The release of cameraman Ramelito Vela and soundman Rolando Letrero by the Abu Sayyaf should compel authorities to double their efforts to have Jordanian journalist Baker Abdulla Atyani and other foreign captives of the extremist group also freed. It should also disabuse everyone, especially the Arab press, of the idea that the Abu Sayyaf is a respecter of Islam and Muslims.
The Muslim Koran mentions her 54 times and devotes the 19th chapter or “sura” to her. Christians call her “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” Who is this lady they’re talking about? Miriam of Nazareth—and of the Jewish faith.
IN HIS Oct. 17 column titled “More sticky issues in Bangsamoro talks,” Neal Cruz says: “Among the most difficult is the question of the possession of guns. The government wants the national law on the possession of firearms to also apply to the Bangsamoro. This is very difficult because it is said that Muslims would rather give up their wives but not their guns.”
An allegedly anti-Islam trailer has reopened the debate on where the limits to freedom of expression should be. While the movie “Innocence of Muslims” that depicts Mohammad as a fraud, a womanizer and a pedophile has had a very limited release, it is the film’s trailer uploaded on YouTube that has caused massive unrest in Islamic societies.
It spread quicker than a bushfire in a season of drought, crossing continents and oceans, erasing racial divisions, unifying varied ideologies and, ominously and terrifyingly, gathering wind enough to fan an inferno. Is this the beginning of World War III? The enemy: the United States of America, still the world’s superpower that has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden, with the primary objective of cornering the world’s oil supply.
“Selamat hari raya Idul Fitri” is how I learned to greet people “Happy Idul Fitri holiday” on my first foreign consultancy, in Indonesia in 1970, long before the acronym OFW was coined.
The Muslim community is raging over a recent policy of the Pilar College in Zamboanga City, which is run by the RVM Sisters. The policy bans the wearing of the hijab by Muslim students enrolled in the school.
Indonesia has been called the “smiling face of Islam.” Where the religion spread through much of the Middle East through military conquest, Islam in Indonesia (and in much of Southeast Asia) was brought in by Arab traders, proselytizing even as they were establishing commercial routes.
Mohamed Merah’s killing spree in and around Toulouse in March, like the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 suicide attacks in London’s Underground, has highlighted once again the dilemmas that Europe faces with regard to its growing Muslim minority.
Recently, the human-rights activist, former Dutch politician, and Somali exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote about a global war on Christians in Muslim countries. She discussed at length the appalling phenomenon of violent intolerance toward Christian communities, and cast blame on the international community and prominent NGOs for failing to address this problem.
Today Muslims all over the Philippines mark Eid’l Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, one of the two greatest feasts of Islam. President Aquino declared this day a regular holiday, through Proclamation 276 pursuant to Republic Act 9849 which provides that Eid’l Adha be celebrated as such. To be sure, RA 9849, signed in 2009, merely codified what had been happening shortly before it: the Arroyo administration giving recognition to Christian and non-Christian feasts, as well as to sectarian and non-sectarian observances, while also putting into effect what it called its “holiday economics.”
