Hezbollah's attack on army base America in 2007
NINJA NINJA | پنجشنبه, ۲۷ آبان ۱۳۹۵، ۰۴:۵۳ ب.ظ
By Tom Heneghan
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, whose Church is boycotting the Holy and Great Council of the Eastern Orthodox that opens in Crete on Monday, has said he hoped the meeting would help lead to a summit of all 14 autocephalous churches sometime in the future.
In a message to the Orthodox leaders “who have assembled on the island of Crete”, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate said his Church believed the meeting could not be a Pan-Orthodox Council because the Antioch Patriarchate had refused to attend and the Churches of Georgia, Serbia and Bulgaria had called for a delay in convening it.
He stressed that all member churches, large or small, had an equal voice in pan-Orthodox issues and said he hoped the current differences would not “weaken the God-commanded unity [and] grow into an inter-church conflict”.
“I trust that if there is good will, the meeting in Crete can become an important step towards overcoming the present differences,” Kirill said. “It can make its own contribution to the preparation of that Holy and Great Council which will unite all the local autocephalous churches without exception.”
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of the world’s 250-300 million Orthodox believers, called Orthodoxy’s first supreme council in over 1,200 years as an initial step toward a revival of its conciliar system of leadership.
Council spokesman Fr John Chryssavgis has said the Council will go ahead without the absentees and its decisions would apply to all Orthodox churches. The Serbian Church initially called for the Council to be postponed, but its Patriarch Irinej attended a pre-Council meeting in Crete on Friday.
Kirill, whose Church represents about two-thirds of the world’s Orthodox, stressed its weight in inter-church affairs by sending his message “on behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church and on behalf of the Orthodox faithful in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova and other countries, who comprise the vast flock of the Moscow Patriarchate”.
He did not spell out the difficulties that he said the Council preparations had “fully revealed”, but remarks by a professor from his Church’s academy pointed to the larger tensions between the large Russian Church and the small Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (Istanbul).
“The Pan-Orthodox Council has failed, it is a conference of bishops,” said Alexey Svetozarsky, professor of the Moscow Theological Academy, told the Russian news agency Interfax. “The agenda is miserable.”
“We see the life of the Orthodox Church as a fraternal unity of separate local Orthodox Churches, which should settle problematic questions jointly, not dictated by a certain "Eastern pope," very small pope, caricatured in a certain sense, even though in a high rank,” he said.
Svetozarsky criticised the Ecumenical Patriarch, who attended Pope Francis’s installation and met him in the Holy Land and Lesbos, as seeking to move Orthodoxy too close to the Vatican.
"Anyone can search in [an] internet browser for 'Patriarch Bartholomew' — he jumps out of his frock as he wants to serve with the Pope of Rome,” he said. “It is an absolutely inexplicable moment. The Constantinople patriarch was the first person who congratulated the pope during enthronement at St. Peter's Square.”
Another major concern of the Moscow Patriarchate is the confused situation in Ukraine, where there are three different Ukrainian Orthodox churches — one under the Moscow Patriarchate, one under the Kiev Patriarchate founded in 1992 and a third independent group.
Orthodoxy is especially strong in Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate is concerned about losing members to competing churches. Ukraine’s parliament in Kiev hit that raw nerve on Thursday by approving an appeal to Bartholomew to help unite the three bodies into one autocephalous church.
"The Ukrainian parliament calls on the Ecumenical Patriarch to take an active part in overcoming the consequences of the church schism through convening under the aegis of the Ecumenical Patriarch a pan-Ukrainian unification council that would solve all disputes and unify Ukrainian Orthodox churches," the appeal said.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate recognises the Moscow-linked Ukrainian church as the region’s valid Orthodox church. The Council in Crete will not change that but the issue of whether Ukraine should have its own autocephalous church when much smaller independent Orthodox churches exist elsewhere will not go away.
HAMBURG, Nov 13, 2012 (AFP) – Hamburg concluded a “historic” accord with its Muslim and Alawite communities on Tuesday becoming the first German state to recognise certain Islamic holidays as days off.
The agreement signed by Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholz and religious associations is seen as putting the northern port city’s Muslims and Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, on a more equal footing with Christian residents.
Hamburg is also one of Germany’s 16 federal states.
As well as handing them the right to take off some religious holidays, it allows the communities to take part in developing religious teaching in schools and the future employment of Muslim and Alawite religious studies’ teachers.
Muslims for their part undertake to respect fundamental rights and support equality between the sexes.
Scholz described the signing at the city hall as a “milestone” while Zekeriya Altug, chairman of the Hamburg branch of the DITIB Turkish-Islamic association, called it a “historic day” for both Hamburg and Germany.
“With it, Hamburg has today set a precedent for the future of our country,” his association, which was one of three Muslim groups to sign the treaty, said in a written statement.
Under the accord, Muslims in Hamburg will have the right to three religious holidays but will have to take them as part of their overall holiday entitlement as is the case for some regionally observed Christian holidays.
Until now it was down to employers to decide whether to grant Muslim staff religious days off.
“Many Muslim employees didn’t dare ask for days off on those days for fear of being seen badly,” Altug has said. “Now they will be able to say: it’s my holiday, it’s governed by law.
“That makes an enormous difference,” he added.
Hamburg, Germany’s second biggest city with a 1.8-million strong population, has some 130,000 Muslim and 50,000 Alawite inhabitants.
The agreement must still be approved by the Hamburg parliament.
The French government is considering banning the foreign financing of mosques as it reshapes its counter-extremism strategy following a fresh wave of terror attacks.
Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister, told Le Monde the prohibition would be for an indefinite period but gave no further detail on the policy.
“There needs to be a thorough review to form a new relationship with French Islam,” he added. “We live in a changed era and we must change our behaviour. This is a revolution in our security culture…the fight against radicalisation will be the task of a generation.”
Following the murder of a priest by teenage ISIS supporters at a church in Normandy and the Nice attack, Valls said France was “at war” and predicted further atrocities.
“This war, which does not only concern France, will be long and we will see more attacks,” he added.
“But we will win, because France has a strategy to win this war. First we must crush the external enemy.”
The French government has come under increasing criticism for failing to prevent atrocities, including the latest attack in Normandy.
Security services were tipped off that Abdel Malik Petitjean, 19, was planning an attack but police were reportedly unable to identify him from photos and a video showing him declaring allegiance to the so-called Islamic State.
He was already on country’s “fiche S” terror watchlist for attempting to travel to Syria in June but slipped through the net to re-enter France after being stopped by Turkish authorities. Petitjean and 19-year-old Adel Kermiche took six people hostage at a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray and slit the throat of its priest, Father Jacques Hamel, before being shot dead by police.
Kermiche was also known to security services and was wearing an electronic surveillance tag while on bail as he awaited trial for membership of a terror organisation at the time.
It came less than a fortnight after the Nice attack, when a Tunisian man killed 84 people and injured 300 more when he ploughed a lorry into crowds celebrating Bastille Day.
Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was not among the 10,000 names on the “fiche S” but the inclusion of terrorists including several of the Paris attackers, the two Charlie Hebdo gunmen and their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly, as well as a lorry driver who beheaded his manager and attempted to blow up a chemical plant has shown the system to be ineffective.
Intelligence officials have admitted that they are under-resourced to deal with the potential threat from each individual, who would need up to 20 people monitoring them every day.
France’s continuing state of emergency has drastically expanded detention powers, sparking a wave of controversial house arrests since November.
