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Tag: Charlie Hebdo

  • Pope: Free Speech Should Not Involve Insults On Others’ Faith

    Pope: Free Speech Should Not Involve Insults On Others’ Faith

    ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) — Pope Francis said Thursday there are limits to freedom of speech, especially when it insults or ridicules someone’s faith.

    Francis spoke about the Paris terror attacks while en route to the Philippines, defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one’s mind for the sake of the common good.

    But he said there were limits.

    By way of example, he referred to Alberto Gasbarri, who organizes papal trips and was standing by his side aboard the papal plane.

    “If my good friend Dr. Gasbarri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said half-jokingly, throwing a mock punch his way. “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

    His pretend punch aside, Francis by no means said the violent attack on Charlie Hebdo was justified. Quite the opposite: He said such horrific violence in God’s name couldn’t be justified and was an “aberration.” But he said a reaction of some sort was to be expected.

    Many people around the world have defended the right of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed in the wake of the massacre by Islamic extremists at its Paris offices and subsequent attack on a kosher supermarket in which three gunmen killed 17 people.

    Others, though, have noted that in virtually all societies, freedom of speech has its limits, from laws against Holocaust denial to racially motivated hate speech.

    Recently the Vatican and four prominent French imams issued a joint declaration that, while denouncing the Paris attacks, urged the media to treat religions with respect.

    Francis, who has called on Muslim leaders in particular to speak out against Islamic extremism, went a step further Thursday when asked by a French journalist about whether there were limits when freedom of expression meets freedom of religion.

    “There are so many people who speak badly about religions or other religions, who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others,” he said. “They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr. Gasbarri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit.”

    In the wake of the Paris attacks, the Vatican has sought to downplay reports that it is a potential target for Islamic extremists, saying it is being vigilant but has received no specific threat.

    Francis said he was concerned primarily for the safety of the faithful who come to see him in droves, and said he had spoken to Vatican security officials who are taking “prudent and secure measures.”

    “I am worried, but you know I have a defect: a good dose of carelessness. I’m careless about these things,” he said. But he admitted that in his prayers, he had asked that if something were to happen to him that “it doesn’t hurt, because I’m not very courageous when it comes to pain. I’m very timid.”

    He added, “I’m in God’s hands.”

     

    Source: https://sg.news.yahoo.com

  • 2 Reported Islamist Extremists Killed During Belgian Police Raid

    2 Reported Islamist Extremists Killed During Belgian Police Raid

    BRUSSELS (REUTERS/AFP) – Belgian police killed two men who opened fire on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group that federal prosecutors said was about to launch “terrorist attacks on a grand scale”.

    Coming a week after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris, the incident heightened fears across Europe of young local Muslims returning radicalised from Syria.

    But prosecutors’ spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt said the Belgian probe had been under way before the Jan 7 attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

    A third man was detained in the eastern city of Verviers, where police commandos ran into a hail of gunfire after trying to gain entry to an apartment above a town centre bakery.

    All three were citizens of Belgium, which has one of the biggest concentrations of European Islamists fighting in Syria.

    Other raids on the homes of men returned from the civil war there were conducted across the country, Mr Van Der Sypt said, adding that they were suspected of planning attacks on Belgian police stations.

    Security had been tightened at such sites.

    “The searches were carried out as part of an investigation into an operational cell some of whose members had returned from Syria,” he said.

    “For the time being, there is no connection with the attacks in Paris.”

    Describing events in the quiet provincial town just after dark, he said: “The suspects immediately and for several minutes opened fire with military weaponry and handguns on the special units of the federal police before they were neutralised.”

    Earlier in the day, prosecutors said they had detained a man in southern Belgium whom they suspected of supplying weaponry to Amedy Coulibaly, killer of four people at a Paris Jewish grocery after the Charlie Hebdo attack.

    After the violence in Verviers, La Meuse newspaper quoted an unidentified police officer saying: “We’ve averted a Belgian Charlie Hebdo.”

    Two French brothers, who like Coulibaly claimed allegiance to Islamist militants in the Middle East, killed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

    ISLAMIST STRENGTH

    Belgium has seen significant radical Islamist activity among its Muslim population.

    Public television RTBF showed video of a building at night lit up by flames, with the sound of shots being fired.

    “When we began running, we heard three or four big explosions and shots,” she said. “It was really startling.”

    Another local resident said “machineguns were firing for about 10 minutes.”

    A third witness said he saw two young men apparently of North African origin “dressed all in black carrying a bag of the same colour,” adding that the pair looked terrified.

