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CAIRO – Indian activists have warned that a recent decision by a Mangalore college to ban full face-veil in classes would force Muslim students to quit education, a move that could increase dangerous illiteracy rate among Muslim women. "The burqa is a cultural symbol for Muslim women,” Ruth Manorama, president of the National Alliance of Women, told the Times of India on Friday, April 27. “I don't see any point in educational institutions putting a ban on it,” he added. The controversial ban on burqa was imposed by the St Aloysius Pre-University College as part of its prospectus for undergraduate...

A SYDNEY artist whose anti-burka mural has infuriated left-wing and Islamic activists is vowing that the provocative artwork will stay in place despite death threats, abuse, a string of vandalism attacks, a violent weekend protest and a police request to remove it. Newtown glass sculptor Sergio Redegalli has this week restored the mural painted outside his studio for more than the 40th time after dozens of graffiti and paint-bomb attacks by protesters who say it is racist and inflammatory. In the latest incident last Sunday, a crowd of 50 activists hurled paint at the mural and then turned on...

SILVER SPRING, Md. — Montgomery County police said a man wearing a burqa robbed a bank in Silver Spring. Police said the man who robbed a TD Bank branch on Briggs Chaney Road about 4:20 p.m. Tuesday was wearing a "long black burqa over his face." He also wore jeans and tan boots.

Picture me on the Eurostar, in Brussels, Belgium. The year is 2004. There’s a veil-wearing lady sitting behind me with her friend. Like most women of a certain age, they’re chattering their heads off. Later, however, the loud conversation takes a sharp turn, when the Muslim lady pontificates about the superiority of Islam and the evils of paganism. But, if I had been sharing my Protestant beliefs? From a theological perspective, there’s nothing wrong with Muslims or Christians peacefully evangelizing. I am a friend of free speech. But the subject of clothing politics (for want of a better term) is...

An MP was investigated by police for inciting racial hatred over controversial comments about the burkha following complaints from a human rights association. Conservative MP Philip Hollobone said wearing the garment was the religious equivalent of 'going round with a paper bag over your head'. During a parliamentary debate last month he urged the House of Commons to 'seriously consider' banning the garment.   Now it has emerged police received a complaint about the Kettering MP a few days after his comments from the Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council (NREC). Officers rang Mr Hollobone to say a complaint had...

Western culture has lost another battle in the clash of civilizations as Barbie dons the burqa. Burkha Barbie, by Italian designer Eliana Lorena, will be among the dolls auctioned by Sotheby's in a benefit for the nongovernment charity Save the Children. The message to little girls worldwide: Abandon all hope.

Nothing like the world of political correctness. In its desire to have something for everybody, the Mattel Corporation has decided to create a Barbie Doll wearing the symbol of the harsh Islamist Repression of women: One of the world's most famous children's toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover - wearing a burkha. Wearing the traditional Islamic dress, the iconic doll is going undercover for a charity auction in connection with Sotheby's for Save The Children. More than 500 Barbies went on show yesterday at the Salone dei Cinquecento, in Florence, Italy. 'I think this is really important for girls,...

A Muslim teacher was barred from a Roman Catholic college after refusing to remove her full-face veil so staff could identify her. The woman, who works at an Islamic school, opted to leave instead and now the college could face a claim of religious discrimination. The teacher was at an open day at the sixth-form college with two female pupils, all of them wearing niqabs showing only their eyes. After they were asked to remove them to comply with college policy, the girls, thought to be aged 15, agreed but their teacher refused and left. The incident in Justice Secretary...

On a train to London, a young woman wearing a burkha, with only her heavily made-up eyes peeping out, did not have a valid ticket. Challenged by the guard, the young woman gave a litany of excuses. She had left her bag at her boyfriend's, he had bought the ticket, she had no money on her... My friend Jane, who was in the same carriage, noticed how the guard became nervous as the Muslim girl presented herself as an innocent in a society she didn't understand. Instead of issuing a penalty fine, the guard backed off, shrugging his helplessness at...

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye. Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

- Top Islamic Proselytizer As soon as I heard about the Muslim women in hijabs being excluded from sitting behind Barack Obama at a Michigan rally, I knew what you probably knew: that CAIR and ADC and MPAC and ISNA, the alphabet soup of terrorist-sympathizing, pan-HAMAS/Hezbollah Islamofascist grievance theater, would milk the story like there's no tomorrow. It was ripe fodder for their PR branch of the jihad against America and the West. Now, I've come to learn that one of the hijab-encrusted, rejected whiners, Hebba Aref, was an official of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), in charge of proselytizing....

