CHRISTIAN CHARGED WITH ' BLASPHEMY ' FOR SENDING TEXT MESSAGE IN PAKISTAN; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE

ISTANBUL, – More than 100 protestors last week surrounded a Pakistani courthouse and chanted death threats against a Punjabi Christian said to be framed for sending a “blasphemous” text message on his cell phone.
Rawalpindi police arrested Hector Aleem, 51, on Jan. 22 and detained him on charges of sending a text message that insulted the Islamic prophet Muhammad. At his Jan. 27 hearing at the Rawalpindi Sessions Court, crowds gathered and began shouting death threats.
His attorney, Malik Tafik, told that a local man allegedly framed Aleem for the charges because Aleem has made legal challenges on behalf of Christians involved in a land dispute. Aleem directs a small agency that often defends the rights of Christians.
Last November, a scholar associated with the national Islamist political movement Sunni Tehreek received a text message claiming to have come from Aleem. The religious scholar registered blasphemy charges against Aleem on Nov. 28 at the Rawalpindi police station.
Police raided Aleem’s house at 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 22 and assaulted him, his wife, and his two daughters. They also stole 50,000 Pakistan rupees (US$630) worth of valuables and broke pictures of Jesus hanging on their walls, according to a report from the Center for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS).
Authorities charged him with violating sections 295c (blasphemy) and 109bb (abetting) of the Pakistani criminal code. Aleem was transferred to a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court for a second hearing on Jan. 30, where an even larger crowd of protestors gathered shouting that his life would not be spared. Many of those who came to protest were associated with Sunni Tehreek, which has been involved in violent sectarian clashes with other Islamist movements in the last decade.
“There were about 150 people protesting that Aleem should be handed over to them,” Tafik said. “And there were many journalists, two news stations, and lawyers who came out to protest against him.”
Aleem is detained at the Adiyala Jail in Rawalpindi. During his incarceration, police have mistreated him and denied him adequate food and access to medicine for his heart condition. He told lawyers that police have not allowed him to meet with his family and referred to him as “choohra” (sweeper), a derogatory term for Pakistani Christians to designate them as the lowest rung of society.
At a hearing at an anti-terrorism court on Monday (Feb. 2), Judge Sakhi Mohammad Kohut exonerated him of blasphemy charges but did not clear him of abetting. A government official told that the judge’s decision was heavily influenced by Islamic extremists attending the open court hearing who told the judge, “If you release [Aleem], then we will kill him outside.”
At the hearing, the judge implicated the man who allegedly framed Aleem – Bashar Kokar, previously charged multiple times with fraud – accusing him of using his cell phone to send a blasphemous message against Muhammad. Kokar was charged with blasphemy and arrested later that day. But court evidence shows the original text message came from an unregistered mobile number that pertained to neither Kokar nor Aleem, sources said – exonerating Aleem, but also making it difficult to prove that Kokar framed him. Khushdil Khan Malik, deputy secretary of Pakistan’s Ministry of Human Rights, said he believes the judge implicated Kokar as a scapegoat for the blasphemy charges in order to appease the extremists.
The next hearing will be held in March. Attorney Tafik told he believes Aleem will be cleared of all charges because there is no evidence against him.

ANCIENT ' SYRIAC BIBLE ' FOUND IN CYPRUS

NICOSIA – Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.

The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old.
The manuscript carries excerpts of the Bible written in gold lettering on vellum and loosely strung together, photos provided to Reuters showed. One page carries a drawing of a tree, and another eight lines of Syriac script.
Experts were however divided over the provenance of the manuscript, and whether it was an original, which would render it priceless, or a fake.
Experts said the use of gold lettering on the manuscript was likely to date it later than 2,000 years.
"I'd suspect that it is most likely to be less than 1,000 years old," leading expert Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge told Reuters.
Turkish Cypriot authorities seized the relic last week and nine individuals are in custody pending further investigations. More individuals are being sought in connection with the find, they said.
Further investigations turned up a prayer statue and a stone carving of Jesus believed to be from a church in the Turkish held north, as well as dynamite.
The police have charged the detainees with smuggling antiquities, illegal excavations and the possession of explosives.
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic - the native language of Jesus - once spoken across much of the Middle East and Central Asia. It is used wherever there are Syrian Christians and still survives in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India.
Aramaic is still used in religious rituals of Maronite Christians in Cyprus.
"One very likely source (of the manuscript) could be the Tur-Abdin area of Turkey, where there is still a Syriac speaking community," Charlotte Roueche, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London told Reuters.
Stories regarding the antiquity of manuscripts is commonplace. One case would be the Yonan Codex, carbon dated to the 12th century which people tried to pass off as earlier.
After further scrutiny of photographs of the book, manuscripts specialist at the University of Cambridge library and Fellow of Wolfson College JF Coakley suggested that the book could have been written a good deal later.
"The Syriac writing seems to be in the East Syriac script with vowel points, and you do not find such manuscripts before about the 15th century.
"On the basis of the one photo...if I'm not mistaken some words at least seem to be in modern Syriac, a language that was not written down until the mid-19th century," he told Reuters.

