Israeli PM backs attack on Gaza aid

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has supported the military action against the Freedom Flotilla, carrying humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip.

"The prime minister reiterated his full backing for the IDF and inquired about the well being of the wounded," Netanyahu's office told AFP on Monday.

The Israeli navy killed at least 20 people aboard the ships, mostly Turkish nationals. About 50 others were also injured, according to Palestinian sources.

Netanyahu, who is currently in Canada, cancelled plans to meet US President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday in the wake of the deadly Israeli raid.

"Netanyahu decided to cut short his visit to Canada and return to Israel early," read an official statement, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council is scheduled to hold a meeting regarding the brutal assault later on Monday.

The humanitarian convoy was carrying thousands of tons of supplies and hundreds of politicians, activists and journalists.

The Flotilla was seeking to break Israel's crippling blockade of Gaza and deliver basic necessities to the impoverished Palestinians living in the coastal enclave.

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Born in Gaza

Firas Mazloom was born with two holes in his heart. His condition could have been fixed by routine surgery, but Israel's siege on the Gaza Strip has crippled the medical system there. The doctors do not have the training or the equipment to perform the necessary operation.

Firas went to Israel for a check up after he was born and was supposed to return for a follow-up. But Gaza is blocked off from the outside world and Firas never made it back to Israel for his heart operation.

His parents say their request to cross the border was turned down six times because his case was not considered an emergency.

But when their son's condition suddenly started to deteriorate and the doctors in Gaza could no longer help him, their only solution was to send him to an advanced hospital in Israel - and now it was urgent.

An Israeli doctor accepted the request and Firas' parents, Amal and Assad, started a race against time and bureaucracy to get their son out of Gaza.

Just when they finally managed to push through the red tape to get their son out of Gaza, Firas died.

The journey to Israel would have taken only an hour, but after three hours of obstacles and delays, Firas' journey never began.

Ran Yaron from Physicians for Human Rights helps Palestinian patients get access to the medical treatment they need.

He says: "Since Israel controls the only gate out for Palestinians who seek for care unavailable, it has responsibility to let them out.

"Nearly 25 per cent of the patients who apply for exit permits are denied due to rejection or to delays. I do my best to help Palestinians, not only because they are human beings ... but also as an Israeli I feel responsibility for them."

But Israel's main concern is security. Colonal Moshe Levi, the Gaza Strip coordinator of the Israeli army, says: "Four out of five requests we received every day, we approved. This is 80 per cent from the requirements from the Palestinian side we approve.

"Our challenge is how to create a balance between the security needs and between the civilian needs. This is the main issue, this is the main challenge of Israeli policy here."

One year later, the pain caused by the death of their first child has subsided because Amal is due to give birth again. She is expecting another boy - they will call him Firas.

Hope has been restored for this young family in the besieged Gaza Strip, but the political situation remains unchanged.

There are still more than 1,000 patients in Gaza who are desperately waiting for the bureaucracy to allow them adequate health care.

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The Divine Book Intro (1)

The Best in West About Islam أفضل ما صنع في الغرب عن الإسلام

Christians targeted in Mosul blasts

A shopkeeper has been killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, as two bombs went off near buses carrying Christian students.

More than 100 people, including students and other civilians, were injured in the blasts on Sunday morning.

Abdul-Rahim al-Shammari, the head of the provincial council's security committee, said a roadside bomb exploded first, followed by a car bomb moments later.

The buses were transporting university students from the mainly Christian town of Hamdaniya, 40km east of Mosul.

"All of them were Christian students. They go in buses like that to Mosul's university after the troubled times when Christians were targeted in the past," Nissan Karoumi, the mayor of Hamdaniya, said.

Dr Muhsin Shamzi, who works at a hospital in Irbil, said at least 17 critically injured patients were taken to the hospital.

Protection urged

About 750,000 of Iraq's 30 million population are Christians.

The US-based National Council of Churches last week sent a letter to Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, calling on her to urge Iraqi officials to do more to protect Iraq's Christian community.

The organisation said they were particularly worried now as Iraq struggles to seat a
government after the March 7 parliamentary elections.

"Our concern is now particularly acute because it is possible that tensions will increase as various political forces continue to vie for power following the recent elections,'' the letter said.

"We fear that a growing climate of mistrust and animosity will further threaten the fragile Christian community."

In November, the US-based Human Rights Watch warned that minorities including Christians were the collateral victims of a conflict between Arabs and Kurds over control of disputed oil-rich provinces in northern Iraq.