    Three Islamic State militants threatened attacks on Belgium in a video broadcast on Wednesday, the Belga news agency reported.

    Belgian investigators said earlier on Thursday they were probing whether an arms dealer sold weapons used in the Paris attacks, after confirming supermarket gunman Amedy Coulibaly sold the man a car belonging to his partner Hayat Boumeddiene.

    There was no immediate confirmation of any link between the Coulibaly investigation and Thursday’s raid.

    The man, Neetin Karasular, from the airport city of Charleroi in French-speaking southern Belgium, is in detention on suspicion of a possible link to the weapons used in the Paris attacks.

    “The issue of weapons is under investigation,” Mr Van der Sijpt told AFP earlier in the day, adding that Karasular was under suspicion for “arms trafficking Belgian prosecutors are working with French authorities to establish any “possible link” to last week’s Paris attacks.

    Coulibaly, who was killed by police on Friday, is also believed to have shot dead a policewoman in another Paris attack.

    Mr Van der Sijpt added that the Belgian suspect “bought the car belonging to Coulibaly’s wife.”

    Karasular handed himself into police on Tuesday, saying he had been in contact with Coulibaly in recent months and had tried to “swindle” the Frenchman over the car deal, but was scared after the Paris attacks.

    Investigators searched his house and found documents proving the sale of the vehicle and papers showing negotiations with Coulibaly about arms and ammunition, including a Tokarev pistol of the sort used by the Frenchman during the supermarket attack, Belga said.

    Karasular will appear before a magistrate in Charleroi on Monday who will decide whether he will remain in custody.

    Spain, meanwhile, opened an investigation Thursday into Coulibaly and Boumeddiene’s visit to Madrid shortly before the attacks.

    Turkish authorities say Boumeddiene crossed into Syria on Jan 8 from Turkey.

    She had arrived in Istanbul on a flight from Madrid before the Paris attacks took place.

    Per head of population, Belgium is the European country from where the highest number of citizens have taken part in fighting with Syrian rebels in the past four years, data compiled by security researchers has shown.

    Belgium has taken a lead in EU efforts to counter the threat perceived from the return of “foreign fighters” from Syria.

    The Belgian government believes about 100 of its nationals have come back from there, while a further 40 may have been killed and about 170 are still in the ranks of fighters in Syria and Iraq.

    Belgium is part of the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and has six F-16 aircraft taking part in bombing raids on Syria and Iraq.

    A court in Antwerp is due to deliver its verdict on 46 people accused of recruiting young men to join militants or of becoming militants in Syria – Belgium’s largest Islamist militant trial to date.

    The court was to have given its verdict this week, but it was delayed for a month after the Paris violence.

    In Germany, police arrested a suspected supporter of the insurgent group Islamic State who was recently in Syria, federal prosecutors said.

    The 26-year-old German-Tunisian suspect, named as Ayub B, is thought to have entered Syria via Turkey last year to be trained in ISIS combat and recruiting, before returning to Germany in August, the German prosecutor said in a statement.

    The German authorities have not uncovered any evidence of concrete preparations for an attack on their soil.  Berlin estimates that some 550 German nationals have gone to fight in ISIS ranks in Syria and Iraq.

     

    Source: www.straitstimes.com

  • How Would Prophet Muhammad Have Reacted To Charlie Hebdo Caricatures?

    How Would Prophet Muhammad Have Reacted To Charlie Hebdo Caricatures?

    The level of freedom of expression in the early centuries of Islam would put much of the current Muslim world to shame.

    After the brutal assassination of two visitors and eight of its staff members, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has vowed to continue its trademark irreverence and secular iconoclasm, which critics have accused of being Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian.

    Its first issue since the tragic massacre features a cartoon of a tearful Prophet Muhammad holding a sign showing the famous twitter hashtag “Je Suis Charlie.” The turbaned figure stands under the slogan “All is forgiven.”

    As a staunch advocate of freedom of expression, I believe the publication has every right to run such a cartoon, even if their decision would upset the religious sensibilities of some Muslims such as Egypt’s grand mufti, Shawqi Allam, who blasted the cartoon as racist.

    The caricature drove me to consider some hypothetical questions: What would Muhammad make of this? Would the prophet forgive Charlie Hebdo’s lampooning of him and his religion? If he were alive today, would he tweet his solidarity with the slain cartoonists?

    My own reading of Muhammad’s life and history leads me to conclude that although the prophet may not have tweeted “#JeSuisCharlie,” he would have condemned these savage murders and even forgiven French satirists no matter what insult was directed his way.

