Islam

Pax Christi Victoria Inc. International Christian Peace Movement invites you to the first Agape of 2015. Sunday February 15 at Kildara, rear 39 Stanhope Street, East Malvern. Shared meal 1 p.m Meeting 2 p.m-4.00 p.m. Speaker will be Noor Huda Ismail, from Central Java, Indonesia, the founder and director of a grass root NGO called Yayasan Prasasti Perdamaian (Institute for International Peace Building in Indonesia). He describes himself " a terrorist's whisperer". His
connection to jihadism world went back to his childhood where he studied for 6 six years with Bali bombers in a pesantren (an Islamic boarding school) in Central Java. One of the founders of the school is Abu Bakar Ba'asyir who is now incarcerated in Nusakambangan (Indonesia's Alcatraz prison) for his involvement in Aceh Military training Camp in 2010.
He will speak on : "The Emergence of Groups of Violence in Indonesia in the Name of Islam and the Effort of Civil Society in Indonesia to Peacefully Fight this Toxic Ideology.”

This article argues that you could probably get away with some nasty cartoons in a truly free press because such a press would freely report all sides to a dispute and not leave whole regions and classes of people with no expression in an international argument mediatized by the very same bunch of pillaging and plundering power elites, corporate and government, who profit from their silence. The article also wonders (but does not profess to know) whether the cold blooded assassinations at Charlie Hebdo were really an act of Islamic terrorism, or another false flag, on the principle of cui bono.

Speakers are Susan Day Dirgham, on “Valuing Secularism in Syria” and Fr Bruce Duncan, on “Peacemaking in Islamic traditions”. This is a Social Policy Connections Public Forum at The Study Centre, Yarra Theological Union. Best entry via 34 Bedford Street, Box Hill. The forum will go from 7:30pm - 9pm, Thursday 6 November.

The Syrian people have barely been able to come to terms with with their grief at the murder of 35 in an attack with chemical weapons, when the war against them, sponsored by the U.S., it's European NATO allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel, resumed with a terrorist suicide bombing

Almost two dozen more Syrians including top Sunni cleric Mohammed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti were killed in a terrorist blast at the al-Eman Mosque in Damascus.

The report has been adapted from the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).

(This article also looks at related population, immigration and democracy issues in the West.) A film, Innocence of Muslims has been released of which parts available on you-tube portray the founder of Islam in a bad personal and political light, to say the least. A strong theme depicts Muslims as aggressively anti-Christian. Apparently largely as a response to this film, there have been widespread riots by Muslims against foreign embassies, particularly US embassies, including riots in Sydney on 15 September 2012, with police injured. Meanwhile warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are together launching a military exercise in the Straits of Hormuz, in response to threats to close it off. There is plenty of reason for Muslims to be angry with and frightened by the West apart from that film. And maybe Westerners should hold their own governments to greater account if we are to avoid World War Three.

Republished from PressTV.

Here is a very topical, historical account by E.J. Hobsbawm of the rise of Islam in the so-called undeveloped world which occurred in reaction to the disruption caused by colonialism.

What is not widely known is the role of supposedly Trotskyist left wing parties in propping up the rule of the Mullahs in 1980. Whether this was decisive I cannot say, but in 1980, one of the major Trotskyist Parties, affiliated with the Trotskyist Fourth International, made a surprising turn and, instead of being a left-wing opponent of the government and the mullahs, began to whitewash the mullahs and to smear political opponents of that government, including feminists and left-wing University students at the University of Tehran.

This article started out as a comment in reply to the comment entitled "Stoning of Women in Iran."