lifesitenews--2019-12-04--UK bishop allows pagan Hindu festival to be celebrated on Catholic church grounds

WIMBLEDON, UK, December 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A London Catholic parish allowed a Hindu group to hold a “Diwali” pagan festival in its parish hall next to the church. The local archbishop defended the decision after a parishioner complained, but has also decided to review policy after LifeSiteNews reached out for comment.  On October 12, Sacred Heart Church in Wimbledon hosted the “Diwali Mela” festival which was put on by a group that aims to “promote and encourage” Indian culture. Diwali, called a “festival of lights,” is the most important Hindu religious festival of the year. Key rituals generally include lighting candles and often include worshipping Hindu pagan deities including Lakshmi (goddess of prosperity) and Lord Ganesha (god of intelligence). The Hindu religion holds itself to be the universal religion for the whole world.  Promotional material for the festival in the Catholic parish hall included colorful pictures of Hindu deities and children dressed up as Hindu deities to act out Hindu myths.  A member of the Catholic parish contacted the archbishop of Southwark, John Wilson, one month prior to the event to express concern about the event. In an email obtained by LifeSiteNews, the parishioner wrote: “Ecumenism, dialogue and hospitality notwithstanding, I can’t see how hosting a pagan festival on Church property is not contrary to the First Commandment.” The first of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses in the Old Testament states: “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” The author of Psalms points out that “all the gods of the pagans are demons” (Psalm 95.5).  “If we ourselves have not faith in Christ and manifest our indifference to paganism by hosting this festival, then we should expect Mass attendance to decline in our country,” the parishioner added.  Archbishop Wilson, responding to the parishioner a week and a half later, indicated that he was satisfied that the event was “cultural” and not “religious” and pointed the parishioner to Church documents about “interreligious dialogue.”  In an email obtained by LifeSiteNews, the archbishop stated: “I have contacted the Parish Priest, Canon John Clark, who offered the following response after seeking clarification from the Hall Secretary: ‘The Mela is a purely cultural event open to all who would like to come along. This is the third Mela and all have been held here without any problems. We have approached the organising committee of the Mela and they have confirmed that it is a cultural not a religious event. They have made a summary of the programme for the day and none of it has a religious element. I enclose a copy of their response for your benefit. As far as I know their Mela is not operated by a commercial company. We have a number of contacts with the Hindu community as they often hold their wedding receptions and birthday parties here.’”  The archbishop continued: “Canon Clark also forwarded to me the response of the person organising the event: ‘Thank you for the call, I am attaching the poster for the event. It’s open to all and is organised for all. Mainly kids’ activities, food stalls and merchandise stalls. Kids’ activities include but not restricted to face painting, henna, and such. Food stalls for a feast of Indian food and non-alcoholic drinks. Merchandise stalls like decorative things for around the house or clothes. There’s no religious programme or activity intended. Actually an afternoon with family to enjoy with kids having fun and eating good food!’”  Archbishop Wilson concluded his letter, stating: “We must always be faithful to Christ and the teaching of His Holy Catholic Church.”  He added: “Alongside this, we must also pursue genuine friendship and dialogue with people of other religious traditions, in the service of the common good, as enunciated in the teaching of the Church and by St John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.”  LifeSiteNews reached out to Archbishop Wilson asking if allowing a pagan religious festival on Church property undermines the Church’s claim that she alone offers the true religion and provides the only path to the Kingdom of God by means of her carrying on the work of Jesus.  The Church is committed to proclaiming the fullness of the Catholic Faith in Christ as the Saviour of the world. If I didn’t believe this I would not belong to the Church, nor spend my life trying to be a witness to Christ so that others might also know, love and serve Him. This is not mutually exclusive with seeking to sustain good and friendly relationships with people of different cultures and religions. This sense is expressed in the annual messages for Divali [sic] by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Bishops Conference of India. Indeed, it is often with people of other religious traditions that we find common voice in defending the values of human life and the family. In this particular situation, there appears to be a disagreement between the organisers of the event, who have hired the hall for the past three years without incident, and the person who raised a complaint this year. There also seems to be a difference concerning the understanding of what is cultural and what is solely and explicitly religious. When I sought clarification from the organisers of this event, I was told: “It’s open to all and is organised for all. Mainly kids’ activities, food stalls and merchandise stalls. Kids’ activities include but not restricted to face painting, henna, and such. Food stalls for a fast of Indian food and non-alcoholic drinks Merchandise stalls like decorative things for around the house or clothes. There’s no religious programme or activity intended. Actually an afternoon with family to enjoy with kids having fun and eating good food!” It was explained that it is called a Diwali Mela, a festival in the sense of a ‘fair,’ rather than an explicit religious celebration. The church hall is available for social and community use and there was not, and should not, be any compromise of any Church property consecrated for divine worship.  LifeSiteNews then asked how the Archbishop would respond to Catholics in the parish and in his diocese who are scandalized by the decision to allow this pagan festival to take place on Church property. He replied:  I have received one formal complaint from a parishioner about the hire of the church hall at Sacred Heart Parish in Wimbledon for a Divali [sic] fair and I am obviously sorry if anyone feels scandalised by this. In this context, the Catholic Church has a profound witness to give in our diverse society. First, to the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and the beauty of the Catholic Faith. Second, secure in our identity and mission, to the importance of interfaith friendship, without compromising any truths of that Faith. I want all the parishes in our Diocese to be evangelising communities. I think we do this by positively proposing the truth we hold dear in a way that is respectful and engaging. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI reminded us, the Church grows by ‘attraction,’ ‘just as Christ draws all to himself by the power of his love.’ We are currently reviewing the documentation used for the hire of non-consecrated Church property.  The “Diwali Mela” festival, which ran on October 12 as scheduled, is hosted by a group called the “Social Spark Hub.” The group states on its website that it was founded in 2015 to “promote and encourage the Indian Culture” with the primary goal to “help children learn about different customs, religious and cultural beliefs.” This year, the group became part of the “Kailash Narain Mehrotra Foundation,” a registered UK charity. The Foundation states that its charitable object is to “advance religious harmony” specifically by “spreading Sanatan culture and Sanatan religious scriptures” and “encouraging observance and celebration of Hindu festivals.” “Sanatan” is another word for the Hindu belief system. Both "Social Spark Hub" and the “Kailash Narain Mehrotra Foundation” list the same contact phone number on the UK’s Charity Commission website.  Advisor to Archbishop: Hindu deities are ‘just manifestations of the divine’  The parishioner went on to respond to the archbishop’s original email, providing evidence from social media posts by “Social Spark Hub” that the group does, in fact, include a religious dimension to the “Diwali” event, including putting on a play at a previous festival in the same location called a “Ramleela", this particular one depicting the Hindu god Ram's life. The parishioner noted that “Ramleelas” are considered by Hindus to be a religious event in the same way that Christians would consider a Nativity or Passion play to be a religious event.  The parishioner wrote to the archbishop: “We should love the sinner but hate the sin. Hindus violate the First Commandment with their pagan worship, but they are not culpable, because they do not know Christ. We do know Christ, so we are without excuse. We should of course treat all Hindus with the utmost Christian Charity, but this does not mean allowing them to use the Sacred Heart Parish Hall to celebrate Diwali. It cannot be compared with holding a birthday party in the hall.”  The following day, the parishioner unexpectedly received an email from Deacon Jon Dal Din, who appears to have a special role within the archdiocese as advisor on interreligious dialogue. Deacon Dal Din was listed in 2015 as “Director of Westminster’s Interfaith agency.” The email, intended for Archbishop Wilson, appears to have been accidentally sent to the parishioner. The Deacon appears to be responding to the Archbishop’s request for guidance on how to deal with the parishioner’s concerns.  In an email obtained by LifeSiteNews, the deacon told the archbishop: “I think you have far more important things to do than waste time responding to these letters.”  “My understanding of a [Diwali] Mela is that it is an Indian cultural event and celebration, although there may be a religious element involved, in the same way that many people celebrate Chinese New Year and people of all faiths and cultures celebrate Christmas,” the deacon wrote.  “It is interesting how [the parishioner] has highlighted selected texts from the Hindu group and not others. I doubt [the parishioner] read the texts you attached. [The parishioner] quotes Pope Benedict. I fear [the parishioner] has a narrow view of mission, evangelisation, proclamation and dialogue. All must be done in a spirit of Love. Jesus’ new Commandment,” he added.  Deacon Dal Din in his email went on to quote at length a talk Pope Francis gave during his September 2019 visit to Africa where he answered questions about evangelisation and proselytism. During his talk, the Pope said he felt “bitterness” when he was introduced to Catholics who had converted from other religions.  Deacon Dal Din said, “[The parishioner] continues to call Hindus pagans. Well perhaps they are, from [the parishioner’s] perspective, because they are not Christians. [The parishioner] would probably feel the same if Sacred Heart were to offer Iftar to the Muslim community during Ramadan. [The parishioner] does not realise that Hindus believe in one God. Their deities are just manifestations of the divine, as indeed, all humans and creation itself are manifestations of the divine.”  “Allowing Hindus to celebrate Diwali Mela in the Church Hall is part of Dialogue of Life, being a good neighbour. Jesus did not mix only with the virtuous, but with sinners and outcasts. Like Pope Francis he reached out to the poor and those on the peripheries,” he stated later in the email to the archbishop.  Archbishop Wilson’s decision to allow the Hindu festival to run on Church property comes at a time when many Church leaders, including Pope Francis, have signaled that the Catholic Church may not contain the fullness of God’s revelation and may not be the only sure path established by God to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.  In February of this year, the Pope claimed in a joint statement with a Grand Imam that a “pluralism and diversity” of religions is “willed by God.” Despite backlash from concerned Catholics around the world, which included criticism from priests, bishops, and cardinals, the Pope has not recanted this statement. The Pope also alarmed Catholics around the world when he participated in events surrounding the recently concluded Amazon Synod in Rome that included the worship of the pagan idol "Pachamama."


