💭 Danish Far-Right Party Leader Burns The Quran Under Police Protection in Sweden
The Danish leader of the far-right Stram Kurs (Hard Line) party burned a copy of the Quran on Thursday in a heavily-populated Muslim area in Sweden, according to media reports.
Rasmus Paludan, accompanied by police, went to an open public space in southern Linkoping and placed the the Anti-Christ Islamic Quran down and burned it while ignoring protests from onlookers.
About 200 demonstrators gathered in the square to protest.
The group urged police not to allow the racist leader to carry out his action.
After the police ignored the calls, incidents broke out and the group closed the road to traffic, pelting stones at police.
💭 Abune Mathias is an Ethiopian patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church since 2013. His full title is “His Holiness Abune Mathias I, Sixth Patriarch and Catholicos of Ethiopia, Archbishop of Axum and Ichege of the See of Saint Taklehaimanot”.
💭 Ethiopian Jews Can’t Get The Same Embrace From Israel as Ukrainians
👉 Courtesy: Ynetnews
Opinion: Ukraine crisis is clear evidence of a racial imbalance in how the world responds to tragedies; while many open their doors to Europeans, few do so when it comes to refugees from Ethiopia, or other countries with populations of color
The past few days I couldn’t stop crying about the situation in Ukraine. Watching the news, reading articles and hearing reports took me to dark moments in my past. My heart broke to see people being victims again in a war that they did not choose to be part of.
I have watched videos of fathers saying goodbye to their children, mothers trying to save their babies. When I watch the news it invokes painful memories of my own childhood, of my family’s history. I don’t remember the experience of escaping civil war and famine in Ethiopia as a child. However, I heard and learned about it over the course of my childhood through my father, my family and my community. With the very limited information that I had, I began to piece together the true history of my people.
I only had a few years of happy home memories before everything changed forever. This was after my family and I escaped, in 1990, from a war-torn Ethiopia where Jews were targeted, and settled in Israel, in the town of Beit She’an. My fondest memories are of gathering around the dinner table, talking about our days and laughing at my father’s jokes. I was too young to realize the realities of being a refugee and the racism around me. I was in a naive reality, before the horrors of the world were to enter my life.
My father got sick when I was still very young. I was around 10 years old when I heard him cry for the first time. I didn’t understand why, but the more I listened carefully the more I started to hear him. He repeated one name so often that I had to ask someone in my family who it might be. It was his nephew, who was killed in front of my father by agents of the Derg junta as my father watched, unable to do anything to save him.
The world around me shattered. I learned that the world is a cruel place, and that there are people who are meant to suffer unfathomable things when they don’t deserve it because of disconnected leaders with selfish agendas.
I was overwhelmed and overjoyed, then, to see how the world came together in condemning and isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin for what he is doing to Ukraine. The way Israel and the world acted so quickly to help Ukrainians to escape, and to help others to fight the war alongside them, was nothing short of extraordinary. When people started to advocate for Ukraine, I joined. I changed my profile picture on social media to the Ukrainian flag.
A few days later, however, someone from my Ethiopian community asked why I didn’t post the Ethiopian flag, when the government there has recently and regularly targeted civilians in a 16-month-old war against rebellious forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
I was ashamed. I had done what many white people do: I had brushed off what happened to my people, to Africa, to the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Why does the survival of one country matter more than another’s? Why does one group of people have more value than another?
When I realized my mistake, I felt rage and the urge to do something about it. I started to do research, make phone calls, ask questions. I reached out to everyone I knew in order to find out more about what is happening in Ethiopia and what we are doing about it.
There is clear evidence of a racial imbalance in how we respond to tragedies, not just in Israel but throughout the world. Many countries have opened their doors to the Ukrainian people, but not to refugees from Ethiopia, or other countries with populations of color.
