Queen Rania of Jordan Takes on Hardliners over Honour Killings
THE TELEGRAPH: Queen Rania of Jordan is challenging Islamic hardliners by supporting tougher sentences for men who commit 'honour killings'.

Queen Rania of Jordan is challenging Islamic hardliners by supporting tougher sentences for men who commit 'honour killings'. Photograph: The Telegraph
On one side is the fashionably dressed Queen Rania of Jordan, an elegant symbol of progressive values for Arab women. On the other are her country's conservative social and religious leaders.

At stake is a political test case for reform in the Middle East, one that pits demands for greater democracy against the need to end the scandal of so-called honour killings of women.

Queen Rania, who regularly appears without head-scarf, let alone hijab [sic?], has given her quiet support to women's rights groups who want to change laws amounting to legal impunity for men involved in honour killings.

But standing against is are another symbol of the country's attempts to show a progressive face. Jordan's MPs, who have been given more power to hold the government and royal family to account than in other Arab countries, have shown little enthusiasm for the moves.

"This whole issue is being exaggerated, and the reason behind it is not innocent," said Sheikh Hamza Mansour, leader of the parliament's Islamic Action Front. His coalition of Islamist and tribal representatives has so far blocked an attempt to introduce tougher sentences for men who have killed their sisters and daughters for bringing "shame" on their families.

"It's as if the government is giving up our personality to turn us into a Westernised society," he said.

The practice of honour killing is more often associated with impoverished and remote areas of countries like Pakistan than cities like Amman, Jordan's sophisticated and Westernised capital.

But it was in Amman's outskirts that Abu Ishmael and his three brothers recently picked up their sister after a call from her husband, took her home, and stabbed her to death. >>> Richard Spencer in al-Baq'a | Sunday, December 06, 2009

Marshmallow Policies Will No Longer Do! It’s Time to Get Tough!
THE TELEGRAPH: The United States is facing what has been described as its "most serious instance of domestic terrorism" to date, the FBI has warned.

Officials say a second generation of Somali immigrants is becoming increasingly radicalised and could pose a growing threat to security.

The warnings come amid the revelation that 20 young Somali American men who returned to their war-torn homeland have been radicalised by a group linked to al-Qaeda.

The FBI is urgently examining links between the youths, who are all American citizens, and al-Shabaab, an Islamist group fighting in the country's long-running conflict.

Investigators are concentrating on two mosques, the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Centre in Minneapolis and the Dawah Institute in the neighbouring city of St Paul, where parents and guardians of the departed youths said their sons attended classes.

But the probe has now spread to Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Maine.

US law enforcement agencies are concerned young militants could return to the US to plot terror attacks, following a similar path to the British Pakistanis behind the London bombings in July 7, 2005 who made multiple visits to radical mosques in Pakistan.

The authorities began looking into the radicalisation of Somali youths after 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed became the first known American suicide bomber in late October.

The Minneapolis student blew himself up in one of five co-ordinated bombings in northern Somalia orchestrated by al-Shabaab, whose former leader reportedly trained at terror camps in Afghanistan before being killed in an American air strike in May, 2008. US Facing Home-grown Islamic Terror Threat >>> By Alex Spillius in Washington | Friday, March 13, 2009

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