Christian community protests burning of the Holy Quran

GAINESVILLE: The Christian community in Lahore protested against the proposal of a Florida church to burn copies of the Holy Quran.

Hundreds of Christians gathered outside the Lahore Press Club on Thursday and staged a protest against the plan.

They raised slogans against the authorities of the church and burned an effigy of the pastor.

Addressing the protestors, leaders of the Christian community said the Holy Books have descended from God and show the right path to humanity, it is the moral duty of every person to protect the Holy Books and pay respect to them.

The leaders said they will support Muslims in raising their voice for the honour of the Holy Quran.

Church defiant

The Church shrugged off global outrage and vowed to go ahead with a Quran burning ceremony amid growing fears it will ignite a wave of Islamic rage.

Condemnation rained down from top US officials, the military, the Vatican and other religious and world leaders, but the church refused to halt plans to torch the Islamic holy book on Saturday’s anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“As of this time we have no intention of canceling,” Pastor Terry Jones told a press conference here Wednesday, adding his evangelical church, the Dove World Outreach Center, had received numerous messages of support.

Jones had indicated he was praying for guidance on whether to go ahead with the incendiary event after warnings from US Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus that US and allied troops could be targeted in revenge.

“We understand the general’s concerns and we are still considering it,” Jones said, but swiftly added he had been contacted by a special forces soldier who told him “the people in the field are 100 percent behind us.”

Why the burqa ban makes no sense

As France convenes to vote on the burqa ban this week, one can only congratulate the country on having rid itself of all its other problems — for example, crime, unemployment, the impact of the global recession on the French economy — because surely only a nation freed from all other societal ailments would find a woman’s headgear a vital enough issue for legislative concern.

Let us for one moment attempt to suspend our disbelief for long enough to consider that Nicolas Sarkozy’s fixation with the burqa ban isn’t in fact a desperate attempt on his part to cash in on nationalistic Islamophobia. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, it is after all possible that Sarkozy’s desire to liberate Muslim women from their veils is not, in fact, a cheap gimmick to grant him a quick shot of popularity amongst an electorate who, judging by recent opinion polls, are all out to get shorty. If the French president honestly believes he’s doing his bit for women’s lib, then one can only express one’s sympathy at how he’s managed to miss the wood for the trees and how the end result of his actions will do French women, Muslim or otherwise, a great and lasting disservice. For the assumption that the burqa is attire that automatically degrades women is as ludicrous as a certain strain of Pakistani belief, which imagines that a black cloth tent somehow confers honour, dignity and respectability upon women.

Both are dead wrong and, as is the case with fascists, even those who stand on entirely different ends of the same issue, Sarkozy has far more in common with our morality police than he’d care to admit. Neither of them can quite come to terms with the fact that a woman is more complex than mere physical appearance, greater than the sum of her parts.

Order to block nine websites with blasphemous material

LAHORE: A Pakistani court has ordered the authorities to block access to nine websites including Google, Yahoo and YouTube for allegedly offending Muslims with blasphemous material.Judge Mazhar Iqbal ordered Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority to block the websites due to “material against the fundamental principals of Islam and its preaching,” according to a copy of the judgement obtained by AFP.

Pakistan shut off Facebook for nearly two weeks last month in a storm of controversy about a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad and has restricted access to hundreds of online links because of blasphemy.

Iqbal announced a short version of the order in the eastern city of Bahawalpur on Tuesday and released a written detailed order on Wednesday, lawyer Latifur Rehman who brought the petition for the ban, told AFP.

Talat Hussain arrives back home

Three Pakistanis, including TV anchor and columnist for Express Tribune Talat Hussain, who were detained by Israel following the brutal Israeli army raid on Freedom Flotilla, arrived in Islamabad on Friday.

After a warm welcome, Talat thanked the journalist community, organizations and people from cross sections of the society for this respect and the prayers for their safe arrival.

Talat Hussain, said that he and his team “had seen death from very close,” as Israeli commandoes boarded the boat and fired indiscriminately. “They started firing and two people died close to where I was,” said Hussain, who arrived in Lahore on Thursday.

Facebook fiasco

Denying that the Holocaust took place is actually illegal in many parts of Europe. If they pride themselves on the freedom of speech why curtail it in this particular instance and criminalise it? With the problems Muslims have with Facebook these days, it’s quite important to understand this. For starters, neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic groups used free speech as a mask to disguise their hatred by questioning historical accuracy of the Holocaust taking place at all, in effect claiming a conspiracy of historical fabrication by Jews for their own benefit.

On the surface, what may seem like an academic position (Holocaust denial) is often simply the cloak of those who preach hate. In this respect, Holocaust denial and the effort to draw cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) are quite similar. Those who seek the right to express their freedom

‘Leaving Islam?’ ads appear on NYC buses

NEW YORK: New York bus ads asking readers if they were leaving Islam caused a stir in the American muslim community on Thursday.

A conservative activist and the organizations she leads have paid several thousand dollars for the ads to run on at least 30 city buses for a month. The ads point to a website called RefugefromIslam.com, which offers information to those wishing to leave Islam, but some Muslims are calling the ads a smoke screen for an anti-Muslim agenda.

Pamela Geller, who leads an organization called Stop Islamization of America, said the ads were meant to help provide resources for Muslims who are fearful of leaving the faith.

Smokers’ Corner: Black fell the day

Extremism is nobody’s friend. It only deals in might gained from coercion. It does not rest after it has defeated its ideological opponents because then it goes on to destroy even those supporters whom it deems too soft or moderate.

This is an aspect of extremism that a lot of its more ‘moderate’ supporters in Pakistan have not comprehended. Educated men and women can be heard and seen concocting outlandish explanations and justifications in a bid to sympathetically define the economic and political reasons behind religious extremists’ acts of terrorism. What they do not realise is that to the extremists these sympathetic ‘moderates’ are as much infidels as any westerner or a non-Muslim.

Protests in Indian Kashmir over killings

Police in Indian Kashmir fired teargas on Saturday to disperse thousands of villagers protesting against the alleged staged killing of three Muslims by security forces.

Late last month, the military said it had foiled an infiltration bid by killing three militants in the area.

But three families in the northern district of Baramulla said the slain men were innocent relatives who had gone missing three days back.

A new Facebook for Muslims?

KARACHI: The ongoing ban of Facebook in Pakistan has prompted some entrepreneurs to jump at the opportunity with the creation of an alternative social networking site, Pakfacebook.com.

Launched on May 19, the ‘kosher’ alternative to Facebook has become the 488th most active site in Pakistan according to search analytics website Alexa.