Wednesday, July 25, 2012

A Frenchman's union of Islam and homosexuality

Ludovic Mohamed Zahed (R) and his husband Qiyam al-Din
Ludovic's story is an inspiration.  The LGBT community is blessed with so many extraordinary individuals.  Our common struggle together sans the typical boundaries of sexual orientation, religion, nationality or race, so ingrained into the rest of humanity, is a new icon that beckons every man, woman and child to embrace the truth of the oneness of humankind.  Seen as a whole, the universal brotherhood and sisterhood that we are reflecting back to the world, is cracking, breaking through, and demolishing the ancient, ignorant walls that have kept civilizations divided and weakened.  And we, the LGBT community, are the architects, builders and pioneers of the new world ahead of us.   ~Madison Reed


A Frenchman's union of Islam and homosexuality

By Pauline Froissart (AFP) – 2 days ago

PARIS — A newlywed homosexual Frenchman is on a mission to prove that "being gay and Muslim is possible" after feeling forced for years to choose between his religion and sexuality.

It took Algerian-born Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, 35, two decades to come to terms with himself, but now that he's at peace he's made it his goal to fight Islamophobia and homophobia.

His call comes at a time when France, home to Europe's largest Muslim community, is warming up to gay marriage.

New Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who took over after the Socialist victory in June elections ousted their conservative predecessors, promised this month to offer marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples "in the first quarter of 2013".

Zahed, a Ph.D. student in religious anthropology, married his fellow Muslim partner in South Africa, the continent's only country to recognise same-sex unions. Becoming a spokesman for the community was a long time in the making, a product of much soul-searching.

"I think homosexuality, whatever one says, is not a choice," he wrote in his memoir "Le Coran et la chair" or "The Koran and the Flesh", published in March.

"And you'd have to be crazy to choose to be homosexual when you come from my socio-cultural background."

Homosexuality is considered a criminal offence in most Arab states and is "strictly prohibited" by Islam, said Abdallah Zekri, a member of the French Council of the Muslim Faith which acts as an official interlocutor with the French state.

"No imam, unless self-proclaimed, can officiate a gay wedding," he told AFP.

But that did not stop Zahed from following up his 2011 South African nuptials with a symbolic religious "marriage" officiated by an imam in the Paris suburbs this year.

Although associations for the gay faithful - like David et Jonathan for Christians and Beit Haverim for Jews - have been around for decades in France, until recently there was no group for Muslim gays.

In 2010, Zahed founded Homosexual Muslims in France (HM2F), which counts 270 members.

"To be gay and Muslim is possible," the slender, bespectacled Zahed wrote in his book. "However the road is still long."

Born in Algeria and raised in a poor neighbourhood of the 17th district in Paris, Zahed displayed early effeminate tendencies, prompting regular beatings from a brother who hoped it would "teach me to be a man."

His father, who sensed Zahed was gay, repeatedly told him he'd prefer to "break my back and bury me alive rather than see me become like that," Zahed said.

Finding refuge in religion, Zahed paid regular visits to Salafists, Muslims who advocate a strict interpretation of Islamic law, when on holiday in Algeria.

But as an adult, his homosexuality bubbled up to the surface. With the sexuality strongly frowned upon by his community, Zahed experienced "great suffering".

"I told myself, 'you must choose' and I violently rejected Islam," he said. "A long spiritual void" followed amid years of unhappiness.

When he came out to his family, his father accepted it, but his mother cried every night for two months and he fell out with his brother.

The turning point came when he was 30 years old: "I no longer looked to hate anyone for anything, but simply to change the discriminatory reactions facing me," he wrote in his book.

In 2011, Zekri, who is also an AIDS activist and has written about himself being HIV positive, met his future husband in South Africa, where they tied the knot in a civil wedding that year.

Gay culture has flourished there since the fall of apartheid - which harshly penalised homosexuality - in 1994, when South Africa enshrined equal rights in its constitution and allowed same-sex couples to marry and adopt.

Other African nations sentence homosexuals to prison, as in Morocco, where homosexuality is punishable by six months to three years in prison, though it's tolerated provided practitioners don't flaunt their difference.

When the pair wed again in a religious ceremony in the Paris suburbs in February, it was a symbolic step that won them threats and insults.

"Visibility is a sensitive issue," Zahed said.

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5in-4O5RlGLjAqOyoaRntTXi84R9w?docId=CNG.3fab33c2e7c8facc2c3351763af178e8.581

Related: http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/04/08/206218.html 

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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

European Parliament Declares Independence and Democracy for the Internet

AFP Photo/Frederick Florin: E.U. Members of Parliament

The European Parliament has rejected ACTA, a controversial trade agreement, which was widely criticized over its likely assault on internet freedoms.

Supporters of the treaty suggested postponing the crucial voting at the Parliament plenary on Wednesday, but members of the parliament decided not to delay the decision any further.

MEPs voted overwhelmingly against ACTA, with 478 votes against and only 39 in favor of it. There were 146 abstentions.

Many members of parliament held anti-ACTA banners or wore anti-ACTA T-shirts during the session.

Earlier all five parliament committees reviewing ACTA voted in favor of rejecting the international treaty.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is aimed at protecting copyright over a wide range of industries. The main focus of criticism was targeting the impact it would cause to internet freedom.

ACTA would require signatory states to impose draconian restrictions on online privacy in the drive to eradicate content piracy and the sale of counterfeit branded goods through the internet.

ACTA was developed with the participation of a number of countries, including the US, Japan, European counties, Australia, South Korea and others since 2007. When the ramifications of the agreement came to wider public knowledge this year, a wave of protests hit several countries. The EU suspended the ratification of ACTA in February to reconsider it.

SOURCE:  http://www.rt.com/news/acta-eu-parliament-vote-400/

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CERN Scientists Announce Historic Discovery: A New Particle Likely to be the Higgs Boson, or "God Particle"

At a seminar held at CERN1 today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.

“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”

The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today’s observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.

The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

Positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.

Contact:


CERN press office, press.office@cern.ch
+41 22 767 34 32
+41 22 767 21 41

Further information:

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1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel and Serbia are Associate Members in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

SOURCE:  http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2012/PR17.12E.html

Related news:  CERN Discovers a New Particle, Likely the Higgs Boson
                        A New Particle Could be Physics' Holy Grail

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