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Six translations of Qur'an 4:34: "Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful, during the husband's absence, because God has of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness you have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them: but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them: verily, God is High, Great!" (Rodwell's version of the Koran, Quran, 4:34) "Men have...

Well, we did the TVO show and I doubt it was Must-See TV, even by the standards of Canadian public broadcasting. I succeeded in bouncing the Sock Puppets into agreeing to a face-to-face discussion, though it wasn't my finest hour or theirs. I believe the final words of the show were me saying, "Do you wanna go to dinner?", and Khurrum Awan yelling back, "No." We didn't go for dinner, but we did have a relatively pleasant conversation after the broadcast that I thought was much more productive than the show. Khurrum was a bit chippy but the two ladies,...

Recently I reported on a speech by Michael Ignatieff under the title Ignatieff in the lion’s den and also posted Ignatieff’s non-apology by my friend Rochelle Wilner. Ignatieff had come to the Jewish community to apologize for accusing Israel of war crimes. Unfortunate he kept stressing the need for Israel to abide by international human rights law and the Geneva Convention. Irwin Cotler was in the room. I wrote to Irwin subsequently to plead with him to make Israel's case vis a vis international law. Whether he was responding to me or not, a week or so later, he delivered...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has endured years of criticism over its human rights record but now it is hitting back by setting up watchdogs in New York and Paris to challenge the West over its own rights record. Natalya Narochnitskaya, one of the leaders of the project, said the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation will offer a fresh perspective on human rights that is not hostage to the political agenda of Western governments. "American policy under the flag of democracy and human rights in actual fact is a Trotskyist permanent revolution which serves the aim of giving them (political) mastery,"...

The UN again commits human rights violations in the Congo; and ignores Zimbabwean atrocities. Every once in a while a story crosses the wires that just has to stir outrage. The latest comes from the United Nations and their peacekeeping mission in the Congo. The Congo as you know is a nation rife with violence. So the United Nations sends in peacekeepers from India and Pakistan. Guess what happens next? If you guessed the looting of the nation and the arming of one force against another, you’d be right.

.....Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian "human-rights" group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security. In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros's Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it...

Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes in today's Wall Street Journal that George Soros's Open Society Institute has been funding terrorism. In a column entitled Friends of Terror in Peru, O'Grady notes that Thursday's vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Movement," which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the...

A really inconvenient truth. In 2002, thanks to soccer star David Beckham, the world was introduced to the “metrosexual.” Two years later, and with less mainstream-media attention, we got our first exposure to “Intersex.” Intersex is not some new perversion or a weird combination of science fiction and pornography. It is an unfortunate condition that is affecting freshwater fish all over the developed world. It occurs when fish of one sex also exhibit sexual characteristics of the other sex. In 2004, for example, researchers on the Potomac River, downstream from Washington, D.C., found large-mouth bass that in most respects were...

Human Rights for Taxpayers by: Bethany Stotts, April 18, 2008 A recent conference on “The Future of Human Rights” raises the question of whether human rights advocacy masks a dual agenda of economic distribution and entitlement expansion. Hosted by Georgetown Law and the progressive Center for American Progress, the panelists offered clear evidence why human rights expansions demand matching government enforcement in order to ensure “inclusive,” egalitarian markets. Raymond Offenheiser, a speaker at the conference, explained why human rights demand government intervention. “I think the important thing to me....however, is the issue of shrinking the state in the era of...

Freshman Grace Wang has been called a traitor since appearing to support Tibetan independence at a pro-Tibet demonstration April 21. Her parents' home in China was vandalized Wednesday.A Duke student's participation in last Wednesday's pro-Tibet and pro-China protests has led to retaliation against the student and her family and has attracted international attention. The home of freshman Grace Wang in the city of Qingdao, China was allegedly vandalized as a result of her involvement in the protests. The Chronicle has obtained an image of a bucket of what appears to be feces poured in front of an apartment door from...

Of Georgetown Law and Abu Ghraib by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 14, 2008 A gathering of academics and human rights activists at Georgetown Law last week delivered some predictable broadsides at the Bush regime but also some unexpected critiques of the Clinton Administration, from which nearly half of the panelists came. Of the seven Clinton alumni to hit the podium, more than half made the case for American relativism and brought up Abu Ghraib, frequently in the same sentence: • President Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, now a visiting law professor at Georgetown, evoked the “image of Iraqi civilians...