sputnik--2019-01-07--Iniesta Nooooo Critics Clash Over Footballers Racist Epiphany Photo

'Iniesta Nooooo': Critics Clash Over Footballer's 'Racist' Epiphany Photo

Many were left furious with the Spanish footballer's photograph marking the Epiphany festival, a religious celebration that commemorates the three Magi who brought gifts to Jesus Christ in Christianity. Others stood to defend the sportsman, arguing he had "absolutely 0 intent of being racist."  A photograph of Andrés Iniesta posing with two people in blackface caused an animated discussion on social media, with some immediately concluding that "racism is all over European soccer."  Some commentators disagreed, pointing to a longstanding tradition of celebrating the Three Kings Day in Spain, which commemorates the Biblical story of traveling kings who followed a star to the birthplace of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem and brought him gifts.  Iniesta, formerly a player for Barcelona and currently with the Japanese club Vissel Kobe, is yet to respond to the criticism.


thedailybeast--2019-04-17--Police Stop Alleged Terrorist Plan to Attack Spains Holy Week

Police Stop Alleged Terrorist Plan to Attack Spain’s Holy Week

A 23-year-old man has been arrested in Morocco, in a joint anti-terrorist operation with Spain, over an alleged plan to attack Spain’s Holy Week festivities.  The suspect’s name is Zouhair el Bouhdidi and he is a student at the University of Seville. According to police sources in Spain, the young man was preparing an imminent attack against the processions of Holy Week in Seville, one of the most important events of the Catholic calendar. According to the newspaper El Confidencial, el Bouhdidi has already confessed to the Moroccan police his plans to commit a “large-scale massacre” in the Andalusian city. The Spanish secret services had reportedly been following him for several weeks.  Holy Week in Seville is a celebration declared as a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest. Nearly 70 brotherhoods come out in procession with wooden sculptures depicting scenes of the Passion of Christ between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. The procession called La Madrugada—on the night of Thursday into Good Friday—brings together hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, crowded through the narrow streets of Seville.  El Bouhdidi allegedly intended to attempt the attack this week in Seville with a homemade explosive known as “the mother of Satan.” It is the same type of explosive that terrorists prepared in the attack on Barcelona in August of 2017, and in the attack on the Bataclan in Paris in November 2015.  Spanish police are now investigating the home of the alleged jihadist. El Bouhdidi lives in Su Eminencia (‘His Eminence’), a humble neighborhood of Seville. Neighbors say that he had never caused problems, although he did not really associate with others, and that the blinds in his house used to be closed. His recent trip to Morocco has been interpreted by the police as a possible farewell visit to his family.  Spain’s CNI (National Intelligence Center) is investigating whether el Bouhdidi was inspired by, or connected to, a video that the Islamic State published in recent days, in which they threatened to attack the religious celebrations of Holy Week in Spain. The video has been broadcast by several jihadist groups on Telegram and includes images of the attacks in Barcelona and crowds of people participating in the processions of Holy Week in Spain.  The threats against Spain have been spread on social networks by the Muntasir Media Foundation, which is responsible for propagating jihadist messages and which had already threatened Spain last December. The recent video encouraged attacks against Holy Week in Andalusia, the region of Spain that corresponds to Al Andalus, which was Muslim territory before the Reconquest. Recovering Al Andalus is an old obsession for jihadists and often appears in many of their propaganda messages.  The thwarted attack would have taken place only 11 days before the general elections in Spain. In 2004, three days before the general elections, the Madrid bombings ripped through the heart of Spain’s capital, leaving 193 dead and more than 2,000 injured. Since then, the Spanish police have doubled up on terrorism protection in the days before each major election.  A suicide attack in Holy Week in Seville would have certainly claimed many victims, in addition to causing a huge international media panic. On the other hand, one of the great dangers of La Madrugada—the most famous procession—are the stampedes: In 2017, more than a hundred people were wounded after a stampede was set off by eight mischief-makers, who had been recruited through social networks for a dangerous prank.  One of the issues on the table in the electoral campaign is the possibility of tightening laws and borders to prevent the entry of jihadists, potentially hiding among other immigrants, into Spain. This is one of the proposals of the far-right party VOX, which has been growing in popularity in Spain according to all the polls. The president of Spain and main socialist candidate are both against hardening the laws. In recent weeks the controversy over the entry of jihadists in Spain has been present in all media and is generating polarized positions among the Spanish.


theguardianuk--2019-04-23--The shocking rape trial that galvanised Spains feminists and the far right

