| The Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights urged the United Nations to appoint someone to investigate what it called "jihad violence" against non-Muslims and moderate Muslims in several Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries. At a rally outside United Nations headquarters, speakers from Afghanistan to Indonesia to Sudan cited the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States by suspected Islamic militants as even more reason for the world to pay attention to allegations of persecution in majority-Muslim countries. In a letter delivered at the U.N. gates to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the group demanded that he appoint a special rapporteur to examine "the status and conditions of non-Muslim minorities, women, and humanist, moderate Muslims in states ruled by Islamic majorities." What an interesting development - a human rights group that's concerned with human rights! They're right, too. Sufis and other Muslim minorities take it just as hard as the Christians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and Ba'hais. |