A Retired Asst Professor of Pediatrics currently working in Canada.
If Israel’s parliament approves the proposal, 30,000 Bedouins could be removed from their homes in Negev within 60 days Six Arab-Israeli towns in Israel‘s southern Negev region have ground to a halt in protest at government plans to confiscate swathes of land from the Bedouin community. If the proposal passes […]
(JTA ) — Nearly 1,000 rabbis in Israel and America have signed a petition condemning the burning of a mosque in a Bedouin town in northern Israel. According to the New Israel Fund, which circulated the petition within 24 hours of the Oct. 2 arson, it was presented Thursday to […]
Religious leaders confront myths that stop faithful from donating organs Nothing should stand in the way of saving a life, particularly not death. Rabbi Reuven Bulka has spent years spreading that message within the Jewish community and beyond with limited success. He is up against centuries of the cultural belief […]
Rob Kerby, Senior Editor | 1:56pm Wednesday October 5, 2011 Islam’s most populous nation, Indonesia, is the most diverse nation imaginable — a far-flung archipelego of 13,466 islands where 238 million people speaking 742 languages live in everything from luxurious skyscraper penthouses to squalid cardboard slums, mountainside-hugging bamboo huts and […]
STOCKHOLM — Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for a discovery that faced skepticism and mockery, even prompting his expulsion from his U.S. research team, before it won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough. While doing research in the U.S. in 1982, Shechtman discovered […]
Two international relations scholars, Ed Mansfield and Jack Snyder, suggest that one of the characteristics of transition to democracy is the weakness of state institutions and the tendency for political elites to use negative nationalism to gain votes. In this case, the risks of internal conflict, and to some extent […]
By Paul R. Kopenkoskey, An estimated 275 Christian leaders are meeting in Indonesia this week (Oct. 4-7) to plot an ecumenical future in what one veteran of the ecumenical movement called a watershed gathering. Leaders of the fledgling Global Christian Forum will gather evangelical, Pentecostal, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic and […]
Haaretz: By Eli Ashkenazi Hundreds of youths clash with police in Upper Galilee village overnight Monday, blocking roads and setting fire to buildings; former village council chief says incident ‘only harms us.’ Northern District Police Commander Major-General Roni Atia, who visited the scene of Monday night’s clashes in the village […]
Opinion: Religious liberty is the proverbial canary in the mine,” according to Doug Bandouw, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Canaries are often used by miners as an early-warning signal for poisonous gases. When the small birds stop singing and suffocate, miners know toxic gases have polluted the area […]
The President stresses the importance of the time in which mosque attack took place – the Ten Days of Atonement. President Shimon Peres on Monday condemned an arson attack on a mosque in the Upper Galilee village of Tuba the night before, branding it an immoral and illegal act that […]
sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted with fury on Monday after seeing pictures of a mosque in northern Israel which was torched overnight, a statement from his office said. Netanyahu was “furious” when he saw the pictures of the mosque in a Bedouin village in the northern Galilee region which […]
A close friend introduced me to the idea that practicing martial arts has the potential to assist a Muslim in achieving a higher spiritual connection with God. Since I had always associated martial arts with Asian culture and Eastern religions such as Zen Buddhism, the connection with Islam did not […]
(AP) JAKARTA, Indonesia — The chanting crowd at the radical Muslim protest in Indonesia stood out for its normalcy: smartly dressed businessmen, engineers, lawyers, smiling mothers, scampering children. At a time when al-Qaida seems to be faltering, the recruitment of such an educated, somewhat mainstream following is raising fears that […]
JERUSALEM — Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time this week in a project launched by Israel’s national museum and the web giant Google. The appearance of five of the […]
Is Indonesia headed for another round of deadly sectarian violence? Following the suicide bomb attack in Solo which has so far claimed two lives and injured more than 20 worshippers in a church, the country’s political elite has a lot of questions to answer, and we need a firm and […]
The mother of a passenger aboard a plane that crashed in a remote area of Indonesia says her daughter has called her, raising hopes of finding survivors as rescuers struggled to reach the site. Search and rescue teams had been unable to reach the accident site in a mountainous area […]
Indonesia’s biggest Muslim organization is calling on the government to block international radical Islamist sites. Nahdatul Ulama says extreme teachings are fueling racial violence across Indonesia. It is understood a suicide bomber who attacked a church in Central Java last week accessed radical Islamist websites. The government has already passed […]
If politics are personal, then let me say this. I love almost everything about the Judaism I practice: Born into a Jewish family, but raised without any formal religious education, I have in recent years become a member of a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn. I love singing the ancient prayers. […]
ndonesia has a national motto which reads in Bahasa Indonesia – Bhinneka Tunggal Ika; translated to English it means Unity in Diversity. For anyone in Indonesia this is familiar but for those less familiar with this country it is an interesting insight into the aspirations of the nation. The word […]
Rosh Hashana 5772: Hope and the Social Justice Movement While right-wing politicians are rolling back democratic rights in Israel, a new generation of protesters is demanding more powers for the people. The Jewish year 5771 brought two diametrically opposed developments in Israel. One was the flood of anti-democratic laws passed […]