Tag Archives: christian

London Christian protesters against gay marriage. – Video

Posted on June 8, 2013



London Christian protesters against gay marriage.
Marriage is not the solution for gay people, but Jesus Christ.

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Can a low-key professor fill the shoes of Washington's West Bank darling?

Posted on June 4, 2013

Salam Fayyad, who resigned as prime minister in April, was renowned internationally for winning donor trust. Rami Hamdallah, head of a West Bank university, is comparatively unknown.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas selected a little-known university chief to fill the outsized shoes of former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, renowned by international diplomats and in Israel for turning the Palestinian Authority from a basket case to a functioning government.

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Rami Hamdallah, a linguist who heads the West Banks Najah University, is toutedby the Palestinian governmentas a political independent, but analysts say he is an inexperienced politician largely dependent on Mr. Abbas. That raises questions about whether he will continue Mr. Fayyads record of groundbreaking reform sometimes at the expense of his relationship with the presidentat a time the US is pushing to revive the peace process.

“Hes a gray figure,” says Gershon Baskin, an Israeli activist and expert on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process who sometimes tries to pass messages between the sides. “I think that Abbas was looking for someone who is an administrator and not a politician, while retaining the confidence of the international community that the PA would not become corrupt.”

Fayyad announced in April that he was stepping down after years of tension with politicians in Abbas’s Fatah party, who feared Fayyad’s growing political cloutoutside the partyand resentedhisreforms that scaled back the influence of the party.

Abbas accepted the resignation despite appeals by Washington, which considered Fayyad, a US-trained economist, the best figure to shepherd continued reform of the government and tooverseePalestinian security services in the West Bank that coordinate with the Israeli military, a key element of stability there.

Observers speculate that Abbas wants another prime minister who would be seen by the international community as a technocrat independent of his partys machine. But that could also hinder his ability to govern effectively.

“He has little or no political experience and is unlikely to deal with the challenges that he will face,” says Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian political analyst.

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When Minnesota approves gay marriage, does Supreme Court listen? Maybe.

Posted on May 14, 2013

Minnesota on Tuesday became the third state in two weeks to legalize gay marriage. According to one exchange at the Supreme Court earlier this year, that’s exactly why the justices shouldn’t get involved.

In the past two weeks the number of states recognizing same-sex marriages has risen from nine to 12, with new marriage bills signed into law in Rhode Island, Delaware, and on Tuesday in Minnesota.

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Public polls in recent weeks confirm that more Americans than ever before accept the idea of same-sex marriage.

And theres an even bigger potential prize on the horizon as the justices of the US Supreme Court work behind the scenes fashioning decisions expected next month in two major gay rights cases, both involving same-sex marriage.

While it is clear that gay-rights advocates are enjoying significant momentum and historic victories, it is not at all clear how these recent successes will be perceived by the justices at the high court.

Some analysts see the recent events as helpful to the cause of gay rights, while others suggest the rapid progress could convince a swing justice or justices that the intervention of the courts is not necessary.

In one possible scenario, the rising tide of public opinion and state laws favoring equal rights for gay men and lesbians may embolden Justice Anthony Kennedy, a potential swing vote, to join the courts liberal wing in providing special legal protections for gay Americans like those that cover African-Americans, Latinos, and women.

On the other hand, the recent successes might also convince Justice Kennedy and/or other justices that the political process and democracy itself is an engine of change sufficient enough to guarantee the rights of gay Americans.

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Christian groups welcome gay marriage referendum

Posted on April 30, 2013

Independent MP Tony Windsor has flagged a referendum on gay marriage. Photo: Andrew Meares

Christian groups want a referendum on gay marriage, saying Australians will reject any change to the status quo if the question posed was a ”black and white” choice on whether to allow ”homosexuals to marry”.

As divisions emerged among the Greens and same-sex marriage advocates over a referendum, Reverend Fred Nile joined the Australian Christian lobby in calling for the matter to be decided on election day.

Fred Nile: thinks the people should decide. Photo: Jon Reid

The government is set to announce a referendum will be held on September 14 on constitutional recognition for local government but key independents led by Tony Windsor have called for a second question to be attached to the paper on recognition for same-sex marriage.

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Rev Nile said his Christian Democratic Party had been ”pipped at the post” by Mr Windsor and had planned to publicly call for a referendum next week.

He told Fairfax Media: ”I think people should decide the issue.

”But the question has to be clear. A question like ‘are you in favour of marriage equality?’ will confuse some people. I’m in favour of marriage equality between a husband and a wife.

”The question has to be black and white: Do you agree that homosexuals should be legally married? ”I think the majority of people would vote no if the question was clear.”

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IDF breaks up Palestinian march toward West Bank settlement

Posted on April 27, 2013

Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse about 500 Palestinian villagers marching toward an Israeli settlement outpost in the West Bank on Friday.

The procession, the largest of its kind for years, followed charges by Palestinians that the Israeli settlers, whose caravans abut village land, had attacked them twice this week.

Men from Deir Jareer, including Christian and Muslim clerics, gathered for Friday prayers on a craggy outcrop between their village and a cluster of half a dozen makeshift settler homes surrounded by Israeli army jeeps and soldiers.

