China: Xi stresses modernization of national defense, armed forces

  Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, has stressed advancing the modernization of the national defense and armed forces.

Xi made the remarks while presiding over a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on strengthening the modernization of the national defense and armed forces, which was held on Thursday.

To uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics and achieve national rejuvenation, Xi underscored ensuring both development and security, and ensuring that efforts to make the country prosperous and efforts to make the military strong go hand in hand.

The modernization of the national defense and armed forces must be in step with the country's modernization process, and the military capabilities must fit national strategic needs, Xi said.

Xi underscored implementing the military strategic guideline for the new era, formulating the 14th five-year (2021-2025) plan for building the military, drawing a scientific road map, and cultivating a new type of high-caliber and professional military talent.

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Xi stresses modernization of national defense, armed forces - Global Times

Islam: The Berlin mosque breaking Islamic taboos - by Damien McGuinness

With its red-brick spire and stained-glass windows, St Johannes looks like any other 19th-Century Protestant church.

Go around the back, however, head up a few flights of stairs and you come to a simple white room, with shoes neatly laid out at the entrance and patterned prayer rugs folded away in a corner. That is because this is a mosque.

The room is being rented from the parish, while the church remains active.

But the mosque is not unusual because of its location. Rather, because of the people who come here.

At Berlin's newest mosque, men and women pray together, women are allowed to lead Friday prayers, and gay, lesbian and transgender people are welcome.

"Our mosque is open for everybody," says mosque founder Seyran Ates, a German Turkish-born lawyer and women's rights activist.

"And we mean that really seriously: everybody, every lifestyle. We are not God. We don't decide who's a good or a bad Muslim. Anybody can come through this door - whether you are heterosexual or homosexual, we don't care, it's not our right to ask."

Read more: The Berlin mosque breaking Islamic taboos - BBC News

The politics of Islam cannot be bombed away - by Eugene Robinson

The Islamic State’s vision of conflict in the Middle East as part of a centuries-old struggle between faithful Muslims and infidel crusaders is apocalyptic and insane. But there is a less-crazy version of this narrative – involving colonialism and oil – that many people accept, especially in Arab countries.

The dictators who held power in the Middle East for much of the 20th century, propped up by the West, were brutal in repressing the Muslim Brotherhood and other religiously inspired political movements. Yet even when they were outlawed and driven underground, these movements managed to survive – and grow.

When Hosni Mubarak was deposed in Egypt, creating another of those sudden vacuums, the political force most ready to step in was the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamed Morsi had the chance to show the world that a government led by an Islamist party could be fair, tolerant and effective. The United States and its allies had the chance to help Morsi succeed.

He failed, and so did we in in Europe and the US.

Had things worked out differently, Obama would be able to point to Egypt as an example for frustrated young Muslims who feel powerless. Instead, the jihadists point to Egypt and say: Look, my brothers, it is as we told you. They will never allow pious Muslims to hold power, not even in our own lands.

There is much about fundamentalist Islam that is incompatible with – even abhorrent to – the modern world. I’m not talking about the Islamic State’s obscene and theatrical violence, which appalls and disgusts devout Muslims and others alike. I refer mostly to a set of attitudes about women that need to be aired, challenged and reformed. This kind of positive change can take place, but only in the open. Repression strengthens the hand of the hard-liners.

Political Islam cannot be bombed away. If it is not somehow allowed constructive expression, it unfortunately will make itself heard, and felt, in more tragic ways.

Note EU-Digest: Indeed the politics of Islam can not be bombed away but need to get a Martin Luther type modernization. Martin Luther in the 16th Century challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church .  Luther taught that salvation and subsequently eternity in heaven is not earned by good deeds but is received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as the redeemer from sin and subsequently eternity in Hell. Luther also set a model for the equality between men and women and promoted the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry. Change must come from within Islam, like it came to Christianity through Martin Luther.

