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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According to the press release:

A British branch of a new Europe-wide phenomenon is to be launched on Thursday 21 June in London. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain is building on the stunning success of other branches already operating in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The British Humanist Association and National Secular Society are sponsoring the launch and support the new organisation.

The Council will provide a voice for those labelled Muslim but who have renounced religion and do not want to be identified by religion.

• Read the manifesto at Maryam Namazie’s blog
• The website (still under construction at the time of writing) is www.ex-muslim.org.uk
• Also see AC Grayling back on Comment is Free
• Islamophobia Watch have already dismissed the organization on the basis of one comment made on Maryam Namazie’s blog

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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The International Campaign Against Honour Killings (ICAHK) reports a large demonstration yesterday in Arbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, against so-called “honour” killings, and against the large mob-murder of one young woman, Du’a Khalil Aswad, in particular. Hers is only one story; the UN has already recorded 40 such “honour” killings in the Kurdistan region over a three-month period this year.

ICAHK’s full story follows, of the tragic circumstances which led to her death and the brutal nature of the murder itself. The ICAHK are running a petition to the Kurdistan regional government, here.

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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.

Is Google-aquisition YouTube censoring some videos that are critical of Islam? Slashdot notes that YouTube banned “popular atheist commentator Nick Gisburne” recently. Gisburne was Flagged as Inappropriate by users — by a “pressure group”, he speculates — in response to a video he posted consisting only of disagreeable quotes from the Qu’ran. This lead to the closure of his account. He opened a new account, and re-posted all his videos, but the Qu’ran-quoting video was again deleted by administrators. A very similarly formatted video of disagreeable quotes from the Bible was left in place. (The Qu’ran video can still be seen, mirrored by another user… for now? He talks about the account deletions here.)

In another emotional video response (”CENSORED again“) Gisburne thanks other YouTubers for re-posting his content, putting their own accounts on the line, but knows he cannot upload the video again or he will face the closure of his new account.

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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.)