Brights News Feed

Abdullah Gul has been elected to the Turkish presidency by parliament today.

His candidacy provoked military threats and mass secular protest back in April. He has said that he will not contravene the country’s secular constitution, and he has won kudos in Europe during negotiations for Turkey’s EU membership, but secular opposition and many secularist campaigners remain unconvinced that the new President Gul will not use his powers of veto in the direction of an Islamist agenda.

Only time will tell…

(See Guardian, Al Jazeera.)

In October 2000 a Pakistani, Dr Younus Sheikh, was arrested on the charge of “blasphemy” and he was later found guilty and sentenced to death. He had been an active humanist and campaigner, and only after a concerted effort on behalf of humanist and other NGOs and rights groups was he finally freed in 2004, after three years spent mostly in solitary confinement.

This week, another man who by coincidence is also named Younus Sheikh — a writer who has criticized Islam — has been found guilty of “blasphemy” and sentenced to life in prison. And once again, the media outrage is limited — at this moment there are just two related news stories on Google, one from Pakistani newspaper The News, and the other from the UK’s National Secular Society.

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Amid heightened, “critical” level terror alerts across the UK, the Daily Mail (which the Brights News Feed does not necessarily condone as a good source of objective news) today carries an article (“I was a fanatic, I know their thinking”) with a self-proclaimed “former extremist recruiter”, Hassan Butt.

I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

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The government of Pakistan has today added its voice to the official condemnation against the British government’s honouring of novelist Salman Rushdie (now “Sir Salman”) in the bi-annual British hounours ceremony. Iran had already passed a resolution of condemnation yesterday.

Of course, the rent-a-mobs are back out for their now-traditional bi-annual effigy burning photo opportunity. There have been renewed calls for Rushdie’s death.

(Iran’s official position as of 1998 is that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was void, but the Iranian state media famously followed the announcement with news that leading clerics considered the fatwa irrevocable, leaving the actual state position somewhat ambiguous.)

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Around 700,000 Turkish secularists rallied in the streets of Istanbul yesterday, campaigning against Islamist presidential candidate Abdullah Gul. Gul is the presidential candidate of the ruling party, has deeply Islamist political roots, and the protestors to not believe the pro-Western “makeover” that he has undergone, nor his assertions that if elected he would stand by the country’s secular constituion. The opposition are challenging the constitutional legitimacy of the presidential election process, which sees parliament electing the president, rather than a peoples’ vote. The secular protesters are making the same demand, as well as coming out against the army. The army have already hinted (or threatend) the possibility of a military coup if Gul is elected by parliament, a move which has not generally been to the protesters’ liking and has caused Turkish stocks to plummet.

(See The Guardian UK)

A budding editor at Clare College, Cambridge (UK) has faced harsh disciplinary action over re-publishing a Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoon in his college newspaper, Clareification. The cartoon was used to illustrate a special issue on religious satire. The National Secular Society respond:

We are shocked that the staff and even the students union at this supposedly liberal college have joined the attack on this student because he had the temerity to poke fun at religion. Free expression is such a precious commodity and is under such ferocious attack at present from religious interests that it is disgraceful that no-one is standing up for this young man’s right to be rude about religion – even about Islam.

(Also see MediaWatchWatch.) GagWatch also points out that from France there is some:

good news. The state prosecutor has called for the dismissal of the court case brought by two French Muslim groups against satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, saying that the cartoons denounce terrorists’ use of the Muslim faith but do not damage Islam. A verdict was expected March 15.

Schools across France have received several thousand unsolicited copies of an “atlas” which advocates Islamic creationism theories, according to the Education Ministry. Stuff.co.nz says:

The lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya, a shadowy figure who runs a large Islamic publishing operation from Istanbul, was sent to schools and universities over the past 10 days. The Turkish original of the 768-page book, which rejects evolution, first appeared in Turkey late last year when it was also sent unsolicited to schools. It sees Charles Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest” as the root of many of today’s ills, including modern terrorism.

The large-format, lavishly illustrated book, is meant to show that current animal species look exactly like the fossils of their ancestors. It appears to have been mailed from Turkey and Germany to schools all around France, a project of Harun Yahya, otherwise known as the Islamic teacher Adnan Oktar.

The Atlas of Creation puts an Islamic twist on criticism of the theory of evolution, a cause usually associated with conservative Christians in the United States.

Robert Redecker, the French teacher of philosophy who was threatened with death after heavily criticising the content of the Qu’ran and modern Islam, has now resigned from teaching. The resignation comes despite the arrest of two suspects. His criticisms were originally published in Le Figaro, September last year. Although his views are more extreme than many mainstream thinkers usually find comfortable, the French intellectual community has rallied around Redecker in defence of free expression.

(See DNA. Via.)

“I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage,” said Somali presidential chief of staff, Abdirizak Hassan, today. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was the chief suspect in the planning of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 225 people, and a number of other terrorist activities.

In a series of air strikes undertaken since Sunday, and ongoing (Retuers), the Somali transitional government claims the US forces have eliminated numerous Islamic Courts fighters, on the run from government and Ethiopian ground troops. A successful strike against Fazul Abdullah Mohammed represents closure on two fronts for the US military, as the air strikes are the first overt US military action in Somalia since the devastating failed mission in 1993 that was immortalised in the book and film Black Hawk Down.

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The Old Bailey (London, UK) yesterday convicted Umran Javed, 27, of soliciting murder and incitement to racial hatred. The charges were brought in response to his vocal leadership of demonstrations outside the Danish Embassy in London during the Jyllands-Posten cartoon protests early last year. Supporters of Javed in the coutroom apparently protested loudly at the conviction, one man shouting “Allahu Akbar, I curse the judge, the court, the jury, all of you.”

Javed had argued in court that his position behind a loudspeaker was unplanned, that his chants were merely “soundbites”, and the idea that he was threatening anyone was a misinterpretation of his words. But, according to the Times:

Javed had links with the recently banned group al-Muhajiroun, which was led by the extremist cleric Omar Bakri Mohammad.

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