.

The programme recorded preachers at the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham making remarks that were not only bigoted and full of hate but also bordered on incitement to murder. Abu Usamah, one of the main preachers, was shown saying: Osama Bin Laden, he’s better than a thousand Tony Blairs, because he’s a Muslim; Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a PhD, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete; and advocating that homosexuals should be “thrown off” mountains. Mr Patani’s reaction? To refer the programme makers to the Crown Prosecution Service for inciting racial hatred.

He also referred the programme to Ofcom, the TV regulator, sending out a press release as he did so. Mr Patani’s press release claimed that those featured in the programme had been misrepresented and that it had undermined community cohesion. Those claims were blatantly false, as the Ofcom investigation itself made crystal clear. But why on earth did Mr Patani make them?

...Read full article

Courts in Jeddah should dismiss cases against a Saudi web critic charged with “insulting” Islam, an unequivocal violation of freedom of expression protected under international law, Human Rights Watch said.

Criminalizing speech on grounds that it is insulting might appease some people, but it violates the fundamental human right of free speech, said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch: The Saudi government uses these laws primarily to silence its critics.

On May 5, the prosecution service in Jeddah charged Ra’if Badawi with setting up an electronic site that insults Islam, and referred the case to court, asking for a five-year prison sentence and a 3 million riyal (US$800,000) fine.

Unknown persons have hacked Badawi’s website multiple times, and have published his phone numbers, work address, and a threat on the hacked site: Oh you retard, you are in the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him. Underline ‘Muhammad’ with a thousand lines before a thousand swords are put above your neck! Prosecutors have not investigated the hackers or the death threats against Badawi.

The prosecution service had detained Badawi in March 2008 for one day to interrogate him about his website, which he uses to detail abuses by the Saudi religious police and to question the predominant interpretation of Islam. After being threatened with arrest for his online activities and receiving personal threats of physical harm, Badawi fled Saudi Arabia two weeks ago.

Christian nutters based in San Diego have found grounds for outrage over the new retro-style Starbucks logo.

The Resistance says the new image has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute, Mark Dice, founder of the groupsaid: Need I say more? It's extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks.

The group, which claims more than 3,000 members nationwide and has found a place on the fringe advancing various conspiracy theories, is calling for a national boycott of the coffee-selling giant.

The logo will run on Starbucks cups for several more weeks, said company spokeswoman Bridget Baker, and will live on as the logo for Pike Place bags of coffee.

The image is a less-revealing version of what the chain used for many years, starting when it first opened in Seattle in 1971. The explanation for that initial logo is explained in the book Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, written by company founder Howard Schultz:

[Creative partner Terry Heckler] poured [sic] over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old 16 Century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store's original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.

Marriott International is coming under heavy fire from nutter activists urging the hotel giant to banish  sexual fare from its bedroom TV.

Focus on the Family met with hotel executives in Washington DC, and provided Marriott with a petition signed by 102,000 nutters who want pornographic films purged from the list of movie offerings.

Daniel Weiss, media and sexuality analyst for the group, said Marriott has billed itself as a family-lodging establishment, and its decision to provide adult films to its customers is contrary to its reputation.

Weiss said hotels and motels have been major contributors to the proliferation of pornography in mainstream culture: We've heard from people who have developed addictions, businessmen, people who travel a lot, who found that away from their support structure and families they were very vulnerable to this type of material. They indicated that hotel porn was very significant in their addiction.

When WND asked Marriott Vice President of Communications Roger Conner why the hotel offers sex films in its rooms, he provided the following response: That's one of those any-kind-of-'why' questions. It's very universal in nature. For 25 years or more, not just Marriott, but the whole industry has offered a wide range including adult movies.

Asked if he believes customers would miss the pornographic films if they were not offered, Conner said, It would be interesting to know. I don't want this to sound flippant, but who knows?

Marriott International offers families an option to block pornographic movies by calling the front desk or using the remote control, but Focus on the Family and other nutter groups would like the hotel chain to consider a policy where the pornography would automatically be turned off unless a guest requests it.

For some people, that may just be enough of a hindrance that they won't access that material, Weiss said. They won't get caught up in it if they have to come out of the anonymity of ordering it in their room and call somebody.

Marriott executives said they will think about the suggestions and respond to concerns by July 1, though Conner acknowledged that not everyone left the meeting satisfied: We know it's not a perfect world that we live in, unfortunately, so it's not a perfect response for those that we met with yesterday. There were some who said they wanted more of an immediate response or decision. But, based upon the complicated business model and contracts that are in place, we can't simply walk away from it as we speak.

Hotels do not lose a large percentage of revenue when they boycott adult content because they only take 10 to 15% of the profits from the sale of pornographic films, Weiss said. He has faith that Marriott International will live up to its reputation as a family friendly establishment and make its 3,000 hotels porn free: I think at this point we want to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they will do the right thing. We're going to take a cautious wait-and-see approach.

A cartoonist who works under the pseudonym Gregorius Nekschot has been arrested on suspicion of publishing work which discriminates against Muslims and ‘people with dark skins’, the Netherlands public prosecution department says.

Nekschot, an established cartoonist was released after spending a night in custody. His house was searched and a quantity of work taken away.

In a statement, the public prosecution department said cartoonists are by nature satirical and often insulting to others. However, Nekschot’s work broke the boundaries of freedom of expression and artistic licence.

The arrest follows a complaint made against Nekschot in 2005 by imam Abdul Jabbar van de Ven.

The investigation is continuing.

Muslim leaders in Kenya's North Eastern Province have resolved to campaign against the promotion of condoms as a means of preventing HIV.

The decision was made after a recent meeting on the theme of "Islam and Health", attended by more than 60 Muslim scholars and teachers in the provincial capital of Garissa.

A lot of money is being wasted to poison our community ... a huge amount of money is spent on buying condoms, buying immorality, Sheikh Mohamud Ali, of Garissa district, told IRIN/PlusNews.

The leaders agreed to actively preach against the use and public promotion of condoms as a strategy to contain the pandemic and prevent pregnancy. They also agreed to oppose the distribution of condoms in villages and educational institutions across the northeast.

The clerics further demanded the closure of bars in the northeast and asked the government to suspend the licensing of any new bars. According to the clerics, local bars and "video dens" screened pornographic movies that were contributing to sexually transmitted infections. The widespread abuse of drugs was another factor: a locally grown mild stimulant, "khat", is popular in the region.

The leaders expressed their view that the best way for the youth to avoid HIV was through the observance of Islamic teachings such as fasting, regular prayer and shunning extramarital affairs. They advised men to avoid looking at women, who should dress modestly.

