Europol Report: All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 99.6% that Aren’t

Europol publishes an annual report entitled EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report.  On their official website, you can access the reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009. 

One terrorist attack was carried out in 2009 in all Europe by persons of Muslim heritage (I do not say ‘by a Muslim’ because terrorism is forbidden in Islamic law).

http://www.juancole.com/2010/10/on-juan-williams-firing-for-islamophobia-and-how-most-european-terrorism-is-by-european-separatists.html

Where Having It All Doesn’t Mean Having Equality

France ranks 46th in theWorld Economic Forum’s 2010 gender equality report, trailing the United States, most of Europe, but also Kazakhstan and Jamaica.

READ ON:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/europe/12iht-fffrance.html

Pakistan's Troubles Stem From Misunderstood Past

Ayesha Jalal, a professor at Tufts University, just finished a semester teaching history at a leading university in Lahore, Pakistan. Jalal was the author of a noted book that reinterpreted Pakistan's birth. She tells Steve Inskeep that Pakistan was founded to protect the political interests of Muslims on the Indian subcontinent -- and not necessarily as an explicitly Islamic state or a theocracy. Pakistani governments have deliberately confused this issue for many years, encouraging many of the religious conflicts the country faces today.

INSKEEP: What's an example of the difference between a piece of history and a piece of ideology and how that warps people's thinking today?

Ms. JALAL: Well, I think a very good example is the reasons for why Pakistan was created. The ideologues would argue that it was created for Pakistan to become an Islamic conservative bastion, whereas the history tells you otherwise. The history tells you that Pakistan emerged out of an attempt to win a large share of power for Indian Muslims in India.

Listen to podcast of interview: 7 min 46 sec

Understanding Pakistan, By Way Of Its Pop Idols

"Many Muslims in Pakistan practice variations of Sufism, a less rigid form of Islam that's very open to music and dance. Facing waning popularity in the late 1970s, then-dictator Muhammad Zia-ul Haq ushered a more extreme Islam into the law and culture of the country."

Listen to this short report (7 min 48 sec), and watch some Pakistani music videos...about "cool" Pakistan and how the "culture wars" are being fought in that very strategic country:


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130384137

Games India Isn’t Ready to Play

October 2, 2010

By PANKAJ MISHRA

Mashobra, India

ON Friday afternoon, public spaces across north India were flooded with policemen and paramilitaries. Thousands of alleged “troublemakers” were arrested. The sending of bulk text messages from mobile phones was banned. These precautions had nothing to do with the opening on Sunday of the Commonwealth Games, the athletic competition among the nations of the former British Empire that so many Indians have hoped would be their country’s symbolic coming out as a world power.

Rather, the police were out in force because an Indian court had pronounced its verdict on the site in the town of Ayodhya that has been long claimed by Hindu nationalists as the birthplace of Lord Rama. The government did not want a repeat of the horrific mob violence that in 1992 had followed the destruction by Hindu nationalists of a 16th-century mosque standing on the land in question.

Shortly after the verdict, which split the disputed site unequally in favor of Hindus and to the detriment of Muslims, I went for a walk through the Himalayan village near my home. Even here, 600 miles from Ayodhya, people seemed to be playing it safe, the market partly closed, and shopkeepers clustered around television sets behind shutters.

Only the migrant laborers, who have come hundreds of miles from central India to the Himalayas, were still at work, men, women and even children carrying heavy stones on their heads at the construction projects that litter the hillsides.

Easily identified — the parents small and thin and dark, and the children with distended bellies and rust-brown hair that speak of chronic malnutrition — these migrant laborers have been a regular sight here for some years, building summer homes for the affluent of Delhi all day, and then huddling under tin shacks at night.

Read on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03mishra.html

Indian Court Divides Disputed Ayodhya Holy Site

By JIM YARDLEY

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Hindu holy men awaiting a ruling Thursday on a site claimed by Hindus and by Muslims.

A long-awaited decision on control of India’s most disputed religious site splits the land into three portions to be divided among Hindus and Muslims.

NEW DELHI — In a case that spanned centuries of religious history and languished in the legal system for six decades, an Indian court issued a historic ruling Thursday on the ownership of the country’s most disputed religious site by effectively handing down a split decision: granting part of the land to Hindus and another part to Muslims.

read article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/asia/01india.html?ref=asia