Turkey Launches Probe into ‘Veiling Party’ at Secondary School

This is a warning for western countries of how Muslims can be quickly and easily influenced by radicals.

Turkey has for the past 100 years been officially secular. Attaturk set it up that way and the military has made sure it stayed that way until the 21st century. President (read Caliph) Erdogan has gutted the military, removing many senior officers who were not strong Muslims. He wants to turn Turkey into a caliphate and, in all probability, expand it to include much of the former Ottoman Empire. 

He can't accomplish that until the people are completely behind him, meaning vestiges of secularism must be removed, but it must be done carefully in a manner in which the people think that it is their idea rather than Erdogan forcing it upon them. 

As such, these veiling parties are not likely to be trounced upon, but gently encouraged. It will be interesting to watch how that comes about.

An inquiry has been launched against the management of a school in Turkey after revelations that a local teacher made girls wear headscarves. Photos of pupils attending ‘parties’ that promoted veiling emerged on social media.

Turkey's education directorate in the south eastern Sanliurfa province launched the investigation into a local secondary school after it was revealed that a teacher of religious culture and moral education was organizing what was later described as “veiling parties.”

Photos of these events initially were posted on social media on December 29. The images showed girls, all wearing headscarves, holding heart-shaped small placards that promoted veiling and encouraged others to follow their example.

Some placards read: “I have veiled myself,”“Luckily I have veiled myself,”“Come on, you too veil yourself,”“From now on, I am veiled,” and “Thank God I am veiled.” Others said, “The Lord has given me an order” and “I am happy that I am veiled.” Some of the photos also show the girls wearing paper masks in addition to the veils.

The school administration said it was unaware of any such events and passed responsibility for the incident on to the teacher, who was identified by the local media as Gamze I. They referred to the event only as a “veiling party” without providing any further information.

“We cannot supervise all of the teachers at the same time… We have talked with the teacher that organized this event over the phone, she told us about the incident and said the demand for the event came from the students themselves,” school management told the Turkish Hurriyet daily.

See what I mean? They are manipulated until they think it's their idea. Like a paedophile grooming a child.

The incident caught the attention of Turkey's major opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which took the matter to parliament. Party members argued that the photos showed that children at the school were exposed to “serious abuse.”

Hindu Priest Hacked to Death in Islamic War on Minorities

Hindu temple worker hacked to death in Bangladesh

AFP 


New Delhi (AFP) - A Hindu temple worker was hacked to death in western Bangladesh on Friday, police said, the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamists.

Three men on a motorcycle attacked Shyamananda Das as he walked along a road near the temple early in the morning, police said.

"They hacked him on his neck three times and there was one stabbing mark in his head," deputy district police chief Gopinath Kanjilal told AFP.

"He died after he was brought to hospital."

Police said the 50-year-old, also known as Babaji, was a volunteer who helped conduct prayers at temples.

"He was an itinerant temple volunteer who travels from one temple to another to serve the Hindu devotees. He came to this temple only yesterday," said local police chief inspector Hasan Hafizur Rahman. "He was attacked as he walked outside the temple to collect flowers for prayer services," he told AFP.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but police said it bore the hallmarks of recent murders of religious minorities by suspected homegrown Islamist militants.

Last month a Hindu priest, 70-year-old Ananda Gopal Ganguly, was hacked to death in the same district.

Days later, a Hindu monastery worker was murdered in the same way in a northwestern district.

Deputy police chief Kanjilal said an activist with the student wing of the country's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, had been arrested over the attack.

Hours before the murder, two Jamaat student activists were shot dead in a gunfight with police just a few miles (kilometres) from the Hindu temple, two police officials told AFP.

"They are local leaders of Islami Chhatra Shibir and were suspects in last month's murder of the Hindu priest," Rahman told AFP.

- Targeted killings -

Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of murders of secular and liberal activists and religious minorities that have left some 50 people dead in the last three years.

Victims of the attacks by suspected Islamists have included secular bloggers, gay rights activists and followers of minority religions including Hindus, Christians and Muslim Sufis and Shiites.

Since April, more than a dozen people have been hacked to death amid a sharp spike in the targeted killings.

Most of the recent attacks have been claimed by the Islamic State organisation or the South Asian branch of Al-Qaeda.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government, however, has blamed homegrown Islamists for the attacks. Experts say a government crackdown on opponents, including a ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami following a protracted political crisis, has pushed many towards extremism.