Hindu groups have contacted various cinema/film related organizations around the world and mist recently to Canada urging them not to distribute/screen upcoming Hollywood movie The Love Guru till its presenter Paramount Pictures makes 'necessary changes' to it.

Furthering the drive pioneered by Indo-American leader Rajan Zed, various organizations and leaders have been coming out expressing concern about the possibility of The Love Guru hurting the sentiments of Hindus worldwide and urging filmmakers to be more responsible when handling faith related subjects.

Zed has been saying that from the information available about the movie, it appears to be lampooning Hinduism and Hindus and using Hindu terms frivolously.

G. Kendrick Macdowell, Vice President of the National Association of Theatre Owners, largest exhibition trade organization in the world, replying to one such request wrote, I am sympathetic to your concern as I have been to the ashrams in India and know a little bit about the guru-disciple relationship. I have not seen the trailer or the movie, but I can guess that it satirizes 'gurus on the make'. I doubt I would find it funny. Nevertheless, we are not in a position to take action you recommend ...we are a trade association, and we cannot interfere with the decisions of our members regarding what movies or trailers to play...

Ilona Cheshire, Press Officer of prestigious British Film Institute (BFI), wrote in her reply, Please rest assured that the BFI will not be screening this title nor will be involved with a possible release of it.

J.L. Green, Chief Assistant (Policy) to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), replying the communique, said, The BBFC is sympathetic to your concerns. However, THE LOVE GURU has not been submitted to the BBFC for classification...

Back in August 2007 I wrote a defence of the Undercover Mosque programme and, among many reasonable responses, I came in for the now obligatory charges of Islamophobia, neocon activism and, of course, racism. This kind of thing is standard these days if you state your opposition to the idea that hitting 10-year-old girls is reasonable, that women are lesser beings then men, that killing homosexuals is wrong, that killing apostates is unacceptable, and that all Muslims supposedly hate the kuffar. All of those views were propagated by the preachers who were recorded in Undercover Mosque, a diligent documentary made in difficult circumstances. And yet the West Midlands police not only attempted to prosecute the filmmakers but also, having failed in that absurd endeavour, reported the documentary to Ofcom.

...Read full article

Nova Scotia's leading newspaper, the Chronicle Herald, is being hauled before that province's human rights commissions for publishing a cartoon.

The cartoon, published April 18 in the Chronicle Herald newspaper, depicts a woman in a burka holding a sign that reads, I want millions, and she says, I can put it towards my husband's next training camp.

The cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon is a reference to Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal, a woman from Nova Scotia whose husband was arrested in 2006 in an anti-terrorism raid. Qayyum Abdul Jamal was released from jail after charges against him were stayed on April 15...

In an interview with the Herald before the cartoon ran, Jamal said she wanted to sue the federal government for what her family has gone through and told the reporter, "I want millions, Dan Leger, the Herald's director of news content noted.

Leger said the cartoon does not take aim at all Muslims: The whole purpose of that cartoon was to comment on the outrageous demands of this individual for compensation long before any hearing into her case had ever been held.

[MacKinnon] depicted her exactly the way she looks and used her own words, and that's the genius of cartooning that you're able to do that.

The Chronicle Herald hasn't just been taken to the NSHRC but they've actually been contacted by real police, too.

The Crown Prosecution Service and West Midlands Police will apologise in the High Court today for wrongly accusing a Channel 4 film of faking an exposé of Islamic extremism.

The producers of Undercover Mosque, a Dispatches investigation that showed preachers predicting jihad and calling for the murder of non-believers, have also accepted a six-figure libel settlement reported to be £100,000

The programme, screened last January, showed footage gathered at a number of mosques in the West Midlands using hidden cameras. It included one preacher who praised the Taleban for killing British soldiers.

Another, Abu Usamah, a preacher at the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, was filmed saying: If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs who should be murdered, that is my freedom of speech isn't it?

However, instead of pursuing a prosecution of the preachers, police and the CPS began an investigation into the producers, accusing them of selective editing and distortion. The film-makers were accused of undermining community relations.

The police took the highly unusual step of referring Dispatches to Ofcom, the media watchdog.

Ofcom threw out the complaint. It found that the programme had accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context. It was a legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest. Each quote was justified by the narrative of the programme and put fully in context.

Hardcash Productions, which made the film, joined Channel 4 in a libel complaint against the police and CPS over the “distortion” claim.

West Midlands Police and CPS will apologise unreservedly for comments that they accept were incorrect and unjustified. They said that there was no evidence that the broadcaster or programme-makers had misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity”.

Kevin Sutcliffe, deputy head of current affairs at Channel 4, said: This is a total vindication of the programme team.

Pro-family nutters have wrapped up what is being called a "productive" meeting with officials of Marriott International.

The meeting focused on the hotel chain's practice of selling in room pornographic movies at some of its properties.

Last month, leaders of 47 pro-family groups sent a letter to Marriott CEO John W. Marriott the Third, which asked for a meeting with Marriott executives about the issue.

Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, says the meeting in Washington D.C. was a good first step: Two things came out of the meeting. They are going to look into a system where people would have to call the front desk and get the movie turned on.

Secondly, notes Wildmon, the Marriot executives will discuss the issue further with some of their franchisees. And he says pro-family nutters will have another meeting with Marriott representatives in about six weeks to check progress on the issue.

Belgian police are protecting a 17th century pulpit in the Flemish town of Dendermonde. The sculpted wooden pulpit, made by Mattheus van Beveren, depicts a man subdued by angels and represents the triumph of Christianity over Islam. The man is generally thought to be Mohammed. He is holding a book which is generally assumed to be the Koran.

Two years ago, on April 16, 2006, during the height of the Danish cartoon affair, Brussels Journal published a photo of the pulpit to show that there is a long tradition of depicting Mohammed in European iconography.

Last Friday the Turkish newspaper Yeniçag reprinted our picture on its front page with the caption Stop this hideous insult. Yeniçag demands that Belgium remove the pulpit. The paper writes that We have had the crusades and now they are still trying to humiliate us. This is as bad as the Danish cartoons and Geert Wilders’s Fitna movie in the Netherlands. Even Pope Benedict does nothing to stop these humiliations.

Since Friday, Brussels Journal have received threats while the authorities in Belgium, which has a large population of Turkish immigrants, fear that the pulpit and the church may be attacked. The Belgian press reported today that the police are guarding Dendermonde’s Our Lady church to prevent vandalism to church and pulpit.