While sectarian violence has dropped dramatically across Iraq since its peak between 2005 and 2007, attacks remain common, especially in Baghdad and Mosul.

French anti-burqa law won't offenders

April 30, 2010 - 11:24PM

AFP

France will jail and impose huge fines on anyone who forces a Muslim woman to wear a full-face veil, according to a leaked version of a proposed law revealed on Friday.

While women will face only a 150 euro ($A214) penalty if they choose to don a burqa or a niqab, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to slap one-year prison terms and 15,000 euro ($A21,410) fines on those who make others wear them.

"No one may wear in public places clothes that are aimed at hiding the face," says the text of a new law that is to be presented to parliament in July, according to a copy seen by the pro-government newspaper Le Figaro.

The law will create a new offence of "incitement to cover the face for reasons of gender", the paper said, and this offence will incur a 15,000 euro fine and a year in prison.

Legislators decided to impose a much smaller fine on women caught wearing the veil in public "because these women are often victims", one of the authors of the law told Le Figaro.

Women caught wearing the full veil can choose to attend a "citizenship course" instead of paying the fine, the paper said.

Sarkozy decided this month to opt for a total ban on the full-face veil, despite warnings from the State Council, France's top administrative body, that the law could be struck down as unconstitutional.

The president has declared the burqa and the niqab - veils worn by Muslim women in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf - unwelcome in France, calling them an affront to French values that denigrate women.

There has been a fierce debate in France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority of between five and six million people, with supporters of a ban arguing that veils are a sign of creeping fundamentalism that must not be allowed to take hold.

But opponents accuse Sarkozy of pandering to the far right with such moves and note figures showing only 1900 women wear the full veil in France.

Belgium on Thursday became Europe's first country to vote for a ban, sparking dismay among Muslims and warnings of a dangerous precedent.

© 2010 AFP

Belgium to vote on face veil ban

Belgian lawmakers are set to vote on a proposed ban on wearing face-covering veils in public, a day after neighbouring France proposed enacting similar legislation.

The scheduled vote on Thursday in Brussels comes after the federal parliament's home affairs committee voted unanimously on March 31 to endorse a nationwide ban on clothing that does not allow the wearer to be fully identified.

The ban would include the full-face niqab and the burqa, a shapeless full-body cloak that covers the face with a fabric grille.

Those who ignore the ban could face a fine of up to $34 and/or a jail sentence of up to seven days.

Belgium's governing parties and opposition both appear to agree on the ban, and the full house is expected to easily endorse the draft law.

If enacted, the bill would make Belgium the first European country to ban the garments.

'Respect the law'

Xavier Baselen, a member of Belgium's Reformist Movement party, which drafted the law, said the ban is needed for reasons of public order.

"It's true that when you live in a country you have to accept the laws of that country," he told Al Jazeera.

"In Belgium we decided [that] to be visible in the street is [a] real important law at a public order point of view.

"So people who come to live here have to respect the law the way we have to respect the law in other countries."

But Salma, a 22-year-old in Belgium, told Al Jazeera that she fears being targeted for wearing the niqab and is often harassed on the streets for it. However, she said she will not remove it.

"If you forbid the niqab, you deprive that person of their right of expressing themselves," she said.

"I will continue to wear my niqab. I will remove it if a representative of the law will ask me to identify myself, but will put it back on straight away."

French proposal

The move is to come a day after Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, announced moves to enact a full ban on the face-covering veil in public as well.

Sarkozy told a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the veil "hurts the dignity of women and is not acceptable in French society", Luc Chatel, a French government spokesman, said.

Chatel said the bill banning the veil from all public spaces would be presented to ministers in May.

"We're legislating for the future. Wearing a full veil is a sign of a community closing in on itself and a rejection of our values," he said.

Criticism and praise

The French proposal has attracted both fierce criticism and praise in the home of the largest Muslim community in the 27-member European Union.

Almost 10 per cent of France's 62 million population is Muslim.

Many feminists from France's poor, multi-ethnic suburbs have spoken out in support of a ban, saying it could help young women who did not want to wear the veil but were forced to do so by their partners or families.

Others, however, see the ban as part of a rising hostility against Islam and its symbols, and argue that many Muslim women actually want to cover up.

The debate has spread as far as Afghanistan, where some women's rights activists expressed outrage at the French proposal, saying they disliked the burqa but women should be free to wear whatever they wanted.

The vast majority of Muslim women, in France and elsewhere, do not wear a full veil, but the niqab, as it is known, which covers the face apart from the eyes, is widely worn on the Arabian peninsular and in the Gulf states.

The burqa is worn in some areas of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.