Signal, No Noise

April 26, 2010

U.S. drone strike kills five in Pakistan

Filed under: Asia,Counterterrorism,Pakistan,South Central Asia,Terrorism — mungurk @ 08:29

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Three missiles fired by U.S. drone aircraft struck a militant compound in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region near the Afghan border on Monday, killing five militants, intelligence officials said.

The strike took place about 24 km (15 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, known as a hotbed of Taliban and al Qaeda militants, they said.

“We have got confirmed reports of five dead but the number could be higher,” said a Pakistani intelligence official in the region, who declined to be identified.

Another official said militants had cordoned off the area.

It was the second attack by pilotless U.S. aircraft in the area in the past two days. Seven militants were killed in a similar strike Saturday.

The United States, struggling to stabilise Afghanistan, stepped up its missile strikes in Pakistan’s northwest after a Jordanian suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees at a U.S. base across the border in the eastern Afghan province of Khost in December.

Most of the attacks this year have been in North Waziristan.

U.S. ally Pakistan officially objects to the drone strikes, saying they are a violation of its sovereignty and fuel anti-U.S. feeling, which complicates Pakistan’s efforts against militancy.

Unofficially, however, analysts say Pakistan is cooperating with the United States in identifying at least some of the militant targets the drones attack.

Separately, militants murdered a pro-government cleric in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border after kidnapping him along with three villagers Sunday, a government official said.

“Taliban kidnapped the men when they were going to a mosque in afternoon. They cut his throat and dumped his body on the side of a road,” the official, Adalat Khan, told Reuters.

The three villagers were still missing, he said.

Government forces have largely driven militants out of Bajaur, which was for years a Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold, after months of intermittent clashes.

Security forces have also largely cleared the Swat valley, nothwest of Islamabad, and the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border.

But despite that, the militants have time and again shown they are capable of striking back with attacks, not only in their former bastions but in towns and cities across the country.

But overall, security force successes against the militants over the past year have dispelled fears that nuclear-armed Pakistan was sliding into chaos.

March saw the second highest ever monthly foreign inflow into the Karachi Stock Exchange with $113 million. Foreign investors have bought shares worth a net $66.39 million in April, according to official data.

(Reporting by Haji Mujtaba and Alamgir Bitani; Writing by Kamran Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel and Sanjeev Miglani)

April 12, 2010

NY Times Promotes Hallucinogens for Near-Death Patients, Reminiscent of MK-ULTRA

Filed under: Americas,Drugs,North America,USA — mungurk @ 18:55

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April 11, 2010
By JOHN TIERNEY

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled throughchemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”

Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.

Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.

Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.

The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.

The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Although federal regulators have resumed granting approval for controlled experiments with psychedelics, there has been little public money granted for the research, which is being conducted at Hopkins, the University of Arizona; Harvard; New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and other places.

The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”


The Link Between Engineers and Jihad

Filed under: Christianity,Islam,Judaism,Religion,Terrorism — mungurk @ 00:17

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Newsweek | March 1, 2010
By Benjamin Sutherland

Intelligence agencies tasked with profiling the terrorist mind, and figuring out where future extremists might be found, have begun focusing on a surprising target: science students. As it turns out, many recruits in extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, and Hamas have backgrounds in medicine, engineering, and other hard sciences. In one study by Oxford sociologists -Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, who will be publishing a book on the subject next year, out of 178 terrorists with higher education, almost half studied math or science. And the phenomenon is not limited to Islamists–strong links to science and engineering studies have been found among neo-Nazis, too, and engineers disproportionately supported Hitler and Mussolini during World War II.

With an eye on such statistics, Western and Israeli intelligence agencies are now ramping up their monitoring of hard–sciences departments in universities across the Middle East, says Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence operative and current head of the -Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, which advises foreign intel agencies. U.S. officials are also apt to give visa requests from engineering students extra scrutiny, says Juan Zarate, deputy national-security adviser for counterterrorism under former president George W. Bush.