The shocking rape trial that galvanised Spain’s feminists – and the far right

In the early hours of 7 July 2016, surrounded by throngs of revellers dancing and drinking, an 18-year-old woman suddenly found herself alone. She was standing on Plaza del Castillo, a square in the centre of the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, which was hosting its annual festival, the running of the bulls.  The weeklong festival combines a religious celebration of the city’s patron saint, San Fermin, with the eponymous bull run – and copious amounts of alcohol. Every morning at the stroke of 8am, the bravest festivalgoers sprint ahead of a group of bulls leading them from the pen where they’re kept to the ring where they will die later that day. Then the drinking resumes. The festival has long had a reputation for bad behaviour – exasperated locals often complain about outsiders turning their town into a lawless city – and after photos of young women being groped by groups of men went viral in 2013, the city launched an anti-sexual assault campaign whose symbol, a red hand, was plastered across billboards, walls and buses. But the festival has not lost its somewhat seedy reputation. “People come here to fuck,” a hospital receptionist told me wearily, fanning herself against the July heat, when I attended last year.  The young woman, who had just finished her first year of university, had been drinking with a few people she had met that night, but after leaving them to dance, she lost sight of them. As she would later testify in court, she nudged her way past the crowds to a bench on the edge of the square to get her bearings. There, on the bench, a man struck up conversation with her. His name was José Ángel Prenda, a 26-year-old from Seville with a broad face and a paunchy stomach across which he had inked his name in large, gothic script.  Prenda had come to the festival with a group of friends, four men in their mid-20s, who called themselves la manada – the wolf pack. One member of the group, a soldier named Alfonso Jesús Cabezuelo, had a tattoo of a howling wolf on his foot, along with the words “The power of the wolf lies in the pack”. Another member, Jesús Escudero, a hairdresser, had a wolf paw tattoo on his ribcage. The other two members were a police officer, Antonio Manuel Guerrero, and Ángel Boza, the rookie of the group, who, like Prenda, was unemployed. The woman and Prenda compared tattoos and talked football while the other men hovered around, occasionally dipping in and out of the conversation.  In the woman’s recollection, the chat was friendly but unremarkable. She was tired, and after about 10 minutes, she said she was going to head back to a friend’s car, where she would spend the night. Offering to walk her, the men accompanied her past busy terraces before turning into quieter and increasingly deserted streets. When she pointed out that they were close to the car, Prenda suddenly rushed ahead, catching up with a woman entering a nearby apartment building. Pretending to have rented a room there, Prenda held the door for the resident and then slipped into the lobby.  Outside, one of the men – the woman wasn’t sure which – had begun kissing her, and she had kissed him back. Soon they were interrupted by Prenda’s hushed command from inside the lobby of the apartment building: “Let’s go, let’s go.” The man she was with took her hand and led her towards the door. Before she could register what was happening, she had been corralled into the back of the lobby and felt herself being undressed. Over the next 20 minutes, the five men would take turns repeatedly penetrating her orally, vaginally and anally. She shut her eyes and waited for it to end.  At 3.27am, according to CCTV footage, the men filed out of the building. Once the woman was alone, she got dressed and looked for her phone to call a friend, but the men had stolen it. That’s when she began to cry. She left the building and eventually found a bench to slump on, sobbing inconsolably. Eventually a passing couple stopped to talk to her. When she told them what had happened, they called the police, who drove her to a local hospital where she was treated for vaginal wounds and given a morning-after pill.  The men, meanwhile, had headed back into town, some to continue partying, others to sleep. At 6.50am, Prenda wrote in the WhatsApp group they shared with a few other friends back in Seville, “Good morning. The five of us fucked one girl. Hahaha.” He added: “We have video.” At 8am, the five friends ran with the bulls. They were still catching their breath when the police officers approached.  By that evening, the five were behind bars. What had taken place in Pamplona would become known as the “wolf pack” case, and for the next two years, as the trial approached and more and more details seeped into the press, the story would rarely be out of the headlines. In April 2018, the verdict was finally handed down and the court acquitted all five men of rape, finding them guilty of the lesser crime of “sexual abuse”. It came down to the fine print of the law: because the men had not used violence to coerce the woman into the act, the crime could not technically be categorised as sexual assault, which includes rape. The men were sentenced to nine years instead of the 22 to 25 years the prosecution demanded.  For many women across the country, even before the verdict arrived, the case had been a moment of reckoning, which laid bare a deep culture of misogyny in Spanish society. The wolf pack case “brought out the worst in our society, the worst in our judicial system, the worst in social media,” the human rights lawyer and analyst Violeta Assiego told me. But the outcome of the trial galvanised feminists in Spain like never before, turning feminism into a movement with unprecedented visibility and real political power. Immediately after the verdict, hundreds of thousands of women flooded plazas in dozens of Spanish cities to protest against the ruling, calling for Spain’s sexual assault laws to be rewritten.  But it wasn’t just a transformative moment for feminists – it also became a rallying point for the far right. As more and more women took to the streets, a reactionary counter-movement of aggrieved men was forming online, while the far-right party Vox pitched itself to supporters who felt threatened by the increasing prominence of what they called “radical feminism”. This past December, Vox became the first far-right party to win multiple seats in Spain since the death of Franco. In Spain’s upcoming general election on 28 April, polls are predicting that Vox is likely to win roughly 10% of the vote – up from just 0.2% in 2016 – meaning that it could play kingmaker to a rightwing coalition government. “Vox isn’t an isolated case. It’s part of a global trend where a minority of the population can see that their privileges are in danger,” Ada Colau, mayor of Barcelona, told me recently. “That’s why feminism needs to show its strength.”  Long before the wolf pack trial began, it seemed most Spaniards had already reached their own verdicts. For months, they had pored over the men’s WhatsApp conversations – both text and audio – which had been leaked to the press and posted online. Many predated the Pamplona festival visit, and seemed to suggest a level of premeditation. “Mate seriously, if the five of us all fucked a fat girl together at San Fermin, it would be the best thing ever. I’d rather fuck a fat girl with all of you than a hot one by myself,” one of the men had said. “Are we bringing burundanga [a date rape drug]? I got reinoles [another date rape drug] at a really good price. For the rapes,” a message read. “This trip is a baptism of fire to become a wolf,” read another.  Even more damningly, a leaked video from the same WhatsApp group showed four of the five accused men groping and kissing an apparently unconscious woman in the back of a car two months before the running of the bulls, at another festival in Andalucía. A separate investigation into that incident was launched. (The men stand accused of sexually abusing the woman and are currently awaiting trial. Their defence argues the woman consented because she voluntarily stepped into the car.)  On 13 November 2017, the first day of the wolf pack trial, a famous TV presenter glibly polled his followers on Twitter: “Do you think it was rape or consensual sex?” Followers had to select one option or the other. He deleted the tweet after a storm of condemnation, but not before thousands had picked and clicked their answer. It all seemed to boil down to one question: who was lying?  When the plaintiff took the stand, she insisted that over the course of the 40 minutes she spent with the accused, they “never talked about sex, ever”. She described freezing in shock after the men led her into the lobby, and, because she had her eyes closed, she said she did not realise that the men had filmed her. In the wake of the alleged assault, she said she had tumbled into a spiral of self-blame, shame and guilt. She had suffered from nightmares, insomnia and difficulty concentrating. Months later, when university exams rolled around, she had been unable to sit them.  By contrast, the men’s testimonies read like porn scripts. According to their accounts, they were hanging around, minding their own business, when suddenly an attractive young woman materialised and, within five minutes, declared she would go to bed with any one, two or five of them. They all claimed there was no doubt she enjoyed herself, though admitted they never asked. Most of the men boasted about frequently partaking in orgies, and insisted that it wasn’t surprising an 18-year-old stranger would agree to one given the “festival context”. Guerrero, the police officer, said he was so convinced of the gang’s innocence that when police informed him he was accused of rape, he asked to see their superior and, cop to cop, offered the video he had taken on his phone as exonerating evidence.  When we spoke recently, the men’s lawyer, Agustín Martínez, called the incident “consensual sexual relations among six adults” and suggested that the plaintiff only changed her tune out of fear the men would leak videos of the act and tarnish her reputation. Martínez said that anyone who suggested the plaintiff would not have wanted to have sex with five men she had met minutes earlier was denying her her freedom to do so.  Most of the trial was closed to the public and media to protect the privacy of those involved. But that hardly mattered: as well as the WhatsApps, the testimonies were continually leaked to local press and picked apart by the public like weekly soap opera instalments.  To many observers, one of the most astounding elements of the trial was what was deemed admissible as evidence and what was not. While the three presiding judges – two men and one woman – ruled that the personal lives and social media activities of the accused were generally irrelevant, they took a different view when it came to the victim. During the preliminary “instruction” phase of the trial, they admitted a report compiled by a private investigator, who had been hired by the family of one of the accused to monitor the plaintiff’s behaviour in the months after the alleged assault. Without her knowledge, the investigator had trailed the plaintiff while she enjoyed a brief holiday with friends and family in September. The investigator’s report concluded that she seemed to be living “life as normal”. The investigator also delved into the plaintiff’s social media activity. The defence ultimately withdrew most of the report, but hung on to what their lawyer considered a key piece of evidence proving the plaintiff had not suffered any trauma. It was a picture that the plaintiff had posted on Instagram, two months after the incident. It showed a T-shirt emblazoned with a quote from one of the contestants on Spain’s Jersey Shore spinoff, Super Shore: “Whatever you do, take off your underwear.”  When she read the news about how the Instagram post was being used as evidence against the plaintiff, Teresa Lozano, a 31-year-old actor from Madrid, felt her blood boil. “You need two things to feed feminism: one is theory, and the other is rage,” Lozano told me recently. On 15 November, two days after the trial had begun, Lozano and her collaborator Zua Mendez made a YouTube video that captured the anger many women were feeling. “First, they rape you. Then they investigate you, without your knowing. They spy on you. In the media, many men claim there isn’t enough evidence to prove it wasn’t consensual,” they said in turn, staring into the camera, their voices steady and dry. “I believe you, much more than this bullshit system, this system in which we ask, we demand that victims file reports, but when they do, we don’t believe them.” They called the video Yo te creo, “I believe you,” and hastily posted it online. By that evening, it was trending on Spanish YouTube. (It now has more than 300,000 views.)  The next day, with little notice and no permit, feminist activists called a protest for the following night outside the justice ministry in Madrid, expecting a few dozen to show. By nightfall on November 17, some 3,000 crowded on to the streets around the ministry. It was just a small taste of what was to come.  On 26 April 2018, the day of the verdict, the journalist Cristina Fallarás was standing in a studio in Madrid, getting ready to comment on the case. A screen behind her broadcast the exterior of the Pamplona court where hundreds of assembled women waited for the ruling. When it came out, Fallarás felt her stomach drop. “I said to myself: ‘Right now, I’m not a journalist. I’m a woman’,” she told me recently. Live, on national television, she let out her anger. “This is bullshit,” she shouted. Behind her, the screen showed the women in Pamplona break through police lines and rush the court house. For his own safety, Martínez, the accused’s lawyer, was kept inside for three hours until the crowd began to disperse. (Martínez told me that even now he would only travel to Pamplona if guaranteed police protection.)  Although two of the three presiding judges in the case conceded that they believed the plaintiff had not consented to the act, the fact she had not been violently coerced prevented them from qualifying it as rape. Instead, the men were found guilty of “sexual abuse”. The third judge voted to absolve the men. In his dissenting opinion, he commented that all he could see in the videos the men had taken of the act was “an atmosphere of revelry and joy”. In a matter of hours, hundreds of thousands of women throughout Spain had stormed the streets. It was Spain’s largest spontaneous feminist uprising in living memory.  That night, while women across the country banged pots and pans in so-called cacerolada protests, Fallarás logged on to Twitter. In a series of tweets to her tens of thousands of followers, she recounted some of her own own experiences of sexual violence. She signed off with the hashtag #Cuéntalo, “Tell your story.” That night, 100 women did. By the third day, it was 10,000. By the 10th day, Fallarás’ hashtag had been retweeted 3m times and spread to 70 countries, including Argentina, Mexico and the US. It was Spain’s #MeToo. “It created a collective memory that hadn’t existed,” Fallarás said.  But along with the outpouring of solidarity came a backlash. One of the hubs for this anti-feminist feeling was ForoCoches, a popular Spanish web forum. The site, which is a bit like a Spanish 4Chan, was founded in 2003 as a place to talk about cars (ForoCoches literally translates as “car forum”), but it quickly became a “breeding ground for machismo,” says Gema Valencia, an expert on the Spanish manosphere. According to Alejandro Marín, the founder of ForoCoches, recent polls on the site suggest that around 60% of users support the far-right Vox party, though these polls are far from scientific.  Throughout the trial, the forum had been a place where users gathered to express sympathy with the accused and disparage the plaintiff. After the verdict was released, ForoCoches users posted information identifying the victim. (They had discovered her identity because when the court sent news outlets a redacted version of the sentence, it failed to remove a security verification code that granted access to the unredacted version containing the plaintiff’s name.) The posts were reported and deleted, Marín told me, but news of the young woman’s identity still spread quickly, even making it to the US, where the Spanish-language pages of the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer also published her information. “It’s our citizen duty to spread this slut’s identity,” said the article.  