Iran issues warning on opposition internet use, Islamic World News, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic World News

Iran issues warning on opposition internet use

Opposition rallies in Iran have frequently turned violent

Iranian authorities have warned opposition supporters against using text and e-mail messages to organise protest rallies.

The country's police chief said these systems were monitored and people misusing them would be prosecuted.

Gen Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam also said opposition supporters should not think internet proxies would protect them.

Following post-election protests, the government blocked several pro-reform websites and stopped text messages.

Without newspapers, Iran's young opposition supporters have constantly turned to the internet and mobile phone to communicate with each other and the outside world, organising demonstrations and distributing images and news of violence against them.

Iran's head of police said disseminating the opposition's plans deserved great punishment.

"These people should know where they are sending the SMS and e-mail as these systems are under control. They should not think using proxies will prevent their identification," Mr Ahmadi Moghaddam said.

He warned that those who incited others to protest or issued appeals: "have committed a worse crime than those who come to the streets".

http://newageislam.com/iran-issues-warning-on-opposition-internet-use/islamic-world-news/d/2389

Kashmiri leaders reject Pakistan's move to give Gilgit-Baltistan a province-like status, Urdu Section, NewAgeIslam.com

Urdu Section

Kashmiri leaders reject Pakistan's move to give Gilgit-Baltistan a province-like status

London: The United Kashmir People's National Party (UKPNP) has unequivocally rejected Pakistani government's move to give Gilgit-Baltistan a province like status and branded it the colonisation and further occupation of one of the integral parts of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Calling it a stab in the back of Kashmiri people by the Pakistani authorities, the leader of UKPNP Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri asked the Kashmiris of all stripes and their friends and sympathizers all over the world to raise their voice against the subjugation of Gilgit-Baltistan in the name of so-called package announced by the Pakistani regime on 29th of August 2009. Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri was delivering a telephonic address from Geneva, where he is busy these days arranging a series of meetings to oppose the Pakistani move and to raise awareness on the issue, to the UKPNP demonstrators who gathered here outside the High Commission of Pakistan to protest against the clear violation of the United Nations resolutions which state that Gilgit-Baltistan is an integral part of the united state of Kashmir and its constitutional and political future status is yet to be resolved.

UKPNP’s UK based leaders Jamil Latif, Mujatba Ali Shah, Usman Kayani, Sardar Asad Khan, Akhtar Kashmiri, and Sardar Afzal Tahir led the demonstration. Shaukat Ali Kashmiri said the move by Pakistan had fully exposed the fact that Pakistan was only interested in grabbing the land of Kashmir and only interested to plunder its natural resources and it’s propaganda of being a friend and well-wisher of Kashmiri people was a drama all-along. The governor and the assembly, Kashmiri said, will be a rubber stamp body and it will have no legitimate authority in the eyes of Kashmiri people and it will only serve the interests of Kashmir’s occupiers in Islamabad.

http://newageislam.com/kashmiri-leaders-reject-pakistan-s-move-to-give-gilgit-baltistan-a-province-like-status/urdu-section/d/2070

When the headscarf becomes a death sentence, Islam, Women and Feminism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam, Women and Feminism

When the headscarf becomes a death sentence

By Mukul Kesavan

The events that led to her murder began with a playground dispute. She became involved in a dispute with Alex W., a Russian immigrant of ethnic German descent, about whose turn it was to use the swing: his niece’s or her son’s. The argument became ugly when he tried to pull off her headscarf and called her a terrorist and an Islamist whore. He was fined by a district court but his defence that people like Marwa were less than human and therefore couldn’t really be insulted, was so provocative that the public prosecutor pressed for more severe punishment.

In the subsequent trial Alex W. walked across the courtroom and stabbed Marwa 18 times as her three-year-old son watched. When her husband ran to her defence, he suffered stab wounds and was shot in the leg by a policeman who mistook him for the assailant. Marwa and her unborn child died in the courtroom; her husband’s condition remains critical.

The German newspapers that did mention the murder, did so on their back pages and confined themselves to reporting that a woman had been killed in a courtroom over a playground dispute. There was concern expressed about security in German courtrooms but no mention of the racist context of the murder. It was only when her burial provoked outraged demonstrations in Alexandria, that a handful of news providers—the Guardian, AP, the Huffington Post—gave the story some play. Even today, if you Google Marwa el-Sherbini, you get pages and pages of websites in the Arab and Muslim world; for all the interest shown by the European and American media or the German government, the murder might never have happened.

http://newageislam.com/when-the-headscarf-becomes-a-death-sentence/islam,-women-and-feminism/d/1686