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Pope Francis Equates Muslim and Christian Violence

by Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPage Magazine
August 2, 2016

15

^{Originally published under the title "Pope Francis: A Fool or Liar for Islam?"}

At a time when Muslims all around the world are terrorizing and slaughtering non-Muslims in the name of Islam, Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, continues trying to distance Islam from violence.
Last Sunday a journalist asked him about the recent and "barbarous assassination of Fr. Jacques Hamel" in France, and how the priest was clearly "killed in the name of Islam." To this Francis

replied that he doesn't like speaking about Islamic violence because there is plenty of Christian violence as well... [He] said that every day when he browses the newspapers, he sees violence in Italy perpetrated by Christians: "this one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law... and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence. And no, not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there's everything."

Is the Pope really that dense? Is he incapable of distinguishing between violence committed in the name of a religion, and violence committed in contradiction of a religion?
Yes, Catholics—and people of all religions, sects, creeds—commit violence. That is because humans are prone to violence (or, to use Christian language that some—maybe not Francis—might understand, humans are fallen creatures). And yes, the Catholics that Francis cites do not commit crimes—murdering girlfriends and mothers-in-law—because of any teaching contained in Christianity or Catholicism; on the contrary, Christian teachings of mercy and forgiveness are meant to counter such impulses.

Pope Francis conflates violence committed in the name of a religion with violence committed in contradiction of a religion.

On the other hand, the violence that Muslims are committing around the world—the beheadings, the sex slavery, the church burnings—are indeed contained in and a product of Islam, and they have been from day one.
Francis continued offering half-truths in the interview. After he acknowledged that there are "violent persons of this religion [Islam]," he immediately added that "in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists. We have them."
This is another sloppy generalization. Sure, "in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists," but that which is "fundamental" to them widely differs. One may say that Muslim and Christian fundamentalists adhere to a literalist/strict reading of their scriptures. While that statement may be true, left unsaid by those who think the issue is settled right there is: what do the Bible and Koran actually teach?
The long and short of it is, the Christian fundamentalist will find himself compelled to pray for his persecutors, and, depending on the situation, maybe even turning the other cheek; conversely, the Muslim fundamentalist will find himself attacking, subjugating, plundering, raping, enslaving, and slaughtering non-Muslims. In both cases, the scriptures—Bible and Koran—say so.
Not for Francis. Poverty is supposedly the real reason behind all the Islamic violence plaguing the world:

Terrorism grows when there are no other options, and when the center of the global economy is the god of money and not the person — men and women — this is already the first terrorism! You have cast out the wonder of creation — man and woman — and you have put money in its place. This is a basic terrorism against all of humanity! Think about it!

This has got to be one of the silliest arguments ever devised to justify terrorism. So the Muslims screaming "Allahu Akbar!" while slaughtering a priest or driving a truck into people in France were suffering from poverty? What about the fact that one of the richest nations in the world—Saudi Arabia—is violent to and intolerant of non-Muslims? What about the fact that there are billions of impoverished non-Muslims—yet, strangely, they do not engage in wanton acts of terror against "infidels" in the name of their religion. What to make of these facts?
But apparently none of these questions about scriptures and demographics matter; after all, Francis "knows how Muslims think":

I had a long conversation with the imam, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar University, and I know how they think. They [Muslims] seek peace, encounter.

This is just plain sad. Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, arguably the most authoritative Islamic institution in the world, did indeed recently visit Francis and inform him of how Muslims desire peace and harmony with the world.
But back home in Egypt, the grand imam and Al Azhar promote an Islam that is virtually indistinguishable from that of ISIS. Indeed, days before he went to take pictures hugging the pope, Tayeb said that it is a criminal offense to apostatize from Islam, and the punishment is death.
In response, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies blasted the grand imam and Al Azhar. After accusing them of being twofaced—preaching a moderate Islam in the West and a radical one in Egypt—the statement concluded with some words that people like Francis should take to heart:

Combating terrorism and radical religious ideologies will not be accomplished by directing at the West and its international institutions religious dialogues that are open, support international peace and respect freedoms and rights, while internally promoting ideas that contribute to the dissemination of violent extremism through the media and educational curricula of Al Azhar and the mosques.