In one of the only public statements by any of the accused after the verdict, Guerrero, the police officer, wrote a letter that was published on a rightwing news site, in which he gave special thanks to ForoCoches members for “not following the herd”. Guerrero attacked the feminist movement and warned that what had befallen him “could happen to your brother, your father, your son, or even you”. The same site published an editorial titled, “Yo no te creo” (“I don’t believe you”) expressing support for the men. The counter-slogan caught on. One typical tweet said: “#IDon’tBelieveYou What the hell, if any girl who regrets hooking up with you the next day can report you for rape and then all the feminazis go to battle for her. Scary”.  In the media, the term “wolf pack” became shorthand for any alleged group sexual assault, with numerous ongoing cases described as the wolf pack of Barcelona, Alicante or Madrid, like a modern Grimms’ fairy tale warning young women of the dangers of going out at night alone. In 2018, according to an independent website that tracks sexual assaults committed by groups, there were 59 such attacks, more than in the previous two years combined. Some journalists have worried that the wolf pack coverage triggered copycat crimes, but it is unclear whether the surge represents an actual rise, or a growing confidence among victims to report them.  And then, on 21 June, two months after the verdict, there was another twist: the five men were released from jail on bail, pending an appeal against their sentences. In their decision, the judges said the men’s “loss of anonymity” through the trial made it “unthinkable” that they would attempt to flee the country or commit a similar crime. In response, hundreds of thousands of women again flooded the streets in protest. Soon after, Carmen Calvo – minister of equality in the new socialist government, which had taken office after the ruling conservative party was ousted following a corruption scandal – announced that the government would propose a new sexual assault law that eliminated the distinction between rape and sexual abuse.  Other parties on the left, such as Podemos, pushed for bigger changes to resolve the kind of legal absurdities the wolf pack case had brought to light. For example, Spanish law has, since 2004, included special provisions for crimes classified as “gender violence” – but the only crimes actually classified that way are acts of violence between partners or former partners. Victims of gender violence are allowed to testify remotely, and should be assigned lawyers who have received specific training. But because the woman in the wolf pack case was abused by strangers, she was not entitled to these protections. Instead, she had to travel to Pamplona to testify (though she was spared from having to do so in front of the men who sexually abused her) and she was assigned a lawyer, Carlos Bacaicoa, who had no specific gender-violence expertise.  Bacaicoa, who alternated between deep, exasperated sighs and gruff rebukes when we spoke on the phone, is a social conservative who was assigned the wolf pack case simply because he happened to be on call the night the incident took place. He described the case as “the worst experience in 37 years” of his career because of the toll it took on him, and told me he wished it had never fallen under his charge. Bacaicoa held no affection for the accused – “those animals,” he called them – and believes they should have been found guilty of rape. But although he doesn’t agree with the verdict, he respects it. “Justice is served in the tribunals, not the streets,” he told me. There was no need to reform the current sexual assault law, he said – it just needed to be applied with “common sense”. He added that it was a “disgrace” how feminist groups had exploited the case to prop up their “gender ideology”. He was far from the only person to think this.  In 2013, a young conservative politician called Santiago Abascal published an open letter on his blog announcing that he was defecting from the ruling Partido Popular (PP) for “betraying its principles”. He was angry that the party had not taken a tougher line with Basque and Catalan separatists, and had failed to undo the previous socialist government’s “ideological legislation”. (It was the socialists who had passed the 2004 gender violence law.) In December 2013, he joined forces with a group of other former PP politicians and co-founded Vox. By September 2014, he was the face and president of the party.  Abascal described Vox as “the party that defends what Spaniards say on WhatsApp”. Like other new far-right parties around the world, Vox scorned political correctness and touted its politicians as the only people brave enough to say what many Spaniards had grown afraid to say out loud, whether the subject was nationalism or immigration or feminism.  One of Abascal’s first political recruits was Francisco Serrano, a former judge and outspoken critic of feminism, who had been suspended from the bench in 2011 for bending the law in a child-custody case. (Serrano said he was persecuted by his ideological opponents, and has complained about being “a victim of gender-based jihadism”.) Last month, I met Serrano on an unseasonably warm evening in Seville, the orange-tree scented capital of Andalucía and the wolf pack’s hometown. Serrano had invited me to a Vox youth event he would be speaking at later that night. He wore a burgundy sweater stretched taut across his round stomach, and his eyebrows sloped behind his glasses giving him a sleepy look. For more than a decade, he told me proudly, he has waged war against Spain’s anti-gender violence legislation, which he believes removes the presumption that one is innocent until proven guilty, and emboldens women to make false accusations against men. The title of Serrano’s latest book is A Practical Guide for Abused Fathers: Advice to Survive the Gender Dictatorship.  In early 2015, Abascal asked Serrano to run on a Vox ticket in Andalucía’s regional elections, and he accepted. “It was a very high risk to join a party no one knew,” he told me, recalling how he and Abascal would stand on top of beer crates or benches, a loudspeaker in hand, speaking to a few dozen people. In the elections, they were trounced, winning only 0.45% of the vote.  Back then, the conventional wisdom was that the far right held little appeal in a country where memories of fascist dictatorship were still fresh. But over the next few years, Vox began to win over conservative voters with their hardline positions on the most divisive issues, such as immigration and Catalonia’s push for independence. Vox voters are, for the most part, middle- and upper-middle-class men disenchanted with the PP, according to Spain’s Centre for Sociological Investigations.  Although commentators have tended to focus on how Vox has won voters with its rhetoric on immigration and Spanish unity, its opposition to feminism has also been a key part of its pitch to the electorate. Vox has sought to rally voters who feel alienated or threatened by what the party likes to refer to as “radical feminism” – a phrase they use to describe any kind of feminism whatsoever. Such voters, many of them unhappy with sweeping social changes that have challenged traditional notions of family and gender roles, believe they have been abandoned by mainstream political parties. “Even the PP no longer defended their point of view, since the party had slowly accepted these changes,” Berta Bartet, a political scientist, told me. “Vox emerged to be the voice for those who haven’t accepted these changes.” According to a recent survey polling 1,116 Spaniards, 44% said the current gender violence legislation could be harmful to men, and 77% of potential Vox voters believed this – by far the highest percentage out of any political party.  In late 2018, Abascal asked Serrano to run in Andalucía’s regional elections again. This time, Vox was more organised, and its message was finding a far larger audience. Chief among the party’s new 100-point programme was the dissolution of federally funded feminist organisations; the creation of a family ministry in lieu of the current gender ministry; removing sex change and abortion procedures from public health services; and – Serrano’s rallying cry – the repeal of the 2004 gender violence law.  On 12 December, Vox won 12 seats – nearly 11% of the vote. It wasn’t huge, but it was enough to give them real influence: the new regional government, a conservative alliance between the PP and Ciudadanos, a centre-right party formed in 2006, would need Vox’s support to be sworn in. Vox promptly declared it would only lend them its support if they pledged to deport 52,000 illegal immigrants and dismantle Andalucía’s anti-gender violence law. In now familiar scenes around the country, women returned to the streets. In Barcelona, women carried signs saying “Solidarity with our sisters in Andalucía”. Vox eventually backed down and agreed to lend the government its support anyway.  On the day I visited Serrano at the Vox youth event in Seville, about 100 young men, and a sprinkling of women, had crowded into the back of a bar for the monthly Cañas por España (“Beers for Spain”) gathering. Almost all were dressed in starched white shirts, navy and pastel sweaters and shined leather shoes. The atmosphere felt like a cross between a Young Republicans convention and mass.  When Serrano took the floor, the room fell silent. “Every time progressives attack us, Vox wins more votes,” he began. A few men nodded solemnly. The previous night, someone had graffitied “death to Vox” and “no to fascism” on the outside of the bar in purple spray paint, signing off with a feminist Venus symbol. Vox thrives off this kind of attack, real and fabricated. Earlier that month, an official Vox account tweeted that a “radical feminist” had assaulted three adolescent girls – one’s jaw had allegedly been broken – for refusing to wear purple ribbons to mark International Women’s Day. The story was circulated across Vox’s social media platforms, each of which have hundreds of thousands of followers, but it turned out to be a hoax. It took several hours after the story was debunked for Vox to eventually issue a statement claiming they had been duped.  One attendee at the youth event, Manuel, a 26-year-old whose yellow chequered shirt and two small hoop earrings made him stand out among the legions of Oxford shirts, told me that he knew Vox were portrayed as bigots by the mainstream media, but, as a gay man, he said that he had never had a problem with the party. Like most of the attendees I spoke with, he said feminists had grown “too radical” and “aggressive”. “Spain is divided like it was before the civil war” – but this time, he said, it was “around gender”.  When I asked Serrano what he thought about the wolf pack case, he launched into a short rant about how the press was all too happy to report cases involving Spaniards, but ignored those involving foreigners. On the one hand, Vox insists gender equality has been won in Spain – “we’re not Saudi Arabia,” Serrano told me – but on the other, they regularly invoke the need to protect women to justify other contentious, and often racist, policies. In late March, Abascal shared an article about an investigation into a woman’s alleged rape by a group of Moroccan boys, and tweeted: “Is it more important to protect illegal immigration than women?” Abascal has also recently suggested that “good Spaniards” be allowed to carry arms because, they couldn’t “be at peace when they’re under attack and their daughters are being raped”.  Vox seeks to “shift people’s attention away from gender violence as a problem that pits men against women” and instead “frame it as a cultural problem from abroad”, Violeta Assiego, the human rights lawyer, told me. “And portraying foreigners as violent individuals who attack women reinforces the idea they want to create – that anything goes when it comes to defending our own, our women, our daughters, our land. It’s a perfect confluence.”  March 8 was a cold, crisp day, but the sun shone brightly on Madrid. At noon, a sea of young women decked out in purple shirts, skirts and leggings, with Venus symbols drawn in purple lipstick on their cheeks, streamed down the capital’s major avenues. Some waved purple feather boas, others danced and carried each other on their shoulders. It looked like a Mardi Gras parade. They chanted, “Tranquila, hermana, aquí es tu manada” (“Don’t worry, sister, we are your wolf pack”).  If last year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) saw record numbers of Spanish women take the streets, this year’s confirmed the fact that feminism had reached critical mass. Police estimated 350,000 people rallied in Madrid, 200,000 in Barcelona, and 50,000 in Seville and Bilbao – the biggest turnouts among hundreds of others throughout the country. Surveys indicate that nearly 65% of Spanish women under 30 consider themselves feminists today – double the number of five years ago. Describing this younger generation of feminists, Isabel Cadenas, a 36-year-old spokesperson for the group that organises the annual IWD march, said: “They know violence for what it is in a way that we didn’t. They’ve been raped, they’ve been harassed, they’ve been abused, and many became feminists that way. It’s easy for women to become feminists when they realise that their problems aren’t unique, but collective.”  At the march, a group of high-school girls in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square posed for selfies. For most of them, it was their first protest. When I asked if they had followed the wolf pack case, a 15-year-old with purple lipstick and glitter smeared across her face answered quickly, “That’s why we’re here. If they touch one of us, they touch all of us,” repeating a popular slogan.  In recent months, with the general election looming, politicians have seemed increasingly desperate to win over female voters, presenting the occasionally comic spectacle of male politicians fighting over who is the best feminist. (None of the major parties are fronted by women.) Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, joked in an interview that “feminist men are better in bed,” and when his party entered a coalition for the elections, they adopted the name, “Unidas Podemos” (United we can), using the feminine form of the adjective (unidas rather than unidos) in a nod at inclusive language. (Iglesias also publicly apologised for a text he had written about a female journalist a few years back – and which was leaked – in which he said that he would “whip [her] till she bled.”)  Meanwhile, before IWD, Pedro Sanchez’s entire Socialist cabinet changed their Twitter profile pictures to a purple icon bearing the phrase “It’s women’s time”, and launched a hashtag that translates as “the Spain you want is feminist”. Even parties on the right joined in: Ciudadanos brought out its own “liberal feminism” manifesto, prompting many feminists to roll their eyes. “If Ciudadanos is talking about feminism, a word they used to denigrate, that’s a victory for the feminist movement,” Cadenas said. “The problem is that they’re talking about feminism a week before [IWD].” Vox, meanwhile, is banking on the backlash.  Today the members of the wolf pack are all home in Seville, on bail. Four of them await trial for the other case that came out of the Pamplona investigation. Alfonso Jesús Cabezuelo was expelled from the army. Antonio Manuel Guerrero retained his position in the Civil Guard police corps, but is no longer active. Jesús Escudero was laid off from his hairdressing job. Ángel Boza and José Ángel Prenda were unemployed before the case, and remain so. They all live with their parents.  The victim has broken her silence only once, in a letter she sent to a local television station. She beseeched the public to report sexual crimes. “Tell a friend, a family member, the police, in a tweet, however you want, but tell your story,” she wrote. “Don’t stay silent, because if you do, you’ll let them win.”  • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.