Despite a pledge to speed up its evacuations of some of the relatives of Ethiopian Israelis who remain in the country in the midst of an escalating civil war, the Israeli government seems to be making it more difficult for Ethiopian Jews to make it into Israel. Case in point: The Israeli High Court has frozen the planned entrance of 7,000-12,000 Ethiopians into the country for more than a month. Meanwhile, the same government is preparing to receive several thousand Jewish Ukrainians, and to take in 5,000 non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees.
Preventing these Ethiopians from entering Israel keeps them in harm’s way while their case gets reviewed by the High Court, and it’s all because of those in Israel who question the Jewishness of those individuals. Ukrainians of any faith are rushed in, while Ethiopians of Jewish heritage are kept out.
The Ukrainian conflict is a perfect example of the world’s hypocrisy. It shows how little Black and brown skin matters. The voices of other refugees aren’t shared on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. War in Ethiopia and other countries is not as appealing to the international media.
But it’s up to each one of us to be their voice. We’re seeing big companies, sports teams, celebrities and governments boycotting Russia and blocking Putin in every way they can. But my wish is that the world will also treat Black and dark-skinned people the way they treat those who are white. A world, for example, that won’t stand for border guards in a war-torn Ukraine preventing brown students from fleeing the country while allowing white Ukrainians to get out.
What is happening in Ukraine is appalling, and we should all absolutely unite to fight oppression and murder any time it happens, but we can’t only do this when it is appealing to our racial or economic biases. Ethiopia is worthy of our time; all suffering around the world is worthy of our time. If we cared about human life more than we care about oil and military spheres of influence and our own racial biases, there would be less suffering in this world.
Let’s be a megaphone for the voices that have been drowned out.
💭 In the video, armed men burning civilians to death in Western Ethiopia. Some of the men in the crowd are wearing Ethiopian military uniforms as well as uniforms from other regional security forces.
[Leviticus 18:21]
„Never give your children as sacrifices to the god Molech by burning them alive. If you do, you are dishonoring the name of your Elohim. I am Yahweh.”
💭 In Ethiopia, the National Flag (Red + Gold + Green) – which was first introduced by Emperor Yohannes IV (1872-1889) has been repeatedly changed / desecrated since Emperor Menelik II’s Reign (1889-1913)
👉 The Flag of Emperor Yohannes IV proudly displayed by priests at Hiruy Giyorgis Church near Dabra Tabor, Gondar.
💭 Around the World in Things You Can’t Do to Flags
A SYMBOL USED TO REPRESENT something powerful or influential—a person, a sports team, a religion—also makes itself vulnerable to destruction. It isn’t easy to, say, destroy a country, but you can destroy a symbol of that country fairly easily, and there’s no symbol more identified with a nation, and thus more commonly destroyed in protest, than a national flag.
In the United States, the Supreme Court has been clear and consistent in the opinion that the desecration of the Stars and Stripes is an American right, enshrined in the First Amendment. To change this, as has been continually proposed, would be extremely difficult, requiring—from a viciously divided Congress—a two-thirds vote on a constitutional amendment, followed by ratification by at least 38 fractious states. In short, it’s not likely.
How countries treat the destruction of their national symbols varies around the world. That the United States has such strong protections for flag burning makes it rather unusual. Most other nations, including many generally perceived as progressive and permissive, have some kind of flag-desecration laws on their books. These laws are, often, a fascinating blend of the seemingly arbitrary and the desire to suppress legitimate protest.
The concept of a national flag, or even a nation in general, is not particularly old. Nations as we think of them didn’t really exist until the 17th and 18th centuries; prior to that, there were territories, kingdoms, empires, and various other polities and geographic entities, but no universally recognized concept of nationhood, with specific borders and governments and rules for communication with each other. Flags themselves are very old, of course, but until the Age of Sail they were mostly used for communication, or to identify more localized groups, such as a specific family line or military unit. As national symbols, they didn’t begin to emerge until the mid-1800s, and it was a while longer before they became a seeming requisite for statehood.
