Sharia Law Being Used in Germany in Muslim Domestic Disputes | Newsnet 14:
Background:
"Muslims should obey Law, not Sharia", Merkel says.

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."

Source.



Background:
Germany: conservative leaders reject President Wulff's remarks about Islam.

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.

Source.

MSNBC:

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.

This is a similar case to the one of the Fla. pastor. I think this kind of moves are a little bit stupid. He's not solving anything with this move. But he's got a point: a book, whatever the meaning others give to it, it's just a book. Other considerations would really mean that what other people believes in, we should too. That is, in this case, that we all should consider the Qu'ran as a holy book or, in other words, that the Sharia is legal.

A boom in sales of halal products, including alcohol-free bubbly and goose liver paté approved by Islamic law, is being driven by the emergence of an affluent middle class of young Muslims in France. Known as the beurgeois – a play on bourgeois and the word beur, slang for a French person of North African descent – these new consumers are behind a rapidly expanding and highly profitable market in halal food and drinks.
With spending power worth an estimated €5.5bn a year these under-40s are forcing international food suppliers to cater for their demands. Younger members of France’s estimated 5 million-strong Muslim community - with whom relations have been strained by the recent debate on national identity and threats by Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-of-center government to ban the burqa - are asserting their economic muscle. As one French website put it, halal is “very good business” for French companies.

The problem is not that they buy and consume halal products (besides the suffering animals get when they are slaughtered with halal methods). The problem would be when they would like everyone else to eat the same (pork restrictions or alcohol ban in quarters mostly inhabited by Muslims for example).

Anyway, seeing Shariah Law introducing itself on France because "it is a good business", doesn't make me feel comfortable. It gives me the creeps... really.