Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday Muslims must obey the constitution and not sharia law if they want to live in Germany, which is debating the integration of its 4 million-strong Muslim population.

..."Now we obviously also have Muslims in Germany. But it's important in regard to Islam that the values represented by Islam must correspond with our constitution," said Merkel.

"What applies here is the constitution, not sharia."

Merkel said Germany needed imams "educated in Germany and who have their social roots here" and concluded: "Our culture is based on Christian and Jewish values and has been for hundreds of years, not to say thousands."

The U.S. Embassy in Dublin has sponsored a seminar on Muslim entrepreneurs and business in Ireland. A main point of the conference was the need for Sharia law compliant financial products to be used.

The U.S. Embassy supported the conference as part of President Obama’s outreach to Muslims around the world.

Ambassador Dan Rooney congratulated the organizers on Wednesday and said that the U.S was “solid partners” in the venture. He gave a copy of President Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope “ to Imam Hussein Halawa, of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland, who opened the event.

At the conference, Thomas Cooney, academic director of the Dublin Institute of Technology, stated that 76 per cent of Muslim business people in Ireland say securing finance is their biggest problem and 90 per cent said there is a need for financial products to be compliant with Islamic law.

There are 45,000 Muslims in Ireland and Islam is the third largest religion reported on census forms.

A blogger who filmed himself burning the Koran and urinating on it to put out the flames is to appear in court in eastern France, charged with incitement to religious hatred, legal sources said on Tuesday.

...In the film, which was posted on the Internet, the 30-year-old blogger from Bischheim near Strasbourg is seen sitting in his living room wearing a devil's mask and tearing pages out of a copy of the Koran to make paper airplanes.

He then throws the airplanes at two upended boxes, arranged to look like the Twin Towers in New York, before burning the book on his balcony and urinating on it.

The man, who was arrested on Monday, faces up to five years in prison after being identified by police using his telephone number which is visible in the images.

"He claims full responsibility. He says he's not a right-wing extremist but that in France he can burn the Koran, just as he can burn a Winnie the Pooh book, without worrying about the consequences," Strasbourg deputy prosecutor Gilles Delorme told Reuters.

ARTINFO:

In most places, discretely lingering outside gallery openings with a cup of white wine or a can of beer in hand may earn a disapproving look from passersby, or, at worst, a citation from especially persnickety cops. In Turkey, however, it can lead to violence. Last night, a mob of about 30 people wielding sticks and other weapons attacked attendees outside two separate art receptions at Istanbul's Beyoğlu district, with the victims claiming they were targeted for drinking in public, according to the Doğan News Agency.

The two gallery events had begun at about 7 p.m. in a local cultural center, a site of much of the city’s nightlife activity. Hundreds of visitors, many drinking outside, were reportedly in attendance at the parties, which were just 100 feet apart. According to a witness quoted by Doğan, the attack began after gallery-goers and locals entered into a dispute that eventually brought dozens of other local residents into the melee, with some smashing the windows of one gallery and spraying pepper spray inside. Five people were hospitalized with injuries from the chemical together with "broken bottles, batons, and knives," the paper reports, and 40 victims have filed complaints with local police, though only one suspect has been apprehended.

Neighborhood residents told press that there may have been more than alcohol at issue in the attack, with some reporting that attendees had harassed people on the streets in the area. Other witnesses say authorities were "too tolerant" of the attacking mob. Istanbul governor Hüseyin Avni Mutlu decried the attack. "We will not allow the repetition of such things," he is quoted as saying in the Doğan article. "It is our duty to ensure that everyone can go about their business in peace."

El Mundo (Translation T&P):

His many fans consider him almost like a prophet for having predicted 9/11and his resounding discourse on the subject led many of his lectures on the subject of "Islam, terrorism and the West." But he has many enemies too: they call him "Islamophobic.

The American analyst and director of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, is more than that. His talks are followed by hundreds of people in the auditorium and thousands of others over the Internet. You can praise or criticizehim but what it's certain is that he speaks without fear. A feature alien to many leaders of the XXI century.

"The key is not what the Islamists want to do but to be aware about what they want to do in the West. I am satisfied that there is more and more people who understand what is Islam and Jihad. You can not defeat the enemy without first defining him. If you are afraid even to the extent of being fearful of defining him, how can you stop it?" asks Pipes in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, after participating in a Forum on terrorism.

Although some call him a neocon, he has also attacked the foreign policy of former President George W. Bush. Of course his opinion on Barack Obama is worse. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero? The U.S. national recognizes that he has no in-depth knowledge of Spanish reality but believes, to sum it up, that "the Islamists are happy with the Spanish president".