theindependent--2019-02-25--Hezbollah added to UKaposs list of terrorist groups

Hezbollah added to UK's list of terrorist groups

The British government has designated Hezbollah’s political wing a terrorist organisation, amid a US push to isolate Iran and its proxies.  The UK had previously made a distinction between the Lebanese Shia group’s military and political branches, the latter of which counts 13 MPs in Lebanon’s parliament.  But following a renewed campaign by Donald Trump to pressure Tehran, it has now proscribed the whole organisation as a terror group.  “Hezbollah is continuing in its attempts to destabilise the fragile situation in the Middle East, and we are no longer able to distinguish between their already banned military wing and the political party,” home secretary Sajid Javid said Monday.  “Because of this, I have taken the decision to proscribe the group in its entirety.”  Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s with the support of Iran, and spent much of its early existence fighting the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.  Following Lebanon’s devastating 1975-1990 civil war, Hezbollah was the only militia in the country which didn’t fully disarm, justifying its weapons as a necessary deterrent to another Israeli invasion.  Today, Hezbollah is the most powerful armed group in Lebanon, surpassing even the country’s national army. That military power has given it a significant influence over the government’s decision making.  In recent years, it has played a key role in the Syrian civil war, intervening on the side of its ally, Bashar al-Assad. The group said it was motivated by a desire to stop the war spreading to Lebanon, but it also sought to protect the main delivery route for weapons from Iran, and prevent a majority Sunni opposition taking power.  Policy makers in the west have watched Hezbollah’s growing strength with alarm, but the latest move appears to come in response to the group’s increasing role in Lebanon’s government.  In the country’s last elections, held in May 2018, Hezbollah’s political bloc emerged as the largest in parliament. The group named three cabinet members in the current government, two of whom belong to the organisation.  The Trump administration has introduced sweeping sanctions on Iran – which it characterises as the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism – and its Shia proxies in the region, Hezbollah being the largest.  Key financiers and entities tied to the group have been targeted by the US Treasury in a clear effort of containment, and Mr Trump has urged other members of the UN Security Council to work with America to ensure Iran never acquires a nuclear bomb.  Earlier this month, the US ambassador to Lebanon, Elizabeth Richard, said Hezbollah was fighting in “at least three countries”, – referring to Syria, Iraq and Yemen.  “I was also very frank with the prime minister about US concern over the growing role in the cabinet of an organisation that continues to maintain a militia that is not under the control of the government,” she told reporters after meeting Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri.  Hezbollah has also become more of an issue in the UK since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Party leader. Mr Corbyn has previously called for greater dialogue with the group.  Sami Nader, director of Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs, said the ban may affect ties between Lebanon and the UK government in the future.  “It used to be the case that European countries would distinguish between military and political wings because it offered them a certain space to manoeuvre, so it could keep dealing with Lebanon independently from its position on Iran and Hezbollah’s behaviour,” he told The Independent.  “But after the last election, Hezbollah has the upper hand in the government; it’s the number one stakeholder. The big question now is how this will impact the relationship between the UK and the Lebanese government, given that this margin of manoeuvre doesn’t exist anymore.”  There may be a material impact on the group, too, according to Phillip Smyth, a fellow at the Washington Institute and a researcher on Shia armed groups.  “Hezbollah has sent ‘political’ representatives to the UK before and its supporters would wave its banners at religious celebrations. That will now come to a halt. Fundraising, while less developed in the UK, will also be stopped,” he said.  “Regardless, Hezbollah itself never argued it had a political or military wing. Let alone that these ‘wings’ were autonomous,” he added.  The news was welcomed by Israel, Hezbollah’s greatest foe.  “All who truly wish to combat terror must reject the fake distinction between ‘military’ & ‘political’ wings,” Israeli security minister Gilad Erdan tweeted. “Now is the time for the #EU to follow suit!”  Hezbollah declined to comment when contacted by The Independent.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.


theindependent--2019-06-01--Thousands of Muslims worship in Mecca for the final days of Ramadan

Hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims have travelled to Mecca for the last days of the fasting month of Ramadan.  An influx of worshippers have descended on the Saudi Arabian city - the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad - for the last 10 days for what  believers consider the holiest month of the year.  Worshippers gather around Islam's holiest shrine, the Kaaba - a black square building at the Grand Mosque in Mecca which determines the direction of prayer for Muslims around the world.  The holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which is expected to fall on 4 June this year, celebrates the end of the 29 or 30 days of dawn-to-sunset fasting.  Here The Independent has collated some of the best images from this years event, of worshippers who have made the journey to Mecca for the religious celebration.


theirishtimes--2019-04-29--Patron bodies Who really controls your childs school

Patron bodies: Who really controls your child’s school?