So why do geeks disproportionately turn to terror? According to personality experts, engineers are more likely than humanities students to view society like a big machine. And when that machine breaks down, engineers often tend to think it can be fixed by eliminating the so-called bad parts and replacing them with good ones. This clear distinction between right and wrong, good and bad, broken and fixed, appeals to scientific minds, which are more likely to be troubled by the idea that life might have messy moral gray -areas. It’s a mindset of “either the equation works or it doesn’t,” says Mitchell Silber, head of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department. Silber says this mentality helps explain why engineers are more likely to make literal interpretations of Islamic holy writings that appear to call for violence or jihad.

The ability to get inside the engineering mind is also proving helpful when suspects are captured, says Ami Angell, former civilian head of a Department of Defense-funded -insurgent-rehabilitation program at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. The rehab program had a rough start in 2007, says Angell, but results drastically improved when the program was tweaked to target the insurgents’ love of logic. Respected Iraqi clerics refocused class discussions on Quran passages that appeared to highlight the need to interpret scripture in context, rather than just literally; and they pushed the students to make clear arguments about why indiscriminate killing would not make society a better place. Angell says appealing to the extremists’ logical side was “crucial” to the program’s success. Of course, not all terrorists are rational–far from it. But for those who are, using the rigor of their own disciplines against them may prove a powerful new tool in the war on terror.

April 7, 2010

A Jewish Movement to Shroud the Female Form

Filed under: Israel,Judaism,Middle East,Religion — mungurk @ 23:28

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March 17, 2008

Followers of a spiritual leader in Beit Shemesh, Israel, believe in a strict interpretation of the Torah in which women cover themselves head to toe. Jerusalem-based reporter Sheera Frenkel, who writes for The Times of London, says the look is similar to the burqa many women wear in Afghanistan.

Converts wearing the so-called Jewish burqa, or sal, Frenkel says, are attracting attention in a Jerusalem suburb known for educated, affluent commuters. Frenkel says the movement centers largely in a village outside the town’s center, where extremely devout converts from the United States and England have settled. Followers also dot Jerusalem and outposts on the West Bank.

“It’s an incredibly warm place,” Frenkel says, explaining how unusual the heavy clothing is in Israel. “Here’s a woman wearing six layers of clothing.”

Frenkel says locals tend to assume that the covered women aren’t Jewish. “People think they’re Arab women,” she explains, noting that they are circulating in areas where strong feelings prevail about the Arab Muslim coverings for women.

Frenkel says that approximately 100 women currently follow the teachings of Keren, the female religious leader who says covering women was originally a Jewish tradition. Keren claims to have seen an image from 400 years ago of Jewish women covered from head to toe, but Frenkel says experts believe there are no historical references to back up her claims. Frenkel also says Keren is not in any way ordained, a circumstance that has drawn ire from area rabbis.

But the women’s husbands and relatives are perhaps the most unhappy with the movement. Some men, Frankel says, accuse the covered women of being immodest, because they draw more attention to themselves with their unusual dress.

In Israel, Frenkel says, “modesty is blending in, not drawing attention to yourself.”

Islamic Televangelists Draw Acolytes, Critics

Filed under: Africa,Britain,Egypt,Europe,Islam,North Africa,Northern Europe,Religion — mungurk @ 23:26

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July 22, 2005

Religion and television have been a powerful combination in this country, and the same thing is true in the Middle East. Arab channel surfers looking for a dose of Islamic preaching needn’t look far.

Amr Khalid, a 38-year-old former accountant from Egypt, is one of a handful of Islamic televangelists winning converts among young, upper-middle class Arabs. He and others use many of the same techniques used by Christian televangelists in the West.

Threatened by Khalid’s popularity, the Egyptian government banned him from preaching in his own country. He now lives in England, but his satellite TV shows and Internet site are more popular than ever.

Pope Meets With Muslim Scholars

Filed under: Americas,Christianity,Europe,Islam,North America,Religion,Southern Europe,USA,Vatican — mungurk @ 23:16

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November 7, 2008

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

Muslim and Catholic scholars held an unprecedented meeting at the Vatican. Over three days they vowed to work together to combat violence and terrorism, especially when carried out in God’s name. A joint declaration called for freedom of conscience but did not address the issue of conversion. NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports from Rome.