Madeleine and her Exes by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 11, 2008 When big-name Democrats return to academia after leaving elective or appointive office, they may go through withdrawals. “I’m starting a group of former foreign ministers called ‘Madeleine and her exes,’” the first woman to serve as U. S. Secretary of State said last Tuesday. Currently, Madeleine K. Albright teaches at Georgetown. “This weekend my class is doing a simulation on Iran,” she said at the seminar co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress. “We were doing North Korea but I got tired of that.” Albright addressed a symposium on...

Muhammad Al-Munajid: Some of these heretics say: "Islam is not the private property of anyone." So what do they want? They say: "No sect has a monopoly on Islam." So what do they want? They say: "We want to issue rulings." Someone who is ignorant, who does not know any Arabic, or who has no knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence wants to issue rulings?! They say: "We reinterpret the texts." There is a very dangerous conspiracy against the religion of Islam in newspapers and in what these people say. A journalist, or one of those lowlifes, wants to... These people are...

ABC News' Eloise Harper Reports: Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is calling on President George W. Bush to boycott the opening ceremony at the Olympics this summer. First reported on the Drudge Report, Clinton's call for a boycott specifically cites China's reaction to recent violence in Tibet and inaction in Darfur. "The violent clashes in Tibet and the failure of the Chinese government to use its full leverage with Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur are opportunities for Presidential leadership," Clinton said in a written statement. "These events underscore why I believe the Bush administration has been wrong to downplay...

China is dealing with visible and invisible opposition in the months before the Beijing Olympics begin. The visible was front-and-center in the world media as the OIympic torch made its way through various countries on a circuitous route to the Games. Everywhere Chinese security is on guard against activists prepared to disrupt the flame's progress to protest China's human rights record in Tibet and in the enormous province of Xinjiang. In London, a protester tried to grab the flame away from its official bearer; at one point, the torch had to make its way through the city within the protective...

Olympics 'worsening China rights' China's human rights record is getting worse, not better, because of the Beijing Olympics, a rights group says. According to Amnesty International, China is clamping down on dissent in a bid to portray a stable and harmonious image ahead of the Games in August. It urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and world leaders to speak out against abuses, including China's handling of protests in Tibet. US President George W Bush is facing calls to boycott the Games' opening. "It would be clearly inappropriate for you to attend the Olympic Games in China, given the increasingly...

Western and Muslim nations clash at UN body over free speech April 01, 2008 18:19 EDT GENEVA (AP) -- Muslim and Western nations are at odds over adding monitoring of religious prejudice to the duties of a U.N. free speech expert. The change passed 32-0 by the United Nations Human Rights Council last Friday. It refers to acts of "racial or religious discrimination" that constitute what it calls "abuse of the right of freedom of expression." It's seen as a move against forms of expression that have offended Muslims, such as Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Canada and...

The Story of a Convert from Islam – Baptized by the Pope at St. Peter's His name is Magdi Cristiano Allam. For five years he has lived under guard, threatened with death. But his baptism has raised harsh criticism, against him and against Benedict XVI. The complete text of the accusation written by Aref Ali Nayed, architect of the letter of the 138 by Sandro Magister ROMA, March 28, 2008 – Three days earlier, in an audio message released over the internet, Osama bin Laden had accused "the pope of the Vatican" of having "a significant role" in fighting a...

Climate change is now officially a human rights issue, as the UN Human Rights Council on Friday passed a resolution on the subject, recognising that the world's poor are particularly vulnerable. The council also gave the green light for a study into the impact of climate change on human rights, describing climate change as a "global problem .. that requires a global solution". The resolution, submitted by the Maldives and passed without a vote, also noted that the poor tend to have limited resources to cope with the impact of global warming. The country's Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid told AFP...

To the sound of cheers, and by an overhwelming majority of 40 out of 47 votes, the UN Human Rights Council today elected Jean Ziegler, the co-founder of the "Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize," as an expert advisor representing the Western world. And for its new Palestine expert, the council chose Richard Falk, who, like Ziegler, accuses the U.S. of being responsible for many of the world's ills and describes Israel in Nazi terminology. "Even within the benighted UN Human Rights council, today was a dark day for human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based...

