The number of people accepting Islam in France has increased significantly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, with imams reporting a growing number of people coming to take the Shahada at mosques.
“It makes me want to go to Islam and to show everyone that this is not what Islam is about,” a young Muslim convert to Islam was quoted by RTL Radio a week ago.
According to the radio station, the Great Mosque of Paris issued 40 reversion certificates to Islam.
At the same period last year, the mosque gave certificates to 22 only, almost 50 percent of this year’s conversion rate.
Percentage of converts to Islam in Strasbourg and Aubervilliers was also high, scoring around 30% increase.
Lyon also followed the same trend with an increase of 20%.
The imams said they were surprised at first by the increase in the number of new converts.
Additionally, the diversity of those converts, including a doctor, a school headteacher or a police officer who all crossed the gate of the Grand Mosque to accept Islam.
A few days after Charlie Hebdo attack, a French business director Isabelle Matic, announced her decision to revert to Islam on her FaceBook account.
As well as condemning the attackers as unIslamic, French Muslims also called for the criminalisation of insulting religions amid increasing anger around over Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish new cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (saw).
The Kurds fighting the so-called Islamic State are attracting combatants from all over the world. Some head into battle out of conviction. Others want to make a buck.
DAQUQ, Iraq — The so-called Islamic State has recruited copious cannon fodder from around the world, along with quite a few ferocious fighters. But its toughest opponents on the ground, the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, are attracting Western ex-soldiers for their ranks who are determined to see the self-proclaimed “caliphate” not only “degraded,” as Washington puts it, but destroyed.
At a Kurdish Peshmerga base on the fluid battle lines outside the ethnically and religiously mixed Iraqi city of Kirkuk, three American fighters sat down with The Daily Beast. We were less than half a mile from the black flags of ISIS, as the would-be Islamic State is widely known, and the soldiers asked that I not give too many details about their identities. They worry that their families could become special targets for a fanatical fighting force whose battlefields, like its targets, seem limitless.
Dressed in a Peshmerga uniform, Jeremy is a compact, affable 28-year-old-guy from Mississippi who fought with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s been fighting alongside the Pesh for the last six months.
Leo is a tall and direct 38-year-old Texan who worked security for private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mel’s background also is in military security contracting and he says he served for a while with an army from a European country, but he won’t specify which. Mel’s a little eccentric. At 41, the Colorado native sports a pair of carefully pointed canine teeth—fangs, in fact— and a goatee that gives off a strong goth-metal vibe.
For two months Leo and Mel have been with the Peshmerga, the erstwhile guerrilla army that now makes up the autonomous armed forces of Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, and both are dressed in the gray flannel shirts and cargo pants often associated with private security contractors, but they and Jeremy all claim to be volunteers who are not receiving any kind of salary.
As we sit in the comfortable field office of Peshmerga Maj. Gen. Karwan Asaad, with Kurdish TV playing on a flat screen in the background, the hazy battle lines feel bizarrely distant despite a network of frontline dugouts only a few hundred yards away. But the Americans are anything but complacent.
Brett, a 28-year-old U.S. national who fights jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group alongside Dwekh Nawsha, a Christian militia whose name is an Assyrian-language phrase conveying self-sacrifice, poses for a photograph on February 5, 2015, in the northern Iraqi town of Al-Qosh, located 35 km north of Mosul. (Safin Hamed/Getty)
“ISIS are tough, real tough,” Jeremy says with his Mississippi twang. With fog settling in, he says it’s prime conditions for ISIS to make a move. It’s a different kind of warfare from what he saw when he was with the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees ISIS not so much as an insurgency as an invasion force. “It’s very different fighting a group that’s trying to take over,” he says.
The three men say their main assignments are guarding high-ranking Kurdish military officials and transporting jihadist prisoners in Peshmerga custody. It’s work Mel and Leo became well accustomed to when hired as contractors in earlier American wars. Here, Mel says he’s transported ISIS prisoners that come from Chechnya, Ireland, France, Germany, the UK, The U.S. and Canada, but maintains he is barred from speaking with them and has no idea what happens once they are handed over to Kurdish guards.
The three say, without specifics, they have received U.S. assurances they won’t be prosecuted when returning home, but that to be sure requires dealing with a lot of government clearances and maintaining a low profile. According to Jeremy, a lot of his ex-Army buddies are itching to get to Iraq and join the anti-ISIS fight, but he says many have been blocked because they make those plans public on social media.
The three say they have no interest in internal Kurdish politics and that even their sympathies for the Kurdish national struggle are secondary to their goal of contributing to the defeat of ISIS. They doubt the capabilities or commitment of the Iraqi Army and see the Kurds as the first defense against the spread of an American enemy.
