Sikh Group Develops App to Report Airport Profiling (CNN)
EXCERPT: Airline travelers who feel they’ve been harassed at airport check-ins by screeners now have a speedier outlet on which to complain right at their fingertips.
The Sikh Coalition, a civil rights advocacy group, on Monday released a mobile application on iPhones and Android phones giving passengers who feel they’ve been racially or religiously profiled a way to speak out against screeners with the Transportation Security Administration.
The free mobile app, FlyRights, prompts disgruntled passengers with questions and allows them to quickly check the basis on which they feel they’ve been discriminated, then name the airport where the incident occurred, the airline and the flight number.
Article18: Germany — Pope Benedict XVI Addresses Legislators; Chancellor Merkel Calls for Global Religious Tolerance
By Martin Surridge – Like many of the other countries profiled in this blog, Germany has had a problematic, yet fundamentally important religious history. Home to both the Holocaust and the Protestant Reformation, Germany provided Europe with the impetus to take giant strides forward in the name of religious freedom, but also inflicted terrible losses and unimaginable pain on millions. Today, Germany is the biggest economy in Europe and, whether they like it or not, the de facto leader of the Eurozone economies. It is also the birthplace of the leader of the global Catholic church, whose words do not always inspire confidence in his fellow Germans. 
This is Article18–RLTV’s weekly blog specifically dedicated to religious liberty issues in other countries around the world. Each week, we profile a different nation, and the struggles facing one of its religious communities. This week, Germany, where during a homeland visit, Pope Benedict XVI urged lawmakers to consider religion when drafting laws and Chancellor Angela Merkel highlighted the role that religion can play in the quest for world peace.
The DPA reported that Pope Benedict XVI, “used a speech to Germany’s Bundestag on Thursday to exhort politicians to keep religion in mind when drafting laws, and he defended his right as head of the Vatican to speak in the parliament.” It was explained that his visit was not specifically as a religious leader, but rather as a guest of state. His “speech to the Bundestag was mainly a philosophical attack on the idea that religion has no place in ethics and politics.” But while some were concerned that the Pope was seeking to influence politics in Germany by taking sides in any upcoming elections, Benedict stated, “I am clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from my mind.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany, may not have been seeking to anticipate or preempt the Pope’s remarks, but she also highlighted the importance of religion recently when she spoke for an Italian Catholic peace group in Munich last Monday.
“‘The separation of church and state should never make us forget that we easily become arrogant without belief in God,” Merkel told the assembled group.
Merkel also explained that while terrorism has affected millions, the global community should not let Islamists be the most influential religious group and that other faiths should strive to help undo some of the damage terrorism has caused.
“Politics can encourage cohesion, but it can’t command it to happen. Religion was wickedly misused in our own times. I believe that combating poverty and injustice are a good way to remove the sources of terrorism.”
Article18 is a weekly blog written by Martin Surridge, Associate Editor of Religious Liberty TV. Article18 logo and other artwork created by Bradley Kenyon.
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Don’t forget to check out other recent Article18 entries.
Article18: Norway — Personal Reflections on the Origin of a Tragedy
Article18: Uzbekistan — Recent Incidents of Violence Against Christians Alarm Religious Minorities
Is Christian “Just War” Just Like Jihad? (Patheos)
EXCERPT: Christian and Islamic views of warfare are closer than we have been led to believe. When it comes to questions of war and peace, is American Christianity more like Muhammad or Jesus? Since 9/11, such a question has seemed outrageous to many Americans. But perhaps the offense is grounded in some unhelpful assumptions.
Here in the Bible Belt, many argue that Islam is inherently war-mongering and oppressive, and that it is waging a “holy war” against anyone that refuses to embrace Muhammad. Others around the country assert that all religions are inherently concerned with the same ethical core, pursuing “love” and “peace.”
New Pew Research Center Survey Finds Moderate Attitudes Among Muslim Americans (Pew Forum)
EXCERPT: A comprehensive public opinion survey by the Pew Research Center finds no indication of increased alienation or anger among Muslim Americans in response to concerns about home-grown Islamic terrorists, controversies about the building of mosques and other pressures on this high-profile minority group in recent years. Nor does the new polling provide any evidence of rising support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans.
A Madman and His Manifesto (NYT)
EXCERPT: It passed with only scant notice, as with so many of the rude extremes of American life in a kinetic media age. The bodies of those Norwegian children slaughtered by a terrorist had yet to be fully recovered, let alone buried, when Glenn Beck compared the victims to Nazis.
The summer camp where children of the Norwegian Labor Party went for soccer, swimming, political debates and lectures “sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth,” Beck said in his national radio broadcast.
Following Norway attack, Adventist religious liberty director urges caution in use of ‘fundamentalist’ label
Adventist News Network -
Church religious liberty director urges caution in use of ‘fundamentalist’ label
ANN staff
Separately, the denomination’s religious liberty director urged careful dialogue on the incident and cautioned that the ideology of the man who confessed to the acts should be referred to as “extremist” instead of “Christian Fundamentalist,” as several news reports had indicated.