    While some might find my assertion hard to believe, it is backed up by Muhammad’s own actions and convictions. Although the prophet’s contemporary self-appointed defenders take offence on his behalf and believe they are doing his will by protesting perceived insults or punishing those who commit them, their actions could not be further from the truth.

    During the vulnerable early years of Islam, the Islamic prophet endured and tolerated mockery and disdain. Even in victory, Muhammad wisely advised to exercise tolerance. Upon his triumphant return to Mecca, he forgave the inhabitants of the city which had been home to his fiercest enemies. He even pardoned a member of his inner circle, Abdullah Ibn Saad, who denounced the prophet as a charlatan.

    More importantly, the Islam Muhammad preached recognised the pluralistic nature of society and guaranteed freedom of belief. Surat al-Baqara of the Quran reminds Muslims: “There shall be no compulsion in religion.”

    Significantly, the constitution Muhammad drew up in Medina included in its definition of the “umma” all the oasis’ inhabitants, not just its Muslims. These included both the “people of the book”, ie: Christians and Jews, but also, perhaps surprisingly, pagans – all of whom were granted equal political, cultural and religious rights as Muslims.

    There was so much freedom of thought and expression in the early centuries of Islam that it would put much of the current Muslim world to shame. Although many contemporary Muslims are convinced that ridiculing Islam and rejecting religion are western innovations, this is closer to wishful thinking than historical fact.

    In Christendom, Muhammad and Islam was derided from a rival religious vantage point; that the prophet of Islam was believed to be the false prophet of a fake religion. He was even condemned to the ninth circle of Dante’s inferno where he supposedly stands “rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind”.

    Within the Islamic world itself, Muhammad and Islam were criticised and mocked from a secular, rationalist, anti-religious perspective.

    One example is the religious sceptic and scholar Ibn al-Rawandi (827-911) who, despite his rejection of religion and Islam, lived a long life in the 8th-9th centuries.

    Rawandi, who spent a significant part of his life in Baghdad, believed that intellect and science supersede all else, that prophets were unnecessary, that religion was irrational, that Islamic tradition was illogical and that miracles were a hoax.

    In neighbouring Syria, a few decades later, the Richard Dawkins of the Abbasid era was born. Abu al-Ala’ al-Maarri (973-1058) was so contemptuous of religion that he divided the world into two types of people: “Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.”

    Maarri also lived to a ripe age. Rather than being visited by assassins, he attracted many students and engaged with scholars of various persuasions, even when he decided to return to his hometown of Maarra to live ascetically in seclusion.

    Although this tradition of free thought and scepticism has shrunk over the centuries, it still exists. It even witnessed resurgence in the 20th century – and included the “Dean of Arab Literature”, Taha Hussein – until the conservative Islamist current started to block it in the late 1970s/1980s.

    The years since the revolutionary wave in 2011 have seen secularists, sceptics and atheists mounting a comeback. But with some countries equating non-belief to terrorism and arresting atheists, theirs is a risky venture.

    But these efforts are essential. Freedom of thought and expression were vital components of Islam’s golden age and lifting Arab and Muslim countries out of their current plight will require a return to that era of free inquiry.

    Khaled Diab is an award-winning Egyptian-Belgian journalist, writer and blogger. He is the author of Intimate Enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land. He blogs at www.chronikler.com

     

    Source: www.aljazeera.com

  • Muslims Protest Against Charlie Hebdo’s Renewed Insult Of Islam

    Muslims Protest Against Charlie Hebdo’s Renewed Insult Of Islam

    Charlie Hebdo’s decision to depict the Prophet Mohammed on its front cover today has angered Muslims around the world who called it a renewed insult to their religion.

    Around three million copies of the French satirical newspaper hit the stands this morning for the first since the terror attack on its office which killed 12 people.

    The front cover showed a weeping Mohammed, holding a sign reading ‘I am Charlie’ with the words ‘All is forgiven’ above him.

    Such was its immediate popularity, the print run has since been increased to five million after issues sold out within minutes.

    Copies have since been changing hands on eBay for three-figure sums as customers rush to get their hands on the edition.

    But many Muslims believe their faith forbids depictions of the prophet and reacted with dismay – and occasionally anger – to the latest cover image.

    Some felt their expressions of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo after last week’s attack had been rebuffed, while others feared the cartoon would trigger yet more violence.  

    ‘You’re putting the lives of others at risk when you’re taunting bloodthirsty and mad terrorists,’ said Hamad Alfarhan, a 29-year old Kuwaiti doctor.