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama's rally in Detroit Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women's headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate. The campaign has apologized to the women, all Obama supporters who said they felt betrayed by their treatment at the rally. "This is of course not the policy of the campaign. It is offensive and counter to Obama's commitment to bring Americans together and simply not the kind of campaign we run," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, who added that the volunteers were acting...

When I came to this country, I took off my hijab. It wasn't an easy decision. I worried at night that God would punish me for it. That's what I had been taught would happen, and it filled me with fear. I was 27, coming from my home country of Iraq to study in California. I hoped that by taking off the hijab I had been wearing for eight years, I would be able to maintain a low profile. In Baghdad, you keep a low profile to stay alive. But in the United States, I merely wanted not to be...

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates-- The West believes that Islam oppresses women. But as a Muslim, descended from generations of Muslims, I have a different story to tell. It starts like this: You say, "The sea is salty." I say, "But it is blue and full of fish." I am not objective about Islam, and although I am considerably Westernized, I can never truly see it through Western eyes. I am in this religion. It is in me. And articulating the intimacy of faith and the experience of worship to a Western audience is a challenge and a discovery... Recently,...

LONDON: Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. Like little else, their appearance has unnerved Britons, testing the limits of tolerance in this stridently secular nation. Many veiled women say they are targets of abuse. At the same time, efforts are growing to place legal curbs on the full Muslim veil, known as the niqab. The past year has seen numerous examples: A lawyer dressed in a niqab was told by an immigration judge that she could not...

AN Iraqi Muslim man allegedly raped a Muslim woman as "punishment" for her reading the Bible. Campbelltown District Court in Sydney's west yesterday heard Abdul Reda Al Shawany twice sexually assaulted the woman, a practising Muslim, and then said to her: "Let your Jesus help you." Al Shawany, 52, has plead not guilty to two counts of having sexual intercourse without consent between September 1 and 27, 2002, at a unit in Warwick Farm. At the first day of the week-long trial yesterday, Crown prosecutor Michael O'Brien outlined the case and told how the woman allegedly kept the clothes and...

A model wears an outfit by Fashion East designer Louise Golden during her catwalk show at London Fashion Week in London, Monday Feb. 12, 2007. The designers are showing their Autumn/ Winter 2007/8 collections. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) A model wears an outfit by Fashion East designer Louise Golden during her catwalk show at London Fashion Week in London, Monday Feb. 12, 2007. The designers are showing their Autumn/ Winter 2007/8 collections. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) A model wears a creation by Louise Goldin for Fashion East during 2007 Autumn/Winter show at London Fashion Week in London February 12, 2007. REUTERS/Luke...

Supposedly, a mixture between a burkha and a bikini,(although some aliken it to an old fashioned swimsuit) this will allow those ladies who don't wish to share the view of their flesh to the 'toms', to partake in water activity. While this might not put an end to the perhaps odd sight of full abayas floating in the sea, it might change the landscape of the ladies beach or ladies day at Wild Wadi. We have mentioned the sports hijab before, which originated from the Netherlands. This culturally sensitive attire comes from Oz. Good on ya mate. From Ahiida -...

A man who was being hunted for the murder of a policewoman is understood to have escaped from Britain by disguising himself as a veiled Muslim woman. Mustaf Jama, a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, assumed his sister’s identity — wearing the niqab and using her passport — to evade supposedly stringent checks at Heathrow, according to police sources. The use of the niqab, which leaves only a narrow slit for the eyes, highlights flaws in British airport security. At the time, Jama was Britain’s most wanted man, while Heathrow was on a heightened state...

100 turn out in Fremont for ``Wear a Hijab/Turban Day.'' EVENT PROMPTED BY SLAYING OF AFGHAN MOTHER OF SIX They came in saffron turbans, glittering purple head scarves and blue yarmulkes to show that Fremont is not a hateful place. The catalyst for the grass-roots event was the Oct. 19 slaying of Alia Ansari. The 38-year-old mother of six was gunned down as she picked up her children from a Fremont elementary school. The Afghan native wore a chador -- a loose scarf that is also called a hijab -- over her head, as a sign of modesty mandated in...

Teheran police order 64,000 women to cover up in the heat of summer By David Blair (Filed: 29/08/2006) Police in Iran's capital, Teheran, have stopped almost 64,000 women and warned them against breaching strict Muslim dress codes in the last month alone. The authorities have chosen the height of summer for a new crackdown to ensure that women cover their heads with veils and their bodies with long, heavy overcoats whenever they can be seen in public. For years, Iran's police turned a blind eye when young women pushed the boundaries of the rules by wearing the flimsiest of veils,...

