A Bavarian judge who ordered the crucifix to be removed from the courtroom during the trial of an Afghan migrant has faced a backlash. The defendant says he does not mind being tried under the cross.
Klaus-Juergen Schmid, a judge in the Bavarian town of Miesbach, has ordered a crucifix to be removed from the courtroom during the trial of a 21-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker accused of making death threats to another Afghan who converted to Christianity.
Initially reported last week, the story received wider coverage later with people on social media weighing in. Shortly after the case was made public, Schmid began receiving “angry emails” accusing him of removing a symbol of Germany’s “cultural and religious sovereignty.”
“The blood shed by the hands of the defendant will be partly due to you,” the judge quoted one of the comments as saying. This is despite the judge’s claim that he imposed the maximum penalty on the defendant.
“I can’t believe it,” one Facebook user, Otti Friedrich, wrote. “The judge just has to realize where he lives, in a Christian country? Or did I miss something?”
Another person said: “Sorry, but this judge is dishonorable… There are laws in Germany and judges should adhere to them. Poor Germany, everyone is only thinking of our government in the first place. We are foreigners in our own country.”
Explaining his move, Schmid said that there is no law that requires having a crucifix in the courtroom in the first place. He also said he wanted to show the Afghan man that his decision is not a reflection or a sign of conflict between Christians and Muslims.
“So I did not think it would be proper to convict him under the cross – that was the issue,” he said, as quoted by Bayerischer Rundfunk.
The judge said that he does not want to have the crucifix in the courtroom anymore. “After Bavarian Judicial Law was changed so that neither crosses nor headscarves should be worn by judges during trials, I do not believe it is right that religious symbols should hang in the courtroom,” he said.
The Afghan defendant, meanwhile, said he did not mind being tried under the crucifix. “I don’t care if there’s a cross hanging in the courtroom,” he told Bild newspaper, as cited by Rosenheim24.
The man, who claims to have fled Afghanistan because the Taliban threatened his father, added: “I’m a normal person, I’m not a [Muslim] believer, I have Christian friends.”
The State Department announced a new $600,000 taxpayer-funded study that suggests “ideals of masculinity” in Kenya are contributing to terrorism.
The department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism is seeking a nonprofit group to “explore gender identities of boys and men in Kenya.” The grant proposal states that men being “tough, heterosexual, aggressive, unemotional, and achieving” can make them vulnerable to joining Islamic extremist groups.
“Gender is increasingly recognized as an essential aspect to understanding and countering violent extremism throughout the world,” the State Department said. “To date, research and interventions on gender in Kenya have predominantly focused on the role of women and girls in violent extremism. However, men and boys are disproportionately recruited by and join terrorist groups and carry out terrorist operations. In Kenya, there currently exists no CVE [countering violent extremism] programming dedicated to the role of gender of boys and men and vulnerability to violent extremism.”
To remedy this, the State Department will spend up to $592,500 on the “Masculinity and Violent Extremism” study, which will be awarded to an American nonprofit or nongovernmental organization later this year.
The study will “determine existing knowledge and gaps on male gender and violent extremism as well as explore gender identities of boys and men in Kenya.”
The grant proposal blames Kenya’s “patriarchal” society of “tough, heterosexual” men for problems facing the developing country.
“In Kenya, boys and men are disproportionately recruited by al-Shabaab and more likely to be both operators and victims of terrorist acts,” the State Department said. “Kenyan society, while diverse in its ethnic and cultural composition, is uniformly patriarchal and highly prescriptive of gender expressions and identities.”
“Kenyan males are expected to head the household as well as provide for, protect, and maintain the family,” the department continued. “Socially, males are expected to be tough, heterosexual, aggressive, unemotional, and achieving. The practical and social pressures to fulfill these expectations can be immense and create vulnerabilities that are exploited by violent extremist groups who appeal to these characteristics and offer the opportunity to fulfil [sic] these roles.”
The State Department added that the research would involve fathers and community leaders in Kenya in the hopes to “shape existing cultural narratives on masculinity, gender, and violent extremism.”
“Funds will support male-to-male dialogue and training on issues of gender and encourage stronger social and familial support structures,” the department said.
I’m sure it is okay because Allah told him to do it.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A man was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison after admitting to strangling his ex-wife in 2016, then stuffing her body into a duffel bag and burying her remains as their 3-year-old son watched.
Fahad Saeed, 28, showed little remorse before Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Pamela Barker imposed the sentence.
“Things happen,” Saeed said through an Arabic interpreter.
Cuyahoga County prosecutors and Saeed’s lawyers struck a deal on Thursday that would see him plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, kidnapping and burglary charges, and serve the maximum time in prison on each charge for a total of 25 years.
Prosecutors agreed not pursue an aggravated murder charge that would put Saeed behind bars for life.
The court hearing offered details into Al-Dhannoon’s October 2016 disappearance from her apartment on Lakewood’s Gold Coast, and the months-long search that ended when investigators found her body in May 2017.
Prosecutors noted for the first time that Saeed took the couple’s toddler son with him to bury the mother’s remains in a patch of thick woods near the apartment where Saeed once lived, across the street from the Memphis Kiddie Park.
The toddler told FBI agents in a November 2016 interview that “daddy put mommy in the pickies near the horses,” an apparent reference to the park’s carousel, Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Blaise Thomas said.
Five months would pass before a tipster from the county jail came forward with a detailed map that Saeed drew while serving a sentence on charges dating back to before Al-Dhannoon’s disappearance.
Saeed, an Iraqi national in the U.S. on a green-card visa, will be subject to deportation once he is released from prison.
