3 Oct 2011 | Uncategorized
Gainesville continues to be the battleground for a debate about Islamophobia and free speech in the United States, thanks to the Dove World Outreach Centre, which has its headquarters in the Florida city. Pastor Terry Jones first brought international attention to the centre when he threatened to burn a Koran on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2010. More recently, the centre has been involved in a court case against the Alachua County school board, after student members of the church were sent home for wearing T-shirts saying “Islam is of the devil”. According to Senior District Judge Stephan Mickle, the decision to send home the students does not violate their First Amendment rights, and he said that the message was “confrontational” and “not conducive to civil discourse on religious issues”. On the other hand, Pastor Wayne Sapp was surprised by the ruling, saying he felt that the case was a clear violation of the rights of the students.
The Dove World Outreach Centre actually seems to be a small group of attention-seeking loons, not unlike the Westboro Baptist Church. My attitude towards both organisations is the same: let them express themselves.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, I was a hijab-wearing student at an American high school. In the few days following the attacks, I remember a few of us complaining about students wearing anti-Osama Bin Laden T-shirts because we were afraid of backlash against Muslim students. Rather than questioning our fear, the administration made the students change their shirts. Looking back, I disagree with the teenage version of myself. I did not feel safer when “controversial” perspectives were not brought up in class and I watched my school become more segregated and tense. Instead, my school should have made more of an effort to create a dialogue and, more importantly, make students like myself feel safe enough to be normal students free to express our opinions.
Gainesville will not have to worry about the Dove World Outreach Centre casting a negative light on the town for much longer. The centre is relocating from the 20-acre property and 20-30 younger members of the church will be moving to a different county. So Gainesville can return to being well known for university football and Gatorade rather than a man with a handlebar moustache and threats to burn Korans.
26 Sep 2011 | Uncategorized
On 23 September, a group of students known as the “Irvine 11” were handed three years probation, as well as 56 hours of community service and fines for disrupting the 8 February speech of Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States.
District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said that the students censored Ambassador Oren, and labelled their behaviour as “thuggery”. The decision was met with outrage from supporters, and at a town hall meeting held on 25 September, the students announced their plans to appeal the court’s decision, and one of the attorneys for the group, Jacqueline Goodman, vowed to continue fighting for the rights of the students, “even if it means going to the Supreme Court”.
15 Sep 2011 | Uncategorized
In February 2010, a group of 11 students disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador to the United States. They shouted protest slogans for 20 minutes before they were arrested during Michael Oren’s hour-long speech at the University of California Irvine’s campus . Last week, ten of the students went on trial for misdemeanor charges of “conspiring to disturb a meeting” and “disturbing a meeting”, they face up to six months in prison.
Both parties believe that their First Amendment right to free speech was trampled on in the incident. Prosecutors said that the disruption prevented attendants from being able to listen to Oren. The student’s defence attorneys argue that the students were expressing their views, and their prosecution violates their right to freedom of expression. On Tuesday (13 Sept), the defence argued that Oren actually left the lecture because he’d been given VIP tickets to a Lakers game — he was pictured with Kobe Bryant — rather because he felt threatened by the protesting students as the prosecution claims.
With the frequency of student protests on university campuses, the severity of the potential sentence is mystifying. John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, pointed out the regularity of these kinds of protests on university campuses across the nation, including the UC Irvine campus, where a Muslim speaker was kept from speaking back in 2001. Others have pointed out the waste of taxpayer’s money, especially after the university already disciplined the students, handing them 100 hours of community service, two years of probation, and a quarter-long suspension of the Muslim Students Association.
The authorities insist that the student’s religious beliefs have nothing to do with the case, but according to Dan Mayfield, the attorney of one of the students, prosecutors were able to illegally obtain search warrants through focusing on the religion of the students, even going as far as calling the case the “UCI Muslim case”. As a part of the jury selection process, potential jurors were required to fill out an eight-page questionnaire, which asked questions about their views on the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, as well as whether or not they “harbour negative feelings towards Muslims”.
Focusing on the role of Islam in the prosecution of the students could easily turn the conversation into one about freedom of religion, which is not necessarily interchangeable with freedom of expression. What must be protected is the right of students to express their views, regardless of what they might be.
5 Sep 2011 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa
Iranian publishers are reeling after measures to save money when printing the Koran backfired this week. In an attempt to make cheaper, mass distribution editions available, the Holy Book was produced and printed in China. But the copies, already on the streets, contain several typing errors, compromising the accuracy of the religious text.
Officials are now considering banning Chinese-printed editions of the Koran in Iran, in order to eliminate erroneous copies. Bookshops who have been supplied the books will have to pay the costs. Rather than acknowledging their errors, officials are focusing on encouraging the purchase of higher priced Iranian editions, which were praised for being more meticulously checked than their Chinese counterparts.
Meticulous checking is something Iranian officials are extremely adept in — it seems that the Iranian editors (read censors) have once again been investing their time and energy on surveillance, as citizens became the target of an internet security scam that enabled snooping on Google users. Google last week confirmed that Internet users in Iran had been scammed by a false certificate verifying site authenticity. Internet users unwittingly revealed their activity to Iranian officials through the usage of the “man-in-the-middle-attack”, which uses a false certificate to obtain the login credentials of users.
The certificate has since been cancelled, but Mozilla has now released an update to Firefox to further protect targeted Internet users with a step by step guide to deleting the DigiNotar CA certificate