Aimé Stroobants, the custodian of Our Lady in Dendermonde, told the newspaper De Standaard that the figure on the pulpit cannot possibly be Mohammed because He is wearing a Persian dress, while we know that the Prophet came from the Arab Peninsula. For all we know the depicted man might even be a Jew.

An Algerian Christian detained five days for carrying a Bible and personal Bible study books was handed a 300-euro (US$460) fine and a one-year suspended prison sentence last week, an Algerian church leader said.

A court charged the Muslim convert to Christianity with printing, storing and distributing illegal religious material. He received the “printing” charge because he was traveling with a computer printer in his possession.

He told fellow Christians that police pressured him to return to Islam while in custody.

The conviction is the latest in a wave of detentions and court cases against Algeria’s Protestants and Catholics. Since January police and provincial officials have ordered the closure of up to half of the country’s 50 estimated Protestant congregations.

Officials in several instances have cited a February 2006 law governing the worship of non-Muslims. Clarified by subsequent decrees in 2007, the law restricts most religious meetings to approved places of worship and forbids any attempt to “shake the faith of a Muslim.”

British Airways has taken beef off the menu for economy passengers amid concerns about its "religious restrictions".

The airline has instead switched to a fish or chicken dish option for the so-called "cattle class" passengers.

BA's second-biggest long-haul market is to India, where the majority Hindu population do not eat beef because of their beliefs.

The decision to scrap the nation's favourite fare was described as a "great shame" by the English Beef and Lamb Executive. A spokesman said: It is regrettable that Britain's flag carrier is not proposing to serve Britain's national dish.

A BA spokesman said the it stopped serving beef to economy class passengers last month. He added: We can only serve two options and beef and pork obviously have religious restrictions. We have to try to use two meals which appeal to as many customers as possible. This summer season we are offering customers in World Traveller on most longhaul flights a choice of chicken and tarragon or fish pie.

The Hindu Council UK said: The Hindu community will welcome this decision and the news it has been made partly because Hindus don't eat beef. That said, Hindus are tolerant of the beliefs of others and do not expect everyone to stop eating a food because they do not eat it.

Muslim villagers in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, eager to rid the area of the Christian work of a local pastor have gang-raped his 13-year-old daughter, the girl's father said.

Pastor Motilal Das of United Bethany Church said that on Friday (May 2) the villagers sexually assaulted his daughter, Elina Das, and left her unconscious in front of his house in an attempt to drive him and his Christian ministry out of Laksmipur village.

Local residents have long been angry with him for his ministry and evangelism, he said, and he has received death threats.

Elina Das has identified two of the rapists and could identify the others if she saw them or their pictures, said Das.

When Das initially went to police to file charges, he said, police were reluctant to register the case: Police told me that it was a false case. They also said that it was a fabricated drama. Police spoke with my daughter in filthy language and showed prurient interest in the details of the incident in front of us rather than filing the case quickly.

A Pakistani TV channel was wrong to broadcast a prayer in which a Muslim scholar called for God to "ruin" Salman Rushdie, Ofcom have ruled.

During a live broadcast on Geo TV, in Urdu and from Pakistan, scholar Dr. Aamer Liaquat Hussain said:

O God I beg you for the sake of this night; ruin those who have blasphemed against Your beloved Prophet Muhammad, Peace be upon Him.

Ruin them. Ruin Rushdie, I beg you for his death. O God, give him death, O Provider; he has blasphemed your beloved. Oh God, we beg in Your Court for his death.

Some Muslims judged Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses to be blasphemous against Islam.

Two viewers complained that the statements made on the Shabeqadar programme in October were offensive. Under Ofcom's broadcasting code, offensive statements are allowed but must be justified by the context.

Geo TV said Rushdie had, in its view, committed serious blasphemy, and the host had exercised his freedom of expression, in this very specific context, by condemning the blasphemous act.

Ofcom said offensive material, where broadcast, had to be justified by the context. Dr. Hussain’s remarks, albeit primarily addressed to a specific audience outside the UK (i.e. Pakistan), and in the context of a prayer, were broadcast without, for example, comment or editorial narrative.We therefore concluded the remarks complained about were not sufficiently justified by context and so were in breach of [Broadcasting Code] Rule 2.3."

Woman and Horse

Criminal charges against India’s leading living artist for an allegedly obscene painting of a Hindu goddess have been quashed in a ruling that said religious extremism risked pushing the country into a “pre-Renaissance era”.

Maqbool Fida Husain, 92, a Muslim, who has been called “the Picasso of India”, was served with private criminal complaints by Hindu groups for Bharat Mata (Mother India), a work representing the nation as a nude woman.

The Delhi High Court judged that the picture could not be construed as offensive.

The Roman Catholic Church is opposing a nudist beach festival in Sicily billed as a “celebration of nudity” over fears of an invasion of naked sunbathers.

The Church complained after the mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, the village nearest to the planned festival on Capo Bianco recently issued a decree allowing free use of Capo Bianco by lovers of nude sunbathing.

But Father Giuseppe Miliziano, the parish priest, said: The beach belongs to the state, not to the local council. If the state decided to allow people to take their clothes off, there is not much I could do about it. But as far as I am aware no such authorisation has been issued.

Nude sunbathing is illegal in Italy but a few naturist beaches are authorised by councils if they are patrolled by naturist associations.

The Capo Bianco festival, due to take place between May 23 and May 25, is organised by the Italian Naturist Federation, based in Turin, and the Sicilian Naturist Association. The beach is also near Agrigento and the ruins of Eraclea Minoa.

Pope Benedict has praised a 1968 Church document that condemned contraception. In a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the document, Benedict reiterated the Church's ban against artificial birth control as well as more recent teaching against using artificial procreation methods.

Pope Paul's 1968 Humanae vitae (On Human Life) encyclical prohibits Catholics from using artificial birth control.

The teaching laid out in the Humanae vitae encyclical isn't easy, Benedict said: What was true yesterday remains true even today. 'The truth expressed in Humane vitae doesn't change; on the contrary, in the light of new scientific discoveries it is ever more up to date.

Benedict appeared to be referring to artificial procreation methods, which in the Church's view offend the dignity of life and go against Vatican teaching that the only way to conceive a child is through intercourse between husband and wife.

No mechanical technique can substitute the act of love that two married people exchange as a sign of a greater mystery, Benedict said in his speech.

Benedict also expressed concern that human life risks losing its value in today's culture and worried that sex could transform itself into a drug that one partner had to have even against the will of the other.