NBC'S ' THE LAST TEMPLAR ' AN ANSWER TO THE ' DA VINCI CODE '

Produced by the justly respected team of Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr., and starring Mira Sorvino as a brilliant archaeologist and martial arts expert, NBC’s miniseries The Last Templar is a likable though fanciful and indeed frequently silly four-hour miniseries about the hunt for an ancient document that could shake the foundations of Christianity if it should come to light.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because of the obvious similarities to The Da Vinci Code, the bestselling novel by Dan brown and film by Ron Howard. In both Brown’s novel and Howard’s movie, the protagonist’s quest leads to the revelation that Christianity as we know it is a sham invented by the Catholic Church to allow a small group of people to have undue power over the world. According to The Da Vinci Code, Jesus Christ did not die on a cross but instead married Mary Magdalene and had a family, and his descendants are alive today.
That’s all taken from a set of arguments presented by three men in England a couple of decades ago, who outlined this amusingly preposterous theory in a series of charmingly paranoid and apocalyptic books with titles such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Brown’s story is more of a jeu d’esprit, albeit badly written and boring, but Christians understandably took great offense to its thesis.
The furor will surely resume this spring as we approach the May 15 release of the film version of Angels and Demons,Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code. However, those who conclude that Brown’s book insults Christianity and spreads lies about their religion should take comfort in the fact that The Last Templar takes a very different perspective on that story line.
After a long, long narrative that jumps from the United States to Turkey and includes more than enough chase scenes and characters mucking about in old ruins, the protagonist, Tess Chaykin (Sorvino), finds the document everyone has been seeking throughout the story. It is a manuscript that has been preserved by the Knights Templar, a secret society, over the centuries, and it purports to be a “gospel” written by Jesus Christ in which he claims to be a mortal human being, not the Son of God as described in the Bible. That, of course, is essentially the same matter at issue in The Da Vinci Code.
The Last Templar’s treatment of the issue is quite different, however. Upon finding the document, Tess tries to convince her main antagonist, the sinister, aged weirdo William Vance, that no one can ever know whether what the document says is true anyway: a two-millennium-old hoax is still a falsehood regardless of how old it is. That’s a very good point indeed, but Vance remains nonetheless intent on taking the document so that he can use it to “prove” that Christianity is a lot of hooey. His belief is that doing so will put an end to all wars, which he posits are caused solely by religion.
Tess, who started out in the story as an atheist who says she believes only what she can see and God isn’t in that category, has just finished fervently praying for the recovery of her new boyfriend, FBI agent Sean Daly, who is lying in a coma after injuries sustained in a shipwreck (part of the quest, you see). Sean has been portrayed throughout the story as a faithful Catholic and has engaged in several very earnest discussions about religion with Tess, who has satirized and insulted him while he has responded with exceeding reasonableness and kindliness albeit not particularly scintillating theology.
Tess has fallen in love with Sean despite his inadequacy as a theologian, and in her anguish over his dire medical condition—which clearly can be cured only by a huge dose of Hollywood sentimentality and wish-fulfillment—she turns to the only source of miracles she knows; God, of course. Having just done so when confronted by Vance’s arguments for atheism, she desperately tries to convince Vance to give up his quest to destroy all faith in God (which is clearly about as likely as convincing Democrats to give up their addiction to tax dollars).
Alas, Tess’s entreaties are all in vain, and the elderly Vance tries physically to wrest the document from her hands. They struggle over possession of the document atop an exceedingly picturesque but windy bluff overlooking the sea, and not at all surprisingly the pages are soon dislodged from her grasp, caught by the wind, and carried off into the sea below, never to be recovered. “Crap, now we’ll never know!” says Tess’s crestfallen expression.
What’s particularly dizzying about Vance’s arguments, of course, is that they’re ones that have been frequently made by atheists in recent years in attempts to characterize Christianity as not only wrong but in fact nearly as dangerous as the burning of fossil fuels. This gives the miniseries a bit of extra relevance and piquancy, which is probably never a bad thing.
The notion that a secret document disproves the Bible’s claims about Christ’s divinity is clearly not going to sit well with Christians, of course, even when the claim is made in fictional form—as the furor over Brown’s novel proved.
(Those who don’t wish to know the resolution of The Last Templar should skip the next paragraph.)
There’s a final twist, however. Although Tess and the other characters in the story never do find out whether the document is authentic and true (and hence must take their religion on faith, as it were), the audience does get to know the answer. In a flashback to the time when the document was originally hidden, during the Crusades, we find that it is indeed fake, and that it was created for the very same reason as motivated Vance’s crazed quest, the idea that destroying the Christian church would end all wars.
Thus The Last Templar takes the same material as The Da Vinci Code but posits the exact opposite conclusion.
I imagine that quite a few people watched The Last Templar during its initial showings, and that many more will do so over time. In cultural terms, this exchange of views is exactly what Thomas Jefferson said was the great value of freedom of speech (”Notes on Religion,” 1776): “Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. . . . She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men.” Thus not only is The Last Templar an interesting antidote for those bothered by The Da Vinci Code, it’s an object lesson for anyone not entirely comfortable with the idea of cultural freedom.