Because flags are fairly recent developments, the concept of flag burning, or flag desecration of any sort, is a fairly recent idea as well. Effigies were a much more common form of big-concept protest prior to the modern era. In the United Kingdom, it has been a tradition to burn an effigy of the Pope, or of failed Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes, for hundreds of years. Leaders embodied the state, so in the absence of other symbols of a legal territory, people burned representations of specific people.
Flags have several advantages over effigies. They’re cheaper and easier to acquire than a reasonable likeness of a human—and fairly flammable, depending on material. Flag burning really became a go-to tactic in the United States in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, but around the world, burning a flag has long been a simple, effective means of protesting a federal government.
Governments have some stake in this, as flag burning is most obviously a form of protest against them, often conducted by persecuted minority groups as a means to raise awareness (or by irate people in another nation). Governments don’t generally want negative publicity, or people angrily pointing out their shortcomings. In that sense, banning the action is not so different from actively breaking up a protest march with tear gas or worse. “If it’s a crime to burn the flag because it’s the flag, the only reason the government is doing that is because it disagrees with the message the protester is trying to convey,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on free speech issues.
There are other reasons for these laws as well. Denmark, for example, bans the burning of any flag, with one exception: the Danish flag itself. According to Danish law, burning the flag of a foreign nation is a provocation that can hurt Denmark’s status in the world community. Burning the Danish flag, though? Fire it up; some even say that burning is the accepted way to dispose of a Danish flag in Denmark, though that doesn’t specifically appear in the law.
Australia is one of the few nations, along with the United States, Canada, and Belgium, to explicitly allow flag burning. As in the United States, this hasn’t stopped legislators there from attempting to ban the protest act, or at least provide the political appearance of attempting to ban it. During the violent 2005 race riots known as the Cronulla riots, a Lebanese-Australian teenager burned an Australian flag. He was charged and prosecuted, too; not for burning a flag, but for stealing and destroying personal property. This use of other laws to prosecute acts of flag burning is a common practice: Charges may include disturbing the peace, theft, destruction of property, arson, and other crimes, in lieu of symbolic desecration.
China, on the other hand, is going hard in the other direction. In 2017, the nation passed an amendment that dramatically increases the penalties and the scope of its symbol-desecration laws. Offenders can be hit with jail terms of up to three years for acts such as mocking the national anthem by singing it in a sarcastic voice. Burning, defacing, or stomping on the national flag is covered, too.
A lot of the countries that have such laws on the books don’t usually bother with the enforcement side. France, on the other hand, actually prosecutes. In 2010, an Algerian man, furious with the extremely bad customer service he was receiving at a local government office, grabbed a Tricolore and snapped its wooden pole in half. He was forcibly restrained and fined—not for destruction of property, but for “insulting” the flag.
“Insult” is a broad brush. India prefers bonkers specificity, with laws so granular that they cover much more than actual desecration. The country legislates which side of a room a flag must be installed in, what kind of material is allowed, who can mount a flag on a vehicle (only government or military personnel, and only some of them), the order in which the Indian flag must be placed when displayed with other national flags, and the specific weight of one square foot of flag material. Violate any of these and you’re already afoul of the flag laws. Sometimes it doesn’t even take a flag at all; in 2007, a petition was filed against cricketer and national hero Sachin Tendulkar for cutting a cake that had the flag on it.
Israel is another country with an aggressive stance toward symbolic protest involving flags. The government, in 2016, dramatically raised the financial penalty for conviction. Inflation and not one but two separate new currencies make it hard to track just how much it went up, but the new penalty is a maximum fine of over $16,000 and up to three years in prison. Last year, a Palestinian protestor stomped up and down on an Israeli flag as part of a protest against the Israeli army shooting people through the Gaza fence. He is not nearly the only one to be prosecuted for flag desecration in Israel.
Those fines will hurt, but sometimes such forms of punishment are as symbolic as a flag itself. In Mexico, flag desecration is illegal, but not often prosecuted. A notable exception came in 2008, when, after a very long legal battle, famed poet Sergio Witz was found guilty of desecrating the Mexican flag—in verse. In 2002, he published “La patria entre mierda,” or “The Motherland Among the Shit.” “I clean my ass with the flag,” he wrote, along with “I dry my urine on the flag of my country,” and a couple of lines about how the flag produces nothing but nationalist vomit. Witz has later conceded that the poem is not his best work.