A Malaysian Islamic court has allowed a Chinese convert to renounce Islam in a rare decision for this conservative Muslim-led nation.

Apostasy is one of the gravest sins in Islam and a very sensitive issue in Malaysia where Islamic sharia courts have rarely allowed such renunciations and have also jailed apostates.

Penang Sharia Court judge Othman Ibrahim said he had no choice but to allow an application by cook Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah to renounce her faith and return to Buddhism.

The court has no choice but to declare that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah is no longer a Muslim as she has never practised the teachings of Islam, Othman told a packed courtroom: I order the conversion certificate to be nullified.

Siti Fatimah or Tan Ean Huang said she had never practised Islamic teachings since she converted in 1998 and only did so to enable her to marry Iranian Ferdoun Ashanian.

The couple married in 2004 but since then her husband has left her following which she filed for the renunciation.

Othman said it was clear from witnesses and the evidence presented that Siti had continued to practise Buddhism even after her conversion. He rebuked the state Islamic religious council for not counselling and looking after the welfare of new converts.

Update: Well Some Muslims Allow It

23rd May 2008

A group of Muslims in Malaysia's northern Penang state staged a protest to denounce an Islamic sharia court's rare ruling allowing a Chinese convert to renounce her faith.

Hizbut Tahrir Malaysia, an Islamic hardline group, gathered outside the court and submitted a memorandum urging a judicial review of the decision.

We outrightly disagree with the court decision as it is against Islamic laws. In Islam, a person who insists on leaving the religion must be punished with death, the group's blood thirsty president Abdul Hakim Othman told reporters.

Gunmen broke into Miyan Abdul Hakim school in Kandahar.

After they had terrorised the caretaker for doing the work of foreigners, they collected floor mats and desks to light bonfires inside the classrooms. Then they gathered all the dog-eared exercise books and school textbooks that they could find and threw them into the flames.

After a year's respite the Taleban has returned to attacking schools and intimidating teachers across much of the south and east of the country.

Since the beginning of the new school year on March 23 there have been 36 attacks. Empty buildings have been set on fire or had grenades thrown into them. Teachers have been kidnapped, and later released. In one grisly case a caretaker was mutilated by having his ears and nose cut off, a common punishment for those accused of collaborating with the Afghan Government.

The security situation is now so bad in Kandahar province that nearly half of all schools are closed some or all of the time. Girls' classes have been particularly badly hit because women teachers are too afraid to venture into rural districts where the Taleban is strong, threatening one of the successes of post-2001 Afghanistan.

All of the 40 schools in Marouf, one insurgency-affected district of Kandahar province, are now shut. Teachers fear that the situation could get as bad as it did in 2006 when nearly 200 schools were attacked. They worry that a new generation of Afghans is growing up uneducated and vulnerable to extremism.

Hindu nutters have contacted various cinema organisations in Australia urging them not to distribute or screen the upcoming Hollywood movie The Love Guru until Paramount Pictures makes changes to it.

Vamsi Krishna, representing Hindu Janjagruti Samiti and Sanatan Society for Scientific Spirituality, sent a letter to several film groups saying the film would hurt the feelings of the worldwide spiritual and Hindu community unless certain scenes were altered.

The letter went to the Australia Classification Board, Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia, Australian Film Commission, Media Standards Australia, Becker Entertainment, Hopscotch Films, Hoyts Cinema Chain, Palace Cinemas, and Palace Films.

If the trailer is an indicator of the content of the movie…then we feel that this movie is most likely to hurt the sentiments of seekers from various spiritual paths and also the peaceful Hindu community at large in Australia, the letter said: Poking fun is one thing...BUT...if it creates a sense of belittling others’ faith, then it is wrong.

Update: Worldwide Calls

12th May 2008

Hindu groups have contacted Central Board of Film Certification (Censor Board) and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of India, urging them not to screen upcoming Hollywood movie The Love Guru till its presenter Paramount Pictures makes necessary changes in it.

It seems that the hindu groups are sending their calls for a ban worldwide and the same story is cropping up in multiple stories. Surely good hype for Love Guru.

Islamic militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, which border Afghanistan have issued a decree banning music from mobile phone ringtones and vehicles in tribal areas of the country. A spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Maulana Faqir Mohammed said, the they would not allow commuters to play music in their cars or use musical ringtones on mobile phones.

He warned that offenders would be punished according to Shariah lynch mob law.

This is not the first time that Taliban leaders have tried to clamp down on music in their areas - and a wave of attacks on mobile phone stores in North Waziristan was carried out last October to stop them selling music capable phones.

The shop-owners said at the time that they had received several letters, asking them not to sell mobile phones pre-loaded with 'musical' ring tones. Many retailers had started offering phones pre-loaded with 'jihadi' ringtones, but this did not seem enough to appease the militants.

A governor in northern Saudi Arabia has ordered authorities to punish men who flirt with women in public places by cutting their hair.

Prince Fahd bin Badr, governor of the northern al-Jof region, ordered police to carry out the punishment after seeing a group of men with long hair pestering female students as they left school.

The prince instructed police to apply the punishment to all youths guilty of flirting, including the sons of senior military and civil officials. The decision doesn't include men who spend their free time in public places without hurting anyone.

Many clergymen in this conservative Gulf country say men should not have long hair because Islam prohibits the sexes from emulating each other.

Sheik Mubarak al-Rushoud, head of the religious police in the area, has ordered that the punishment against the men who emulate women should be carried out at the scene of the infraction.

The House of Commons voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to support the abolition of the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. This was the final stage in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, and the amendment was carried by 378 votes to 57. The Bill has received Royal Assent, so the blasphemy law is now officially dead and buried.

In a tetchy and bad-tempered parliamentary debate, Conservatives put in their final bid to block the abolition, arguing that it represented a significant step in the secularising of Britain. Some raised the spectre of it being the beginning of a process that would eventually lead to disestablishment. Government Minister Maria Eagle MP assured MPs that there was no such "hidden agenda".

Other MPs were, though, less shy about hoping that one day the Church of England would be disestablished. David Howarth, Liberal Democrat shadow Solicitor General said: It is the policy of my party to work towards the disestablishment of the Church, and the separation of Church and state. I am fairly comfortable with that position.

Howarth continued: The principle of the separation of Church and state is not about the separation of religion and politics, which I think is impossible. We cannot separate people's moral, religious views from their political views. We are talking about the state, not about society, and about the religious commitments of the state, not about whether people in society are religious or not. In the course of debate we have heard three separate arguments against the idea of state neutrality in religion. One of them; it might be called the "this is a Christian country" argument.