SWEDISH PENTECOSTAL ( SON OF A PREACHER ), JOINS THE ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES

'Fredrik" recently finished basic training in the 51st Battalion of the Golani Brigade. Together with thousands of other soldiers, he is waiting on a base a few miles from Gaza, ready to be deployed in case the cease-fire collapses. The only difference is that he is not an Israeli citizen, or even Jewish. He is a 29-year-old Swedish Pentecostal Christian.
Fredrik came here for the first time nine years ago as a tourist. "It was love at first sight. I stepped out of the airplane, looked around and felt that this was a country I could die for." He returned to his small Swedish hometown, where his father serves as a pastor in the local Pentecostal church. "I always commit 100 percent to things that I do and I felt strongly that this is where God wanted me to be," he explains, so he wrapped up his own career as a youth pastor and moved here. The love he felt for the land was uncompromising.
Soon after his arrival, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up along with 21 young people in a discotheque in Tel Aviv. "Suddenly I realized that not everybody is nice," Fredrik says with a touch of irony. "When I was called up to do army service in Sweden, I had refused to carry a gun."
After having experienced terrorism up close, he stopped being a pacifist. "I realized that there are situations when one needs to use weapons to defend oneself."
That insight led him to an IDF conscription office in the summer of 2001, where he explained that he wanted to join the IDF. He received a resounding no for an answer, since he was not a citizen, nor Jewish. He was not even a legal resident, only a tourist.
"That was when I first heard of Sar-El, an IDF volunteer program. You essentially become a jobnik." Between 2002 and 2005 Fredrik spent a total of a year and a half as a Sar-El volunteer, mostly as a tank mechanic. The rest of the time he worked odd jobs in Sweden to support himself in Israel. "Finally, after endless petitions, I got temporary residency." He immediately went back to the conscription office, but was told that he needed permanent residency to be eligible for the IDF.
Fredrik worked odd jobs here for more than two years, doing everything in his power to make his dream come true. "When it was time to renew my residency, I felt that it was now or never. I wrote to everybody I knew and used all the contacts that I had made in Sar-El."
And finally, in the summer of 2007, he was granted permanent residency. "As soon as I had received my blue identity card, I walked straight from the Interior Ministry to the IDF conscription office." All those years of persistence finally paid off and Fredrik was admitted to Golani, the brigade he had aimed for all along. In March he started training.
The enthusiasm with which he was greeted can be gleaned from the fact that he was handpicked from the 51st Infantry Battalion for the Egoz Reconnaissance Unit, the elite of the elite. "He possesses some very rare qualities," says one of the soldiers who went through basic training with him. "Any officer would do anything to have a soldier like that in his unit, someone who gives everything and never complains."
Fredrik received his beret in Egoz and trained with them for a few months before Intelligence stepped in, curbed the enthusiasm and bumped him back down to the 51st.
Fredrik is very humble about his feat. He just followed his conviction and doesn't expect a special prize for it, but part of his motivation is to inspire people in Israel. He feels rewarded when he sees that reaction in people. "When Israelis hear my story they say, 'Kol hakavod [Good for you].' I want to be a source of inspiration for them and make them realize that they are not alone in the fight against terrorism," he explains.
The situation in Sweden is obviously very different. The antiwar demonstrations during Operation Cast Lead on several occasions erupted into violent attacks on anything associated with Israel. Out of concern for the safety of his family in Sweden, he does not want to reveal his real name or show his face on pictures in this article. "In Sweden there are some people that think that I am a fanatic, that I came here to kill Arabs, which is absolutely untrue."
He doesn't want to discuss politics or the country's future borders. "That's not for me to decide. I just believe that God wants the State of Israel to exist, and I am here to protect its existence."
God is ever present when Fredrik explains what motivated him to leave Sweden and move to Israel. "God placed a love for this country in my heart and I want to spread that love. I want to express it in a practical way. That love is my purpose."
He explains it as if it were a very simple thing. He has always been completely honest about his Christian faith and says that it has never caused any problems or conflicts with his fellow soldiers. "I feel especially close to the religious Jews in my unit. They say that I have an interesting relationship with God," he says with a smile. "I think we challenge and inspire each other. They know a lot of Talmud, while I know more Bible. It triggers them to learn more, and their knowledge triggers me to learn more, but at the same time I respect their faith completely and they respect my faith completely. We are not trying to change each other. And there is a lot we have in common. On Saturday evening when the guys gather to sing as Shabbat departs, I sing with them. We sing to God together, we sing our hearts out. I feel the Holy Spirit so strongly when I join them."
Fredrik suddenly stops himself. "Listen to me," he says and shakes his head. "I keep saying 'them' all the time, not 'us.'"
I ask him how long he thinks he will keep doing that. "Probably as long as I live," he says, and for the first time I detect a certain sadness in his voice. "I will never completely be a part of this society and I don't expect to be. I don't say hayinu on Pessah: I was never a slave in Egypt." He shrugs his shoulders, at a loss for words.
I don't blame him, because how can one ever explain a love that doesn't ask for anything in return?