In the end, and when it comes to the question of whether Islam promotes violence against non-Muslims, Pope Francis falls within the ranks of those Western leaders who are either liars or fools, or a little bit of both.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/.premium-1.733913?utm_content=%24sections%2F1.733913&utm_medium=email&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_campaign=newsletter-daily&utm_term=20160731-00%3A07

Judaism is not a major player in the history of humankind

One of the most important and most beautiful values of Judaism is modesty. We would do well to take this value to heart when considering the religion's impact on humankind through the ages.

By 

Yuval Noah Harari

 Jul 31, 2016

·         'In the U.K., people are worried about their future. In Israel, we feel secure.'

·         This Palestinian served out his 14.5-year sentence. Why is he still in Israeli jail?

Though many Israelis are convinced that the history of the human race revolves around Judaism and the Jewish people, in truth, Judaism has played a relatively minor role in the annals of our species. Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, Judaism is a tribal creed. It focuses on the fate of one small nation and one tiny land, and has little interest in the fate of all other people and all other countries. For example, it cares little about events in China or about the people of New Guinea. It is no wonder, therefore, that its historical role was limited.

It is certainly true that Judaism begot Christianity, and influenced the birth of Islam – two of the most important religions in history. However, the credit for the global achievements of Christianity and Islam, as well as the guilt for their many crimes, belongs to the Christians and Muslims themselves, rather than to the Jews. Just as it would be unfair to blame Judaism for the mass killings of the Crusades (Christianity is 100 percent culpable), so also there is no reason to credit Judaism with the critical Christian idea that all human beings are equal before God (an idea that stands in direct contradiction to Jewish orthodoxy).

The role of Judaism in the history of humankind is a bit like the role of Newton’s mother in the history of science. It is true that without Newton’s mother, we wouldn’t have had Newton, and that Newton’s personality, ambitions and opinions were likely shaped to a significant extent by his relations with his mother. But when writing the history of science, nobody expects an entire chapter on Newton’s mother. Similarly, without Judaism you would not have had Christianity, but that doesn’t merit giving much importance to Judaism when writing the history of the world. The crucial issue is what Christianity did with its Jewish legacy.

This idea may shock and annoy many Israelis, who are educated to think that Judaism is the central hero of human history. Israeli children usually finish 12 years of school without receiving any clear picture of global historical processes. Though they learn about the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and World War II, these isolated jigsaw pieces do not add up to any overarching narrative. Instead, the only coherent story offered by the Israeli school system begins with the Hebrew Bible, continuous to the Second Temple era, skips to various Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and culminates with the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. Most students leave school convinced that this must be the main plotline of the entire human story. For even when pupils hear about the Roman Empire or the French Revolution, the discussion in class focuses on the way the Roman Empire treated the Jews or on the legal and political status of Jews in the French Republic. People fed on such a historical diet have a very hard time digesting the idea that Judaism in fact had relatively little impact on the world as a whole.

'Yom Kippur,' by Isidor Kaufmann (before 1907). N/A

It goes without saying that the Jewish people is a unique people with an astonishing history (though this is true of most peoples). It similarly goes without saying that the Jewish tradition is full of deep insights and noble values (though it is also full of some questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes). It is further true that, relative to its size, the Jewish people has had a disproportional impact on the history of the last 2,000 years. But when you look at the big picture of our history as a species, since the emergence of Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago, it is obvious that the Jewish contribution to history was very limited. Humans settled the entire planet, adopted agriculture, built the first cities, and invented writing and money thousands of years before the appearance of Judaism.

