President Obama delivered Chapter Two of his “New Beginning” U.S.-Muslim playbook with an intensely personal speech in Indonesia on Wednesday that praised his boyhood home as a model of how democracy and Islam can peacefully coexist.
“Relations between the United States and Muslim nations have been frayed over many years,” POTUS said. “As president, I have made it a priority fo repair these relations.”
The president’s pledges were met with skepticism, however, in Cairo, the scene of his first major address on Islam, Reuters reports. Earlier on Wednesday, POTUS and FLOTUS visited Indonesia’s largest mosque (see pic at left), and a top Indonesian minister got in trouble for shaking FLOTUS’s hand.
Baghdad’s Christians were again attacked on Wednesday as 11 roadside bombs killed five people in predominantly Christian neighborhoods, leaving many wondering whether it’s time to flee Iraq, the AP reports. Concerned with growing violence against Christians in the Middle East and touting its long experience with evil, the Vatican wants to participate in Interpol meetings from now on.
A Pakistani-born U.S. citizen pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to help people he thought were al-Qaida operatives bomb Washington’s subway. Britain’s Islam Channel broke broadcasting regulations by condoning marital rape and encouraging violence against women, the country’s broadcast regulator ruled, according to CNN.
Some 12,000 American Muslims are expected to join the 2.5 million pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca next week, but a Muslim civil rights group says the U.S. government is delaying the shipment of pilgrims’ passports.
The Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, who has announced he will retire in 2013, said he’s not “being run off” by the death threats and criticism hurled his way. Gay civil rights groups filed two lawsuits seeking to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act.
U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are defending their flagship anti-poverty program and sponsoring a conference to train more exorcists. Israel says the 33 formerly trapped Chilean miners will visit the Holy Land this Christmas.
Faith helped President George W. Bush quit drinking and Kanye West said “my bad” for calling Bush a racist. Bush said he accepts the apology. “I’m not a hater,” he said.
Bishop Eddie Long’s church now says he shared rooms with the boys accusing him of sexual coercion, but that the megachurch pastor did not engage in “sexually inappropriate conduct.” A fundamentalist Mormon man was sentenced to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine for sexually assaulting his 15-year-old “wife.”
The ACLU is suing a New Jersey town that prays at council meetings. Humanists are spending $200,000 to tell everyone that they do not like the Quran and Bible.