Their march, preceded by a group of stone-throwing youths, was repeatedly pushed back by salvoes of Israeli tear gas. Young boys howled from the effects of the tear gas and old men hitched up their robes to flee, holding onion slices to their noses.

Medics treated several men for gas inhalation and rubber bullet wounds.

A few Palestinian villages hold weekly protests against the Israeli army and settlements, usually involving a score of rock-throwing youngsters, and unrest has mounted this year.

But political gatherings are rare around Deir Jareer, and was sparked after villagers say settlers torched around ten of their cars on Monday night, after planting an Israeli flag on a derelict church on Friday and pelting village youth with stones.

“This was a peaceful area. We’re gathered today to say we refuse to be attacked and driven off our own land,” said Sami Issa, a resident. “We want their army to pull the settlers out.”

The Israeli military has said it is investigating the events leading up to the march. Asked about Friday’s incidents, an army spokesman said: “Soldiers responded to a group of some 250 stone-throwing youths with riot dispersal means near Ofra.”

The United States is trying to revive long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress this month that these efforts were urgent because the chance to create a viable Palestinian state was fast receding.

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Palestinian Catholics fight against Israeli barrier in West Bank

Posted on April 27, 2013

Beit Jala, West Bank Palestinians in this Christian village are hoping the new pope can succeed where others have failed pressing Israel to drop plans to build a stretch of its West Bank separation barrier through their picturesque valley.

Since Vatican properties are affected, residents have appealed to the Roman Catholic Church to use more of its significant influence in the Holy Land to reroute the barrier, even as local Catholic leaders hold a special protest Mass in threatened orchards each week.

The Vatican has called on Israel not to seize the lands, but local Palestinian Catholics want the new pontiff to lean more heavily on Israel.

“We have hope in the new pope, as he is close to the poor and the oppressed,” said the Rev. Ibrahim Shomali, the Palestinian priest who has been leading the protests.

Israel has been building the barrier since 2002 in response to a wave of suicide bombings early last decade that killed hundreds of people. Israel says the barrier is needed to keep out Palestinian attackers.

Palestinians say the barrier is a land grab because it zigzags through the West Bank. When complete, nearly 10 percent of the West Bank, including many Israeli settlements, would lie on Israel’s side, according to the United Nations. Roughly two-thirds of the 450-mile structure has been built.

Beit Jala is a postcard-pretty Christian town of 16,000 in the overwhelmingly Muslim West Bank. The likeness of the Palestinian patron, Saint George, is carved into building facades. Groceries sell beer and butchers sell pork, items banned under Islamic law. A bowling alley faces an Israeli military base.

Yet the village feels hemmed in. It abuts the biblical town of Bethlehem on one side. On another, barbed wire separates Beit Jala from the Jewish settlement of Har Gilo. Part of the separation barrier seals in another side, protecting a nearby road used by Jewish settlers. Residents say the planned stretch of construction will close off one of the village’s last remaining open spaces.

“They are crowding us inside a ghetto,” sighed Issa Khalilieh, whose family lost 12 acres in years of Israeli confiscations, and is poised to lose another three acres (one hectare) to the barrier.

An Israeli defense official said Jerusalem would remain “open and vulnerable” if the section isn’t built. He noted that during the height of violence a decade ago, militants fired at nearby Gilo from Beit Jala.

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France approves gay marriage after surprisingly violent debate

Posted on April 24, 2013

The French parliament voted to legalize gay marriage today, becoming the 14th country to do so. But France’sroad to marriage equality has been surprisingly divisive, bitter, and even bloody.

France became the 14th country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage today, fulfilling the campaign pledge of Socialist President Franois Hollande.

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But if Mr. Hollande thought passage of the law would be easy in this secular nation, the road to marriage equality has been surprisingly divisive and bitter, even shockingly violent at points.

For months, demonstrators protesting the bill have amassed in the streets of Paris one protest wasthe largest gathering mobilized around a social issue in nearly 30 years.

Since then, extremists have joined the fray. Riot police with tear gas stood on guard at nightly protests in the week leading up to the vote, with dozens of arrests made. Politicians have brawled, and one who supports gay marriage even received a death threat. According to gay rights activists, reports of homophobic incidents have tripled during the six-month battle.

That a swath of the population is protesting the issue is not surprising. Conservatives, here and across the Western world, have protested so-called “culture war” issues since the 1970s. But the scope and scale, tinged with hate, is what has caught France off-guard, says Jean-Yves Camus, a political researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. Its much more strident than expected.

He and other analysts say that the battle here does not necessarily reflect a society that overall is less supportive of the rights of homosexuals than other European countries, where gay marriage has been less controversially adopted.

Rather, the heated debate has merged with a general discontentment with Hollande who faces record low approval ratings turning the issue into a political rally of sorts against his Socialist administration. Some in the opposition are calling it the French Spring.