Even in the last two millennia, if you look at history from the perspective of the Chinese or of the Native American Indians, it is hard to see any major Jewish contribution except through the mediation of Christians or Muslims. Thus the Hebrew Bible eventually became a cornerstone of global human culture because it was warmly embraced by Christianity. In contrast, the Talmud – whose importance to Jewish culture surpasses that of the Bible – was rejected by Christianity, and consequently remained an esoteric text hardly known to the Arabs, Poles or Dutch, not to mention the Chinese and the Maya. Though Jewish communities that studied the Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play a key role in the building of the Chinese empires, in the early modern voyages of discovery, in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution. The coin, the university, the parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing press and the steam engine were all invented by gentiles.

Ethics before the Bible

Israelis often use the term “the three great religions,” thinking that these religions are Christianity (2 billion believers), Islam (1.5 billion) and Judaism (15 million). Hinduism, with its billion believers, and Buddhism, with its 500 million followers – not to mention the Shinto religion (50 million) and the Sikh religion (25 million) – don’t make the cut. This warped concept of “the three great religions” often implies in the mind of Israelis that all major religious and ethical traditions emerged out of the womb of Judaism, which was the first religion to preach universal ethical rules. As if humans prior to the days of Abraham and Moses lived in a Hobbesian state of nature without any moral commitments, and as if all of contemporary morality derives from the Ten Commandments. This is a baseless and somewhat racist idea, which ignores many of the world’s most important ethical traditions.

Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes had moral codes tens of thousands of years before Abraham. When the first European settlers reached Australia in the late 18th century, they encountered aboriginal tribes that had a well-developed ethical worldview despite being totally ignorant of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Indeed, scientists nowadays point out that morality has evolutionary roots, and that it is present among most social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys. For example, when wolf cubs play with one another, they have “fair game” rules. If a cub bites too hard, or continues to bite an opponent that has rolled on his back and surrendered, the other cubs will stop playing with him.

In one hilarious experiment, the primatologist Frans de Waal placed two capuchin monkeys in two adjacent cages, so that each could see everything the other was doing. De Waal and his colleagues placed small stones inside each cage, and trained the monkeys to give them these stones. Whenever a monkey handed over a stone, he received food in exchange. At first the reward was a piece of cucumber. Both monkeys were very pleased with that, and happily ate their cucumber.

Aboriginal Australians. Had a well-developed ethical world in the 18th century, despite being ignorant of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Mark Graham, AP

After a few rounds, de Waal moved to the next stage of the experiment. This time, when the first monkey surrendered a stone, he got a grape. Grapes are much more tasty than cucumbers. However, when the second monkey turned over a stone, he still received only a piece of cucumber.

The second monkey, who had previously been very happy with his cucumber, became incensed. He took the cucumber, looked at it for a moment in disbelief, and then threw it at the scientists in anger, jumping and screeching. He’s no sucker. Equality and social justice were central values in capuchin monkey society hundreds of thousands of years before the prophet Amos complained about social elites “who oppress the poor and crush the needy” (Amos 4:1), and before the prophet Jeremiah preached, “do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow” (Jeremiah 7:6).

Even among Homo sapiens living in the ancient Middle East, the biblical prophets were not unprecedented. “Thou shall not kill” and “thou shall not steal” were well-known in the legal and ethical codes of Sumerian city states, pharaonic Egypt and the Babylonian Empire. A thousand years before Amos and Jeremiah, the Babylonian king Hammurabi explained that the great gods instructed him “to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”

Meanwhile in Egypt – centuries before the birth of Moses – scribes wrote down “the story of the eloquent peasant,” which tells of a poor peasant whose property was stolen by a greedy landowner. The peasant came before Pharaoh’s corrupt officials, and when they failed to protect him, he began explaining to them why they must provide justice and in particular defend the poor from the rich. In one colorful allegory, this Egyptian peasant explained that the meager possessions of the poor are like their very breath, and official corruption suffocates them by plugging the passage through their nostrils.

Many biblical laws copy rules that were accepted in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan centuries and even millennia prior to the establishment of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. If biblical Judaism gave these laws any unique twist, it was by turning them from universal rulings into tribal codes aimed primarily at the Jewish people.