EU-Digest

Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2014/09/09/3307229/the-politics-of-islam-cannot-be.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2014/09/09/3307229/the-politics-of-islam-cannot-be.html#storylink=cp

Outer Space Exploration: 'Big plans': Russia looks to revive ailing space program - by Alissa de Carbonnel

A Russian Space Probe Launch

From rocket-shaped playground equipment to faded murals of cosmonauts, mementos of the heyday of Soviet space exploration are scattered around this sandswept town that launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.

When President Vladimir Putin described the space port on the remote Kazakh steppe as "physically aged" in April, he could have been speaking about Russia's space industry itself.

In Baikonur as elsewhere, the once-pioneering sector is struggling to live up to its legacy, end an embarrassing series of botched launches, modernize decaying infrastructure and bring in new blood and new ideas.

Putin hopes a sweeping reform he signed off on this month will not come too late to turn the industry around -— part of a push to make Russia a high-technology superpower by salvaging leading Cold War-era industries and research centers.

Built far from prying eyes in a desert-like flatland in central Asia, the once-secret launch site of Sputnik and the first man in space lives on in a strange limbo, marooned in western Kazakhstan by the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Today it is the only gateway for manned flights to the International Space Station, hosting astronauts from the world, and the site of about one-third of all satellite launches.
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But Baikonur has no movie theatre — let alone many of the trappings of the 21st century. Camels graze the barren steppes near rocket launch sites, and what little seems to have changed since Soviet times often looks the worse for it.

By separating space agency Roskosmos from its contractors, the Kremlin hopes the reform will boost quality control and end a calamitous series of blunders like July's crash of a Proton rocket carrying a $200-million payload.

"We have big plans," the new Roskosmos chief, Oleg Ostapenko, told Reuters last month. "We will do everything possible to get rid of the black marks on our reputation."

The reform also aims to streamline production by uniting suppliers into a new state-run firm.
Roskosmos will be left in charge only of policy, research and ground infrastructure such as the Baikonur cosmodrome.

"It will be very difficult, but the Kremlin realizes it can't keep living the old way," said Sergey Pekhterev, head of Russian sat-com firm SetTelecom. "The latest Proton accident showed the inexplicable degree of degradation in the sector."

The United Rocket and Space Corporation is to be created by mid-April on the grounds of a space research institute, and officials say the restructuring will cost nothing extra. An experienced plant manager, the former head of car-maker Avtovaz, Igor Komarov, 49, has been tapped to lead it.

Read more: 'Big plans': Russia looks to revive ailing space program - NBC News.com

Islam: Even though Islam and Democracy are secret enemies there is hope for change from within - by RM

Tariq Ramadan

Whatever" the West" wants to believe, the complexities of Islam in the modern world and the currents of fanaticism and radicalism cannot be regulated by Western-style democracy or military intervention.

Change can only come from within.

Alon -Ben Meir wrote in the American Thnker: "Islam is the most recent of the Abrahamic religions to emerge on the world stage. Monotheism in general, and specifically as it developed in the Dark and Middle Ages, in principle reflects extremely authoritarian regimes.

Theologically, it posits a cosmic or heavenly hierarchy with absolute authority in God, angels in go-between positions, and a fallen humanity in need of salvation at the base of the pyramidal power structure.

It is no surprise then that in the centuries wherein the Catholic Church was at its zenith of influence in the West, political power was held by kings, popes, emperors, and powerful nepotistic and despotic elite with huge economic chasms between the people and their rulers.

Obviously, all these structures were not compatible with democracy.

Christianity and Judaism, being monotheistic, are no less inheritors of this stratified and centralized power paradigm, but unlike Islam these religions were effectively secularized and toned down during the century of the European Enlightenment.

Thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, and Hegel paved the way for Marx, Schopenhauer, Buber, and Sartre to challenge conventional approaches to religious ideologies and political formations.

Traditional monotheism, with its highly categorized view of man and God, may not in itself be wholly compatible with democracy, but modern Western monotheism gradually molded itself to new ways of thinking during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and was certainly forced to do so amid rapid scientific and technological advances."