    In the Philippines, there were angry protests at the front cover and also the perceived double standards by the West.

    Placards by demonstrators in Marawi were held aloft which accused the West of remaining silent over the deaths of Muslims and that said ‘You are Charlie, I love Mohammed’.

    In one rally a picture of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was set on fire and banners waved that declared there would be no apology from the Islamic world for the Paris massacre.

    Mr Netanyahu became a central figure in the response to the attacks after four Jewish shoppers were killed by one of the Islamic fanatics at a kosher deli the day after the Charlie Hebdo shootings.

    It came as Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram hailed the Paris massacres.

    ‘We are indeed happy with what happened in France,’ the group’s leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video posted online.

    ‘We are happy over what befell the people of France… as their blood was shed inside their country as they (try to) safeguard their blood,’ he said.

    Meanwhile, Abbas Shumann, deputy to the Grand Sheik of Cairo’s influential Al-Azhar mosque, said the new image was ‘a blatant challenge to the feelings of Muslims who had sympathised with this newspaper.’

    But he said Muslims should ignore the cover and respond by ‘showing tolerance, forgiveness and shedding light on the story of the prophet.’

    An angry reaction, he said, will ‘not solve the problem but will instead add to the tension and the offense to Islam.’

    In Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood said it would stage a protest after Friday prayers in Amman in response to the paper’s Mohammed cartoon.

    Spokesman Murad Adaileh said the brotherhood strongly condemned both the killings and the ‘offensive’ against the prophet.

    That was a widely expressed sentiment.

    Ghassan Nhouli, a grocer in the Lebanese port city of Sidon, said the magazine and the killers ‘are both wrong.’

    ‘It is not permitted to kill and also it is not permitted to humiliate a billion Muslims,’ he said.

    The Iranian government has strongly condemned the killings, but Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif said that in a world of widely differing cultures, ‘sanctities need to be respected.’

    He said: ‘I think we would have a much safer, much more prudent world if we were to engage in serious dialogue, serious debate about our differences and then what we will find out that what binds us together is far greater than what divides us.’

    Egyptian cartoonist Makhlouf appealed for peace with his own spin on the Charlie Hebdo cover, replacing Mohammed with an ordinary Middle Eastern man carrying a placard reading ‘I am an artist’ in French.

    ‘I am for art and against killing,’ he added in Arabic. ‘May God forgive everyone.’

    The image was widely circulated on social media. Turkey was rare among Muslim-majority nations to have publications running Charlie Hebdo images. But the decision has raised tensions in the officially secular country.

    Police stopped trucks leaving the printing plant of newspaper Cumhuriyet after it said it would reprint some of the cartoons.

    The vehicles were allowed to distribute the paper once officials had determined that the image of the Prophet Mohammed was not shown.

    The paper printed a four-page selection of cartoons and articles – including caricatures of Pope Francis and French President Francois Hollande – but left out cartoons likely to offend Muslims.

    However, two Cumhuriyet columnists used small, black-and-white images of the new Charlie Hebdo cover as their column headers.

    A small group of pro-Islamic students staged a protest outside the paper’s office in Ankara, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

    The police intensified security outside Cumhuriyet’s headquarters and printing center as a precaution.

    Meanwhile, Al Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo, saying it was ordered by the jihadist network’s global chief to avenge the French magazine’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

    In a video entitled ‘A message regarding the blessed battle of Paris’, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said that it had financed and plotted the assault on the weekly that left 12 people dead and shocked France.

    But it said the orders had come from the very top of the global jihadist network – Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who succeeded Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after his death in 2011.

    ‘We, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the messenger of Allah,’ Nasser al-Ansi, one of AQAP’s chiefs, said in the video.

    Leading Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, formerly a member of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), praised the ‘heroic and rare attack’ in France, hailing the Kouachi brothers as ‘two soldiers of Islam… who humiliated France.’

    France ‘thought that it was immune to the strikes of the mujahedeen,’ he said in a statement.

    Across Europe, there was high demand for scarce copies of the latest edition and several newspapers ran extracts from Charlie Hebdo.

    Spain’s El Pais published two pages of the cartoons with Spanish translation, though it did not include any images of the prophet.

    A small Italian newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano (The Daily Fact), published Charlie Hebdo as a 16-page supplement, in French with Italian translations of the captions.

    `’Why are we doing it?’ editor Antonio Padellaro wrote in a front-page column.

    ‘Because last Friday, when we called the surviving top editor of Charlie Hebdo, we heard him say: ‘Thanks, you’re the only Italian newspaper who asked us’.’

