Middle East

Behold, the messianic!

Jack Teitel has attracted a lot of media attention since the Sabbath. An American Jew who made aliyah in 2000, Teitel was arrested by Israeli police and charged with several acts of terror, including the murder of two Palestinians in 1997, the bombing of a leftist Israeli professor’s house and the Purim bombing of a teenage boy. Police said Teitel also took credit for killing two gay Jews in Tel Aviv in August — though he hadn’t actually been involved.


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Noor Faleh Almaleki is dead

Noor Faleh Almaleki has died in Phoenix. Thus, we have another development in the case of her father, 48-year-old Faleh Hassan Almaleki, who fled the United States after it is alleged that he hit the 20-year-old Noor and the mother of her boyfriend with his car.


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Killing in the name of ...

Did you hear about the attempted honor killing a couple of weeks ago in Arizona? I haven’t seen many stories about it. Tmatt looked at the ghosts in some of the coverage a week or so ago but It’s clearly not major news, although national media outlets have begun running their traditional one (or fewer!) stories on the matter. For the life of me, I can’t understand why stories about honor killings or attempted honor killings aren’t major news. This is a concept so very foreign and horrifying to most readers of American media and yet these stories are routinely underplayed. Now maybe the mainstream media doesn’t need advice on how to get more readers/viewers/listeners, but I think that when a father runs down his daughter with two tons of steel over some perceived slight to his honor, that’s newsworthy.


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'Traditional Iraqi values' in the news

Quite a few newspapers and television stations across America have posted various versions of the following short Associated Press story on their websites. For the sake of clarity, here’s the whole report:


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Missing the point of Coptic tattoos

When my family made the decision to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, we helped start a tiny mission in the Tennessee mountains — in Johnson City, to be precise. In the early days, Holy Resurrection Orthodox Mission included a family in with very recent roots in Egypt and its Coptic Orthodox traditions.


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Cocktails and the caliphate

Last week the man who would have been the 45th head of the continent-spanning Ottoman dynasty, founded by Osman I in 1299, died. Ertugrul Osman instead lived in a rent-controlled flat in New York City.


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