If we look at the turmoil in the Middle East today we see nothing, or any country in the area that seems to offer any hope which will make the area change for the better when it comes to Democracy or equal opportunities for all its citizens.

Some people claim that the development of democracy in the Islamic world eventually came to a halt following the Sunni-Shia split. But was there ever any democracy to speak of ?

Even  Erdogan's Turkey, which was on the right track when the followers of Ataturk known as Kemalists where in control, is now sliding back into "re-introduced undemocratic Muslim traditions", inspired by Fethullah Gulen a Turkish Cleric who directs a world-wide network from a US sanctified base in Pennsylvania.

The question that obviously arises is, where is the Muslim equivalent of  the Christian  Martin Luther who can steer Islam onto a more modern and democratic course without compromising the basics principles of the religion ? A name which keeps on surfacing when this question is brought up is Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan  might not a household name in the US, but the Swiss professor is probably one of the most important and knowledgeable intellectuals in the world when it comes to Islam.

Ramadan’s thinking, his methods and his personal history are all connected to the same question: Islam’s encounter with the modern world. Can the youngest of the world’s three great monotheisms co-exist harmoniously with the Western world and its Enlightenment legacy? Or is it fated to be reactionary, closed off from the world, an excuse for terrorism and failure?

Ramadan’s theological inquiries cut to the heart of the motivations of the Sept. 11 terrorists, of the apocalyptic claims of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian mullahs. Above all, however, they are concerned with that disputed terrain where Islamic tradition collides with modernity.

Ramadan has the credentials and credibility to confront Islam’s modern identity on its own terms. Many Muslim scholars recognize that no one is more orthodox in his methods and sources, or more innovative in his conclusions.

He is genuinely radical ub the good sense of the word, rather than reactionary. Quiet, thoughtful and deeply religious, he always closes his e-mails with: “May the Light protect you and go with you and all the people you love.” 

Indeed,  there is hope for Islam around the world, but it won't be coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey. or the U.S.A.

EU-Digest

ISLAM - Egyptian Imams and intellectuals: Renewing Islam towards modernity - by Samir Khalil Samir

"The program - truly revolutionary - wants to rethink the value of women, fraternization between the sexes, the relationship of equality with Christians. And it also desires to clarify interpretations on the sayings of Mohammed and the myths of fundamentalist Salafism, rejecting the influences that come from Saudi Arabia.

A score of intellectuals and theologians of Al Azhar have issued a text of enormous importance, entitled "Document for the renewal of religious discourse." The text was "posted" on the Internet on 24 January at 18:27, on the website of the weekly magazine Yawm al-Sâbi’'("The Seventh Day"). The importance of the document also derives from its signatories, all noted scholars and profoundly committed Muslims.

  
Among these it is worth mentioning: Dr. Nasr Farid Wasel, former Grand Mufti of Egypt, the imam Safwat Hegazi, Dr. Gamal al-Banna, brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the professors Malakah Zirâr and Âminah Noseir the celebrated Islamist writer Fahmi Huweidi; Dr. Mabruk Atiyyah, a large number of preachers (du'ât), responsible for Islamic Propaganda, such as Khalid al-Gindi, Muhammad Hedâyah, Mustafa Husni, etc..
 
It is the first time that such an attempt has been made by recognized Islamic figures. On being posted, the document received 153 comments in the same day. The majority (88.25%) condemned the text, saying it distorts Islam or tries to establish a new religion. Only 18 people congratulated the authors. This means that the path of renewal will be long and require much time and effort.

The original text of the document (in Arabic) and comments can be found at: http://www.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=343007.

Note EU-Digest: this development could very well make the Muslim Brotherhood a more palatable  proposition in the eyes of the US when the time arrives for the formation of a new Egyptian coalition  Government after Mubarak leaves?

For more: ISLAM - EGYPT Egyptian Imams and intellectuals: Renewing Islam towards modernity - Asia News