Question. Do you believe people are fearful of Islam?

Image by John Griffin via Flickr

A Mail on Sunday investigation – which will alarm anyone concerned about animal cruelty – has revealed that schools, hospitals, pubs and famous sporting venues such as Ascot and Twickenham are controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public.

All the beef, chicken and lamb sold to fans at Wembley has secretly been prepared in accordance with sharia law, while Cheltenham College, which boasts of its ‘strong Christian ethos’, is one of several top public schools which also serves halal chicken to pupils without informing them. 

Even Britain’s biggest hotel and restaurant group Whitbread, which owns the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre chains, among many others, has admitted that more than three-quarters of its poultry is halal.

Animal welfare campaigners have long called for a ban on the traditional Islamic way of preparing meat – which involves killing animals by drawing a knife across their throats, without stunning them first – saying it is cruel and causes unnecessary pain.

Sharia law expressly forbids knocking the animal out with a bolt gun, as is usual in British slaughter houses. Instead, it must be sentient when its throat is cut, and the blood allowed to drip from the carcass while a religious phrase in praise of Allah is recited.

The extent of halal meat consumption, even in areas of Britain with a very small Muslim population, was revealed as the Pope, on his first visit to Britain, expressed fears that the country was not doing enough to preserve traditional Christian values and customs.

In a strongly worded speech to Parliament, he said: ‘There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.’

But it is animal rights groups which have been most vociferous in their opposition to halal slaughter. Campaign organisation Viva!, whose supporters include Heather Mills and Joanna Lumley, said in a statement: ‘Other practices which may be undertaken for religious reasons, such as polygamy or the stoning of adulterers, are not permitted in the UK.

Image via Wikipedia

As readers of the paper, this blog and viewers of Channel 4’s Dispatches will know, very disturbing things are going on at Tower Hamlets, the east London council which has fallen under the influence of an Islamic supremacist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, based at the hardline East London Mosque.

The Labour council leader, Lutfur Rahman, squirmingly refuses to deny that he was elected to his job with the IFE’s help. Several key officials and councillors are closely linked to the IFE. Various organisations controlled by the IFE, including a youth group called the Osmani Trust, have been given enormous amounts of council money.

The Osmani Trust, run by leading figures in the IFE, is a recent merger of two IFE youth organisations, Blyda and Elite Youth. Part of its purpose, according to critics, is to take vulnerable young people off the streets and imbue them with the values of the IFE.

The man in charge of its project working with local gang members, Muhammad Rabbani, is the same person who trains young IFE recruits. Last year, he told them: “Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise these believers into an organised force for change who will carry out dawah [preaching], hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law, eg Sharia law] and jihad. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order.]… We have to bear in mind that victory is for Islam and Muslims.”

Despite the exposure of all this, the council’s cabinet brazenly decided on April 7 to hand another £500,000 to the Osmani Trust. Perhaps aware of what it might do to the Labour vote at next month’s election, the decision was taken in secret – only to be notified to the public once Labour was safely back in power. But I’ve been leaked the papers. Sorry, chaps!

In September 2008, Tower Hamlets decided to spend £3.3 million on building the Osmani Trust a new youth centre, even though there is already an existing, secular youth centre just round the corner, recently refurbished by the council at massive public expense. This sum then mysteriously rose to £4 million. It then mysteriously rose again, in June 2009, to £4.4 million.

This month, the Osmani Trust was secretly granted yet another half-million, taking the total council contribution to this project to £4.9 million – nearly 50% higher than the original amount. It will be given in the form of four and a half years’ free rent on the premises the council has just built them and is supposedly because the Osmani Trust has agreed to raise a similar amount from its other income for fixtures and fittings of the new building.

In fact, of course, quite a lot of the Osmani Trust’s “other income” also comes from… Tower Hamlets council. Last year Blyda and Elite Youth together scored a handy £400,000 worth of grants from the council, excluding money for the new building. They got a further £365,000 from other public sector bodies, including the NHS and the Big Lottery Fund. Nearly 70 per cent of their funding comes from the public purse.

As well as being done in secret, the decision to give the extra half-mill was taken under an unusual “urgency procedure”. So the alternative explanation for the council’s action, of course, is that they are anticipating defeat – and need to shovel as much public money as they can into the Islamists’ coffers before that happens.

Whatever the reason, the continued willingness of Tower Hamlets council to act as a paymaster for Islamists needs to be exposed to the public while they still have a chance, at the polls, to stop it.