With the smoke still rising from the ruins of the al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, intelligence agents and journalists from all over the world were already combing through the rubble in an attempt to uncover information on the nature and quality of the training the camps' roughly 20,000 graduates had received. (snip) After losing its training camps, al-Qaida went on the offensive. By 2003, the entire "Encyclopedia" was suddenly available on the Internet. Thousands of illustrated pages containing bomb-building instructions, in-depth rules on how to encode information and extensive details on organizing terrorist cells were suddenly available -- in Arabic --...

The Italian author Oriana Fallaci, who once wrote that Muslims "breed like rats", may be facing up to three years in prison after she vowed to blow up a mosque.Ms Fallaci, 75, who has cancer, is due to appear in court next week charged with the lesser offence of vilifying Islam, punishable with a £3,450 fine. But after her latest outburst in the New Yorker last week Muslim leaders are demanding that she be tried for inciting religious hatred, which carries a three-year jail term. The former journalist, who has said she will not attend Monday's hearing in Bergamo, told...

Where it's playing: The film will premiere at the American Film Renaissance’s Hollywood Film Festival on January 15, 2006 at 3PM. About the project: What the West Needs to Know Islam, violence, and the fate of the non-Muslim world. 95 mins Main Idea Virtually every major Western leader has over the past several years expressed the view that Islam is a peaceful religion and that those who commit violence in its name are fanatics who misinterpret its tenets. This claim, while widely circulated, rarely attracts serious public examination. Relying primarily on Islam’s own sources, this documentary demonstrates that Islam is...

MILAN - Playing an Internet video one evening last year, an Egyptian radical living in Milan reveled as the head of an American, Nicholas Berg, was sawed off by his Iraqi captors. Yahia Ragheh, foreground, and Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed being led into a Milan court last month, charged with ties to a terror network. "Go to hell, enemy of God!" shouted the man, Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, as Mr. Berg's screams were broadcast. "Kill him! Kill him! Yes, like that! Cut his throat properly. Cut his head off! If I had been there, I would have burned him to...

Muslim wins right to reject the hijab By Anthony Browne, Brussels Correspondent ISLAMIC groups across Europe have campaigned for years for the right of Muslim women to wear the religious headscarf, or hijab. Now a Muslim woman in the Netherlands has won the right not to wear it. Samira Haddad, 32, won her case against the Islamic College of Amsterdam, which insists that all Muslim women wear the hijab. The secondary school rejected her for a job after she said in an interview that she did not wear it. The country’s Equality Commission ruled in Ms Haddad’s favour, saying that...

DAMASCUS, Nov 15 (KUNA) -- A Gulf Air passenger plane took off to Manama safely from Damascus International Airport on Tuesday after the flight was delayed due to location of a gun in a bag, a Bahraini diplomatic source said. The source told Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) that the flight was delayed after the Syrian authorities detained seven Iraqi women who tried to board the plane with a gun concealed in one of their bags.Preliminary interrogations revealed that a man, who did not show up at the air facility, was expected to accompany them on the flight. The women and...

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has warned recently of ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’. Although he was not speaking principally about Muslims, they have become perhaps the most dominant group in British society. Divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, Muslims are nevertheless united by their creed, their law and the powerful concept of the umma, the totality of Muslims worldwide. The process of migrating and establishing a Muslim community in a non-Muslim context has an important place in Islamic theology. The word hijra is used to describe such a migration, in particular the migration of Mohammed...

As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained that Allah would be extremely cross if Muslims torched any more cars, shot any more policemen, lobbed any more petrol bombs or murdered any more elderly white people. Allah wanted Muslims instead to stay at home, potter about the house, maybe watch a little TV....

The worldwide Islamic jihad has begun. The riots in France are not isolated incidents of "disenfranchised Muslim youths". They are being organized and coordinated by adults. Shortly after the rioting began, French police discovered at least one warehouse facility that contained bomb making ingredients, Molotov cocktails, black masks to hide behind, motorcycles and cell phones. This "insurgency", or more appropriately-terrorism-was planned. The Islamic mayhem in France and Denmark, and now the beginnings of the same chaos in Germany and Belgium, are neither unexpected nor are they coincidences.

