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...From its very inception the Baha'ism has suffered from sects, denominations, isms, schisms and offshoots of various sorts. The Baha'i Faith developed as an offshoot of the Babi Faith, which developed as an offshoot of Shaykhism, which developed as an offshoot of Ithna-'Ashariyyih, which developed as an offshoot of Sufism, which developed as an offshoot of Shi'ite, which developed as a denomination of Islam. The death of the first Guardian Shoghi Effendi gave rise to the greatest number of these groups who all claim to be the one true Baha'i Faith since...

When a mother of two can be sentenced to death by stoning on the basis of a disputed confession of adultery and without proper legal representation, there is little reason for faith in the fairness or mercy of Iran's judicial system. But as in the appalling case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 20-year jail sentences just handed out to seven Bahá'í leaders must provoke an international outcry in the hope that the Iranian government can be shamed into thinking again. ............. The catch-all charge of espionage exposes the reality behind the regime's cruel behaviour. Over the years, Bahá'ís have found...

NEW YORK — The harsh prison sentences handed down to seven Iranian Baha'i leaders who are absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing is a judgment against an entire religious community, the Baha'i International Community said today. Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, whose Defenders of Human Rights Center represented the Baha'i defendants, said she was "stunned" by the reported 20-year jail terms. (/multimedia/slideshow.php?storyid=789) The incarceration of the seven Baha'i leaders is the latest development in a deliberate policy of the Iranian government to suffocate the Baha'i community. Systematic plans were drawn up in 1991 - at the request of the Leader of the...

NEW YORK — The harsh prison sentences handed down to seven Iranian Baha'i leaders who are absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing is a judgment against an entire religious community, the Baha'i International Community said today. Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, whose Defenders of Human Rights Center represented the Baha'i defendants, said she was "stunned" by the reported 20-year jail terms. (/multimedia/slideshow.php?storyid=789) The incarceration of the seven Baha'i leaders is the latest development in a deliberate policy of the Iranian government to suffocate the Baha'i community. Systematic plans were drawn up in 1991 - at the request of the Leader of the...

Faith, life and death in Iran Bahá'í leaders are being made scapegoats. We must press Tehran to grant them a fair trial Cherie Blair The Guardian, Tuesday 12 January 2010 As the Iranian government struggles to contain growing demands for freedom and democracy from its courageous people, it is flailing around trying to deflect blame for the protests. Foreign media and other countries, including Britain, have been accused of encouraging unrest. But the regime is also ­worryingly turning on all too familiar scapegoats within Iran. Once again, followers of the Bahá'í faith within the country are in the firing line....

Arson investigators were looking Tuesday into two fires in three days that destroyed the Orlando Bahá'í Center in Orlando. The first fire in the one-story wood building on Hillcrest Street was reported at 4:48 a.m. Sunday. When the Orlando Fire Department responded to the second blaze at 12:55 a.m. Tuesday, flames were shooting through the roof. "It is unusual for something like that to happen, especially this much down time between the two," said Orlando Fire Department Commander Vicki Robles. A spokesperson for the Bahá'í Center said the fires are baffling to the members, who number about 300 in the...

Seven members of the Bahai faith in Iran are to go on trial on Tuesday on charges of spying for Israel and of "insulting sanctities".   It is not clear how long the trial of the seven Bahais will last                   Six of the Bahais were arrested in May, 2008. The other one was arrested two months earlier. They were the leaders of the Bahais in Iran. The Bahai faith is banned by the Islamic revolutionary leadership of Iran which considers it heretical. Bahais claim some 300,000 members in Iran, where the faith originated.  Midnight raids "The trial...

Seven Baha'i Leaders, who have been imprisoned since May 2008, are to appear in court on August 19 in Tehran. The court order was sent to the office of Abdolfatah Soltani, one of their defense lawyers, who is himself currently under arrest. The International Baha'i Community in Geneva announced that since Mr. Soltani is unavailable and Shirin Ebadi, the other defense lawyer in this case, is out of the country, a trial at this time will infringe on the right of these defendants to a fair hearing. They add that since the investigations and questionings were wrapped up months ago,...

The last eight years well intentioned people of different political beliefs, different religious faiths, and different cultural perspectives have been quietly asking themselves some vital questions. Is Islam a religion of peace? Is the goal of Islam violent global conquest or rather the persuasion of non-Moslems that Islam is the true religion? There are many good Moslems in our world, but is that because of Islam or in spite of Islam? These questions will be answered in Iran. There is no question (or there should not be) that the Iranian people -- actually, the different peoples of the nation of...

ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN'S PERSECUTION OPPRESSION OF MINORITIES - ISLAMIC APARTHEID In General, Christians, Baha'i, Kurds, Jews, Azeris, Baluchis, Ahwazi Arabs Again, religious persecution in IranFebruary 20, 2009Ethel C. FenigAs Thomas Lifson noted yesterday Iranian authorities destroyed a Sufi holy site, continuing their practice of pressuring and discriminating against religions that do not strictly follow the Shi'ite form of Islam.  But the Sufis are not the only religious minority suffering discrimination in Iran.   The 2500 year old Jewish community, which numbered over 80,000 thirty years ago at the time of the Khoemeni Revolution which overthrew the Shah, has dwindled to about...

Villagers attacked the homes of members of the tiny minority Baha'i faith with stones and firebombs in the south of Egypt this week, forcing families to flee for safety, rights groups said on Friday. Police later asked all Baha'is remaining in the mainly Muslim village of Shuraniya to depart, and no Baha'is were left there by the evening of April 1, a group of six Egyptian rights groups said in a joint statement, quoted by Reuters. Egyptian police have detained seven people on suspicion of vandalism in the case, security sources said. "Because the violence was ongoing, police asked them...

Some fear the oppression of a little-known religious minority in Iran is intensifyingNaeim Tavakkoli last saw his father Behrouz three years ago in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. Behrouz, a leader in among the 300,000 Iranians who follow the Baha’i religion, had failed to come home weeks earlier. Naeim, his mother, and brother searched hospitals and police stations but found no trace. Finally they were told Behrouz had been arrested by the Intelligence Ministry and were allowed to see him. The three of them sat across from Behrouz on a small bench in a tiny room with two government agents standing...

NEW YORK — Six Bahá’í leaders in Iran were arrested and taken to the notorious Evin prison yesterday in a sweep that is ominously similar to episodes in the 1980s when scores of Iranian Bahá’í leaders were summarily rounded up and killed. The six men and women, all members of the national-level group that helped see to the minimum needs of Bahá’ís in Iran, were in their homes Wednesday morning when government intelligence agents entered and spent up to five hours searching each home, before taking them away.The seventh member of the national coordinating group was arrested in early March...

TEHRAN --A bomb blast in a mosque in southern Iran on Saturday killed at least eight Iranians in southern Fars province and injured more than 50 people, the semi-official Fars news agency reported. "The death toll is expected to rise above eight because some of the injured people are in a critical condition," Fars said, without giving a source. "During the speech of a cleric in the Shohada mosque in Shiraz city, a bomb blast killed several people," Fars quoted an unnamed source as saying. Earlier, state television said the blast happened in central Iran, without giving details. Reuters ©...

Iran mosque blast kills 11, wounds almost 200 TEHRAN (AFP) — Eleven people were killed and at least 191 wounded when an explosion ripped through a packed mosque in Iran's southern city of Shiraz during prayers by a prominent cleric, officials said on Sunday.Mystery surrounded the cause of Saturday evening's blast, which some officials insisted had been triggered by an accident but other sources said could have been caused by a bomb.The massive explosion in the men's section of the mosque took place at around 9:00 pm (1630 GMT) during an evening prayer sermon by prominent local cleric Mohammad...

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iran's judiciary said on Tuesday it has sentenced 54 members of the Bahai religious community, whose faith is banned in the Islamic republic, for anti-regime propaganda. "Three Bahais have been sentenced to four years in prison for propaganda against the regime," judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi told reporters, adding that 51 received suspended one-year jail terms. He said the suspension of the sentence for the 51 Bahais was conditional on their attendance of courses held by state Islamic Propaganda Organisation. The Bahais, who were arrested early last year, were proselytizing in the southern city of Shiraz under...

JIMMY CARTER THE CRIMINAL   Jimmy Carter - infamous worst ex US president that is largely at fault for the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran (by putting extra pressure on the Shah), ultimately resulting in 1) Islamic Republic of Iran's oppression of millions of Persians, and 2) the planet in peril at the hands of that nation's mullahs' nukes.   Jimmy Carter has his hands blooded in every single violent action being perpetrated by that Islamic republic on a daily basis since 1979, including the crimes against humanity like the massacres in the 1980's, the terrible persecution on minorities such as:...

Dominating a holy mountain in Israel is the nerve centre of the world's fastest growing major religion, preaching global unity and world peace from one of the most troubled countries on earth. Founded less than 170 years ago, the Bahai faith believes that Persian-born prophet Bahuallah, who died in Israel, brought a message of unity, equality and world federation to save mankind from the plagues of the modern world. The shrine to the Bab, a messenger whose mission prepared humanity for the coming of Bahuallah, the beautiful Bahai terraced gardens and classical-style World Centre in Israel's port city of Haifa...

