(RNS) The day after President-elect Donald Trump appointed a man accused of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as his chief strategist, two of the nation’s largest Jewish and Muslim advocacy groups formed an unprecedented partnership to fight bigotry.
The American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America Monday (Nov. 14) launched the new national group: The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council. Though Jewish and Muslim groups have cooperated before, the size and influence of these two particular groups — and the prominence of the people who have joined the council — marks a milestone in Jewish-Muslim relations.
“Our council is coming at the right time,” said Eftakhar Alam, senior coordinator at ISNA’s Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances. Continue reading
Jakarta’s Christian governor was interrogated by police on Monday after tens of thousands of angry Muslims took to the streets on Friday to demand that he be jailed for allegedly insulting Islam’s holy book, the Quran.
“Dutch politician Geert Wilders has spent years speaking out against the threat Islam poses to his country, and now he finds himself in legal trouble for it. …The charges stem from a March 2014 rally in which Wilders asked a room full of supporters if they wanted “more or fewer Moroccans” in the country. When the audience chanted, “Fewer, fewer!” Wilders responded, “Well, we’ll arrange that, then.” This led the Dutch government to prosecute Wilders for “offending members of a group based on their race, and hate speech and discrimination,” according to the 
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“In the wake of the news that a group of teenagers were unlikely to see any real punishment for gang-raping a 14-year-old girl and leaving her for dead, citizens of the German city of Hamburg called for new rules regarding violent crime committed by minors. On Monday, an online petition calling for the teens to see jail time had garnered some 21,000 signatures. “The sexual self-determination and integrity of a woman must have more weight than any concern for the perpetrators,” [of sexual crimes,] says the petition. …However, the authorities have made it clear that they came to this decision on their own, and were not swayed by such petitions, Spiegel Online reported. …The judge admitted that “the penalties may seem mild to the public,” but that the teens had all made confessions, appeared repentant and been judged to no longer present a danger to society. …Laws prosecuting perpetrators for sexual crimes in Germany have also come under fire after the string of assaults committed in the city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Although
“The latest WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta emails shows the Obama administration kept a list of high-profile Muslims it wanted to appoint to top administration jobs, sub-cabinet jobs and outside boards, agencies and policy committees. The 2008 emails reveal that it wasn’t enough to be Arab American, you had to be Arab and Muslim to make it onto this list.” –
Rajhu discovered that his sister had defied the family and married the Christian. For six days he paced. His rage grew. How could she? He watched her laughing on the phone, ignoring their mother’s pleas to leave the man. On the seventh day, he retrieved the pistol from where he had hidden it and walked up to his sister. With one bullet to the head, he killed her. For generations now in Pakistan, they’ve called it “honor” killing, carried out in the name of a family’s reputation.” –
“Jamal Mansour, 63, of Rocky River, Ohio, walked into his adult daughter’s bedroom at 1:15 a.m. Tuesday and shot her twice in the head while she slept. His daughter, Tahini Mansour, 27, died about 10 hours later at a local hospital. “We don’t have a solid motive other than an argument occurred between a father and his daughter,” said Lt. George Lichman with Rocky River Police. Islam experts and former Muslims say the suspect’s behavior is rife with clues but don’t look for the police or media to flesh them out and share those clues with the public. Mansour is a Muslim immigrant from Jordan and his alleged execution-style killing of his daughter bears the hallmarks of Islamic honor violence, says Daniel Akbari, a former top Shariah lawyer in Iran who defected to the U.S. several years ago and now lives in Texas. –
“A pattern has emerged, repeating itself after almost every new terrorist attack committed on U.S. soil. The connection to Islam is initially ignored, then downplayed as mere coincidence. The attacker’s motive is either “unknown” or cannot be “speculated” about, according to local law enforcement. It happened again Friday night when Arcan Cetin, a 20-year-old Muslim immigrant from Turkey, shot and killed five people at the cosmetics counter of a Macy’s store inside a mall in Burlington, Washington. Investigators said they didn’t know what Cetin’s motive could have been.