"Full coverage," not your typical fashion show prerequisite, was the theme at a "fashion seminar" recently hosted by Nordstrom at the tony Tysons Corner Center mall in McLean, Va. The show, called "Interpreting Hot Trends for Veiled and Conservative Women," was perhaps the first high-fashion hijab event sponsored by corporate America. The target: well-heeled Muslim women living in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where mansions and mosques are filled with rich Muslim immigrants, an increasing number of whom shop at Tysons Corner. The Nordstrom show is part of a growing trend: Western retailers and designers are beginning to market directly...

Pakistani police on Tuesday arrested two suspected Islamic militants with explosives and bomb-making literature near the industrial city of Faisalabad. The report received on Tuesday said that one of the bearded men was wearing a head-to-toe veil, (burqa) worn by many conservative women in Pakistan. The suspects are believed to be members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an extremist Sunni Muslim militant group that was banned in 2001 for attack. The report said that the two suspects were found carrying 16 kg (35 pounds) of explosives. According to the initial investigating, the men claimed they were experts in making bombs.

A Pakistani woman candidate of the municipal elections Nasreen Bukhari, left, campaigns on Wednesday, August 17, 2005 in Peshawar, Pakistan. Bukhari is nervously campaigning this week after receiving threats from opponents who, like many religious hard liners in country's conservative northwest, prefer women should play no part in politics either as candidates or voters.

I recently set out to learn more about Islam. I had no agenda at the time except to broaden my knowledge on the subject. What I have learned sickened me. I had previously been accepting of the notion that Islam was a peaceful religion and that the Muslim terrorists who inflict so much pain and death around the world represented a fringe element outside of mainstream Islam. I was wrong. The Islamic deity, Allah, is a false god. While the term "Allah" does indeed carry the same meaning as "God," Mohammed's Allah is nothing more than a construct of a...

STOCKTON -- A San Joaquin Delta College student discovered a copy of the Quran in a library toilet Wednesday evening, an incident similar to one described in a now-retracted news report that sparked Muslim protests worldwide last week. Delta police wouldn't release the name of the student, whom they say found the Muslim holy book in the toilet of a second-floor men's bathroom in the library just after 7 p.m. Wednesday. Sgt. Geff Greenwood said the student removed the book from the toilet and placed it on a bathroom shelf before contacting the police. The scenario mirrors one described in...

On Monday, May 23, 2005, the Islamic Political party of America is calling on every Muslim, Man, Woman, in the United States of America to call the Office of the President of the US, Vice President, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, voice your Outrage over the interrogators tormenting Muslim prisoners by the worst act of “blasphemy” ever devised by man against Islam and the Holy Quran.DOWNLOAD THE FLYER FOR PRINT AND DISTRIBUTION

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The case of a Muslim woman fined for wearing a veil has created a dispute involving politicians, civil rights groups and a fashion designer. REZZO, Italy - The immediate issue is how one woman in one tiny town in northern Italy dresses, so it made a certain kind of sense for Giorgio Armani to weigh in. His opinion? A woman should wear what she likes, even if what she likes is a veil that hides her face completely. "It's a question of respect for the convictions and culture of others," Mr. Armani, the fashion designer, said in a statement released...

TAMPA - At 70 years old, Gloria Steinem cannot be considered the poster child for punk rock music. But that didn't stop the famous women's rights activist from partnering with Punkvoter.com, a Washington, D.C., collective of punk bands campaigning against President Bush. Punkvoter.com invited Steinem to join it in Tampa on Sunday for a concert stop at an Ybor City club. But before taking the stage with the bands Anti-Flag, Strike Anywhere and others, she swung by a Michael Moore rally at the University of South Florida and spoke at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser at the Columbia Restaurant. "This is...

"Women and Islam--A Westerner's Perspective" Posted by Doc Farmer Wednesday, June 04, 2003 I've lived in the Middle East region for over five years now. And although I'm not a female nor a Muslim, I think I've got a bit of an understanding of the position of women as regards the religion of Islam. It's not what you've been led to believe, either. First, let's get this misconception out of the way straight up. Female circumcision is NOT sanctioned or supported by Islam. There are some cultures that did this practice far before the rise of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh),...

TEHRAN, Iran - In a taboo-breaking step in this conservative Islamic state, an Iranian soccer club has started allowing female soccer fans into its stadium to watch games. Mahdi Dadras, manager of Tehran's Paykan club, said the decision was made because its fans don't use obscene chants and the presence of women improves his players' morale. Iranian authorities have long banned women from soccer stadiums because most fans direct distasteful language at opposing teams. On Thursday, half a dozen jubilant women were at Iran Khodro Stadium to watch a match between Paykan and Barq of Shiraz, from southern Iran. Sahar...