SYLVIA POGGIOLI: 58 scholars, 29 from each faith, gathered at the Vatican for an inter-religious dialogue under the theme ‘Love of God, Love of Neighbor.’ At a final public session the Muslim delegation spokesman Ibrahim Kalin(ph) read from the final declaration.

Mr. IBRAHIM KALIN (Spokesman, Muslim Delegation): We professed that Catholics and Muslims are called to be instruments of love and harmony among believers and for humanity as a whole. Renouncing any oppression, aggressive violence and terrorism, especially that committed in the name of religion and upholding the principle of justice for all.

POGGIOLI: The Muslim-Catholic forum came two years after Pope Benedict in a speech at Regensburg University in Germany used language that suggested Islam is violent and irrational. The words triggered angry protest in the Islamic world. Dozens of Muslim scholars then wrote a letter to the Pope refuting his statements and calling for better mutual understanding. It came to be known as the common initiative, gathering together 271 religious leaders and scholars from Sunni, Shiites, Sufi and other traditions in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Ingrid Mattson, a convert who heads the largest Muslim organization in North America, said the initiative was born out of a sense of urgency that religion has become an unacceptable source of conflict.

Dr. INGRID MATTSON (Islamic Society of North America): Our misunderstandings have created conflict and tension in the world in a way that has alarmed us. And we feel a sense of shame that our sacred faiths are the reason or the justification for such conflicts.

POGGIOLI: Earlier in the day Pope Benedict told the forum there is a great and vast field in which we can act together in defending and promoting the moral values which are part of our common heritage. And he called on both faiths to resolve to overcome past prejudices and to correct the often distorted images of the other which even today can create difficulties in our relations. At the final public session, French Catholic scholar Joseph Maila(ph) pointed out however that neither side would compromise on issues of theology.

Mr. JOSEPH MAILA (French Catholic Scholar): (Through Translator) Our dialogue is not an amiable exchange; we’re affirming our convictions, not opinions. This are our beliefs, these are the essence of our lives. We’re not ready to make concessions about our faith or our roots.

POGGIOLI: Asked by a reporter why the thorny issue of conversion was missing from the joint statement, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian Muslim scholar at George Washington University, said in the past Muslims had been killed for converting to another faith, because in the Muslim world Islam was closely allied to the state and therefore conversion was tantamount to treason. He said many Muslim jurors are now redefining the concept of apostasy. The Vatican is particularly concerned about repression of Christian minorities in some Islamic countries, but the Muslim delegation did not include any participants from Saudi Arabia, a country which does not allow worship of non-Muslim religions. And at the final session Ramsey Das(ph), an Iraqi Christian, said that Christians are being forced to flee Iraq in Palestinian territories and are now an endangered species.

Mr. RAMSEY DAS (Iraqi Christian): We are now dying. We are being subjected to genocide. We are being subjected to conversion.

POGGIOLI: But the Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr said the prosecution of Christians in the Middle East is small compared to that of Muslims in Bosnia in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and he blamed the current violence against Christians in the Middle East on the Bush administration.

Professor SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR (George Washington University): Unfortunately, tragically, because the Middle East became crushed under the pressure of a power which the ordinary people associate with Christianity.

POGGIOLI: The Catholic-Muslim forum will now meet every two years and the two delegations agreed to study the possibility of creating a permanent community to deal jointly with conflicts and emergency situations such as the 2006 Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that sparked violent protest in the Islamic word. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.

Latinas Choosing Islam over Catholicism

Filed under: Americas,Central America,Christianity,Islam,Mexico,North America,Religion — mungurk @ 23:13

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September 24, 2006

The Catholic Church has been grappling with an exodus of Latin Americans over the past few decades. A small yet growing segment of the Hispanic population is leaving Christianity altogether and converting to Islam — and most of them are women.

LIANE HANSEN, host:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I’m Liane Hansen. Over the past few decades the Catholic Church in America has seen an exodus of Latin American congregants from its pews. Experts point to growing competition from other denominations, primarily evangelical Christianity. However, an emerging segment of the Hispanic population is converting to Islam. And as NPR’s Rachel Martin reports, most of them are women.