"The hatred of the extremist mullahs for the Baha'is is such that they, like the Taliban of Afghanistan who destroyed the towering Buddhist sculptures at Bamiyan, intend not only to eradicate the religion, but even to erase all traces of its existence in the country of its birth," says the statement, which took the form of a paid advertisement in the New York Times. Such has been the plight of one of the greatest segments of the Iranian population. In 1993, in Tehran alone, under the orders of the Islamic authorities, more than 1500 graves were bulldozed on the pretext...

To keep her perfect attendance record, Tahera Ali's 13-year-old daughter used to go to school for only a couple of hours on the Islamic Day of Ashurah, getting out just in time to attend prayers for what is a holy day of sorrow. "We wear all black on that date, and she would have to change in the car on the way" to the mosque, said the Bridgewater mother. This year it will be different. Using a little-known process that intertwines education and religion, Ali petitioned her district and this year the day was placed on New Jersey's approved list...

THE followers of Moqtada al-Sadr believe that the US invaded Iraq to prevent the return to Earth of their sect’s messiah-like figure, the Mahdi, or 12th imam.Hojatoleslam al-Sadr claims that his militia is preparing for the day when the Mahdi, the last direct descendent of the revered Shia figure Ali, reappears. Shia believe that the Mahdi, who disappeared in 868, will bring justice to Earth. At a prayer service in the central Iraqi city of Kufa on September 15, the cleric told a crowd of thousands that the Americans were collecting a dossier on the Mahdi to prevent his return....

Fact Sheet Bureau of Public Affairs Washington, DC August 4, 2006 The Iranian Regime: Human Rights and Civil Liberties Under Siege “Let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free democratic Iran.” ( President George W. Bush ) The Iranian people call out for freedom and respect for their human rights. Courageous voices that speak out risk suppression, imprisonment, and violent government crackdowns. The...

The United States Friday condemned what it said was the persecution of an Iranian of the Baha'i faith who died in prison last week. The State Department said members of minority religions and political dissidents in Iran are systematically oppressed. In a written statement, the State Department condemned the persecution and imprisonment of Iranian Baha'i adherent Zabihullah Mahrami, who died in prison in the central Iranian city of Yazd a week ago of unknown causes. Mr. Mahrami, 59, a civil servant in the government of the late Shah of Iran, had been sentenced to death by an Iranian revolutionary court...

A Baha'i who was wrongly jailed in Iran for 10 years died in his prison cell of unknown causes on Thursday, 15 December 2005, the Baha'i International Community has learned. Mr. Dhabihu'llah Mahrami, 59, was held in a government prison in Yazd under harsh physical conditions at the time of his death. His death comes amidst ominous signs that a new wave of persecutions of Baha'is has begun. This year so far, at least 59 Baha'is have been arrested, detained or imprisoned, a figure up sharply from the last several years. Arrested in 1995 in Yazd on charges of apostasy,...

Possible info source. It was announced that a lot of documents are posted for download here.

Thousands of leaflets were distributed after Friday prayers on the Temple Mount, accusing Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of being a follower of the Baha'i faith, the youngest of the world's independent religions. The Baha'i faith is a sect descending from Islam, but most Muslims don't regard it as authentically Islamic. Its founder, Bahaullah (1817-1892), is regarded by the Baha'i as the most recent in the line of messengers of God that includes Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Muhammad. Rumors about Abbas's affiliation with the Baha'i faith have been circulating among Palestinians for many years. His...

May 21— Sitting in an austere Tehran living room, her clammy hands threatening to soil her answer sheet, Sahar R. knew that it was not the usual fear of academic failure that was causing her a bout of "examination nerves." It was the terror that security officials from unknown quarters of the Iranian government might swoop into the nondescript living room, where a small group of teenagers sat furiously scribbling their undergraduate tests in the early 1990s, that set her heart racing. For if she was caught, the punishment was something the studious undergraduate preferred not to imagine. It could...

Baha’ism: A One World Religion By Darren Morrison & Vicki Morrison Let’s explore one of Satan’s tools toward a global government. The Baha’i Faith started in Iran about 150 years ago. It originated out of the Islamic Shi’ite sect, but Baha’ism is considered an independent religion. Just as Buddhism originated out of Hinduism, Just as Christianity is distinct from its parent religion Judaism also the Baha’i faith is distinct from Islam. That is important to know when understanding this cult. The primary basic belief of the Baha’i faith is that all religions came from GOD. They believe that in all...