Over the next 10 years, the Government will spend an eye-watering €8 billion on new school buildings. It will then hand over the keys – and control – to largely unaccountable patron bodies who wield significant power over what happens in the school.  Patrons control the ethos and philosophy of a school, appoint the chair of the board of management and approve the membership of the board.  This gives the patron huge power to decide, for instance, the religious or philosophical approach of the school, what is taught in relationship and sexuality education (RSE) and how classes are structured.  The issue of patronage has been in the news following a divestment row in north County Dublin, on foot of claims that schools which lose their Catholic patronage may end up having to cancel Christmas festivities and other religious celebrations.  But for some there’s an even bigger question looming on patronage: is it right that the State is handing over control of newly built schools on foot of a popular vote among preschool parents?  Since 2012, parents have been surveyed about their preferred patron for new schools being built in their area.  These campaigns have seen various patrons running quasi-political local campaigns to persuade parents to vote for them; because the winner is decided by a first-past-the-post vote, the successful school can – and often does – win with less than 50 per cent of votes.  In principle, there is no reason why, for instance, Scientology or a radical philosophy could not win control of a local primary school if they gain enough votes.  Experience is also not a barrier. Some small patron bodies which have never run schools of any kind have managed to win control of new, multimillion euro facilities in recent times.  Once a patron has set up a school, the patronage or ethos cannot be changed without their permission.  In addition, patrons can be awarded control based on a very small number of votes: in the most recent competition, for example, Educate Together won a 16-classroom school in Goatstown, south County Dublin, based on just 65 of 116 votes.  It’s a system that has worked well for some patron bodies, but others are asking: is a beauty contest really the best way to decide school patronage?  Caoimhín Ó hEaghra, Ard Rúnaí of An Foras Pátrúnachta, the Irish language school patron, has been among the most vocal critics of how patronage competitions are playing out.  “Surveys show that about a quarter of parents want a gaelscoil, and yet less than 5 per cent are actually gaelscoileanna. There’s little logic to it: we got 60 votes for a Gaelscoil in Killester, north County Dublin, but no school. We got six votes in Stepaside, and we have a Gaelscoil,” he says.  “Previously, we just had to show that there was enough demand for an Irish-language school in the area, but now it’s a constant competition. We all recognise the need for diversity but the Irish language has a special status and the Government has a responsibility to support it.”  Áine Hyland, professor emeritus of education at UCC and one of the founding parents of the Dalkey School Project, which grew into the Educate Together network of schools, says the patronage system is not one that would be set up today.  “It dates back to 1831 but, until the Dalkey School Project, the department’s attitude was that only churches could be patrons. They did finally accept that articles 42 and 44 of the Constitution meant that parents’ rights had to be respected.  “I never envisaged it would develop as it has. On paper, it seems a good idea to take on the views of parents but it has led to more patrons than envisaged. Everybody thinks they can be a school patron. What is the limit?”  Hyland suggests that it may be time for change. “In 1902, there was a proposal that schools in Ireland would be controlled by local education authorities, which is in line with England and most western countries. I wouldn’t be against the Education and Training Boards (ETBs) being the patron for all new schools, provided that parental rights were protected.  “Greater flexibility about Irish language streams could also answer the concerns of An Foras Pátrúnachta. It may be an idea to put the issue to a citizens’ assembly and ask them: if we were to start from scratch, what might we do?”  Unsurprisingly, not all school patrons agree – especially the smaller players with big visions – but everyone agrees the current patronage system isn’t working as it should.  One of the most significant of these smaller patron bodies is the St Nicholas Montessori Society which, as well as running the Montessori teacher training college, is patron of a private, fee-paying primary school in Dún Laoghaire.  What’s different about them? “Children are bunched into three rough age brackets: three-six, six-nine and nine to 12,” explains Nick Breakwell, chief executive of the society.  “We don’t use terms like junior infants, third class or sixth class. The curriculum is similar but the environment is prepared for the age group, with materials specific to each environment.”  Another newcomer to the scene is Scoil Sinéad, which is patron of two Dublin schools: Scoil Sinéad Pelletstown primary (Cabra) and Griffeen Community College (Lucan).  It was founded by Sherene Powell-Ikafor, whose daughter Sinéad has autism. The school runs a special education class alongside every mainstream class, with the two sets of teachers working closely to maximise interaction.  Marianne Farrelly, principal of Pelletstown, says they are multibelief schools which mark a range of religious beliefs and festivals, and that experiential learning – such as bringing children to the canal or botanic gardens for science class or the library for World Book Day – is core to their philosophy.  Both Breakwell and Farrelly say their schools won their patronage by knocking on doors and working hard to persuade parents of the benefits of their patronage model.  Breakwell says the system militates against smaller players but the process itself is “smooth, clear and transparent for everyone”.  The Department of Education provides €500 to each competing patron, but smaller players including Scoil Sinéad have complained that larger organisations, such as multidenominational patron Educate Together or Irish language patron An Foras Pátrúnachta, have more staff resources to run campaigns.  “The competitions have run over the Christmas period, which isn’t ideal, and as we don’t have the same resources to go door-to-door, we organised public meetings, but it’s understandably difficult for parents to get out to these,” says Farrelly. “Ultimately, however, it is right that the local community gets a voice and a say in the process, and parental choice does speak.”  Catholic Church: It remains the dominant player in primary education, with almost 90 per cent of primary schools.      Protestant denominations: They are sole patrons of just over 5 per cent of primary schools, or 165 in total.      Multidenominational: Educate Together is the most familiar of the non-religious patrons with almost 3 per cent of primary schools. An Foras Patrúnacta, the Irish-language patron, controls 2 per cent of primary schools.      Others include State-run Education and Training boards (ETBs) which run 12 “community national schools” on a multidenominational basis, Scoil Sinéad and Lifeways Ireland (patrons of Steiner schools).  Catholic Church: It is the patron or co-patron for just under half (48 per cent) of post-primary schools. They are mostly voluntary secondary schools.      Multidenominational: Almost half of secondary schools (49 per cent) have a multidenominational ethos. The bulk of these are community schools (under the direct control of State-owned Education and Training Boards) and are mostly multidenominational.  Church of Ireland: It is responsible for the running of 23 post-primary schools (3 per cent).


ageofautism--2019-04-01--Thirty Days Thirty Pieces of Silver

Thirty Days Thirty Pieces of Silver

April is a month of important religious holidays for Jews and Christians.  Passover marks the solemn night when parents marked their doors with red blood to save their sons from God's plague upon Egyptian first born sons.  Easter mark's the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ for Christians. Judas was paid 30 piece of silver to betray his friend.  Many of us feel terribly betrayed by politicians, medical personnel, schools, programs. Our children have so many serious needs and few are met.     April has 30 days. March came in like a lion and snapped and clawed at medical choice. It did not leave like a lamb.     April first is day of silly practical jokes. I have a friend who put her son's cereal in the freezer overnight so that the spoon was locked into the milk - much to his sleepy eyed surprise. I feel a bit like like the spoon frozen in the milk. Not exactly "Cheerio..." Let's get on with the month with a vow to continue to look out for one another. If you want to honor your loved one on the spectrum tomorrow on World Autism Day - by all means. We encourage you to do so.  Many of us will not acknowledge the day.    I try to stay upbeat in  my writing, my thinking. And so, in keeping with the holiday theme, my mind travels far across the world to India. I have many Hindu friends here in my town and they just celebrated a beautiful festival called "Holi." It is a festival of love, hope and features bright colors painted everywhere, including the face!      I will choose to enjoy all of the colors of the rainbow this month, not just blue. To celebrate the love we have for our children, some of whom are adults, like my three and whose needs are growing faster than the crocus can pop its green stem from the ground on a warm day.      XOX    Kim


aljazeera--2019-09-10--Ashoura 2019 How Muslims around the world mark religious day

Ashoura 2019: How Muslims around the world mark religious day

Ashoura is observed on the tenth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, by all Muslims.  It marks the day Nuh (Noah) left the Ark and the day Musa (Moses) was saved from the Pharaoh of Egypt by God.  The Prophet Muhammad used to fast on Ashoura, a common tradition commemorated by Sunni Muslims.  For Shia Muslims, Ashoura is a major religious festival to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD.  The death of Hussein is considered by the Shias as a symbol of humanity's struggle against injustice, tyranny and oppression.  The main rituals and observances on Ashoura consist of public expressions of mourning.


bbc--2019-04-23--Why is a 2500-year-old epic dominating polls in modern India

Why is a 2,500-year-old epic dominating polls in modern India?

