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Malaysia has defended a decision not to prosecute two Muslim journalists accused of desecrating a communion wafer in a Catholic church, saying they acted out of “sheer ignorance”.

The archbishop of Kuala Lumpur Murphy Pakiam has criticised the government’s “failure to act” over the incident, in which the pair joined a Catholic service to investigate claims Muslims were illegally converting.

“The journalists have displayed utmost disrespect for the Catholic community when they admit receiving and spitting out the Holy Communion,” he told a press conference Thursday.

However, the government’s top lawyer, Attorney-General Abdul Gani Patail, said the pair did not understand the significance of the wafer, which Catholics believe represents the body of Jesus Christ.

“The actions of the two reporters may have hurt the feelings of the people but I was satisfied that they did not intend to offend anyone. It was an act of sheer ignorance,” he said in a statement late Thursday.

According to the BBC report the two journalists spat out the communion wafer.

Not that some Muslims, and certainly not those in Malaysia, have a reputation for getting upset at something they deem offensive.

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“It’s not an accident that a great earthquake took place in Chile,” Farrakhan, 76, said an hour into his three-hour address. “It was a precipitate of what I have to tell you today of what’s coming to America. You will not escape.”

“I will speak to the kings and rulers of the world. I will speak to the pope and the religious leaders because you have to know that your time has come,” he said. “I desire to guide you and warn you of things that are coming that you must try to prepare yourselves for because we are absolutely living in the change of worlds.”

Ah, the business of religion!

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A candidate for a radical French anti-capitalist party in the forthcoming regional elections wears a headscarf as a token of her Islamic faith, something that has raised eyebrows in this rigidly secular society.

All the more so because the NPA (New Anti-capitalist Party), led by Trotskyist postman Olivier Besancenot, is a party that generates headlines for its extreme left wing position on issues including militant secularism.

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A secularist group has lodged an official complaint against Cherie Booth QC after she spared a man from prison because he was religious.

Shamso Miah, 25, of Redbridge, east London, broke a man’s jaw following a row in a bank queue.
Sitting as a judge, Ms Booth – wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair – said she would suspend his sentence on the basis of his religious belief.

[...]

Ms Booth told Miah that violence had to be taken seriously, but said she would suspend his prison sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before.

She added: “You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.”

The National Secular Society has complained to the Office for Judicial Complaints, suggesting that Mrs Blair acted in an unjust and discriminatory way, and suggesting that she might have treated a non-religious person less leniently.

Cherie Booth is a Catholic.

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