Earlier this week, I argued that Canada's human-rights censors have managed a seemingly impossible task: They've found a way to rehabilitate the image of neo-Nazis, transforming them from odious dirtbags into principled free-speech martyrs. Case in point: At this week's much-anticipated human-rights hearing in Ottawa, a team of journalists and bloggers were campaigning openly in support of hatemonger Marc Lemire. The villains were Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) investigator Dean Steacy and the other apparatchik who've made a career out of parsing Lemire's phobic Web postings. Tuesday's hearing probably won't change the outcome of the case against Lemire: Like a...

The United Nations' Human Rights Council has elected onto a panel of special advisors a left-wing Swiss sociologist with a record of sympathizing with the Castro and Mugabe regimes and criticizing the United States and Israel. And in another move that drew fire, the U.N.'s top rights body also appointed an American academic strongly critical of Israel to a post dealing with Israel's conduct in the territories claimed by the Palestinians. During its less than two years in existence, the Human Rights Council has itself been criticized -- by Western governments and two U.N. secretary-generals among others -- for focusing...

Solid Decision By the EditorsIn one of the most important international-law decisions in its history, the Supreme Court on Tuesday restored the Constitution’s prudent balance between politics and law in the quintessentially political arena of foreign affairs. Doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion concurrently provided individual justice for murder victims, vindication for the rights of states to democratic self-determination, and a searing reminder of why presidential elections — which can chart the high Court’s course for a generation — are crucially important. The case, Medellin v. Texas, involved the brutal gang-rape murders of two teenagers by a Mexican...

South Korea will vote in favor of a U.N. resolution on alleged human rights violations in North Korea, a senior Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday. ADVERTISEMENT The resolution is expected to raise concerns about the rights situation in North Korea — which international advocacy groups say is among the world's worst abusers. Voting for it would make good on the new Seoul government's promise not to refrain from criticizing Pyongyang.

Decries "dominance of an agnostic or even a materialistic approach to life which causes anxiety amongst believers" GENEVA, March 20, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A leader of the Russian Orthodox Church has called for worldwide inter-religious dialogue on human rights and denounced the "dangerous" anti-life and secularist trends in human rights thought. Human rights, a concept brought into Europe by Christianity, has been subverted by a small group of activists and civil servants who have imposed an atheist or agnostic interpretation. Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kallingrad spoke for many Christians outside the Russian Orthodox Church when he told the 7th...

New restaurant's logo described by some as demeaning When the owners of Quickie Burger and Dogs chose their logo, they thought it would make patrons crave an order of chili cheese fries. But the logo, a busty woman in a tight shirt straddling a hamburger, has drawn criticism from campus groups. The newest addition to the South State Street landscape has caused a stir on campus with its brightly colored logo, which some believe is offensive. The restaurant, which opened two weeks ago, sits south of campus at the intersection of State and Hill streets. Adorning the blue awning above...

Barack Obama wants us to think that he has a special sensitivity to injustice and that his entire life has been about combating it. Yet, in this one concrete situation he faced, he failed to act. The fact that not one of the dozens of other lawmakers failed speaks volumes. The fact that support was never contingent on ideology speaks volumes. I often wondered if his refusal to act was strategic, ignorant, or simple cowardice. No matter, the impact on Shoaib Choudhury was the same, as it would be on any freedom fighter. When speaking about this, I ask potential...

President Bush has no choice but to cancel his trip to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. No doubt, the president will resist this inevitability, as cancellation would sour U.S.-China relations. Mr. Bush cannot stand on Chinese soil without making a mockery of the freedom agenda. The repression in Tibet is just the latest evidence. What began as a series of peaceful protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on March 10 has devolved into a series of pitched street battles and house-to-house searches. Chinese troops have exacted retribution against ethnic Tibetans after the latter attacked shops and businesses owned or...

Dulles, Virginia -- The history of the disaster that submerged “The Big Easy,” in 2005 has already been written. In it, race plays a greater role than the real problems exposed by Katrina -- the failure of government at all levels and the unwarranted faith citizens place in bureaucracy. Now, the New Orleans race card is being played again -- this time by busybodies beyond our borders. This month, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued its opinion on Katrina’s aftermath. “The Committee,” the report states, “remains concerned about the disparate impact that [Hurricane Katrina] continues...

Looking at images of the 1936 Nazi olympics we can't help but ask ourselves what they were thinking. Today we have a similar situation brewing with the 2008 communist Olympics in Beijing. A land where christians are persecuted, democracy protesters are crushed with tanks and tibetans are ethnically cleansed. They have been awarded the olympics what can we do about it? Do you want your kids and grandkids to see pictures like this and ask what you did to oppose it? It's beginning:Britain kow tows to China as athletes are forced to sign no criticism contracts China has no freedom...