NSS honorary associate Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Abingdon and Oxford (the original architect of this amendment), challenged Tory MPs who were arguing for the preservation of blasphemy laws. In an earlier debate that evening on the same Bill they had argued that new proposals to outlaw hatred against homosexuals would unnecessarily restrict the right of religious people to make clear their disapproval of homosexuality. Now they were arguing that the blasphemy law was necessary to protect religious people against offence. It seemed that their defence of free speech was not entirely consistent.

Dr Harris said: When it came to the issue of incitement to homophobic hatred, we heard a number of speeches and interventions from Conservative Members claiming that freedom of speech was critical and that freedom of expression was under threat. Yet when it comes to an issue—blasphemy, as opposed to incitement to hatred—that ca causes individuals themselves no damage, making the case for proscribing it much weaker, those very same people argue that freedom of expression has to go in order to maintain their version of no change. They want to maintain some symbolic law or the safety of the UK constitution, which they fear may be shaken to its foundations by the abolition of these unnecessary and discriminatory laws.

Jesus Camp (Channel 4, Tuesday 6 May, 11.05pm).

The documentary Jesus Camp makes for pretty grim viewing. It focuses on the Kids On Fire School of Ministry's Christian summer camp where activities include praying for George W. Bush (with a cardboard cut out present for inspiration), telling young children that abortion is evil and that Harry Potter should be put to death as a warlock. The camp's leader, Becky Fisher, is particularly fond sharing her views on "the truth" and the purpose of the camp...

It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!

As you can probably tell the film does not paint a very good picture of the camp or the evangelical side of modern Christian and the version screened on Channel 4 will have managed to persuade even more people that this is the only face of evangelical Christianity.

The documentary ran at 60 minutes (including adverts) some 24 shy of it's cinema and DVD runtime. Whilst the shortened version got across the general nature of the film and the shocking nature of the camp's indoctrination sessions it also turned it into a one sided argument. The voice of mainstream Chirstianity was nowhere to be heard. The cinema version features a chap called Mike Papantonio, a lawyer, broadcaster and Methodist who heavily criticises the camp and it's activities.

I'm not a religious man but I know plenty of people who are upset by what they consider to be the one sided representation of their religion perpetrated by a media that focuses on these uber-nutters. I don't agree with this view but it certainly does not help when a broadcaster takes, what I consider to be, a fair documentary and edits the balance out of it.

If you are interested in Jesus Camp and the terrible activities of the American Christian Right then you would be much better served to grab a copy of the DVD or, at least, wait until Channel 4 broadcast the full version.

Australia's Catholic church has taken a swipe at foul-mouthed British chef Gordon Ramsay and demanded his reality television shows be either taken off air or shown at a later time.

The move comes as Australia's Parliament holds an inquiry into swearing on television, prompted by Ramsay's antics in his series Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen.

One episode broadcast recently featured Ramsay using a four-letter expletive more than 80 times, while he also shouts at a chef saying: You French pig.

There can be no excuse for vilification of this sort. We conclude that this episode should never have been aired on Australian television, the Catholic church in the southern city of Adelaide said in a submission to the parliamentary inquiry.

Ramsay's reality programmes are popular ratings drawcards in Australia, but they have also prompted complaints from schools and parent groups who are angry that the shows are broadcast at times when children may be watching television.

Two of the Ramsay programmes air at 8.30pm, while one of the shows, Hell's Kitchen, where contestants compete to win a restaurant, is aired at a later 9.30pm time slot.

Conservative Senator Cory Bernardi initiated a Senate inquiry into swearing after his office received several complaints about Ramsay's programmes.

The inquiry has received more than 50 public submissions, with the overwhelming majority in favour of tighter regulation and calling for the Nine television network, which broadcasts the programmes, to censor Ramsay.

But the Council for Civil Liberties in Australia's largest state of New South Wales said it has no problems with Ramsay's programmes, which regularly attract more than one million viewers: This inquiry is yet another attempt to restrict the freedom of expression of ordinary Australians. Not everyone is offended by coarse language.

A Jordanian court has sentenced a man to just six months in jail after convicting him of the honor killing of his 16-year-old daughter.

The court ruled that the man killed his married daughter because she had an affair out of the wedlock. The enraged father severely beat her with a baton and ultimately electrocuted her in November 2006.

Like other tribal-oriented societies, many Jordanians consider sex out of the wedlock an indelible stain on the family's honor that can only be cleansed by blood.

Teenage boys are going wild this week over a more dangerous cultural low: Grand Theft Auto IV. The new video game from Rockstar Games is flying off the shelves, and all the early reviews are glowing. GamePro magazine calls it the pinnacle of interactive entertainment and game design.

Yes, young lads, you can visit strip clubs and get lap dances, pick up prostitutes, go on assassination missions and conduct gangland-style executions. The New York Times applauded the game’s winsome procession of grifters, hustlers, drug peddlers and other gloriously unrepentant lowlifes.

WhatTheyPlay.com is a resource site for parents, and interviews with children find they like the series for its wide-open play, particularly the vicarious experience of the thug life. I’m never going to be a car-jacking, whore-murdering gang member, said one, so I guess it’s very interesting to see what your life could be like, if you chose that path. It’s amazing to become so immersed in the game experience and really be able to feel like a criminal.

The violent content also attracts children as a way to vent anger or stress. One boy explained: “Last week, I missed homework and my teacher yelled at me. When I went home, I started playing [Grand Theft Auto] Vice City, and got a tank. I ran over everybody. And I smashed a lot of cars and blew them up.

There’s something odd about our culture when we try to prevent children under 17 from seeing violent or sexually overt material in a two-hour R-rated movie, but we’re cavalier about selling the same experience - actually, a more offensive experience since it’s entirely non-judgmental - in an M-rated video game that will be played every night for months.

There’s only one word to describe parents who would buy this game for their children: Disgraceful. But retailers, too, must be pressed to check ID before selling the game to children who most assuredly will seek to purchase it. Legally, stores cannot sell children pornographic magazines or handguns - but they can legally sell video games to children that contain pornographic content or that teach children how to gun down cops.

They can choose to line their pockets with the proceeds of the sale of this cultural poison to youngsters. They can join the chorus of consequential deniability, too. All they have to worry about is their conscience.

Muslim rebels drove off more than 1,000 Christians from a southern Philippine farming village and took over their land.

Armed members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) entered the coastal village of Sangay in the town of Kalamansig on the troubled island of Mindanao to demand food and rice recently harvested by the farmers, Kalamansig Mayor Rolando Garcia said.