With the Indian general election under way, the Ramayana, a 2,500-year-old Hindu mythological epic, is back in the spotlight. The BBC's religious affairs reporter Priyanka Pathak explains why.  This year, like in previous elections, the conversation among many hardline Hindus has returned to the epic Ramayana and its protagonist, Ram.  A longstanding demand to construct a temple in the northern city of Ayodhya - a key point of tension between Hindus and Muslims - which Hindus believe is Ram's birthplace, has become louder in recent months.  Hardline Hindus want the temple built on the same spot where a 16th Century mosque was demolished by Hindu mobs in 1992. They believe the Babri mosque was built after the destruction of a Hindu temple by a Muslim invader.  The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised, once again, to reconstruct the Ram Mandir (temple) in its election manifesto.  Like in previous elections, they hope that this pledge will draw in more Hindu voters. They also organised Hindu religious festivals on a grand scale in the lead-up to the polls.  On 12 April, a large gathering of right-wing organisations was held at the iconic Ram Lila Maidan, a sprawling ground named after the god in the centre of the capital, Delhi, to celebrate "Ram's birthday".  People dressed in saffron robes wielded swords as they chanted "Jai Shree Ram", which translates from the Hindi to "Hail Lord Ram". They shouted slogans, reiterating their promise to Ram that they would reconstruct the temple.  Experts believe that the movement to build the temple, spearheaded by a powerful Hindu nationalist organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has helped craft some sort of a collective Hindu identity in India.  This idea is something that the RSS, the ideological fountainhead of the BJP, has cultivated since the early 20th Century.  However, the movement found its zeitgeist moment only a century later.  Several things happened almost concurrently during the late 1980s. First, a television show on the epic reminded 80 million viewers of the story and rekindled a love for its hero.  The serial broadcast a standardised story of the Ramayana, pulled together from many versions and variants. There is no official version of this sprawling epic although historical scholars consider the version by Valmiki, a sage and Sanskrit poet, to be the most authentic.  But really there are as many as 3,000 retellings of the story in around 22 languages, including some that eulogise Ravana while others say it was actually Ram's brother Lakshman who killed the demon king.  But what the television show did was give India a single narrative of the Ramayana. It also gave a single religion to a country "that was diverse and plural and included many different ways to be Indian", says Arshia Sattar, a doctorate in south Asian languages, who has translated Valmiki's Ramayana from Sanskrit into English.  The second big moment came in the late 1980s, when the Congress party led by Rajiv Gandhi - which has always styled itself as secular - decided to lay the foundation stone of the temple in Ayodhya with the help of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing outfit, to woo Hindu votes in a close election.  The plan didn't work - instead, it paved the way for the BJP, still a young party at the time, to seize what they saw as an opportunity to galvanise Hindu voters.  In September 1989, the party's then president LK Advani launched a nationwide march for the temple. Bricks began to move from around India for the construction of the temple. The campaign was successful in mobilising communal sentiments and set in motion a series of events that would result in the demolition of the mosque. This, in turn, triggered nationwide riots.  But in the next elections, the BJP swept the polls. From that moment forward, the party - which was 12 years old at the time - became a national heavyweight.  It took its place as either the party leading the ruling government alliance or as the leading opposition party. For the BJP, the Ayodhya issue became a way to consolidate Hindu votes - something that used to be fragmented along caste lines.  This now well-known version of the epic, championing Ram, also became a convenient point for other Hindu organisations to rally around. This meant that other versions of the epic began to be stamped out.  For instance, in 2011, a Hindu nationalist student union and other affiliated right-wing groups succeeded in forcing Delhi University to drop an essay by the late poet and Ramayana scholar AK Ramanujan, which questioned how many versions of the epic existed, from its history curriculum.  "This may have been part of the general climate of intolerance and the battle over who had the right to tell the country's history and its myths that was part of the Indian landscape between the 1980s and the 2000s," literary critic and author Nilanjana Roy wrote of the incident in her blog in 2011.  But for hardline Hindus, the cultural loss of other versions is simply collateral damage.  They believe that a sort of Hindu renaissance can be built around the epic, allowing Hindus to band together and revive their religion as a way of life that they believe was lost and can be re-established.  For instance, in September 2017, the Uttarakhand state minister for alternative medicine, proposed spending $3.6m (£2.8m) to find Sanjeevani - a mythical, glow-in-the-dark herb, described in the epic as having saved Ram and Lakshman from certain death.  The deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh has also suggested that science was so advanced during the time of the Ramayana that Sita was actually a test-tube baby. And the vice chancellor of an Indian university has claimed that Ravana, had a fleet of airplanes.  A series of such examples from Indian politicians and scholars can be seen as an attempt to bolster pride in the mythological epic. But they also evoke a nostalgia for a grand past, reawakening hope for a future that repeats the great feats of distance ancestors.


bbc--2019-07-04--Rath Yatra The legend behind worlds largest chariot festival

Rath Yatra: The legend behind world's largest chariot festival

One of India's biggest religious festivals, the Jagannath Puri Rath Yatra, gets under way on Thursday. The festival is unique in that three Hindu gods are taken out of their temples in a colourful procession to meet their devotees. The BBC's Priyanka Pathak explains the legend behind the festival and its significance.  The biggest of these processions takes place in Puri in the eastern state of Orissa, while the other takes place in the western state of Gujarat.  Believed to be the oldest Rath Yatra or chariot procession in the world, this festival marks the annual ceremonial procession of Lord Jagannath, his elder brother Balabhadra and younger sister Subhadra, from their home temple to another temple, located in what is believed to be their aunt's home.  This journey is documented in undated Hindu sacred texts known as the Puranas which are believed to have been written a few thousand years ago.  This is the only festival in the world where deities are taken out of temples to travel to devotees, and it is also the largest chariot procession in the world.  Millions of people come to watch as a "king" sweeps the road with a golden mop and three massive 18-wheeled chariots bearing the sibling deities make their way through massive crowds. Their chariots, which are mini architectural marvels, are constructed over 42 days from over 4,000 pieces of wood by the only family that has the hereditary rights to make them.  Legend says it always rains on the day of the procession. For a whole week before, the temple doors are shut and no one is allowed inside, because it is believed that the sibling deities have a fever after bathing in the sun with 108 pitchers of water. The breaking of their fever calls for a change of scene, which is why they go to their aunt's home for a few days.  The size, pomp and splendour of this procession has even contributed a word to the English dictionary: Juggernaut.  Unlike the ornate, carefully crafted metal idols everywhere else, these three deities are fashioned from wood, cloth and resin. They are malformed with large heads and no arms: reminders of the legend of an impatient King.  The legend begins in different ways.  One speaks of an arrogant Indrayumna, King of Puri in the east, who tried to steal the Hindu god Krishna's heart. It had been immersed in the legendary Dwarka sea after his cremation and had reappeared to the tribes people of the place as an idol. When Indrayumna tried to claim its possession, the idol disappeared. The repentant king sought absolution from Krishna by sanctifying him in another form.  Another speaks of how Krishna's grief-stuck siblings - his elder brother Balabhadra and younger sister Subhadra- rushed into the Dwarka sea carrying his half-cremated body. At the same moment, King Indrayumna dreamed that Krishna's body had floated back up on his shores as a log.  The two legends merge here: Indrayumna decided to build a temple to house the log. His next task was to find someone to craft the idols from it. Legends say that Vishwakarma, God's own architect, arrived as an old carpenter. He agreed to carve the idols, but on the condition that he was not to be disturbed. However, when he did not emerge from his workshop for weeks, going without food, water or rest, a worried and impatient King threw the door open.  At the time the images were only half-finished, but the carpenter disappeared. Still, believing the idols to be made from the very body of God, the King sanctified them and and placed them in the temple.  When the deities disintegrate, they are remade in the same half-done image with new wood every 12 years. They were last remade in 2015.  Dwarka in Gujarat - where Krishna's half-cremated body is believed to have been immersed into the ocean - is located on the west coast of India and Puri in Orissa- where it is said to have re-emerged as a log - is located in the east.  About 500 hundred years ago, a travelling Hindu saint and temple priest of a Hanuman temple in Gujarat, Shree Sarangdasji, arrived in Puri to offer prayers at the historic Jagannathan temple.  While sleeping at the temple guest house, it is believed that he received visionary instruction from Lord Jagannathan to go back to Ahmedabad in Gujarat and install three idols of Jagannathan, Balbhadra and Subhadra there. Carrying out the instructions received in his dream, he founded the Ahmedabad Jagannathan Temple.  By doing so, he sanctified the two locations - one where Krishna's mortal remains began their journey from the west, to their transformation as Puri's Lord Jagannathan in the east.  About 142 years ago, one of the founder's disciples, Shree Narsinhdasji Maharaj, began the Ahmedabad Rath Yatra. The deities on chariots, pulled by elephants and humans, replicate their own journey in Puri, completing a set of rituals that sanctify the two places where Krishna's mortal remains are believed to have come to rest.  At the end of the festival, the chariots are dismantled and their wood is used as fuel in the temple kitchens - believed to be the largest in the world that cook 56 things every day and feed anywhere between 2,000 to nearly 200,000 people.  The elephants are returned to the lands managed by the temple trusts to roam free - until the procession the following year.  This year's festival was, however, marred by controversy over the elephants.  Following the death of some of the temple elephants in Gujarat, there was massive outcry over plans to replace them with elephants from the north-eastern state of Assam.  The four elephants would have had to make a perilous train journey of more than 3,100km (1,926 miles) in heatwave conditions to participate in the festival.  This decision was suspended by a wildlife official after activists went to court.


bbc--2019-10-31--Pakistan train fire: Karachi to Rawalpindi service blaze kills dozens