RACHEL MARTIN: In Union City, New Jersey, Spanish is the language on the signs and on the street corners. Specialty stores sell ornate gold crucifixes and Latin pop hits blare from storefronts. But just around the corner, Spanish conversations mingle with a different rhythm.

(Soundbite of music)

MARTIN: Here at the North Hudson Islamic Education Center, weekly classes on what it means to be a Muslim cater to the mosque’s growing Hispanic population. Mosque leaders say 10 years ago there were only a handful of Hispanics at Friday prayers, and today there are roughly 150. On this night a couple dozen new Spanish-speaking converts gather in a small classroom next to the main prayer room.

(Soundbite of classroom)

MARTIN: Children chase each other around the room while their mothers, wearing different versions of the hijab headscarf, situate themselves at a long table or on the floor. They’re here for a lesson on Islamic doctrine, but a different kind of learning takes place after class, when prospective converts talk with mentors. Fifty-seven-year-old Ramona Gravis(ph) is a native of Costa Rica. She started looking into Islam a couple of years ago after her son converted. She’s close to making the declaration of Islamic faith, or shahaadah, but she’s worried about how her husband is going to deal with it.

Ms. RAMONA GRAVIS (Contemplating Conversion to Islam): (Spanish spoken)

MARTIN: The problem with my husband, she says, is that he’s embarrassed by what other people are going to think and say when I start to wear hijab. Deana Santos(ph) nods her head with understanding. Santos converted to Islam more than a decade ago, when she was a teenager, in her home country Spain. She’s been pushing the North Hudson mosque to provide counseling to help new converts deal with family relationships, but for the time being she’s helped set up an informal women’s support network.

Ms. DEANA SANTOS (Convert to Islam): So you try to help. When you see a new convert, you try to talk to the – how is it going to be with their families? And like when I convert, I understood what she’s going through. I didn’t wear hijab immediately, because I know my family was going to kill me or like make a big deal out of it. You are not an Arab, you’re a Hispanic woman. You cannot convert.

MARTIN: Official data on Hispanic conversion to Islam is scarce. The U.S. census bureau doesn’t track religious statistics. But according to the Islamic Society of North America, there are roughly 40,000 Hispanic Muslims in the U.S. Experts say there is an increasing trend of Hispanic converts to Islam, much of which has to do with the changing demographics. As the Hispanic population grows, so does the number of Hispanic Muslims. And most of them are women like Wendy Diaz(ph). The native Puerto Rican says she was drawn to Islam in large part because of its strict guidelines on women’s appearance, rules she says make her feel honored and protected.

Ms. WENDY DIAZ (Convert to Islam): I found myself to be getting more respect as a woman. I would be able to go to a job interview and get a job based on my intelligence, not on the way that I looked. And likewise, from the opposite sex I wouldn’t get that negative attention that a lot of women get.

MARTIN: Yvonne Hadad(ph) is a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University.

Professor YVONNE HADAD (Georgetown University): Whereas American culture gives them freedom but not respect, Islam may restrict their freedom, but it gives them a lot of respect.

MARTIN: Hadad says Hispanic women are drawn to Islam because it reflects the values of the patriarchal conservative societies of Latin America that have been diluted in modern American culture.

Prof. HADAD: There is a group of women who are very unhappy with the feminist movement that has left them behind. There is some restriction which probably these women want to put on themselves. They don’t want to be socially active the way American society demands of them. They’re very comfortable in being a wife and a mother.

MARTIN: But they also come to Islam for something more, something they didn’t get from the Catholic Church. The Catholic Almanac estimates that roughly 100,000 Hispanics in the U.S. leave the Catholic Church every year. Twenty-year-old Gabby Gonzalez(ph) is one of them. Like other converts, Gonzalez found the Catholic Church too bureaucratic and too impersonal. She also had a hard time with certain aspects of the faith, like the hierarchy of the church, belief in the Trinity and original sin. She remembers going to mass weekly with her grandmother and cousins, and just feeling lost.

Ms. GABBY GONZALEZ (Convert to Islam): We would go and, you know, they would never explain to us, you know, why we have to go to church. They would never explain to us – they would just say, you know, you just have to do it because our grandparents told us to do it. You know, they told us like a generation thing that they had. So okay, but I never had a purpose of, like, okay, why am I kneeling, you know? Or why am I putting my hands together? Why am I exalting the image that I have in front of me?