Last month police arrested more than 11,000 people, including nearly 200 suspected militants, in an anti-Islamist drive criticised by the opposition and some rights groups, which said it was used as an excuse to clamp down on dissent.

At least nine suspected Islamists were shot dead in what police said were gunfights. Some rights activists contradict that account and say they were extrajudicial killings.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a long-standing ally of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Although Bangladesh is officially secular, around 90 percent of its 160 million-strong population is Muslim. About one in 10 are Hindu.

Bangladesh Rounds up 900 in Crackdown on Killings of Secularists

By Ed Adamczyk UPI


Following a wave of attacks on minorities and openly secular bloggers, Bangladeshi police in Dhaka (above) announced that they had rounded up 900 suspected Islamist extremists involved in these crimes. Photo by Jorg Hackemann/Shuttertstock

DHAKA, Bangladesh, June 10 (UPI) -- Bangladesh police arrested some 900 suspected Islamist extremists after a wave of attacks on minorities and openly secular bloggers.

About 40 targeted killings of bloggers, self-identified atheists, gay-rights activists, academics and members of minority religions have occurred in Bangladesh in the past three years. The victims are often bludgeoned or hacked to death with machetes on a city street.

A university professor was killed in April though his family said he did not fit the profile of the other victims. His death suggests the extremists may have widened the list of those at risk.

The pace is accelerating, with five people killed in April, four in May and three thus far in June.

Islamic extremists just need to kill somebody; they don't care who.

Some observers noted the recent killing of the wife of a police officer may have prompted the crackdown, the BBC said.

With each death since 2013 came an international outcry. The largest police response came after Avjit Roy, 42, an American citizen, was killed in February 2015. A worker in the U.S. biotechnology industry, Roy spent his off-duty hours as a vociferous writer and blogger, writing about science, homosexuality and religion, with a secular slant.

Bangladeshi authorities say they have identified leaders of two groups they believe are responsible for the killings. Both groups are comprised of Islamist fundamentalists, and each trains volunteers in the assaults. Monirul Islam, chief of the country's police counterterrorism office, told The New York Times the groups' goal is to convert Bangladesh's uneasy mix of secular and religious cultures to Islamic fundamentalism.

The militants have succeeded in discrediting secularism in Bangladeshi society, Islam said.

"In general, people think they have done the right thing, that it's not unjustifiable to kill" bloggers, secularists and gay rights supports, he said.

This, I believe, is the general direction that strong Muslim societies are going. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, etc., etc., are leading the way for more fundamentalist Islam to take hold, and now unnamed groups are popping up to follow the terrorist's lead. If that isn't disturbing enough, it seems the majority of people in Dhaka agree with them. There are 7 million people in Dhaka.

It is just as likely that the majority of Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Afghans agree with them, too. There are 370 million people in those three countries.

Murdering infidels is an inalienable right in Islam. Mohammed said so.

The War Against God Heats Up in Alberta School Districts

Calgary bishop calls Alberta school gender guidelines 'totalitarian' and 'anti-Catholic'

School boards have until the end of March 

to approve their own policies

CBC News 

Bishop Fred Henry says the province's new guidelines 'breathe pure secularism'
and show no 'sensitivity to the Catholic community.' (CBC)

Calgary's Roman Catholic bishop has denounced as "totalitarian" and "anti-Catholic" the province's new guidelines for respecting students' gender identity.

"This approach and directive smack of the madness of relativism and the forceful imposition of a particular narrow-minded anti-Catholic ideology," Bishop Fred Henry wrote in a blog post on the website of the Catholic diocese of Calgary.

"Such a totalitarian approach is not in accordance with [Canadian law] and must be rejected," he added, in a post titled "Totalitarianism in Alberta."

The guidelines were released by Education Minister David Eggen on Wednesday in Edmonton.

The document advises school boards to develop policies that let students choose which washroom to use, the name on their report cards and the sports teams they wish to play on.

'Pure secularism'

The bishop writes: "[The guidelines] show no evidence of consultation with or sensitivity to the Catholic community. They breathe pure secularism."

School boards have been given until the end of March to approve their own policies, which must conform with the provincial guidelines.

There are about 2 dozen Catholic schools in Alberta and at least 2 school boards.

The Calgary Board of Education said Wednesday that it didn't expect any problems complying with the province's new guidelines for respecting students' gender identity.

The supervisor of psychological services at the board, Tamara Gordon, said the division's policy is nearly ready. She called the guidelines a "great support to our system," but added they're likely to have a "pretty profound impact" on school boards in general in the province.