At least 74 passengers have died after a train travelling between the Pakistani cities of Karachi to Rawalpindi caught fire.  Minister for Railways Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said the fire was caused by the explosion of a gas cylinder being used by passengers cooking breakfast.  The blaze is thought to have spread to at least three carriages.  According to officials cited in local media, many of the victims died as they tried to jump off the burning train.  Another 40 people have been injured. Officials say the number of dead may still rise.  The accident happened near the town of Rahim Yar Khan in the south of Punjab province.  Many passengers were pilgrims heading to Raiwind near Lahore for one of Pakistan's largest annual religious congregations, organised by the Tablighi Jamaat Sunni Muslim missionary movement. The train was reportedly diverted to help these religious travellers.  Three carriages were set alight, officials said, with 54 people in the 11th carriage and 78 each in carriages 12 and 13. Most of these passengers were en route to the religious festival.  Mohammad Ramzan, who was on board, told BBC Urdu some pilgrims were making tea when their gas cylinder exploded. He jumped from the train to safety.  Survivor Jamshed Pathan told BBC Urdu he was in carriage 11 when they realised there was a fire just after they had finished morning prayers.  "There was chaos everywhere," he said. "It was very difficult for us to get out and save ourselves."  Another man, who gave his name as Ghaffar, said he could smell something in the night, "but no one paid attention". He and his friends helped take the injured to hospital.  "I have no words to explain what we saw," he said. "The rescue teams got there very late."  District deputy commissioner Jamil Ahmed said some of the victims were so badly burnt they could not be identified, and DNA testing would be used to find out who had died.  What was the cause?  "Two cooking stoves blew up. They were cooking, they had [cooking] oil which added fuel to fire," Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said.  Passengers bringing stoves onto trains in order to cook meals on long journeys was a common problem, the minister said. Though it is common to carry food on board, gas cylinders are banned.  But other reports from the scene suggest electrical problems could have been the cause. Several survivors have reportedly said they believed a short-circuit on board may have been to blame.  Prime Minister Imran Khan said he was "deeply saddened by the terrible tragedy", adding that he had ordered an "immediate inquiry".  After an earlier suspension in the wake of the fire, the railways minister said services have now been restored.  Train travel is one of the most popular means of transport in Pakistan, particularly among middle- and lower-income groups. Built by the British during pre-partition era, the railway tracks cover the length of the country.  However, while some of the upscale trains have dedicated dining carriages, most of the country's trains are in poor condition and have barely functioning amenities. Therefore, passengers choose to bring things along with them or refresh themselves at the different railway stations where the trains stop.  They also take advantage of the fact that inspection is more relaxed than at airports, bringing banned items like cooking stoves and oil canisters to keep themselves sustained during the long hours on board.  This particular service - Tezgam - is one of the oldest and most popular, travelling between Karachi in the south and Rawalpindi in the north.  The journey takes more than 25 hours, with each of its carriages boasting space for somewhere between 60 and 80 passengers on bunk beds. Tickets cost between 1,500 rupees ($9.60; £7.40) and 5,000 rupees ($32; £24.80), depending on the class.  This is Pakistan's worst rail disaster in over a decade.  The country has a history of fatal railway accidents. Casualty figures are often high because trains are packed with far greater numbers of passengers than they were designed for.  In July, 11 people died in an accident, with four dying in another accident in September.  In 2007, at least 56 people were killed and more than 120 injured in a crash near Mehrabpur.  And in 2005, more than 130 people were killed when three trains collided in Sindh province in one of the country's worst train disasters.  Are you in the area? Have you been affected by the fire? If it is safe to do so, please share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.  Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways: • Text an SMS or MMS to 61124 or +44 7624 800 100 • Please read our terms of use and privacy policy


breitbart--2019-12-24--Christmas Carolers Assaulted in India by Presumed Hindu Radicals

Five men attacked a group of Christmas carolers in Tamil Nadu last week, including a 17-year-old boy, as part of a spate of pre-Christmas violence against Christians.  Pastor Joshua, who leads a local Christian community in Permuapalayam, Tamil Nadu, had gathered a group of the faithful to celebrate Advent in their home but they were assaulted by the militants as they began singing carols heralding Christ’s birth.  The day after the episode, the Christians went to the police department to file a complaint, but were rejected, according to reports from the Rome-based Fides news agency.  “Episodes of intolerance towards the Christian faith have been increasing in Tamil Nadu in recent years,” said Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), an NGO that monitors the situation of religious minorities in India.  It is “deeply worrying to see that religious holidays are distorted by those who want to plant seeds of contention and discord in India,” CSW stated. “Respecting the right to practice one’s religion is fundamental. We urge the authorities to take appropriate measures against these behaviors and to promote a culture of mutual respect.”  Several days ago, International Christian Concern (ICC) released a report that Christians in India had suffered over a half dozen acts of targeted persecution in the days leading up to Christmas, and many of India’s Christians have been obliged to adjust their Christmas celebrations for fear of reprisals from Hindu radicals.  “We have cancelled all our Christmas events in Banni Mardatti village, including carols, cottage meetings, and pre-Christmas events,” said Pastor Raja Bhovi of His Grace Church in India’s Karnataka State.  “There is a fear of being attacked by Hindu radicals,” he added, referring to recent events.  In early December, a mob of Hindu nationalists attacked and brutally beat members of Rev. Bhovi’s church community as they were clearing a plot of land for the building of a church. Afterward, they cut off the water supply for all 25 Christian families in the village, threatening to drive them out of their homes unless they renounce their faith in Christ.  “We were small in number at the police station compared to the mob of Hindu radicals,” the pastor said. “All of the 25 Christian families were present at the police station to lodge a complaint; however, the police told us that Christians cannot hold any meetings in the village and that pastors from outside the village cannot visit the Christian families, even during this festive season.”  According to some observers, anti-Christian persecution in India has now reached unprecedented levels, especially under the reigning prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which promotes Hindu nationalism.  “The level of intolerance we are witnessing in this country today is unprecedented,” said Nehemiah Christie, a local human rights activist. “Christians cannot celebrate the holidays for fear of violence.”  “The police are also complicit and do not take complaints seriously,” Christie noted. “In many cases, suffering remains unheard, violence remains unpunished and people continue to live in fear.”


breitbart--2019-12-24--Trump Administration Investigates Ban on Christmas Decorations at HUD Complex

The Trump administration has launched an investigation into the management company of a Missouri 55-and-older housing development for its ban on Christmas lights and yard displays.  Non-profit litigation organization Liberty Counsel reports officials with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are investigating MACO Management Company’s ban on Christmas lights and décor displays at Grandview Estates, a housing development that is subsidized by HUD.  According to the report, MACO Management barred residents of the complex from decorating the exterior of their duplexes with Christmas lights or other displays.  “Nothing in the lease agreement or regulations supported such a ban and residents have previously displayed Christmas lights and yard decorations for many years,” states Liberty Counsel, which recently sent a demand letter to the management company on behalf of Grandview Estates’ residents.  The letter notes residents were told the “rationale” for the Christmas light and decoration ban is that, because all residents are funded, in part, by government funds, the Government’s Fair Housing rules must apply. To that end, even the display of Christmas wreaths is forbidden, though the manager did hold a “Holiday Wreath contest.”  Liberty Counsel reports MACO Management responded to the demand letter with its own letter, signed by Tammy Delcour, regional manager of MACO Management, who cited the company’s own rules and regulations but failed to cite any HUD or “Government Fair Housing” regulations.  “We have never in the past or will in the future hamper a resident from decorating to their desire on the inside of their residence as they choose,” Delcour wrote. “We do however have rules and regulations for the outside and the structures themselves.”  After Liberty Counsel sent a follow-up response requesting MACO rescind the decoration ban in order to avoid receiving a complaint with HUD for civil rights violations, MACO issued a memo to residents. The memo states that residents may decorate the interior of their homes and now “their front door and porch area with more overtly religious displays,” yet continues to ban yard displays deemed “religious:” “When decorating with yard scenes we must stay neutral within the community so no religion is offended or singled out … We as a management company look for a policy which appropriately balanced the beliefs of all while ensuring we are not perceived to favor one religion over another.”  “This conflates the private speech of residents with the speech of the management company,” Liberty Counsel states, adding the company is violating the Fair Housing Act, which bans discriminating against residents on the basis of religion.  “Christmas is a nationally recognized holiday, and banning individuals’ religious decorations or celebrations in a federally subsidized or managed residential facility violates the Fair Housing Act and other federal laws,” Liberty Counsel asserts. “Any federal law or funding requirement that would restrict or prohibit residents’ religious holiday decorations would violate the First Amendment rights of the residents.”  Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel chairman, said he welcomes HUD’s investigation into MACO Management’s practices.  “MACO’s banning Grandview Estates residents from their longstanding traditions of displaying Christmas or other religious holiday decorations constitutes discrimination based on religion,” he said. “Nothing in Federal regulations, the lease agreement or residential regulations supports such a ban. MACO Management Company must allow residents to decorate their duplexes, just like they have in the past.”


crikey--2019-01-18--Un-Australia Day curing the nationalistic itch

Un-Australia Day: curing the nationalistic itch

Australia Day has little do with Australia as a political construct. Do we really need this grotesque distortion of history?  It’s a special time of year. The religious holidays and the celebration of the new year -- characterised by excessive spending, materialism, gluttony and drunkenness -- are behind us. We find ourselves bearing down on our so-called national holiday with its associated intractable and thus utterly pointless debate on whether it should be retained or moved.  January 26 is not the anniversary of Federation. Nor is it the anniversary of the ratification of the Statute of Westminster, when the Parliament in 1942 freed itself of subservience to British legislation. It’s not any of the three anniversary dates upon which the rights of appeal to a foreign court, the Privy Council, were rolled back.