A surprise celebrity wedding bridging Israel’s Jewish-Muslim divide drew mixed public reaction on Thursday in a country where such inter-marriage is extremely rare. Wednesday’s nuptials of Tsahi Halevi, an Arabic-fluent Jewish actor, and Lucy Aharish, a Muslim anchor on a top Hebrew news show, followed a four-year romance that, friends said, they had kept secret […]
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Shinta Ratri, the matron of an Indonesian Islamic boarding school, corrects the pronunciation of a group of fellow Muslims as they chant the phrase “only one God” in Arabic and prepare to pray together. Nothing unusual in that, except that these worshippers, gathered in a cramped residential neighbourhood of the city of Yogyakarta, are all […]
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Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies, said on Monday he had engaged in “sex games” with two women in France who accuse him of rape, but said the “submissive-dominant” relationships were consensual. It is the first time in the near one-year long case that the Oxford University professor, who has taken a […]
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Convicted criminal Anjem Choudary who was found guilty of telling British citizens to join ISIS, is to be released this week. He will be living in a tax-payer funded safe house in North London and we have learnt that he will be living within reach of his wife and family, so that his human rights […]
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Leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have been rebuked for belittling the significance of the Nazis and criticizing a Holocaust memorial, but this has not stopped a small group of Jews from throwing their support behind the party. On Sunday they formed Jews in the AfD, a political group based in the western […]
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Pope Francis on Sunday (October 7) asked faithful to pray to St. Michael the Archangel, “to repel the attacks of the devil who wants to divide the Church” during his weekly Angelus at the Vatican. The leader of the 1.2 billion Catholics ordered a “thorough study” of all documents in Holy See offices concerning disgraced former […]
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Denis Mukwege, a doctor who helps victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State, won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. They were honoured for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon […]
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Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men on Monday danced with scrolls of the Torah, celebrating the religious holiday of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing in the Torah) in one of Jerusalem’s oldest neighbourhoods. During the year, every Saturday in synagogue, devout Jews read a portion of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Simchat Torah marks the […]
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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan wrapped up an ill-tempered visit to Germany on Saturday with a visit to Cologne, where a security lockdown kept supporters and protesters away from a ceremony to open the country’s largest mosque. Police snipers were stationed on rooftops and the area was cordoned off after the city authorities cancelled plans for […]
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On a visit to Israel two years ago, far-right Brazilian lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro leaned back into the River Jordan in a white robe to be baptized in the arms of a fellow congressman and evangelical pastor. While still an avowed Catholic, Bolsonaro is riding a wave of support from Brazil’s evangelical Christians, who have helped […]
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