Jewish morality was initially shaped as an exclusive tribal affair, and remained so to some extent until the 21st century. The Bible, the Talmud and many though not all rabbis maintained that the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a gentile, which is why, for example, Jews are allowed to desecrate the Shabbat in order to save a Jew from death, but are forbidden to do so if it is merely to save a gentile (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma, 84:2).

Some Jewish sages argued that even the famous commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” refers only to Jews, and there is no commandment to love gentiles. Indeed, the original text from Leviticus says: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), which raises the suspicion that “your neighbor” refers only to members of “your people.”

It was only the Christians who selected some choice morsels of the Jewish moral code, turned them into universal commandments, and spread them throughout the world. Indeed, Christianity split from Judaism precisely on that account. While many Jews to this day believe that the so-called “Chosen People” are closer to God than other nations are, the founder of Christianity – Saint Paul the Apostle – stipulated in his famous Epistle to the Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

A Tibetan Buddha statue. Buddhism is among a handful of religions that have influenced billions, for better or worse. Vivek Prakash, Reuters

And we must again emphasize that despite the enormous impact of Christianity, this was definitely not the first time a human preached a universal ethic. The Bible is far from being the exclusive font of human morality (and luckily so, given the many racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes it contains). Confucius, Laozi, Buddha and Mahavira established universal ethical codes long before Paul and Jesus, without knowing anything about the land of Canaan or the prophets of Israel. Confucius taught that every person must love others as he loves himself about 500 years before Rabbi Hillel the Elder. And at a time when Judaism still mandated the sacrifice of animals and the systematic extermination of entire human populations (the Amalekites and Canaanites), Buddha and Mahavira already instructed their followers to avoid harming not only all human beings, but any sentient beings whatsoever, including insects.

Jewish physics, Christian biology

Only in the 19th and 20th centuries do we see a truly extraordinary Jewish contribution to humankind as a whole – namely, the role of Jews in modern science. In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20 percent of all Nobel Prize winners in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population. But it should be stressed that this has been a contribution of individual Jews rather than of Judaism as a religion or a culture. Most of the important Jewish scientists of the past 200 years acted outside the Jewish religious sphere.

 Indeed, Jews began to make their remarkable contribution to science only once they had abandoned the yeshivas in favor of the laboratories.

Prior to 1800, the Jewish impact on science was limited. Naturally enough, Jews played no significant role in the progress of science in China, in India or in the Maya civilization. In Europe and the Middle East, some Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides had a significant influence on their gentile colleagues, but the overall Jewish impact was more or less proportional to their demographic weight. During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Judaism was hardly instrumental to the outbreak of the Scientific Revolution. Except for Spinoza (who was excommunicated for his trouble by the Jewish community), you can hardly name a single Jew who was critical to the birth of modern physics, chemistry, biology or the social sciences. We don’t know what Einstein’s ancestors were doing in the days of Galileo and Newton, but in all likelihood they were far more interested in studying the Talmud than in studying light and gravity.

The great change occurred only in the 19th and 20th centuries, when secularization and the Jewish Enlightenment movement caused many Jews to adopt the worldview and lifestyle of their gentile neighbors. Jews then began to join the universities and research centers of countries such as Germany, France and the United States. Jewish scholars brought from the ghettos and shtetls important cultural legacies. The central value of education in Jewish culture was one of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of Jewish scientists. Other factors included the desire of a persecuted minority to prove its worth, and the barriers that prevented talented Jews from advancement in more anti-Semitic institutions such as the army and the state administration.

Yet while Jewish scientists brought with them from the yeshivas excellent discipline and a deep faith in the value of knowledge, it is hard to say that they also brought a helpful baggage of concrete ideas and insights. Einstein was Jewish, but the theory of relativity wasn’t “Jewish physics.” What does faith in the sacredness of the Torah have to do with the insight that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared? For the sake of comparison, Darwin was a Christian and even began his studies at Cambridge intending to become an Anglican priest. Does it imply that the theory of evolution is a Christian theory? It would be ridiculous to list the theory of relativity as a Jewish contribution to humankind, just as it would be ridiculous to credit Christianity with the theory of evolution.