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First West Bank marathon highlights barriers to Palestinian movement

Posted on April 22, 2013

Marathoners observed a moment of silence for the victims in the Boston attacks before running a landscape scarred by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Visitors come to Bethlehem from all over because of its reputation as the birthplace of Jesus, but, on an unseasonably rain-swept morning, Manger Square became the scene of a different kind pilgrimage as runners in spandex and checkered Palestinian keffiyeh scarves embarked on the West Banks first ever marathon.

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Even as last weeks fatal bombing at the Boston Marathon suddenly robbed the popular events of their innocence in the US, the spirit of the newest marathon seemed little dampened as runners warmed up to drum-driven Middle Eastern folk music. But as the worldwide trend of marathoning spreads to the Holy Land, the Bethlehem Marathon has inevitably been routed through the charged terrain of geopolitical and religious conflict.

Dubbed the “Right to Movement Palestine Marathon,” event organizers cast the run as a demonstration against the Israeli security policies that limit Palestinian travel between their cities and towns.

From the start line outside of the Church of the Nativity (the site of a weeks-long standoff in 2002 between Palestinian militants and the Israeli military), the race led runners to the controversial concrete separation wall erected in the wake of the Palestinian uprising of the last decade, and then on past crowded neighborhoods populated by Palestinian refugees.

“It sends a message of solidarity with the Palestinian people,” says Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and the former head of Palestinian security forces in the West Bank. “It sends a message to the Israelis to recharge their mental batteries and reconsider their policies and start recognizing facts on the ground. It shows the Palestinian people that they are not alone.”

That said, the message of the Bethlehem marathon went beyond Israeli-Palestinan conflict to touch on the Palestinians own internal divisions. Several weeks ago, the United Nations organizers of the Gaza Strip marathon called off what would have been the third annual race there because the Hamas government banned women from participating giving the Bethlehem event added significance.

While Palestinian officials preferred to focus criticism on Israel and the militarys refusal to allow Gazan runners to travel to the West Bank for the Bethlehem race, female runners and spectators acknowledged the friction between the Western tradition of mass amateur races and the social sensibilities of conservative Islam.

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Hamas to ban mixed-sex schools in Gaza Strip

Posted on April 1, 2013

New rules from the Education Ministry of the Islamist Hamas movement ruling the Gaza Strip will bar men from teaching at girls’ schools and mandate separate classes for boys and girls from the age of nine.

The law, published on Monday, would go into effect next school year and applies throughout the coastal enclave, including in private, Christian-led and United Nations schools. Critics of the new measures say the Islamist movement is trying to force its ideology on society, but proponents say they merely want to codify conservative Palestinian values into law.

“We are a Muslim people. We do not need to make people Muslims, and we are doing what serves our people and their culture,” Waleed Mezher, the Education Ministry’s legal adviser, told Reuters. Hamas has administered Gaza since fighting a brief civil war with its Palestinian rivals in the secular Fatah party in 2007, a year after it won a surprise majority in Palestinian parliamentary polls. The political split paralysed the legislature and mostly prevented the passing of new laws in Gaza and the West Bank.

But Hamas parliamentarians in Gaza acted alone to approve the new education law, and the movement’s critics have for years accused it of trying to build a separate state in Gaza. Zeinab Al-Ghoneimi, a Gaza activist for women’s rights, said the new law was part of a Hamas project to impose its values on Gaza residents.”To say that the old law did not respect the community’s traditions and that they (Hamas) wanted to reform people now is an insult to the community,” Ghoneimi told Palestinian radio.

“Instead of hiding behind traditions, why don’t they say clearly they are Islamists and they want to Islamise the community,” she said. Private and Christian schools, where classes are mixed until high school, would be the most affected by the decision. Gaza’s government-run schools were already mostly gender-segregated.

The Gaza Education Ministry said the private schools had been invited to discuss the legislation before it was enacted but failed to do so. Hamas leaders have repeatedly denied accusations by human rights groups they are trying to impose Islamic laws on Gaza.

Rights activists have criticised moves by Hamas’ government in recent years to impose Islamic dress on female lawyers and school girls, ban men from working as hairdressers for women and interrogate couples walking in Gaza’s streets.

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West Bank hosts Obama, Gaza sends rockets

Posted on March 22, 2013

The day President Obama held a press conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Gaza fired two rockets into southern Israel, starkly illustrating Palestinians’ internal divides.

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Europe Editor

Arthur Bright is the Europe Editor at The Christian Science Monitor. He has worked for the Monitor in various capacities since 2004, including as the Online News Editor and a regular contributor to the Monitor’s Terrorism & Security blog. He is also a licensed Massachusetts attorney.

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A pair of rockets launched from Gaza hit the southern Israeli town of Sderot today, amid President Obama’s first state visit to Israel and just hours before he was due to meet with the Palestinian president in the West Bank.

The rocket attack is a reminder that even if the president manages to bring Israel and the Palestinian Authority to the negotiating table, he still has to contend with the more radical Hamas in Gaza, over which the Palestinian Authority has no leverage.

The Associated Press reports that the attacks caused no injuries, though one rocket did hit the courtyard of a house in Sderot, causing minor damage, while the other landed in a field. Two more launches were detected in Gaza, but the rockets landed in the Palestinian territory.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, AP adds.

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