MARTIN: A couple years ago Gonzalez started visiting Protestant churches, even some synagogues, looking for a spiritual home. Eventually a Muslim friend introduced her to a local imam. He gave her some books and answered her questions, and late last year Gonzalez took her pledge of faith. She’s put away her ripped jeans and tank tops. Now she wears the niqab, the all-encompassing black Islamic dress that reveals only her big brown eyes. And she talks about her new faith with all the enthusiasm of a new convert who’s found new meaning.

Ms. GONZALEZ: It’s about community and unity, you know. Everywhere we go we carry this strong passion, this feeling that, you know, everything we do is for a…

MARTIN: But her decision came as a shock to her family. And she recalls the nerve racking moment when she told her father, a devout Catholic.

Ms. GONZALEZ: I’m like sweating and I didn’t know how to tell him, you know, because he comes from – you know, we come from a different culture. And I said, hey dad, you know, I just want to tell you that, you know, I, you know, how, you know, I – I have a love for God and, you know, I just want to tell you that I declare my faith today and, you know, I took Islam. And you know, I’m a Muslim.

MARTIN: At first she says her father dismissed her foray into Islam as a teenage phase. But then Gonzalez stopped eating pork, started praying five times a day and started wearing the hijab, which eventually got her kicked out of the house.

Ms. GONZALEZ: That’s when my mom said, okay, you know, that’s it. I’ve had it. You have to speak to her. I can’t have her here anymore. You know, she – I feel like she’s not, like, with – like us and everything. So my father took me aside and he told me – he asked me either Islam or us.

MARTIN: Yvonne Hadad of Georgetown University says this kind of reaction is not uncommon.

Prof. HADAD: For a lot of families, they see it as a rejection of the values that they had tried to raise their kids on, and they find it very hard. And some people come around eventually.

MARTIN: For other converts, managing family relationships after converting has been a little easier. Dressed in a hot pink trench coat and matching headscarf, 31-year-old Linda Rodriguez stands in stark contrast to the rest of the women at the North Hudson mosque. When the divorced mother of one converted to Islam five years ago, her Puerto Rican family thought they would lose her to a different religion and a different way of life. But over the years she’s integrated Islam into her life in a way that reflects her devout faith but leaves plenty of room for her to embrace her identity as a Latina. It’s this balance, she says, that’s helped her family come to terms with her new religion.

Ms. LINDA RODRIGUEZ (Convert to Islam): As time has passed by, they’ve seen the difference in me, and they’ve started to accept it. And they realize that it’s not a phase. This is already who I am.

MARTIN: Like other converts, Rodriguez came to Islam not through any organized outreach program but through a friend of a friend and what started as casual conversations about faith. Officials with the Islamic Society of North America say individual mosques are engaging more with growing Hispanic communities, but active proselytizing isn’t part of Islamic tradition or doctrine. Instead, they say, they’re opening the door to Islam, and Hispanic women are choosing to walk through.

Rachel Martin, NPR News, Washington.

Israeli Neo-Nazis Arrested

Filed under: Israel,Judaism,Middle East,Religion,Terrorism — mungurk @ 20:59

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by LINDA GRADSTEIN

JACKI LYDEN, host:

Police in Israel today announced they had arrested members of a neo-Nazi cell formed by immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The group is suspected of involvement in dozens of attacks on foreign workers, religious Jews and gays. News of the arrest sparked outrage in Israel and called to tighten the country’s immigration laws.

NPR’s Linda Gradstein reports from Jerusalem.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: The front page of Israel’s largest circulation daily, Yediot Aharonoth, featured a large picture of six young men raising their arms in a Nazi salute. A banner headline had only one word. Unbelievable.

A gag order in the case was lifted today. Israeli Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the suspects were arrested over the past few weeks, and one fled the country.

Mr. MICKY ROSENFELD (Spokesman, Israeli Police): Eight individuals were arrested being part of a neo-Nazi cell that operated both on an ideological level, as well as in operational level here in Israel, in Petah Tikva; carried out a number of attacks on foreigners, Asians, Jewish people that wore yamakas.

