Archive for the ‘Interfaith relations’ Category
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
By Peter Kenny
Religion News Service
(RNS/ENInews) The Baha’i International Community said the harsh prison sentences meted out against seven Iranian Baha’i leaders are an unjust punishment against innocent people and an entire religious community.
The five men and two women imprisoned were arrested in May 2008 and later charged with “spying for foreigners,” as well as “spreading corruption on Earth” and “cooperating with Israel.”
Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, whose Defenders of Human Rights Center represented the Baha’i defendants, said she was “stunned” by the seven- to 20-year jail terms.
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Posted in Bullying, Civil Rights, Hate Crimes, Human Rights Abuses, IRAN, Interfaith relations | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
LAURA ROZEN
President Obama’s envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, who lost much of her family in Auschwitz, joined eight Muslim American clerics and other current and former U.S. officials on a trip last week to the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, in what Rosenthal, trip organizers and one of the imams told me was a transformative experience. But as I report, not everybody was so supportive of the trip in advance:
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, Education, Genocide Denial, Holocaust Denial, Human Rights, Interfaith relations, Righteous People of All Faiths, The Holocaust | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
By Marvin Hier
Earlier this year, eighteen Catholic scholars from the United States, Germany, and Australia, took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, urging him to slow down the canonization process that would designate Pope Pius XII a saint of the Catholic Church, until more evidence could be found to defend the action against charges that he failed to do enough during the Nazi Holocaust. Pope Benedict inherited the Pius XII dossier from his predecessors but angered critics, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, when he issued a decree in December 2009, recognizing Pius’s “heroic virtues,” moving him one step closer to Sainthood.
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Posted in History, Interfaith relations, The Holocaust | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
By: Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Center for Interreligious Understanding
Professor Marshall Breger, Catholic University of America
Suhail A. Khan, Institute for Global Engagement
The Very Reverend Dr. James A. Kowalski, Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
We are here as a single voice that comes from the three Abrahamic faiths, because we are seeing a new slogan ripple from downtown Manhattan across the US. Its timing particularly resonates as some of us have just returned from an unprecedented tour of concentration campsin Europe, where we stood side by side with a delegation of the most influential US Imams and Muslim leadership. Together, those of us who are Jewish and Muslim, came face-to-face with the unambiguous lesson that religious demonization can and does lead to unimaginable violence and horror.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Antisemitism, Bullying, Civil Rights, Crimes Against Humanity, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Speech, History, Holocaust Denial, Human Rights, Human Rights Abuses, Interfaith relations, RELIGION-BASED MURDERS, Righteous People of All Faiths, words that wound | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
By Chris Bowlby
BBC News
The small Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German) has long felt that it suffered from association with the horror of the nearby Nazi death camp, but some residents hope the town can begin to be seen in a more positive light.
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Posted in Interfaith relations, Museums and Memorials, The Holocaust | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 17, 2010; 9:36 AM
On Dec. 8, 2009, the New York Times published a story about a planned development in lower Manhattan:
“The building has no sign that hints at its use as a Muslim prayer space, but these modest beginnings point to a far grander vision: an Islamic center near the city’s most hallowed piece of land that would stand as one of ground zero’s more unexpected and striking neighbors.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Civil Rights, Commemorations, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Speech, Human Rights, Interfaith relations, Museums and Memorials, NEWS, POLITICS, Propaganda, Stereotyping, Stopping Hate, Terrorisim, United States, journalism, words that wound | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Like many countries in Eastern Europe, Poland is dotted with hundreds of Jewish cemeteries left behind when the country’s Jewish population was decimated during World War II. But Poland’s Jewish community and its Prison Service are teaming up to care for the grave sites and combat anti-Semitism at the same time.
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, Europe, History, In Memoriam, Interfaith relations, Poland, Stopping Hate | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
The cycle of outrage and offence set off by the Danish cartoons of Muhammad continues in Sweden
Andrew Brown
Something strange and nasty is happening in Sweden, where the struggle over free speech and blasphemy is moving into physical violence. Last week, Lars Vilks, the artist who had a price put on his head by al-Qaida after he drew a sketch of Muhammad as a comic dog on a roundabout, was lecturing at Uppsala university on free speech. He showed a film by the Iranian-born Dutch artist Sooreh Hera, which alternates slides of gay soft porn with pictures of religious leaders and iconography until two men wearing a masks of the prophet are seen making out; at this point a sixteen-year-old Muslim youth in the audience jumped up and headbutted him, while other protesters started shouting “Allahu Akbar”. The audience had all been searched before they were allowed in, and security police were on hand to overpower the protestors, but it was still a noisy and frightening piece of theatre.
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Posted in Bullying, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Crimes, Hate Speech, Interfaith relations | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Seventeen members of Congress are pressing the State Department to act on the “grim reality” faced by Coptic Christian women in Egypt, who frequently are coerced into violent forced marriages that leave them victim to rape and captive slavery.
The bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote on April 16 to Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, who heads up American efforts to thwart human trafficking around the globe.
In their letter, they exhort the State Department to confront the “criminal phenomenon” of forced marriage they say is on the rise in Egypt, where the 7 million Coptic Christians often face criminal prosecution and civic violence for their rejection of Islam.
“I think it is about as bad as it can be” for Copts and other religious minorities in Egypt, said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who penned the letter. “It is very tough to be a Coptic Christian.”
read more here
Posted in AFRICA, Bullying, Civil Rights, Democracy, GENDER HATE, Hate Crimes, Hate Speech, Human Rights Abuses, Human Trafficking, Interfaith relations, RELIGION-BASED MURDERS, Racism, Terrorisim, The Middle East, Women's Rights | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
John Feffer
Co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus
Let’s imagine that the Cold War was a detour. The entire 20th century, in fact, was a detour. Since conflicts among the 20th-century ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) cost humanity so dearly, it’s hard to conceive of World War II and the clashes that followed as sideshows. And yet many people have begun to do just that. They view the period we find ourselves in right now — the so-called post-Cold War era — as a return to a much earlier time and a much earlier confrontation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t discrete battles against a tyrant (Saddam Hussein) or a tyrannical group (the Taliban). They fit together with Turkey’s resurgence, the swell of Muslim immigration to Europe, and Israel’s settlement policy to form part of a much larger struggle.
read more here.
Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Antisemitism, Civil Rights, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, Education, Europe, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, GENOCIDE, Genocide survivors, Hate Crimes, Hate Speech, History, Human Rights, Human Rights Abuses, Interfaith relations, The Holocaust, The Middle East, Turkey, United States, War Crimes | No Comments »