Al-Dhannoon and Saeed married in 2011. She filed for the protection order in November 2015 after he became increasingly violent, according to court records.
Investigators say Saeed broke into Al-Dhannoon’s apartment in August 2016 and took cellphone video as he commented about the state of the house, Al-Dhannoon’s weight and her mothering capabilities.
Two months later, Saeed again went to the home, where he attacked Al-Dhannoon.
Surveillance cameras caught him and a friend, Ammar Sami, buying shovels from a Walmart the night of Al-Dhannoon’s disappearance. The next day, he took his son to a Home Depot and bought a small hand digging tool, prosecutor said.
Investigators focused on Saeed early and learned that he had been to Al-Dhannoon’s Gold Coast apartment building in the days before she disappeared.
Saeed was arrested, charged and eventually sentenced to six months in Cuyahoga County Jail for violating a restraining order that Al-Dhannoon took out against him.
A community college professor in Texas frightened several of his students when he walked into class Tuesday night with his face covered and incoherently mumbled about the Koran, the moon and the dark night.
Students attending a lecture at Tarrant County College called the police after adjunct professor Daniel Mashburn walked into his astronomy class and started acting out of character.
Students told FOX4 that Mashburn walked in about 20 minutes late and promptly turned off the lights. He was wearing a baseball hat, a beanie, a scarf over his face and gloves.
“The kid next to me had said he was acting very strange, and I looked over at the girl next to me and she seemed very scared,” student April McLeod said.
The students said Mashburn then started talking about the Muslim holy book the Koran and the moon and the dark night.
“Mostly he was talking about different things of the Muslim faith,” McLeod said. “I was in class for about five minutes. He kept messing with his pocket and you could tell there was an object in the right-hand pocket. And whenever he went to pull out his hand, I started having this really bad feeling and jumped up and ran out of the classroom.”
She added: “At one point he stood face-to-face with the board of the classroom and was just talking to the board.”
Eventually campus police arrived and searched Mashburn, who didn’t take off the scarf or baseball hat. Police found no harmful or illegal objects on the professor.
McLeod filmed police searching Mashburn outside the classroom. He was not arrested.
When reached by FOX4 News, Mashburn seemed to deflect many questions and said several times his teaching of astronomy goes hand-in-hand with Islam.
“I keep it secret. I keep it safe. I do my best, but I am tired of hiding in the shadows,” he said when asked if he explained his teaching philosophy when he interviewed for the position. “I am tired of fearing their law. I fear Allah.”
A Somali immigrant allegedly tried to rape a woman while she was in labor at a hospital in Rome, according to a Tuesday report.
Alì Abdella, 38, has been accused of sexual violence and theft by attempting to rape an unidentified woman, 43, while she was in labor at the Sant’Eugenio Hospital in Rome, reported Italian outlet Il Libero Quotidianno. Abdella allegedly stole and donned a green hospital uniform, entered the woman’s hospital room, and began groping her thigh and masturbating in front of her, reported La Stampa.
The woman began screaming, alerting hospital staff who called the police, accoring to pupia.tv. Abdella, who has been living in Italy for the past five years and has a history of crime, was arrested Dec. 31 by the Epozione police department.
Abdella’s first trial has been scheduled for Jan. 10. The defense team is calling for a psychiatrist’s report.
‘Cowardly and Criminal Lynching of Police’: France NYE Mob Attack on Female Officer Caught on Video
New Year’s Eve celebrations in France led to national outcry after footage of a female police officer being savagely attacked surfaced, among reports that over 1,000 cars were burned overnight and 510 arrests took place.
The female police officer was attacked alongside her male inspector in the Paris suburb of Champigny-sur-Marne by a large mob in the early hours of Monday morning, with both individuals being hospitalised.
In the footage widely shared to social media, a large group of African appearance males stand around cheering as a female police officer is kicked to the ground, taking several blows to the head. In other parts of social media footage shared by Front National member of parliament Gilbert Collard, men cheer as cars are rolled over.
France’s RTL reports the officers had become isolated from their colleagues while trying to calm a disturbance related to a New Year’s party in the Parisian suburb. While reinforcements were quickly deployed, with officers using “grenades and gunfire” to disperse the crowd, it was too late for the attacked officers to escape injury. Several government vehicles including two fire engines were also damaged during the unrest.
Champigny-sur-Marne, which is the home of three “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” — French government language for areas of extreme deprivation which are known in common discourse as heavily migrant-populated No Go Zones — is also the former home of suspected French Islamic State executioner Michael Dos Santos.
French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out against the violence on Monday afternoon, remarking: “The culprits of the cowardly and criminal lynching of the police doing their duty on the night of December 31st will be found and punished. Force will sustain the law. Honor to the police and full support to all officers crudely attacked.”
Macron’s comments were followed by remarks by the French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, who decried the “society of violence” and called for police forces to be strengthened. Calling out particular “neighbourhoods” where violence was able to flourish, the interior minister described a situation in some areas where fire crews could not even enter without a police escort, reports Le Express.
No arrests have been made.
The news of the attack comes as the French government revealed the shocking extent of violence across the country on New Year’s Eve, despite some 140,000 members of the security forces being deployed to the streets to keep order. Some 1,031 cars were burnt out over the course of the night, up from 935 the year before, and arrests stood at 510, up from 456.
Breitbart London reported in 2017 that French authorities declared New Year’s Eve celebrations that year had gone off without incident, despite nearly 1,000 cars being destroyed in predominantly low income, high immigration neighbourhoods.