GRADSTEIN: Members of the group took videos as they beat, kicked, and punched innocent people they had cornered inside buildings. This video footage was aired repeatedly in Israel TV. Rosenfeld said the group had strong ties and connections to other neo-Nazi cells active in Germany and elsewhere.

Police also seized explosives, a pistol and an M16 rifle from members of the group. Rosenfeld said all of the suspected members age 17 to 19 came from the former Soviet Union.

Mr. ROSENFELD: They are in fact not Jewish. However, they came to Israel based on the law of return as their family, grandparent or great grandparent were Jewish.

GRADSTEIN: Under Israel immigration law, anyone with one Jewish grandparent is eligible to become an Israeli citizen with full benefits. In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union moved to Israel. Many of them are not Jewish according to Jewish law.

Ephraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told Israel television many of the immigrants came to Israel largely for economic reasons.

Dr. EPHRAIM ZUROFF (Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center): In other words, if we allowed the entry into Israel of people who have actually no connection to the Jewish religion, Jewish culture, the Jewish narrative, it’s not surprising such people will be alienated here, and some of them may turn to this kind of crazy ideas.

GRADSTEIN: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the neo-Nazi cell an isolated phenomenon. But he also said that Israel, as a society, has failed in educating these youths and keeping them away from dangerous ideologies. He called for harsh punishment to deter teens from participating a neo-Nazi activity.

The Israeli interior ministry said it would consider revoking the citizenship of the 18 suspected of involvement if they are convicted. Other lawmakers said Israel should change the law of return and make it harder for non-Jewish relatives to get Israeli citizenship.

Linda Gradstein, NPR News, Jerusalem.

Disruptive Jewish Settlers Anger Israeli Officials

Filed under: Israel,Judaism,Middle East,Religion — mungurk @ 20:57

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by ERIC WESTERVELT

October 30, 2008

There is a growing confrontation between the Israeli government and radical Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. After security forces destroyed an unauthorized settler outpost, the settlers called for violence against Israeli soldiers and rampaged through a Palestinian village. Senior Israeli officials are pushing for tougher action against the right-wing settlers.

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

The ongoing tension between the Israeli government and radical Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has increased in recent days. This week security forces moved in and destroyed an unauthorized settler outpost. The settlers responded by calling for violence against Israeli soldiers, and they rampaged through a Palestinian village. Senior Israeli officials are now calling for tougher action. NPR’s Eric Westervelt reports.

ERIC WESTERVELT: In the middle of the night recently, Israeli soldiers and border police with heavy construction equipment converged on the small hillside farm of Noam and Elisheva Federman near the settlement of Kiryat Arba outside Hebron. The Israeli government had declared this two-family outpost illegal. On Sunday, the state moved in to demolish the buildings and remove Jewish settlers who believe their right to the land comes from God, not the government. Thirty-six-year-old Elisheva Federman stands near the rubble of what was her home. She says some of her nine children were roughed up by the Israeli security forces and then forced out of the trailer they’ve been living in for the last three years.

Ms. ELISHEVA FEDERMAN (Israeli Settler): They thought it was a terror attack. They thought that Arabs came to kill them. They broke everything. It was like a pogrom.

WESTERVELT: Elisheva and her husband were detained for several hours. Israeli soldiers leveled the Federman’s house and adjacent farm sheds. That same morning, in response to the demolition, angry settlers rampaged through an adjacent Palestinian village. They slashed tires and broke windows on some 80 cars and desecrated headstones at a Muslim cemetery. Several settlers were arrested for attacking Israeli police officers, and two women were detained for trying to set fire to a police car. Later, right-wing settlers called in to Israel army radio and shouted for revenge attacks against Israeli soldiers saying they should, quote, “be killed and slaughtered because that’s what they deserve,” end quote.

Human rights and peace groups and leading Israeli newspapers and politicians denounced the rampage and threats as settler terrorism. It was the latest in a series of recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians and their property. The Israeli army recently issued restraining orders against several right-wing settlers in the West Bank, effectively banning them from the area until after the Palestinian olive harvest. Professor Zeev Sternhell is one of the founders of Peace Now, a liberal group opposed to the occupation of the West Bank. Last month someone tried to kill him in a pipe bomb attack at his house in Jerusalem. He says the latest rampage underscores a culture of lawlessness among extremist settlers in the West Bank.