Physicist Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) standing beside a blackboard with chalk-marked mathematical calculations written across it. Hulton Archive, Getty Images

Similarly, it is hard to see anything particularly Jewish about the invention of the process for synthesizing ammonia by Fritz Haber (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1918); about the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin by Selman Waksman (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 1952); or about the discovery of quasicrystals by Dan Shechtman (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 2011). In the case of scholars from the humanities and social sciences – such as Sigmund Freud – their Jewish heritage perhaps had a deeper impact on their insights. Yet even in these cases, the discontinuities are more apparent than the surviving links. Freud’s views about the human psyche were very different from those of Rabbi Joseph Caro or Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, and he did not discover the Oedipus complex by carefully perusing the Shulhan Arukh (the code of Jewish law), or the Mishnah.

To summarize, the Jewish emphasis on education and learning probably made an important contribution to the exceptional success of Jewish scientists. However, it was gentile thinkers who laid the groundwork for the achievements of Einstein, Haber and Freud. The Scientific Revolution wasn’t a Jewish project, and Jews found their place in it only when they moved from the yeshivas to the universities. Indeed, the Jewish habit of seeking the answers to all questions by reading ancient texts was a very significant obstacle to Jewish integration into the world of modern science, where answers come from observations and experiments. If there was anything about the Jewish religion itself that necessarily leads to scientific breakthroughs, why is it that between 1905 and 1933, 10 secular German Jews won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics, but during the same period not a single ultra-Orthodox Jew or a single Bulgarian or Yemenite Jew won any Nobel Prize?

Lest I be suspected of being a “self-hating Jew” or an anti-Semite, I would like to emphasize that I am not saying Judaism was a particularly evil or benighted religion. All I am saying is that it wasn’t particularly important to the history of humankind. For many centuries, Judaism was the humble religion of a small persecuted minority that preferred to read and contemplate rather than to build empires and burn heretics at the stake. Anti-Semites usually think that Jews are very important. Anti-Semites imagine that the Jews control the world, or the banking system, or at least the media, and that they are to blame for everything from global warming to the September 11 attacks.

I would say to the anti-Semites: Get over it. Jews may be a very interesting people, but when you look at the big picture, you must realize that they have had a very limited impact on the world. Throughout history, humans have created hundreds of different religions and sects. A handful of them – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism – influenced billions of people (not always for the best). The vast majority of creeds – such as the Bon religion, the Yoruba religion and the Jewish religion – had a far smaller impact. One of the central and most beautiful values of Judaism is modesty. We would do well to take this value to heart.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” and of “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” (forthcoming in English). His website: www.ynharari.com

Yuval Noah Harari

Haaretz Contributor

How Germans handle terror - Pure reason - The Economist

It took rather long time for the public to caught on to the games politicians play and that involve human lives of their own compatriots. Slowly the paid and organised media facing tough competition from social media has been leaking information that exposes the dirty tricks the politicians unleash to keep their leash on power and on people. Most prominent is the media game are the Jewish media barons, who have made a big propaganda of Islamic terror. They teamed with the politicians who were not averse to stage terror incidents around the world through their willing or most of the time their black-mailed proxies, to hold an entire Muslim community of one billion people hostage to collective sin of terror and therefor fit for collective punishments. It would appear the US President Obama was the first to differentiate between the Muslim terror accused and the entire Muslim people as well as Islam as two separate subjects. Media did take the cue and now in Germany, we see such terror incidents are not creating the mass hysteria that the Jewish media was in the forefront to create out of lone wolf terror attacks. This is a big change. And time all those conspirators in paid media and social media are expose, so that general public heaves a sigh of relief from this organised scare-mongering that had a chain reaction as its ultimate goal.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>

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http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21702718-face-rash-attacks-germans-are-staying-remarkably-calm-pure-reason

In the face of a rash of attacks, Germans are staying remarkably calm

Jul 30th 2016 | BERLIN | From the print edition

• 

Germans, not panicking

ASK some Germans how people should react to terrorism and most would probably agree with the historian Herfried Münkler that the best attitude is heroische Gelassenheit: heroic calmness. Let other countries declare wars on terrorism and near-permanent states of emergency, they say; Germany’s dark history has taught it not to over-react. Sceptics used to reply that talk was cheap coming from Germany, which had been spared major incidents of the sort that have struck America, France, Turkey and other countries. That changed in the space of one week this month, when Germany suffered four very different attacks.