The Catholic Church, the bishop said, espouses a "rather simple" teaching that God created beings as male and female and that "men and women should respect and accept their sexual identity."

Henry voiced his disapproval of student-led gay-straight alliances (GSAs) and queer-straight alliances (QSA).

"GSAs and QSAs are highly politicized ideological clubs which seek to cure society of 'homophobia' and 'heterosexism,' and which accept the idea that all forms of consensual sexual expression are legitimate. The view of sexuality that they espouse is not Catholic," he wrote.

Henry said Catholic schools support "inclusive communities" where every person is treated with dignity and respect.

Education minister responds

Eggen said discussions with school boards will continue and there will soon be meetings with Catholic Church leaders as well.

"Certainly I knew this wasn't going to be easy, but important things are never necessarily easy to achieve," Eggen told The Canadian Press Thursday.

"We'll receive different opinions on this, but I always take it back to first principles, which is to protect and to focus on children, especially young vulnerable children in regards to gender identities. Once we do remind ourselves of those things, then it becomes clearer what has to be done," he said.

How is it protecting our children when a confused boy decides he want to be a girl and starts using the girl's washroom? How comfortable are the other girls going to feel? 

The ministry's endorsement of gender self-identification is not only an affront to the Catholic church, it is an affront to God. And it will only sew confusion on children who are at a very vulnerable age.

Transgender church leader weighs in

Pace Anhorn is the director of Young Queer Church, a monthly service in Calgary. He says the bishop's language is over the top.

"It's a little bit shocking that [he] takes it to that degree, that this is a radical sexual movement and that we are setting up these ideological clubs," said Anhorn, who is a transgender man.

Uh, hello? You may be too young, Mr Pace, to remember that homosexuality, transgender people, etc., were not considered normal nor acceptable to society. I remember that. It was the case through much of my life. And it was the case through virtually all of the history of man. Suddenly it's not! What has been for eons is turned up-side-down in the past 20 years. That's radical!

Pace Anhorn is the director of a new faith project for young LGBT Christians.
'Trying to solidify that homophobia is OK. That kind of bothers me,' he says
of the bishop's remarks. (CBC)

"It is a little bit shocking that we go to that greater degree of trying to solidify that homophobia is OK. That kind of bothers me."

Anhorn said he fully supports the province's guidelines, because he says LGBT youth face higher rates of homelessness and suicide than the rest of the population.

The Calgary Board of Education says it is ready to implement the province's
new LGBT gender expression guidelines. (Ted S. Warren/Associated Press)

With files from The Canadian Press
The Calgary Board of Education says it is ready to implement the province's new LGBT gender expression guidelines. (Ted S. Warren/Associated Press)

Arab Spring Turns into Spring Cleaning in Tunisia

Secular government closes some mosques and cleanses others

Tunisians arrive at Carthage's El-Abidine mosque, on the outskirts
of the capital Tunis, to attend the Eid al-Fitr prayer

Gulf News
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times News Service

Tunis: Among a flurry of security measures the Tunisian government began after a gunman massacred 38 tourists last month in Sousse was a crackdown on dozens of mosques, creating concerns that the secular government may be falling back towards the authoritarian ways of the former dictatorship.

In the middle of Ramadan early this month, the government closed 80 mosques and barred two preachers. But neither the men nor most of the mosques had any known connection with Seifeddine Rezgui, the gunman who carried out the June 26 massacre, officials acknowledged.

It was another sign that the divisions between secularists and Islamists that threatened to tear the country apart in the years after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising are still playing out.

In a recent interview with the daily newspaper La Presse, Habib Al Sid, who heads a government led by the secularist party Nida Tunis, described the battle to control Tunisia’s 5,000 mosques as a “long-term fight”.

“We change a radical imam from a mosque and the next day he is replaced with another extremist,” he said. “But we will not give in.”

Notably, the main Islamic political party, Al Nahda, which holds a token Cabinet post in the coalition government, has supported the government’s stance against terrorism and even its regulation of mosques. Its leaders have condemned the terrorist attacks and told followers that supporting the government, and the country, is more important right now than party support.

“We are all in agreement that no one is allowed to preach violence,” said Ziyad Ladhari, 39, the Al Nahda Cabinet member and the minister for vocational training and employment. The closed mosques are ones that were built without permits in a somewhat “anarchical way”, he added. “No one is closing regular mosques.”