Professor ZEEV STERNHELL (Founder, Peace Now; Historian; Writer): They do not respect the Israeli law, decision taken in the Israeli courts. And the government is unable, unwilling, because too scared, to enforce the law.

WESTERVELT: But this time might be different. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the attacks and threats had crossed a red line.

Mr. MARK REGEV (Spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister): This extremist vigilante violence simply must stop.

WESTERVELT: Mark Regev is the Israeli prime minister’s spokesman.

Mr. REGEV: And I think as Israeli’s we have to remember that it was a right-wing extremist who assassinated Prime Minister Rabin, and as a society we can’t allow them to trample on other people’s rights, on other people’s property, on other people’s lives.

WESTERVELT: Defense chief Ehud Barak, whose ministry oversees Israeli military control of the West Bank, said security forces need to eradicate settler violence. Barak called a top-level security meeting in which he proposed that right-wing activists who use violence be banned from entering the West Bank and that some be put under administrative detention, a controversial tactic long used against Palestinians in the occupied territory.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says there are more than a hundred settler outposts on the West Bank the Israeli government considers illegal. As part of the road map peace process, the Israeli government pledged to dismantle all illegal settlements constructed since March of 2001. So far they’ve dismantled only a handful. Hagit Ofran with Peace Now says despite repeated pledges by senior Israeli officials, not one illegal outpost has been fully evacuated this year. They’re always rebuilt and repopulated, she says, just like the Federman outpost today.

At what’s left of the Federman outpost, some two dozen settlers, most of them teenagers, are already busy removing debris and rebuilding some of the structures. Elisheva defends the settler’s latest riot through a Palestinian village calling it an understandable response to the state’s demolition, and she’s unapologetic about the threats of violence against fellow Israelis.

Ms. FEDERMAN: The Israeli authorities are treating us as if we are their enemies by destroying our homes.

WESTERVELT: It’s OK to threaten Israeli soldiers?

Ms. FEDERMAN: Is it OK to do what they have done?

WESTERVELT: Elisheva then points to a newly built shack amid the rubble, a shed she and her family are now living in. We’re following God’s law, she says. And we will rebuild. Eric Westervelt, NPR News, near Kiryat Arba on the West Bank.

Six Israelis Suspected In Organ Trafficking Ring

Filed under: Israel,Middle East,Terrorism — mungurk @ 20:54

source

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

April 7, 2010

Six Israelis were detained on suspicion of running an international organ trafficking ring and breaking promises to donors to pay for their removed kidneys, police said Wednesday.

Police also said they prevented several would-be donors from giving up their kidneys, intercepting some at Israel’s airport as they were preparing to travel abroad for surgery.

The traffickers offered up to $100,000 per kidney but in at least two cases didn’t pay the donors after the organs were surgically removed, police said.

The number of actual transplants was not known, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. He added that “dozens” of potential donors answered newspaper ads placed by the ring.

The donors were flown to Europe, South America or Southeast Asia, where the organs were extracted. They often returned home empty-handed and with medical complications, police said. Israeli law bans organ sales.

One of the arrested suspects is a retired Israeli army general, police said. Further arrests were expected following a monthslong undercover investigation across the whole country, police added.

Police notified several potential donors shortly before surgery, as well as several people who had already traveled abroad and others who were stopped at the Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Rosenfeld said.

He said the six suspects were arrested “at different times based on where it was most convenient and most necessary.”

In an unrelated case last year, an FBI sting in New Jersey exposed an organ trafficking ring that operated for more than a decade. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, an American, was charged with conspiring to arrange the sale of an Israeli citizen’s kidney for $160,000.

Organ donors in that case were brought to the U.S. from Israel, where their kidneys were removed, according to the indictment.

The New Jersey case mushroomed from an investigation into money laundering and trafficking in kidneys and fake designer bags to a political corruption probe, resulting in 44 arrests.

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