First, on July 18th, an Afghan refugee stabbed and axed four passengers on a train and another on a platform. Four days later a German teenager of Iranian descent went on a rampage in a shopping centre in Munich (pictured), injuring more than 30 people and killing nine before shooting himself. Two days after that, a Syrian refugee hacked a pregnant woman to death with a machete—“relationship troubles”, the police said. Elsewhere that night another Syrian refugee tried to enter a concert with a backpack of explosives. When he was barred, he blew himself up, injuring 15 others.

In this section

• Loss of faith
• Pure reason
• Defend me maybe
• Cross purposes
• Correspondence club

Reprints

Related topics

• Germany
• Munich

Germans grew more jittery with each round of breaking news. There was a brief panic during the initial hours of the Munich rampage, as rumours spread on social media that three killers were on the loose rather than just one. Munich’s 2,300 police were inundated with 4,300 emergency calls, almost all of them false.

But Munich quickly recovered its poise. Under the hashtag #OffeneTuer (“#OpenDoor”), residents offered to accommodate anyone stranded for the night by the lock-down. Munich’s police spokesperson, Marcus da Gloria Martins, laboured tirelessly to sort fact from fiction. Mr da Gloria Martins, who wrote a thesis on crisis communication, ultimately became the country’s hero of the week. On a television talk show, he appealed to the audience and media: “Give us the chance to report facts. Don’t speculate, don’t copy from each other.” It was the biggest applause line of the night.

Most politicians heeded his advice, distinguishing carefully between the issues at play in different killings. The week’s worst disaster, in Munich, had nothing to do with Islamism. The 18-year-old gunman, David Ali Sonboly, had been bullied and suffered from depression, and had prepared his rampage for a year. He had read “Why Kids Kill” by Peter Langman, an American expert on school shootings. In 2015 he visited Winnenden, a town in Germany where a school mass shooting took place in 2009. He executed his attack on the fifth anniversary of the massacre by Anders Breivik on the Norwegian island of Utoya.

Mr Sonboly’s case opened many debates. He had played “Counter-Strike”, a violent computer game also favoured by other shooters. Should such games be banned? The consensus seemed to be no; that would curtail liberty and be unfair on the majority of players who never become violent. Should Germany deploy its army in domestic emergencies such as this? Some, including Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said yes. Others pointed to Germany’s Nazi-era history and remained wary.

In charts: Terror in western Europe

Mr Sonboly had used a contraband Glock 17, the type of gun also preferred by the killers at Utoya and Winnenden. Should Germany’s gun laws be tightened? No, the consensus suggested; Germany already has some of the strictest laws in the world. Mr Sonboly had bought his gun illegally from Slovakia through the “dark net”, an encrypted portion of the internet. The weapon had been disabled for use as a stage prop; Mr Sonboly or someone else later restored it to shoot live rounds.

Public discussion of the other three attackers was equally mature. All were refugees from war-torn countries and probably traumatised. Two of them—the axeman on the train and the backpack bomber at the concert—acted in the name of Islamic State (IS). The former, an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan, was only 17 years old. The latter, a Syrian nicknamed Rambo at his refugee centre, had been denied asylum and was to be deported to Bulgaria. He had already been in psychiatric treatment and twice tried to commit suicide.

Some worried that IS might have smuggled in terrorists amid the refugees who have arrived in Germany in recent years—about 1m last year alone. Germany is investigating 59 such cases, said Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister. (There are 708 other investigations into possible Islamist terrorist plots, involving more than 1,000 suspects.) But he cautioned that the vast majority of refugees are peaceful victims, rather than perpetrators, of terror. Most Germans agreed that refugees, especially the young and traumatised, should receive better counselling and supervision.