But other officials say some regular mosques have been closed, and deep ideological differences exist among the main parties over how to combat extremism. The secularists leading the government, many of whom have connections to the old dictatorship, lean towards tight control of mosques and preachers. The government has replaced many Al Nahda appointees in the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Those in the mainstream Tunisian religious community warn that government controls enforced by the police send religious followers underground and stifle efforts by moderates to counter the ideology of religious extremists.

Religion was strictly controlled under the dictatorship of Zain Al Abidine Bin Ali. Thousands of Islamists were imprisoned, and the outward display of religion, such as head scarves and beards, was banned in government offices, under a policy of forced secularisation.

Zain Al Abidine Bin Ali, former dictator of Tunisia

Al Nahda members, and some independent scholars, say the repression actually encouraged extremism, and that removing mainstream Islamists and reducing opportunities for religious education left a void the extremists were able to fill. Thousands who fled the repression under Bin Ali in 1991 ended up in Afghanistan and were recruited by extremist groups.

Another wave fled to Libya when the government outlawed the ultraconservative Islamic movement Ansar Al Sharia in 2013, said Habib Al Louze, a former Al Nahda legislator who runs a religious organisation, the Preaching and Reform Association. “It is very well known now that a lot went to Libya,” he said. “Thousands escaped.”

In Libya, Tunisians can find work but many have joined extremist groups, compounding the security problem at home. The men behind the country’s two recent attacks on foreign tourists received weapons training in Libya, the government has said.

In the freewheeling period after Bin Ali’s overthrow in 2011, communities forced out many of the clerics who were seen as loyal to him. But there was a shortage of imams, and Salafist clergymen, some of whom were extremists and even Al Qaida loyalists, joined the rush to take over mosques.

Amor Mighri, a quiet-spoken imam and former political prisoner, led the monitoring commission for the Religious Affairs Ministry and began a campaign to weed out the extremists. He toured the country, listening to complaints from the public, interviewing imams and evaluating their sermons.

During a visit to the holy city Kairouan in summer 2013, he noted the implicit militant references in a sermon by Saif Al Din Rais, a young and charismatic spokesman of Ansar Al Sharia who drew a large crowd of youthful followers to a neighbourhood mosque. Mighri said he invited the professed imam to his office and discovered that he had not even completed high school.

“His qualifications were weak,” Mighri said, adding that the spokesman was a hardliner who demanded that all Muslims fight all non-believers. “He only knows the Quran for the things that go with his vision. He is very selective.”

Many of the Salafists were aggressive and resisted efforts by the authorities to remove them. Some of them were armed. The ministry could not reason with them and had to ask the police to intervene, Mighri said. Relations between Al Nahda and the police were tense at the time and cooperation was poor, but the Ansar Al Sharia spokesman was eventually arrested amid some violence in March 2014.

Under the next government, cooperation with the police improved, and by the end of 2014 the government had removed all those considered extremists, Mighri said.

Shaikh Taieb, 73, imam of the Great Mosque of Oqba Ibn Nafa in Kairouan, Tunisia’s most venerated place of worship, said Ansar Al Sharia had come close to occupying the central mosque in 2013. The Salafists, in the meantime, took over three mosques in the city, and the police managed to push them out only six months ago.

“Over the past year, the state backed the mosques and things got relatively better,” Taieb said. “If we are in this situation, it is because the state is still not strong.”

But the problem of the radicalisation of young Tunisians remains.

“There are no extremists who are imams,” Mighri said, but it does not mean the country had eliminated the extremist mentality. He and others in the ministry are worried that the government is addressing the threat improperly.

The newly appointed minister for religious affairs, Othman Battikh, is an old-school cleric who served as chief mufti under the dictatorship. He has disbanded Mighri’s monitoring commission, replaced several senior Al Nahda appointees to the ministry, and handed the oversight of mosques largely to the police.

“There is a decrease in extremist discourse,” he said in an interview. “The preachers realised the need to back down.”

But ministry workers have strong objections to his methods.

“We appreciate the police and the important role they play in fighting terrorism, but we want them to stay out of religious affairs,” Abdul Salem Atwi, secretary-general of the Union of Preachers, said during a recent protest outside the ministry. “If you bring back the interior ministry, it is the police that will evaluate the sermons.”

Mighri warned that the ministry must tackle extremism with vigorous debate and not just with the police.

“The current dialogue is very general, it does not go deep enough,” he said. “You have to use solid debate, deep dialogue, in mosques, on the radio, everywhere, so we use our solid arguments so that people can hear and people can be convinced. The minister is not using strong arguments.”