Leo believes that if ISIS isn’t defeated, he could end up fighting its militants on battlefields around the world, and he is seriously disappointed in the way the Obama administration has handled the rise of the would-be caliphate. He says the failure of U.S. policy is a central reason he felt the need to join the Pesh.
Jeremy says he was uncomfortable sitting at home and watching the news of ISIS beheadings, mass killings and enslavements and felt obligated to use his military training and skills to support those fighting the jihadists.
For Mel, it was a matter of feeling disheartened by the large numbers of foreigners joining ISIS. He became convinced he had to join the Kurds.
I’m a chinese and i met a guy whom i really like. He is a malay. We liked each other and we always enjoy each other’s company a lot. He is a nice guy, someone i can get along well and he knows how to make me happy. However, we had a complicated issue that makes us difficult to be together. It was religion. Because of that, he decided to let us go and he stopped himself from falling in love with me. He like me but yet to fall for me. He said it is hard for us to be together and he wouldnt let himself to love me.
At that point of time, i really do not want any religion commitment and he knows about that. However after losing him, i thought about it and realised i am willing to convert to islam for him. I don’t mind doing it for him. But i dont think this is good because religion is very important and i am supposed to convert for myself, not for anyone.
The problem is.. i havent had the chance to tell him about the fact that i dont mind converting for him. I’m not sure if he still likes me. He may have moved on already since it has been a month since that day he told me we cannot be tgt. It is highly possible he may like someone else already? He is strong in his mind, if he had alr said he wouldnt love me he may have already let us go. I still think of him all the time, i cant get rid of him off my mind. We are still friends. We only met up once after that day we cleared things up.
So we met recently and we still cross the boundaries of friends. Some of our actions are clearly more than just friends. The way we look into each other’s eyes and we hug each other really tight before we part. I told myself, enjoy those moments i have with him that day. Dont think about anything else. When we talk through text, he tend to use that chance to avoid me to stop himself from talking too much with me.
What am i supposed to do.. Should i just tell him that i wouldnt mind converting to islam for him so that religion would no longer be an issue? Regardless whether he still likes me a not, should i just tell? Because 10 years later, i think i will regret for not saying it out. Or should i wait for the next meetup and see how it goes? If we’re still good and i could feel that he still likes me, then by then i go for it?
Feel free to give me your opinions. Thank you everyone for reading.
REUTERS – More than 1,000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo’s synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.
Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” Norway’s Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.
“Humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that,” Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the protest’s organizers told a crowd of Muslim immigrants and ethnic Norwegians who filled the small street around Oslo’s only functioning synagogue.
“There are many more peace mongers than warmongers,” Abdullah said as organizers and Jewish community leaders stood side by side. “There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”
Norway’s Jewish community is one of Europe’s smallest, numbering around 1000, and the Muslim population, which has been growing steadily through immigration, is 150,000 to 200,000. Norway has a population of about 5.2 million.
The debate over immigration in the country came to the forefront in 2011 when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and accused the government and the then-ruling Labour party of facilitating Muslim immigration and adulterating pure Norwegian blood.
Support for immigration has been rising steadily since those attacks, however, and an opinion poll late last year found that 77 percent of people thought immigrants made an important contribution to Norwegian society.
LONDON – British police launched an appeal on Friday to trace three London schoolgirls who are believed to be making their way to Syria, having flown to Turkey earlier this week.
The three friends, two aged 15 and one 16, left their east London homes on Tuesday and traveled to Gatwick airport where they caught a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul without telling their families.
Police said they were working with Turkish authorities to try to find the girls and bring them home.
“We still think there’s a possibility they’re in Turkey and that’s why we’re having the appeal,” Richard Walton from London police’s counter terrorism command told reporters on Friday.
Turkish Airlines declined to say whether the girls had traveled on one of its flights. A spokesman for the airline said in an emailed statement that apart from checking visas the company was not responsible for dealing with pre-flight security issues.
The three girls, two of whom were named as British nationals Shamima Begum and Kadiza Sultana, were pupils at the Bethnal Green Academy.
They are friends with a fourth teenage girl from the same school who police believe is already in Syria, having traveled to Turkey in December.
Their families were surprised and devastated by the disappearance of the girls, Walton said.
Security forces estimate some 600 British Muslims have traveled to Syria to join the conflict there, some of them with the militant Sunni Islamist group Islamic State.
Around half have since returned, and dozens have been arrested in Britain under anti-terrorism legislation.