In the past, the armed rebels have demanded food and stayed only briefly in the village, but this time they told villagers to leave and occupied the land. Faced with about 300 armed MILF guerillas, the scared residents fled to Kalamansig town about three hours away by boat while the rebels remained in the village.

I sent a peacekeeping force there to settle the problem amicably but they were forced to withdraw to avoid bloodshed, Garcia said of the 14-man police team sent to the area. Garcia said his town has about 1,200 people in their temporary shelter area who are too afraid to return to their farms.

For more than three decades, MILF has fought to establish a Muslim homeland in the southern area of the largely Catholic country. Decades of war have killed 120,000 people and displaced two million.

An honour killing can't possibly be worse than this. The only 'crime' 18-year-old Rekha Gokavi had committed was to love a boy belonging to a poor family. Rekha was clobbered and burnt alive by her father and uncle.

Rekha, a high school dropout, was in love with Narasanagowda Patil. The families were opposed to the match. Rekha's parents had sent her to a relative's house, in another village, to keep her away from Patil. On April 22, she returned to her village to meet Patil but told her family she had come to participate in a village festival.

According to the FIR, Patil's mother saw them together in his house and informed Rekha's father, Narasa Reddy. Narasa Reddy and his elder brother, Bhooma Reddy, rushed to the place, dragged Rekha out and beat her black and blue.

Villagers said Rekha's father and uncle set her on fire at their farmhouse.

She was crying for help, but we could not do anything other than being mute spectators, fearing consequences, said a farmer, tears in his eyes.

A neighbour said the girl's parents, who had been looking for a suitable match, could not digest the fact that she was with her lover at his house. A source said the boy's financial status might have triggered the Reddy brothers' savagery.

Narasa Reddy and his brother are under arrest for murder.

The prospect of the BBC auditioning pop hopefuls in front of Andrew Lloyd Webber for the role of Jesus has led a Christian group to promise Jerry Springer the Opera-style protests if the project goes ahead.

Christian Voice said tonight that they might even try to get young Christians into the audition room itself to share the Gospel of the real Jesus Christ with Lord Lloyd-Webber himself.

The BBC are now said to be reconsidering their decision to air the reality TV show based on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar just weeks after the composer said he wanted to cast Jesus as a follow-up to Maria in The Sound of Music and Nancy and Oliver in the musical Oliver.

The TV shows How do you solve a problem like Maria and I'd Do Anything were regarded by TV bosses as such a success that Lord Lloyd-Webber has been urged to come up with another one. He said in March: I have an idea to do Jesus Christ Superstar next year and then maybe another all-new show which I'm really excited about.

But the BBC are now said by the website UnrealityTV to be worried that they will face the same sort of complaints from Christian groups that they faced over Jerry Springer Opera a few years ago.

Auditions could take place this year, but as with previous shows, they will be held across the country and the judges, who will include Lloyd Webber, will be at each venue.

Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, said tonight: If it were to go ahead, the show would then become for Christian Voice very much a Jerry Springer the Opera operation, with witness and evangelism at every venue. There are still plenty of veterans of the early protests over Jesus Christ Superstar around who would love to share the Gospel with the queuing wanabees. It might even be that we could encourage Christian singers to enrol in order to tell Andrew Lloyd-Webber just what they think of his project in the audition room itself.

One of Canada’s largest Christian ministries dedicated to caring for the disabled was fined $23,000 recently by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario for allegedly discriminating against a former homosexual employee.

Connie Heintz claimed discrimination against Christian Horizons after she said she was subjected to a poisoned work environment and pressured into quitting her job after she entered a homosexual relationship – which was in violation of her work contract back in 2000.

In line with its Christian foundation and principles, the ministry requires that all its employees sign “morality statements” vowing to abstain from immoral behavior, including pornography, pre-marital, extra-marital, and homosexual activity as a condition of employment.

In a recently made public ruling, Michael Gottheil, the single adjudicator representing the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, ruled against Christian Horizons, ordering the organization to pay Heintz $23,000 in fines plus two years wages and benefits.

Gottheil also ordered that the organization abandon its Christian principles barring homosexual behavior and issued mandates that it begin requiring all employees to attend a homosexual oriented human rights training program.

In a statement, Barbara Hall, the Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, wrote approvingly of the decision by the tribunal: This decision is important because it sets out that when faith-based and other organizations move beyond serving the interests of their particular community to serving the general public, the rights of others, including employees, must be respected.

A Roman Catholic newspaper cleared its first legal hurdle in its fight against a Malaysian government ban on Christians using the word "Allah" as a synonym for "God."

High Court Judge Lau Bee Lan ruled that prosecutors' objection to a lawsuit by The Herald weekly was without merit. The judge said she will allow the paper to contest the government ban in court.

The government says the word "Allah" refers only to the Muslim God and its use by Christians might confuse Muslims. It has threatened to revoke the paper's publishing license if it defies the order.

The Herald also wants a court declaration that "Allah" is not for exclusive use by Muslims. The court agreed that the church's application is not frivolous nor vexatious nor an abuse of process. It deserves to be heard, said Derek Fernandez, a lawyer for the newspaper.

The court will set a trial date later, Fernandez told reporters.

The Herald  insists that "Allah" is an Arabic word that predates Islam and has been used for centuries to mean "God" in Malay.

In a separate case in Malaysia, the Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also filed a lawsuit in an effort to be allowed to use "Allah" after officials last year banned the import of books containing the word. Hearings in that case were still in the preliminary stages.

Jehovah's Witness Olim Turaev has begun a four-year labour camp sentence imposed in Samarkand on 25 April to punish him for holding an unapproved religious meeting and teaching religion without state permission.

His appeal is pending. He is the third Jehovah's Witness currently serving a criminal sentence for his peaceful religious activity.

Bakhrom Abdukhalilov, advisor to President Islam Karimov on ethnic minorities and religion, showed no concern for Turaev, insisting that Jehovah's Witnesses should not violate the law. He refused to say if he thought the four-year sentence was too harsh.

Jehovah's Witnesses in Samarkand and elsewhere have been repeatedly denied the state registration the authorities insist is necessary before a religious community can conduct any religious activity.

Malaysian women's groups have reacted with outrage to a government proposal to impose restrictions on women planning to travel overseas on their own.

The mainly Muslim country is considering requiring women to obtain the written consent of their families or employers before being allowed to travel solo outside the country, reported Bernama, the state news agency.

It is ridiculous, a totally regressive proposal with regards to women's right to movement, said Norhayati Kaprawi, a spokeswoman for the Sisters in Islam campaign group. They also said the proposal assumed that women were less capable than men of making decisions for themselves.

