I was heartened to see in this mornings papers that Meriam Ibrahim had been released. No sooner had I got home and the BBC was reporting:
A Sudanese woman freed from death row on Monday has been detained with her family at Khartoum airport, sources have told the BBC.
Meriam Ibrahim was sentenced in May to hang for renouncing Islam, sparking widespread outrage at home and abroad.
About 40 security agents detained Mrs Ibrahim - along with her husband, Daniel Wani and two children - at the airport, the sources said.
A top Sudanese official has told the BBC she would be freed "soon".
The arrest may have something to do with the bizarre internal politics of the Islamic state of Sudan. It certainly has nothing to do with justice which seems to be so sadly lacking in the world of Islam.
Meanwhile over at Tendance Coatsey we are told that the ISIS Islamists are now demanding "protection money" gangster style:
In Mosul ISIS has imposed on Christians the discriminatory status of “dhimmi“, forcing them to pay a tax (the jizyah) as a guarantee of protection.
Sad news for the last Christians of Mosul. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (EIIL) – Daech according acronym in Arabic, – has ordered them to pay the jizyah,a special tax which giving them the status of second-class citizens.....
This obligation to pay the jizya for Christian dhimmi - “protected” or a non-Muslim citizens in Muslim state – is compulsory.
It is also open to any non-Muslim citizen, provided they belong to a revealed religion (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc..). It is accompanied by other discriminatory conditions, restricted freedom of worship, and the loss of certain rights, in exchange for a guarantee of security for their persons and property.
The word "Apartheid" comes to mind (BDS supporters please note), just as it does over the position of women in Saudi Arabia where they are not even allowed to drive a car. Not sure where it says that in the Koran,cars hadn't even been invented but some wacky old bunch of clerics managed to make some nonsense up....
Its not just Islamists either. The International Buisiness Times reports:
Russian Orthodox Christians have called on Moscow authorities to ban a performance by controversial rock singer Marilyn Manson.Religious group God's Will argues that Manson's performances contravene Russian anti-blasphemy laws.
Group spokesman Dmitry Tsorionov told RIA Novosti that believers condemned the "blasphemy and profanity of his [Manson's] song lyrics but mostly his behaviour during performances".
"The burning and destruction of the Bible is an integral part of his show," said Tsorionov. "For example, the culmination of his concert in St Petersburg was the destruction of a Bible in front of an enthusiastic crowd that he had brought to an absolutely inadequate state."
The organisation also said Manson's performances were "full of elements insulting to the feelings of believers" and promoted "religious hatred, cruelty, murder, suicide, sexual perversion and Satanism among young people, including minors".
Methinks the only people promoting any "hatred" are the religious fundamentalist types who cannot tolerate anybody who dares to be different and not conform to their superstitious clap trap.
Believe what you want, but you have no right to tell the rest of us how to live and think!
Human Rights always come before Religious Rights.
Here's a song guaranteed to offend someone somewhere for some reason.
I am an atheist, but I don't think religion per se is necessarily to blame. It's how religion is handled. Quite frankly, plenty of atheists were willing to perpetrate equivalent horrors in the name of an ideology...fascism, communism, and in some cases nationalism.
ReplyDeleteReligion, on a philosophical level and in practice, can be benign or lethal. Same with political values or ideologies.
So, perhaps, it's not what religion does to people, but what people do with religion, that's at the root of this. Perhaps there is an innate tendency in many leaders to resort to extremism, and a tendency among many people (whether out of fear or credulity) to follow them.