In any case, in 2008, a judge gave Witz a symbolic fine of 50 pesos—about $2.50—as a “warning” to those who abuse freedom of speech, according to an article in El Universal. Witz has said the fine is ridiculous, and he refuses to pay it.
For a long time, the United States was all of these places and none. Before 1989, a whopping 48 of 50 states had some type of flag-burning law on the books. But a case called Texas v. Johnson, in which a young protester was tried for burning the American flag during the 1984 Republican National Convention, settled things. In a 5–4 decision in 1989, the Supreme Court declared flag burning to be protected political speech under the First Amendment, immediately invalidating those 48 state laws.
It’s not difficult to see a pattern connecting some of the countries that are serious about their flag-desecration laws—they have governments noted for active, even aggressive, responses to dissent and protest. Take note, in case the United States ever does pass a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning
Muslims burn piles of Pampers nappies and call for a ban because cartoon cat’s whiskers printed on them ‘look like the Arabic spelling of Mohammed’
Protesters in India are calling for a boycott of Pampers nappies
They have taken offense with a cartoon cat appearing on the product
Lines of its face resemble the word Prophet Mohammed in Arabic
Groups have staged ‘Pampers burnings’, setting fire to nappies in the streets
Owner Procter and Gamble said design was intended as ‘innocent animated cat’
Muslim protests in India are calling for a boycott of Pampers products after claiming to have seen the word ‘Mohammed’ in the face of a cartoon cat which appears on its nappies.
The lines illustrating the whiskers, nose, mouth and left eye of the smiley feline have been suggested to resemble the Prophet’s name when written in Arabic or Urdu, although the company that makes the products vehemently denied the claims.
Procter and Gamble in a statement that said they would never intend to offend any person or religion and the the design showed ‘an innocent animated representation of a cat.’
However, the image on the hygiene product has been branded an ‘insult’ to Islam by critics, and protesters have staged ‘Pampers burnings’.
Selected Comments:
I had to check the calendar, nope not April the 1st.
For goodness sake.. Get a grip! Looks nothing like, anyway!
Here we go again, unbelievable. I¿ve never seen a bigger bunch of whiners in my life.
How do they expect to be taken seriously
Coming to a supermarket near you soon Jesus these people are easily offended no wonder why there is no decent comedy on shows no for fear of offending them . I’m sick of it
I can guarantee you that these idiots are illiterate….because there is not even one LETTER of Arabic in that drawing of the cat, never mind the entire word of Muhammad
Zero tolerance of our culture however expect complete tolerance of there’s
On the bright side it’s boosting sales for pampers.. Like they say all publicity is good..
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 4, 2015
My note: So why is the mainstream media almost totally silent about this phenomenon? When some politician somewhere around the globe inadvertently offends homosexuals or Muslims, it instantly makes headline news as we’re witnessing right now with the barbaric burning of POW Jordanian pilot — headlines and outrage all over the globe.
Pakistani Christians Burned Alive Were Attacked by 1,200 People
A mob accused of burning alive a Christian couple in an industrial kiln in Pakistan allegedly wrapped a pregnant mother in cotton so she would catch fire more easily, according to family members who witnessed the attack.
Sajjad Maseeh, 27, and his wife Shama Bibi, 24, were set upon by at least 1,200 people after rumors circulated that they had burned verses from the Quran, family spokesman Javed Maseeh told NBC News via telephone late Thursday. Their legs were also broken so they couldn’t run away.
“They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire,” he said. “And then they threw them inside the furnace.”
Bibi, a mother of four who was four months pregnant, was wearing an outfit that initially didn’t burn, according to Javed Maseeh. The mob removed her from over the kiln and wrapped her up in cotton to make sure the garments would be set alight.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 