I think it is particularly important to remember this incident from 2007 given the recent comments about "Going Muslim" made by a particularly ignorant NYU professor that I discussed recently (here and here).

Back in 2007 a Muslim came to the rescue of some Jews being attacked by Christian extremists. Funny how we forget incidents like this but remember incidents that make Muslims look bad.  read more »

An amazing study just came out in the journal Nature where people studied violent conflicts statistically and found that such conflicts all follow very similar patterns. And those patterns are very similar to how financial markets (also based on human behavior) function. Here is the abstract of the article:

Many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. The size distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks have separately been shown to follow approximate power-law distributions. However, the possibility of universal patterns ranging across wars in the size distribution or timing of within-conflict events has barely been explored. Here we show that the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities. We propose a unified model of human insurgency that reproduces these commonalities, and explains conflict-specific variations quantitatively in terms of underlying rules of engagement. Our model treats each insurgent population as an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes. Our model is consistent with several recent hypotheses about modern insurgency18, 19, 20, is robust to many generalizations, and establishes a quantitative connection between human insurgency, global terrorism and ecology. Its similarity to financial market models provides a surprising link between violent and non-violent forms of human behaviour  read more »

I recently covered the attack on Leo Igwe, the Culture Kitchen blogger who was attacked by a mob of religious fanatics in Nigeria. Leo is still carrying on the fight on behalf of abused children in Nigeria, despite the attacks. He has sent me his most recent post:

The attack in Calabar and the threat of religious extremism in Nigeria

By Leo Igwe

Around 11.30 am on Wednesday July 29 2009, a mob of about 200 persons from the Liberty Gospel Church invaded the Cultural Center in Calabar Cross River State The Cultural Center was the venue of a public symposium on witchcraft and child rights organised by the Nigerian Humanist Movement and Stepping Stones Nigeria.

Most of them arrived the venue in buses wearing orange Tshirt while others donned plain clothes to hide their identity. As we were about to start, some of them stormed the conference hall stamping their feet on the ground and chanting slogans critical of the event and the organisers.  read more »

Yesterday I posted about Leo Igwe, contributor to Culture Kitchen, being attacked and beaten on July 30th because he was standing up to religious fanatics in Nigeria who were abusing children. I will reiterated and expand upon the details below. But first, I have now heard from Leo by email and he seems to be doing fine and still eager to fight the good fight. Here is his message:

Thanks for your message and concern As you may know both islamic and christian fanatics are holding Nigeria hostage You must have heard what is happening in Northern Nigeria where islamists have been battling with the police and the army for control in a region where an islamic dark age is already in place The situation makes me sad and to put it literally it makes me angry And my simple ambition is to create and to keep organizing fora where these dark age ideas and their influence can be challenged, debated, discussed and criticized.

Any help I can get to realize this objective will be greatly appreciated  read more »

I only noticed this through an indirect route. His name came up in a discussion on Kiva I came across for other reasons. But it seems on July 30th, Leo Igwe, who sometimes writes articles for Culture Kitchen, was attacked by a mob in Nigeria. This is from a letter written by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (which Leo works for) the Nigerian High Commission in the UK:

According to an eye-witness account, about two hundred members of Liberty Gospel Church stormed the venue of the symposium on Thursday, 30 July. They attacked Mr Igwe, took his bag, his camera and his mobile phone as well as destroying his spectacles. Liberty Gospel Church, led by Helen Akpabio, has been alleged to have held ‘trials’ of children suspected of being witches and many of these children have been killed after having been found guilty by such ‘trials’.

And from an article on AllAfrica.com:  read more »