CHRISTIAN GROUPS ANSWERS ATHEISTS WITH OWN AD'S ON BRITISH BUSES

LONDON -- Three Christian groups in Britain are putting ads on city buses proclaiming that there is a God, a reaction to a high-profile atheist campaign here that has spread around the globe.
From the United States and Canada to Italy, Spain and Australia, nonbelievers have been placing anti-religious ads on buses -- usually seen promoting toothpaste, cellphones and other products -- and stirring up national debates about God.
Thousands of people in Britain recently raised $200,000 to place an ad on 800 London buses that reads: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
Now, just as that campaign has ended, the Christian Party is putting up its response: "There definitely is a God." The Russian Orthodox Church's bus ad reads: "There is a God. BELIEVE. Don't worry and enjoy your life." And in the next few days, the Trinitarian Bible Society will be posting a line from Psalm 53:1: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."
"Great idea!" said Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, a lobbying group. Expressing delight that the godless bus-borne messages are off the road, he said, "The forces of darkness are in retreat."
More than three of four people in the world consider themselves religious, and those who say they belong to no faith are in the distinct minority. But in many of the world's richer nations, particularly in Europe, an increasingly vocal nonreligious movement has gained ground.
Leaders of many humanist and other nonreligious groups say their numbers are growing in reaction to rising religious fanaticism and faith-inspired terrorism, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Perhaps because atheists had rarely advertised before, the ads on buses seen by millions sparked raging debates in many places.
"A lot of people are angry, a lot of people are happy" about the atheists' ads, said Katie Kish, vice president of the Freethought Association of Canada, which promotes secular views. She said her group, which is coordinating an atheist campaign in Canada, will later this month have buses in Toronto, Halifax and Calgary bearing the same message as the London ones: There is probably no God, so people should stop worrying and enjoy life.
In Italy, where the Catholic Church is strong, some proposed atheist bus ads have been rejected, but this one has just been approved to run this month in Genoa: "The good news is there are millions of atheists in Italy; the excellent news is they believe in freedom of expression."
In Britain, the Rev. George Hargreaves, leader of the Christian Party, said he was annoyed that buses running past his London office bore the atheists' creed. So his minor political party bought advertising assuring people of God's existence. Those ads also seek to raise money by encouraging people, for a $2 fee, to text "Amen."
David Long, a spokesman for the Trinitarian Bible Society, which publishes Bibles, said the atheist ads got "people talking about God." That "probably was not their intention," he said, "but we felt that it was amusing."
Fred Edwords, spokesman for the American Humanist Association, said that "nobody is going to be converted because of a sign on a bus." But he said the ads his group put on Washington buses in November and December -- "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake" -- let people who don't believe in God know they are not the only ones.
Edwords said a new bus campaign, due to start in New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras, will feature this ad: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone."
Hanne Stinson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, said the new religious ads proclaiming God are "really quite a compliment" and mean "our ads had an impact."