The National Council for Women's Organisations called it unfair. This is an infringement of our rights, said Faridah Khalid, the deputy president.

The foreign and home ministries claim to have come up with the idea in response to cases where women travelling alone were used to smuggle drugs across borders, according to Rais Yatim, the foreign minister.

The bollox proposal is being portrayed an anti-crime measure rather than a religiously inspired idea and said it was aimed at ensuring that a woman's family would monitor her departure and serve as a preventive measure against being duped.

Pat Condell rose to internet stardom in 2007 with a series of topical rants, posted to popular video-sharing websites. With topics usually centering on religion, politics, and current events, each of Pat’s videos quickly caused a stir and racked up tens of thousands of views.

RichardDawkins.net has now compiled the first 35 of Pat Condell’s videos onto this DVD collection, with an exclusive introduction by Pat. Enjoy this newly remastered collection, totalling 3 hours of video.

Pat Condell is unique. Nobody can match his extraordinary blend of suavity and savagery. With his articulate intelligence he runs rings around the religious wingnuts that are the targets of his merciless humour. Thank goodness he is on our side. - Richard Dawkins

Brash. Uncompromising. Brilliant. Hilarious. Pat Condell has found a simple formula for success: stating the obvious without restraining himself with the conventions of unwarranted piety. Pat flenses sacred cows, and after slicing away the fat and gristle of tired apologetics and mindless tradition, he exposes the hollow carcass of a culture's hypocrisy...and we laugh. - PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com/Pharyngula

Iran's top prosecutor has called for restrictions in the import of Western toys, saying they have a destructive effect on the country's youth.

The Prosecutor General, Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi, said that toys such as Barbie, Batman, and Harry Potter would have negative social consequences.

Najafabadi wants measures taken to protect what he called Iran's Islamic culture and revolutionary values.

Correspondents say Western culture is becoming increasingly popular in Iran.

Najafabadi's comments were made in a letter addressed to Iranian Vice President Parviz Davoudi, and quoted in several Iranian newspapers.

The displays of personalities such as Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter... as well as the irregular importation of unsanctioned computer games and movies are all warning bells to officials in the cultural arena. The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger," he said.

Najafabadi, a high-ranking cleric, said Iran was the world's third biggest importer of toys, with many more being smuggled into the country: We need to find substitutes to ward off this onslaught, which aims at children and young people whose personality is in the process of being formed.

The stoning death of Ms Du'a Khalil Aswad led to the establishment of an Internal Ministry unit in Iraqi Kurdistan to combat violence against women. It reported that last year in Sulaymaniyah, a city of 1 million people, there were 407 reported offences, beheadings, beatings, deaths through "family problems", and threats of honour killings. Rape is not included as most women are too fearful to report it for fear of retribution. Nevertheless, police in Karbala recently revealed 25 reports of rape.

Despite the stoning outrage, recent calls by the Kurdish MP Narmin Osman to outlaw honour killings have been blocked by fundamentalists. Honour killings are not actually a crime in the eyes of the government, said Houzan Mahmoud, who has had a fatwa on her head since raising a petition against the introduction of sharia law in Kurdistan. If before there was one dictator persecuting people, now almost everyone is persecuting women.

In the past five years it is has got [much] worse. It is difficult to described how terrible it is, how badly we have been pushed back to the dark ages. Women are being beheaded for taking their veil off. Self immolation is rising – women are left with no choice. There is no government body or institution to provide any sort of support. Sharia law is being used to underpin government rule, denying women their most basic human rights.

The new Iraqi constitution, according to Mrs Mahmoud, is a mass of confusing contradictions. While it states that men and women are equal under law it also decrees that sharia law – which considers one male witness worth two females – must be observed. The days when women could hold down key jobs or enjoy any freedom of movement are long gone. The fundamentalists have sent out too many chilling messages. In Mosul two years ago, eight women were beheaded in a terror campaign.

It was really, really horrifying, said Mrs Mahmoud. Honour killings and murder are widespread. Thousands [of people] ... have become victims of murder, violence and rape – all backed by laws, tribal customs and religious rules. We urge the international community, the government to condemn this barbaric practice, and help the women of Iraq.

...Read full article

Australian bishops urge their government to ban pornography, one of the most evil uses of the Internet in a new pastoral letter on Internet safety.

The letter explains that the relative anonymity of the Internet and its private nature means that there is a real danger of pornographic addiction. The Bishops warn that All of these images are humiliating and degrading, most often towards women.

The letter points to a growing body of research about the damage that Internet pornography is doing to marriages and relationships. In 2007, the Sydney Morning Herald spent two months charting this new social phenomenon which it said was poisoning couples and destroying families. The investigation found that counselors were reporting that an increasing number of clients had begun to cite Internet pornography as a factor in their relationship breakdowns.

The bishops point out moreover that while it is damaging to marriages, addiction to Internet pornography is no less damaging to single people or to those dedicated to living a life of celibacy.

The letter explains: The Church commends the intimate giving of spouses to each other. Pornography undermines this. It injures the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world.

The bishops urge parents to discuss the dangers of pornography - its damaging impact on human dignity and on relationships - with their children, and call for the government to ban such degrading materials: Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials, and that includes, as far as possible, distribution on the Internet.

An advocacy organization reported this week that Chinese authorities now accuse a Beijing businessman of being a dangerous religious element – which a long-time friend dismissed as contrary to Christian bookstore owner Shi Weihan’s gentle, patriotic nature.

Authorities have been slow to reveal charges against Shi, who after his original arrest for illegal business practices on November 28, 2007 was released on January 4 due to insufficient evidence. He was re-arrested on March 19, according to his wife Zhang Jing, for printing Bibles and Christian literature.

Until last week he had been denied a visit by his attorney. Following that visit, China Aid Association reported that authorities were holding Shi at the Beijing Municipal Detention Center as a dangerous religious element.

During the meeting with his attorney, Shi’s talk was interrupted by the guards on several occasions and he received a warning, according to a statement by CAA. Interrogation of Shi, the lawyer told CAA, has centered on his relationship with foreigners, especially those from the United States.

Long-time friend Ray Sharpe said that Shi’s many foreign relationships as a travel agent may have raised undue suspicions by Chinese authorities.

Update: Still Being Held

23rd June 2008

Despite having held Shi beyond the time legally allowed, absent formal charges or a court hearing, the Public Security Bureau still refuses to allow his family or attorney to see him,” said a source close to Shi’s lawyer. Claiming an ongoing investigation in what they are calling ‘a complex case,’ they have managed to hold the owner of a legally registered Christian bookstore in an undisclosed location without giving any assurances that he is receiving his needed diabetic medicine.

