A 32-year-old woman was critically injured and not expected to survive after an assault in her El Cajon home on Wednesday, police said Friday, and a threatening note telling the mother of five to go back to her home country was found near her, a family friend said.

Police did not disclose the contents of the note. Sura Alzaidy, a family friend, said it told the family to “go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.” The family is from Iraq.

El Cajon police Lt. Mark Coit said the family stated they had found a similar note earlier this month, however did not report it to authorities.

The daughter who found her mother said that her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron. She said her mother had dismissed the previous note, found outside the house, thinking it was a child’s prank.   »»» UTSanDiego.com

UPDATE: The victim has since died, and police have opened a homicide investigation.

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The French government will deny entry to an influential Egyptian preacher if he accepts an invitation from an Islamic organisation to visit France next month, a close aide to President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Sunday.

“The French government does not want any extremist preachers entering its territory,” Henri Guaino, a special advisor and speech writer to Sarkozy, told French Radio J.

Al-Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, is one of the most widely respected Sunni Muslim clerics in the Arab world and a household name in the Middle East thanks to his regular appearances on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel.   »»»  swissinfo.ch

France has just suffered an appalling terrorist attack by an alienated young Muslim who claimed to be inspired by al-Qaeda. And the French government responds … by banning the Muslim world’s most prominent and influential opponent of al-Qaeda from entering the country.

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Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

“They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did,” Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of “confidential informants” in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist “attacks” at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.

In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.

In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant’s criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.

Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. “The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It’s such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It’s fixed,” he said.   »»» guardian.co.uk

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On Monday, March 12th, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah – Saudi Arabia’s supreme religious official – created a stir when he stated that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” While responding to a question from a Kuwait-based NGO delegation to clarify Islamic law’s position about a proposed Kuwaiti ban on the construction of new churches, the mufti argued that the Prophet Muhammad said the Arabian Peninsula must exist under only one religion and, thus, all churches in the region must be destroyed.

The Qur’an commands Muslims to defend all places of worship – churches, synagogues, temples, cloisters, etc – even with their own lives. Far from sanctioning any destruction, our faith instructs us to protect places of worship of all religions.

In fact, Islam goes even further. Muslims have also been made to promise to defend followers of other faiths from unjust and cruel attacks. In 628, the Prophet Muhammad delivered the Charter of Privileges to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai. This charter protected the human rights of all Christians and remains a guide for all Muslim states’ relations with non-Muslim minorities. In this charter, the Prophet Muhammad made a declaration that nullifies the Saudi Mufti’s call to destroy all churches. The charter, still preserved in Mt. Sinai today, states: “None of their churches or other places of worship will be desolated, destroyed or demolished. No material of their churches will be used for building mosques or houses for the Muslims. Any Muslim doing so will be regarded as disobedient to God and His Prophet.”

For those Muslims who may assert that this charter does not apply today, they need not look any further than Muhammad’s first words of the charter: “I have caused this document to be written for Christians of the East and the West, for those who live near, and for those of distant lands, for the Christians living at present and for those who would come after, for those Christians who are known to us and for those as well whom we do not know.” The charter concludes, “Let this document be not disobeyed till the Judgment Day.”

   »»» The Washington Post

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Muslim women in the Australian state of New South Wales will be required to show their faces when they have documents witnessed under new identity check laws.

The laws – due to come into force on 30 April – will apply to statutory declarations and affidavits and cover anything that conceals a person’s face, including motorcycle helmets, masks, veils, burqas or niqabs.

Aziza Abdel-Halim, the president of the Muslim Women’s National Network of Australia, said the change would not have an impact on the community.

“The majority will accept it,” she said, adding that it is a requirement in many Muslim countries.”   »»» The Guardian (U.K.)

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Echoing sentiments expressed in speeches by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Salehi denied that the nuclear program had a military purpose, saying Iran would be a stronger country without nuclear arms.

“We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons — quite the opposite,” he said. He added that on the basis of a religious decree by Ayatollah Khamenei, “the production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin.”

Mr. Salehi said the existence of nearly 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world posed “the gravest threat” to sustainable international security.    »»» NYTimes.com

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At least five US military personnel could face a disciplinary review following the burning of copies of the Qur’an by American soldiers in Afghanistan.

A joint investigation by senior Afghan and US military officials has concluded that although mistakes were made when troops at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, had burned copies of the Qur’an and other religious literature along with piles of waste paper, there was no intent to desecrate the Islamic religious texts

But a different panel appointed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to investigate the incident, has concluded that the burning of the holy books was deliberate.

Maulvi Khaliq Dad, a senior Afghan religious leader on the panel, said US troops told Afghans at the base that the religious materials pulled from a detention centre library were to be stored, but were then sent for incineration.

“They are claiming that it was not intentional. Our investigative team says it was intentional,” Dad said.