Hollywood star and Tibet activist Richard Gere is slamming China for its recent bloody Himalayan protest, and is urging the world to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The outspoken Pretty Woman star was horrified at the treatment of demonstrators protesting against Chinese rule in Tibet on Friday, where at least 10 people were reported to have been killed. Gere, chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet and a devout Buddhist, insists there "absolutely" should be a worldwide boycott of the sporting event in August to force China to allow the Himalayan region to decide its own future. The 58-year-old star...

Local man facing firearms, moonshine violations Posted: 4:39 PM Mar 14, 2008 (WVLT) A Cocke County man is now facing federal firearms and moonshine violations. 61 year old Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton of Parrotsville is charged in a four count complaint with three federal charges, related to the making, possessing and selling of untaxed whiskey. Sutton also faces one charge of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. If convicted, Sutton faces up to ten years in federal prison on the firearms count and five years for each of the moonshining counts. He faces up to a $250,000 fine...

Found this site similar to YouTube. Saudis complain about human rights. This guy tell it like it is.

(BEIJING) - China said the United States is unfit to present itself as a "defender of human rights", denouncing the latest U.S. assessment of Beijing's controls on political and religious life as unfounded distortion. The U.S. State Department's latest report on human rights across the globe, issued this week, did not include China among the world's worst offenders but said Beijing's record remained "poor". But with Beijing due to host the Summer Olympic Games starting Aug. 8, drawing increased international attention to China's strict, sometimes harsh controls on citizens, a Chinese official spokesman on Thursday hit back with sarcasm. "We...

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Wednesday defended withdrawing China from its list of top human rights violators as Washington and Beijing had just renewed dialogue on rights issues. "We just got China to renew or to begin again the human rights dialogue that had been in limbo for some time," Rice told reporters. In the US State Department's annual report on human rights released Tuesday, China was dropped from the list of the world's worst human rights violators, but was classified as an authoritarian country undergoing economic reform and rapid social change that has "not undertaken democratic political reform."...

China tells critics to back off ahead of Olympics By Chris Buckley 48 minutes ago China warned foreign groups on Wednesday not to use the Summer Olympics to pressure Beijing, presenting the nation as a "responsible" but poor power eager to end rows over trade, pollution and human rights. China has been buffeted ahead of the Games by worries over dirty air and international protests over human rights, Tibet, Sudan's Darfur and other controversies that often irk Chinese diplomats. Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told critics to back off, accusing them of violating the Olympic Games charter keeping politics away from...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US dropped China from its list of the world's worst human rights violaters, but added Syria, Uzbekistan and Sudan to the alleged offenders in an annual report released Tuesday. The State Department's 2007 Human Rights Report showed China, which has raised hopes it will improve human rights by hosting the 2008 Olympics, had parted company with countries like North Korea, Myanmar and Iran.

A Kos Kid gives it his best effort to be as blind and stupid as possible: Daily Kos: Is Islam Really Stuck in the 12th Century on Women’s Rights? After denying that there’s any problem for women in Islamic countries, Joshua Holland writes in the first comment: Who Knows? Hell, maybe women do fare a lot worse in Islamic culture than they do in other faiths. I’ve just never seen any hard evidence to support that claim. You haven’t seen any “hard evidence,” Joshua, because you haven’t looked. Ten worst countries for women. It’s a constant source of amazement to...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States should impose a death penalty moratorium and stop sentencing young offenders to life in prison until it can root out racial bias from its justice system, a United Nations panel said on Friday. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also called on Washington to end the racial profiling of Americans of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent, and to ensure immigrants and non-nationals in the country are not mistreated. The 18 independent experts expressed concern that racial minorities in the United States were more likely to be sentenced to death, or to...

France's supreme court has ruled that parents of miscarried or stillborn children can register a name for the child, no matter what stage of development the child was at at the time of miscarriage or birth, reports the AFP. Previous to this most recent ruling, parents in France were allowed to register a name for miscarried or stillborn children, but only after 22 weeks gestation, or if the child weighed over 1.1 pounds. This new ruling gives parents the right to claim the body of their child, which, until this point, was incinerated by the hospital along with other waste...

