ASIRA AL-QIBLIYA, West Bank (IPS) – Ibrahim Makhlouf reached for two wooden planks lying in the hallway and placed them expertly in an L-shape along the seams of his front door.

“Open [the door],” he beckoned, knowing that doing so was nearly impossible. “Every night, we put this here,” he said. “For the settlers.”

Makhlouf’s home sits on the outskirts of the West Bank village of Asira al-Qibliya, only 500 meters from the illegal Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm, an offshoot of the equally illegal settlement of Yitzhar.

Makhlouf said that his house was attacked by Israeli settlers at least two times per week and has been vandalized more than 100 times. The windows on Makhlouf’s two-story home all have bars on the outside to prevent them from shattering when settlers throw stones.

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On Wednesday, some 2,000 Turkish Kurd guerrillas will begin their withdrawal from Turkey to an inaccessible mountain stronghold in northern Iraq. Moving in small groups, the fighters will take one to two months to retreat, assuming the Turkish army sticks to a de facto ceasefire, says a leader of the Turkish Kurd rebel movement, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). The pullout is the first step in a fragile process of reconciliation between the Turkish state and its Kurdish minority after 29 years of guerrilla war in which 40,000 people have died.

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RIYADH, May 12, (AFP): A Saudi court jailed a Lebanese man for six years and sentenced him to 300 lashes after convicting him of encouraging a Saudi woman to convert to Christianity, local dailies reported Sunday.

The same court sentenced a Saudi man convicted in the same case to two years in prison and 200 lashes for having helped the young woman flee the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom, local daily Al-Watan said.

A court delivered the verdict in Khobar in the kingdom’s east, where the woman and the two accused worked for an insurance company.

The July 2012 case caused a stir in Saudi Arabia, which applies a strict version of Islamic Sharia law that stipulates Muslims who convert to another religion must be sentenced to death.

The woman, known only as “the girl of Khobar”, was granted refuge in Sweden where she lives under the protection of unspecified NGOs, according to local press reports. She had appeared in a YouTube video last year in which she announced that she had chosen to convert to Christianity.

Her family’s lawyer Hmood al-Khalidi said he was “satisfied with the verdict,” according to the press. Both men, who could also be prosecuted over other charges including corruption and forging official documents that allowed the woman to leave the country without her family’s agreement, will appeal.

Saudi women are banned from travelling without their guardians’ permission.

Reports that the Internal revenue Service has been targeting Tea Party-affiliated nonprofit organizations has grabbed headlines, but should come as no surprise. In part because of ten years of expanding government powers, much of it under the guise of national security, selective enforcement of the law has increasingly become a norm rather than an aberration.

But some in the Muslim community might have a question – why are conservatives so surprised (and outraged) by this news when Muslim nonprofits and their leaders have been under intense scrutiny for over a decade? And when so many Muslim groups and individuals have faced scrutiny simply for the religion they follow?

Read it at CNN.

From Reuters:

(Reuters) – Tanzania has released three Emiratis and one Saudi held in connection with the bombing of a church this month and charged a local man with murder, Tanzanian police said.

Three people were killed in the attack on the Catholic church in Arusha, north Tanzania. More than 60 were injured.

Tanzania police said in a statement on Monday that the four had been released without charge after investigations proved they were not involved in the bombing.

Arusha regional police commander Liberatus Sabas said 20-year-old Tanzanian Victor Ambros Kalist was charged on Monday with murder and attempted murder in connection with the attack.

A total of nine suspects, including the four foreigners, were initially arrested by the police following the May 5 incident.

The UAE Foreign Ministry had announced on its Twitter account that the Emiratis had been released late on Sunday.

The Saudi citizen was also released and was not charged with any offence, Saudi Arabia’s state news agency reported late on Sunday, citing the assistant minister for foreign affairs.

Sabas said Kenya and Uganda were helping with the investigation and 31 injured were still being treated in hospital.

Tanzania, a nation of about 45 million people, is roughly split evenly between Muslims and Christians. Tensions between the religious communities are on the rise.

Earlier this year, two Christian leaders were killed in Tanzania’s semi-autonomous, predominantly Muslim islands of Zanzibar and there have been attacks on Muslim leaders and mosques.

Arusha lies near the snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in a part of Tanzania that is predominantly Christian.

(Additional reporting by Amena Bakr in Dubai; Editing by James Macharia and Alison Williams)

In this Ted Talk, Palestinian American journalist Sam Bahour talks about the plight of the Palestinian refugees, and how solving the refugee problem is the key to peace in the Middle East.