After the panel presented its findings, Afghanistan’s top religious leaders demanded on Friday that those involved be put on public trial and be punished, a position that Karzai backs.   »»» guardian.co.uk

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Sorry, it was a mistake, an inadvertent one — due to ignorance, not malice, really. We apologize, profusely. It won’t happen again, ever. We will punish the people responsible for it, promise.

That’s been the line from Barack Obama, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and the American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan General John Allen to calm the furor caused by the burning of the Qur’an near an American military base north of Kabul.

To Muslims, the Qur’an, the words of God, and the Messenger who conveyed them are not abstract matters.

Such is their devotion to the holy book that they are rarely far from it, physically or in spirit. They give it pride of place in homes. Most kiss it before and after every reading. They instinctively reach for it on both happy and sad occasions, for blessings or comfort. Many commit all its 86,430 Arabic words to memory — a feat with no parallel in other religions or in the secular realm.

To desecrate the Scripture or to insult the Prophet is to scar the soul of a Muslim. This is especially so when done by non-Muslims whose motives are suspect and who may, in fact, be acting out of malice, like the Florida pastor who burnt a copy of the Qur’an last year.

In 2008, George W. Bush apologized after a U.S. serviceman in Iraq shot a Qur’an in target practice. In 2005, a military investigation confirmed four cases of the desecration of the Qur’an at Guantanamo Bay, as a tool of punishment against prisoners.

This is what seems to have transpired in Afghanistan as well. The Qur’ans came from a detention facility, where the detainees were deemed to have been using the books to send secret messages. Even if they were, why couldn’t the books have been removed rather than consigned to trash?

Gen. Allen has ordered every NATO soldier to immediately undergo a sensitivity session in “the proper handling of religious materials.” Shocking, isn’t it, that after a decade in Afghanistan, foreigners still don’t have a clue about what is or is not acceptable to the locals and, more pragmatically, what might backfire on the mission?

There has also been the desecration of the dead, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. In 2010, some Americans posed with corpses of Afghan civilians gunned down by rogue soldiers. This year, a video emerged of Marines in combat gear urinating on three Afghan corpses.

Afghans also know that some of the scandalous tactics of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were used in Afghan detention camps.   »»» thestar.com (Canada)

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An Afghan soldier shot dead two American soldiers, as the Taliban called for attacks on military bases and convoys in retaliation for the burning of copies of the Qur’an.

As a third day of violence raged across Afghanistan in retaliation for the desecration by US soldiers, Barack Obama sent a letter of apology to the president, Hamid Karzai. “President Obama has written that the incident in their facility was not intentional, and assured the president of full co-operation,” the statement said.

Obama expressed his administration’s “regret and apologies over the incident in which religious materials were unintentionally mishandled”, said White House national security council spokesman Tommy Vietor.

The violence began when Afghan workers at the Bagram airbase discovered copies of the Qur’an among a pile of waste paper sent for incineration late on Monday evening, and pulled them from the flames. Karzai told MPs that a US soldier had acted “out of ignorance and with poor understanding” of the Koran’s importance as Islam’s holy book, a presidential statement said.

Thousands of Afghans took to the streets the next day, and their numbers have grown as news of the burning spread across the country. Embassies, the United Nations and other foreign organisations have restricted travel and kept their staff inside fortified compounds to protect them from possible violence.

Although anger has been directed at foreign troops and foreign governments, most of the people killed and dozens injured have been Afghans. A call for calm from Karzai late on Wednesday night did little to quell the rage. There are fears of further violence on Friday if imams take up the issue in their sermons. A report on the incident by senior clerics and Nato officials is expected to reach Karzai by the end of the week.

Obama’s was the latest in a string of rapid but apparently ineffectual efforts by top US civilian and military officials to contain the damage, which is expected to complicate efforts by Kabul and Washington to seal a strategic deal to keep some US troops in the country past 2014.

The US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, rushed to deliver a fervent apology to the “noble people of Afghanistan” within hours of the burning. The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, also apologised for the “inappropriate treatment” of copies of the Qur’an.

In April 2011, when news that a US pastor in Florida had burned a Qur’an reached Afghanistan, seven foreign UN workers and at least 13 Afghans were killed in protests that raged for several days.   »»» guardian.co.uk

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The Dutch Council of State says it should be up to women themselves to decide whether or not to wear garments which cover the face. The highest government advisory body argues that ministers shouldn’t use a general ban to rule out the choice of some women to wear the burqa.

Last Monday, the government sent draft legislation for a ‘burqa ban’ to parliament. The proposal would outlaw the wearing in public of face covering articles such as burqas, full-face helmets and balaclavas.

One of the reasons being put forward by ministers to justify a ban is that the burqa and similar articles of clothing run counter to the equality of the sexes. The council, however, thinks this is something to be judged by individual women themselves.   »»» Radio Netherlands Worldwide

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