The United Nations Human Rights Council held a moment of silence Tuesday for martyrs in Gaza killed in an Israel Defense Forces offensive in the Strip, after a request by Iran's foreign minister. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called for the gesture on behalf of the women and children who are "nowadays under attack by the Zionist regime," the term Iranian officials use for Israel because they do not recognize its right to exist. "I would like ... to request one minute silence and ask my Muslim brothers and sisters to read the Fatah for those martyrs in Gaza," he...

GENEVA — The U.N. torture investigator said Sunday he has received "credible" allegations that the U.S. detained terror suspects on the British island Diego Garcia — claims that contradict statements by the British and U.S. governments. Multiple people, including detainees, told Manfred Nowak "quite a long time ago" that terror suspects were sent to the remote Indian Ocean outpost, a British territory with a U.S. military base. The suspects were there between 2002 and 2003, said Nowak, one of the U.N.'s unpaid, independent human rights experts. "I've had a few allegations and, in my opinion, they were credible," Nowak told...

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber. At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning...

Mr Li is the face of the world's fastest growing power, China. He clinches oil deals, builds hospitals and motorways, sells merchandise, takes over companies and lays oil pipelines. Over the next few months, as part of the series Looking for Mr Li, four journalists from Radio Netherlands Worldwide and Dutch broadcaster VPRO will be reporting on the upside and the downside of globalisation, with China's expansion being the common theme in all the pieces. This report is the last to come from Zambia. The iron gates to the Chinese NFC-A company's industrial estate in Zambia's Copper Belt are shut...

U.N. Criticizes U.S. For Violating Human Rights Of Internally Displaced Hurricane Katrina VictimsUnited Nations Headquarters (AHN) - Long an advocate for poor internally displaced persons in third world countries, the United Nations on Thursday called on the United States government to halt demolition of low-income housing in New Orleans saying it violated the human rights of Hurricane Katrina victims and was driving them into "destitution." In a strongly worded statement posted on its news center website, U.N. experts on housing and minority rights called the Bush administration to task for its treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans and...

Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan farmer who killed his disabled daughter, is to be released on day parole. The decision comes from the appeal division of the National Parole Board and is a direct reversal of the regional board’s ruling of late last year. Latimer was convicted in 1993 of killing his daughter Tracy, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Although he argued that his act was a “mercy killing,� he was convicted of murder and began his sentence in 2001. (Ed. note: Read a timeline of Latimer's case) One of the central reasons why Latimer’s parole was originally declined in December,...

The U.N.'s humanitarian chief says conditions in the Gaza Strip are "grim and miserable" and far from normal. John Holmes briefed the Security Council Tuesday, following a recent trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories. From United Nations headquarters in New York, VOA's Margaret Besheer has more. Holmes said restrictions on the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza, since Hamas took control of the territory eight months ago, have taken a heavy toll. He said nearly 80 percent of the population is receiving food aid, most industry and agriculture have collapsed, unemployment is up and the...

To call anything the United Nations does a "new low" does an injustice to all the previous "old lows." How do you do worse than pass a resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism on the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht, as the UN did in 1974? Still, even by the sordid standards of the UN, the 2001 Durban "antiracism" conference was a record-breaker. Denouncing racism while conference attendees sold copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- breathtaking. Now, however, the UN faces a new challenge. Was the 2001 anti-racism conference truly the very worst it...

HYPOCRISY, the popular 19th-century American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce once observed, could be defined as "prejudice with a halo." As false halos go, there are few bigger – or shinier, in that cheap, glittery way – than the one now swaying precariously over the United Nations’ so-called Human Rights Council. Since the council was formed as part of former secretary-general Kofi Annan’s "UN reform" a few years back, the world’s supposed watchdog for violations of human rights has been able to officially condemn just one country for abuses of those rights: Israel. If that sounds familiar – you’re right,...

Israel Fathers Target Gender Bias Family Court Custody Judges (photo)Israeli dads are allowed to carry M-16's to protect Israel, but not allowed to carry their own children. By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Ra'anana ----- February 25, 2008 ....... Divorced fathers came from Tel Aviv, Hafia and Jerusalem to protest in Kfar Sava and Ra'anana, Israel. Over 40 single dads were targeting Israel family court judges whose decisions on child custody appear to have been influenced by gender bias discrimination. "We are coordinating peaceful, non-violent protests directly against family court judges, child welfare departments in Ra'anana and Kfar Sava and...