    Physical copies of the paper were hard to find, although newsagents in several countries said they hoped to have some in stock by the end of the week.

    In Sweden, the 320-strong Pressbyran chain of newsagents said it would sell the issue, but only online, not in stores.

    Spokesman Fredrik Klein said the decision was ‘as a security measure and out of concern for our staff.’

    There was brisk bidding for copies of Charlie Hebdo on Internet auction sites.

    On the Irish version of eBay, emailed electronic copies were selling at prices starting around 6.50 euros ($8), while hard copies attracted bids over 200 euros ($240).

    On British eBay, bidding on one copy went above 95,000 ($145,000), though it was unclear whether the bids were genuine or an attempt to make mischief.

    Michael Collingwood of Sgel, Charlie Hebdo’s Spanish distributor, said he normally received 40 copies but had been promised 1,000 this time by the paper’s French distributor.

    He figured he could sell eight times that number.

    ‘I don’t know why they only printed 3 million,’ he said. ‘Everyone wants it.’

    Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

  • AQAP Claims Responsibility For Charlie Hebdo Attacks

    AQAP Claims Responsibility For Charlie Hebdo Attacks

    DUBAI – Al Qaeda in Yemen has claimed responsibility for the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, saying it was ordered by the Islamist militant group’s leadership for insults to the Prophet Mohammad, according to a video posted on YouTube.

    Gunmen killed 17 people in three days of violence that began when they shot staff in Charlie Hebdo’s offices last week in revenge for the publication of satirical images of the Prophet.

    One Western source said no hard evidence of a direct operational link to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had yet been found.

    But it was the first time that a group had officially claimed responsibility for the attack, which was led by Cherif and Said Kouachi, two French-born brothers of Algerian extraction who had visited Yemen in 2011.

    In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman said the United States believed the video was authentic but officials were still determining if the claim of responsibility is true.

    “As for the blessed Battle of Paris, we…claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the Messenger of God,” Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, an AQAP ideologue, said in the recording.

    Ansi said the “one who chose the target, laid the plan and financed the operation is the leadership of the organization”, without naming an individual.

    “ZAWAHRI’S ORDERS”

    He added that the strike had been carried out in “implementation” of the order of overall al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, who has urged Muslims to attack the West using any means they can find.

    Ansi also gave credit for the operation to slain AQAP propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, a preacher cited by one of the gunmen in remarks to French media as a financier of the attack.

    It was not clear how Awlaki, killed by a U.S. drone in 2011, had a direct link to the Paris assault, but he inspired several militants in the United States and Britain to acts of violence.

    The purported claim of responsibility put a new spotlight on a group often cited by Western officials as al Qaeda’s most dangerous branch. AQAP has recently focused on fighting government forces and Shi’ite rebels in Yemen, but says it still aims to carry out attacks abroad.

    AQAP mocked a huge rally of solidarity for the victims held in Paris on Sunday, saying the shock on display showed the feebleness of the Western leaders who attended.

    “Look at how they gathered, rallied and supported each other, strengthening their weakness and dressing their wounds,” it said.

    Al Qaeda offshoot Islamic State released a video that it said showed interviews with three French fighters in Syria praising the attacks, the SITE monitoring service reported.

    One said: “I say to the French people who think that the Islamic State will not reach Europe: With permission from Allah the Almighty, we will reach Europe – all of Europe.”

    “JOY AT TORMENT”

    SITE also said Nigeria’s Boko Haram group had released a video showing its leader welcoming the attacks. “We have felt joy for what befell the people of France in terms of torment, as their blood was spilled inside their country. Allah is Great!” Abubakar Shekau said in the recording, according to SITE.

    One Western source described Ansi as an Al Qaeda hawk reputed to have advocated a merger with the even more hardline Islamic State.

    Two senior Yemeni sources said Cherif and Said Kouachi had met Awlaki in Yemen and undergone weapons training in the eastern province of Marib. However, a Marib tribal leader denied that they had trained there in 2011 or that Awlaki had been based there.

    AQAP’s Yemeni leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, was once a close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whose father was born in Yemen, a neighbor of Saudi Arabia.

    Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi complained on Wednesday that Yemen had been subjected to a politicized media campaign over the alleged 2011 visit.

    “The person reported to have traveled to Yemen to learn in three days how to fire a pistol had been detained and under investigation for two years in France,” Hadi said, according to the state news agency Saba. Hadi asked why such suspicious elements had been allowed to travel to Yemen and return home without being questioned.

     

    Source: www.todayonline.com