“Our thoughts are with relatives and friends of those who have been injured and killed,” said Reidar Kvinge, president of the Adventist Church in Norway. “We are appalled by the cruel disregard for human life these actions show.”
“The grave tragedy that has affected young, enthusiastic people gathered at Utøya must not lead us in Norway to let hatred prevail,” Kvinge said.
Norwegian native Anders Behring Breivik, 32, confessed to a pair of July 22 attacks, which killed 76 people, The Washington Post reported. Breivik allegedly was responsible for the bombing of a government building in the capital, Oslo, and later gunned down dozens of teens and young adults at a youth camp of the Labor Party on the island of Utøya in Lake Tyrifjord.
Breivik had apparently targeted the nation’s ruling Labor Party, a left-center party and historic supporter of immigration and multiculturalism. Breivik allegedly published earlier that day an online screed that railed against pluralism, including, in his words, the “Islamization of Western Europe.”
The afternoon bomb attack on the government building did not affect a nearby Adventist Church property in Akersgt, but services on Saturday were canceled on advice from police, said Torre Tjeransen, Communication director for the Adventist Church in Norway.
The Adventist Church’s national headquarters, along with a junior college, is located a few miles from the Utøya island in Lake Tyrifjord, Tjeransen said.
There are about 4,600 Adventists in Norway, a nation of about 4.9 million people.
In a statement today, John Graz, director of the Adventist world church’s Public Affairs and Religious Liberty department said “media reporting that these attacks may have been motivated by right-wing Christian fundamentalism are profoundly disturbing.”
“Such acts are utterly alien to Christian teachings and values,” Graz said. “Violence carried out in the name of Christianity is an absolute distortion of a religion that finds its genesis in Jesus Christ, the ‘Prince of Peace.’”
Graz also urged caution in the use of the term “fundamentalist” to describe the individual alleged to have carried out the attacks, instead proffering the term “extremist” as a more accurate description of the type of ideology and behavior that falls far outside the norms of a religious community.
“There’s a risk that ‘fundamentalism’ will become blurred in people’s minds with the idea of ‘conservative Christianity’ — a confusion that could serve to widen the gulf of misunderstanding between different religious traditions,” he said.
“We must re-double our efforts to promote understanding and respect between people of different cultures and faiths,” he said.
–reporting by BUC News, IRLA and ANN staff
Atheist Group Wants to Stop World Trade Center Cross (CNN)
EXCERPT: A group of atheists has filed a lawsuit to stop the display of the World Trade Center cross at a memorial of the 9/11 terror attacks.
The “government enshrinement of the cross was an impermissible mingling of church and state,” the American Atheists say in a press statement. The group says it filed the lawsuit this week in state court in New York and posted a copy of the lawsuit on its website.
A Muslim American Reflects on Osama Bin Laden’s Death (Washington Post)
EXCERPT: By Arshad Chowdhury
Osama bin Laden’s many victims include, first and foremost, those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and their grieving families, the soldiers sent to war and the loved ones they left behind, and a new generation forced to grow up in a more polarized and paranoid world. For all of them, bin Laden’s death must bring a sense of relief, of justice finally served.
But his victims also include millions of American Muslims — or Americans suspected of being Muslims — for whom the al-Qaeda leader’s death means something different: the chance to finally reclaim our faith and our identity.
Ground-Zero Mosque Protest Organizer: “Not an Issue of Religious Freedom” (CNN)
EXCERPT:
New York (CNN) — Protesters gathered in lower Manhattan mid-day Sunday to demonstrate against plans to build a mosque near the site of Ground Zero, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by Islamist hijackers on September 11, 2001.
Protest organizer Pamela Geller, a conservative blogger, and her group, “Stop the Islamicization of America,” planned the event because, according to the group’s website, “Building the Ground Zero mosque is not an issue of religious freedom, but of resisting an effort to insult the victims of 9/11 and to establish a beachhead for political Islam and Islamic supremacism in New York… Ground Zero is a war memorial, a burial ground. Respect it.”
The project calls for a 13-story community center including a mosque, performing art center, gym, swimming pool and other public spaces. It is a collaboration between the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative. “The Cordoba Initiative hopes to build a $100 million, 13-story community center with Islamic, interfaith and secular programming, similar to the 92nd Street Y,” its website says, referring to the cultural institution on the upper East side of Manhattan. The Cordoba Initiative aims to improve relations between Muslims and the West.
Daisy Khan of the American Society for Muslim Advancement told CNN it was a “community center with a prayer space inside.” She said the project was an opportunity for American Muslims living in New York to “give back” to the community.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/06/new.york.ground.zero.mosque/index.html?iref=allsearch
RLTV PODCAST: Martin Surridge on the Decline of Islamic Terrorism
Martin Surridge and Michael Peabody discuss Surridge’s recent article, “Is the Era of Large-Scale Islamic Terrorism Coming to an End?” in which he theorizes how and why Islamic terrorism in the West is on the decline.
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