The Public Security Bureau has stated that it will delay action on the case indefinitely, raising questions about Shi’s health and safety.

Update: Denied Medication

9th September 2008

Shi Weihan is awaiting the outcome of an August 19 court appearance and may be back in court within 10 days, according to Compass sources.

Denied proper medication and diet for his diabetes, Shi is almost “unrecognizable” due to severe weight loss, according to family members.

An Iraqi teenage girl was brutally murdered by her father in an "honour killing" after she fell in love with a British soldier in Basra.

Seventeen-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader told her best friend how she had fallen for Paul, a 22-year-old she met at a charity where she worked as a volunteer.

When her father learned she had been seen speaking to a foreigner he rushed home and butchered her, strangling and stabbing her while screaming that he was "cleansing his honour".

He was arrested, but Iraqi police took no action. His wife has since left him and is in hiding.

The Ministry of Defence was last night trying to trace the soldier. Officials stressed he appeared to have done nothing wrong by befriending the girl.

Update: Dishonouring Humanity

15th May 2008. See full article from the Guardian

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. They are men and know what honour is, he said.

A father beat his 12-year-old daughter to death to “save his honour” in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, India.

The victim’s grandmother, Natho, told Newsline that her sons killed Mamta after they found a boy, Pintu (14), her schoolmate, in her room. Father Jagdish Singh and his brother Soni Singh then allegedly burnt her body and dumped it in a well.

The police are, however, yet to recover the body and have registered a case of murder against Singh and his two brothers, who are at large.

Natho said Mamta was dear to her, but what she did was “unacceptable” and that she “deserved” the punishment. How could she let a boy into her room?

We were sleeping and were supposed to wake early because there was a wedding in the family. Around 9.30 pm, I heard a noise and went to Mamta’s room. I saw Pintu there. Seeing the boy, her father and uncles got angry and started beating her up. The beating continued till she died, Natho said with a straight face.

According to Natho, Pintu, who lives next door, had managed to escape initially after he was found in Mamta’s room, but was tracked and beaten up. We would have killed him too, but the villagers came and stopped us, said Sarvesh, Mamta’s sister.

A Christian party has lost a High Court bid to have its party election broadcast (PEB) repeated, after claims it was censored by the BBC and ITV.

Christian Choice said the BBC forced changes to its description of a Muslim group in a PEB aired in London.

The BBC said it expressed concern and Christian Choice responded by agreeing to change the form of words.

The judge said the request had been left "far too late" - although he did not think the PEB had been libellous.

Alan Craig, the party's candidate for London mayor, had argued the action breached his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights - which guarantees the right to freedom of expression.

Rejecting Craig's request for a judicial review, the judge, Mr Justice Collins, said he should have launched the legal challenge before the broadcast took place on 23 April. He said it was "perfectly permissible" for the BBC to take into account legal advice that the original broadcast might have been libellous - although he did not think it would have been.

But the judge said the BBC had indicated that if a legal challenge had been issued before the broadcast it would have backed down and let them publish as they wished.

Unfortunately that was not done, Mr Justice Collins added. He ordered Mr Craig to pay the BBC's £11,875 in legal costs.

Original version:

You may know about plans by a separatist Islamic group to build Europe’s biggest mosque next to the Olympics site in West Ham. I think it’s a bad idea that will bring division and I’m glad moderate Muslims support my stance in opposing it.

Censored version:

You may know about controversial plans by an Islamic group to build Europe’s biggest mosque next to the Olympics site in West Ham. I think it’s a bad idea that will bring division and I’m glad some Muslims leaders support my stance in opposing it.

TA councillor has called for more control over advertising posters in "culturally sensitive" areas of Birmingham.

Coun Talib Hussain made his plea after a billboard on the corner of Sydenham Road and Golden Hillock Road, in predominantly Muslim Sparkbrook, was defaced.

The hoarding, close to mosques in Anderton Road and Golden Hillock Road and visible to parents and children walking to Montgomery Primary School, promotes Matalan's new swimwear range and features three scantily-clad models.

The models have been covered in thick white paint to conceal bare flesh.

Coun Talib Hussain (Ind, Sparkbrook) criticised the vandalism but said it was a result of the lack of action from city council bosses. He said: I condemn the people that did this but at the same time it's wrong for companies to put that kind of advert in sensitive wards.

I have received complaints on a number of occasions not to put adverts like that in Sparkbrook. The city council should not give permission to advertising like that in these wards. Having families seeing naked pictures does not bring the community together, it provokes things.

The vandalism is similar to a spate of attacks in 2005 and 2006 by a group called Muslims Against Advertising.

A Birmingham City Council spokesman, said: Our only power is to approve where advertising can take place, but not what is put on it. That is between the Advertising Standards Agency and the firm itself.

The ASA said the content of billboard adverts was controlled by billboard owner and the advertiser, and that the agency only had "responsive" powers: If we receive complaints we will consider if an advert should be removed.

India's medieval caste system has claimed the lives of an "untouchable" mother and her newborn baby after high-caste doctors refused to treat her.

The sad case of the young mother - who died a day after her baby perished because medics wanted nothing to do with her - highlights the ongoing problems faced by the millions who are at the bottom of India's social ladder.

The mother-to-be, Maya Devi was brought to the Kanpur Medical College hospital in northern Uttar Pradesh state by friends. She was suffering severe pain and complications that prevented her giving birth.

But as she lay in a corridor outside the maternity wing, doctors - including the hospital's chief medical superintendent - reportedly told her that they would not be treating her because she was a Dalit, or untouchable.

People in that caste have long been ostracised and forced into menial jobs such as cleaning toilets and sweeping the streets. Laws banning discrimination have failed to make much difference in most cities. Many high-class Hindus refuse to have any contact with untouchables, fearing they will contract diseases such as leprosy and TB.

Maya's baby was born in the corridor but died shortly afterwards. Her mother went into a coma.

Learning of her plight, Dr Kiran Pandey, head of the gynaecology unit, who was an hour's drive away, turned her car around and sped back to the hospital. Refusing to listen to doctors who told her of Maya's caste, Dr Pandey brought the unconscious mother into the intensive care unit, where she died after going into cardiac arrest for a second time.

The hospital's principal, Dr Anand Swaroop, along with a district magistrate, has ordered a full inquiry into the case. The doctors who refused to help her have been suspended as the investigation into their conduct continues.