Only a few tried to make hay of the tragedies. During the Munich rampage, André Poggenburg, a leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, tried to blame the open-door refugee policy of chancellor Angela Merkel—even before anyone knew who was shooting. “Our sympathy for the wounded and the bereaved, our disgust for the Merkelites and leftwing idiots who bear responsibility!” he tweeted. He earned immediate condemnation on social and broadcast media, followed by ridicule once it emerged that the shooter was German. Then the country went on being heroically calm. 

Every 4th person categorised as ‘beggar’ in India is Muslim - Written by ZEESHAN SHAIKH | Mumbai - The Indian Express

http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/muslims-polpulation-in-india-muslims-beggar-unemployment-census-data-muslim-economic-survey-2941228/

The Indian Express

Every 4th person categorised as ‘beggar’ in India is Muslim

Share of Muslims in official 3.7 lakh ‘beggar’ population is disproportionately larger than the community’s share in country’s population, show Census data.

Written by ZEESHAN SHAIKH | Mumbai | Updated: July 29, 2016 12:34 am

A man seeking alms on the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid is caught in a sudden downpour. Begging is illegal in India. (Express Photo: Oinam Anand)

Muslims make up 14.23% of India’s population. They are, however, nearly 25% of the 3.7 lakh individuals who have been listed as beggars by the Government of India.

Activists claim that the data — released last month — on the religious orientation of those deemed ‘non workers’ in Census 2011, highlights, once again, the limited or unequal access that certain communities or groups of citizens have to government schemes and services, which pushes them to destitution.

‘Non workers’ are defined in the Census as individuals who do not participate in any economic activity — paid or unpaid — household duties, or cultivation.

As per Census data, of the total 72.89 crore non workers, 3.7 lakh are beggars. This number fell 41% since the last Census of 2001, which recorded the number of beggars at 6.3 lakh.

Muslims make up an unusually high percentage of individuals who have been categorised as beggars. A total of 92,760 Muslims are categorised thus — a quarter of the country’s total beggar population of 3.7 lakh.

Hindus are 79.8% of India’s population, but with 2.68 lakh individuals, make up 72.22% of its beggar population. Christians, who are 2.3% of the population, make up 0.88% of the beggar population (3,303 individuals). Buddhists (0.52%), Sikhs (0.45%), Jains (0.06%) and others (0.30%) follow.

Interestingly, more Muslim women seem to be begging as compared to Muslim men, a trend that is opposite to that of all communities except those categorised as ‘Others’. The national average is 53.13% male beggars to 46.87% female beggars; for Muslims, the ratio is 43.61% male beggars and 56.38% female.

“Destitution is the outcome of the failure of government programmes to provide a safety net to its citizens. This number is evidence of how certain groups in society have lesser access to services and government programmes and are pushed to being destitutes,” Mohammed Tarique, coordinator of Koshish, a Tata Institute of Social Sciences Field Action Project on Homelessness and Destitution, said.

Beggary is illegal in India, and is punishable by imprisonment of 3-10 years. The Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959 has been followed by almost all states in the country. Activists say the Act provides no clear categorisation of beggars, and even homeless and landless labourers who have migrated to different cities are categorised as beggars. Like many of India’s laws, the anti-beggary legislation is based on an archaic British law against vagrants.

Under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959, anyone having no visible means of subsistence and found wandering about in a public space is deemed as a beggar. All those who solicit alms in a public place under any pretence including singing, dancing, fortune-telling or street performing are also deemed as beggars.

The Act gives discretionary powers to the police to pick up anyone on suspicion that he is a beggar or a destitute with no means of fending for himself.

Activists say the law, rather than rehabilitating destitutes, criminalises the poor and those suffering from mental illnesses. Some states like Bihar have undertaken a programme for the rehabilitation of beggars. But other states like Maharashtra and West Bengal can put away an individual found on the street to prison.

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