Word: thuggish
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...West Java, three women are serving three-year prison terms for running Christian kindergarten classes also attended by Muslim children. "Sometimes we have to defend the community's morality by force," says Sobri Lubis, spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front (claimed membership: 5 million), which has carried out thuggish antivice raids on Jakarta nightclubs and whose spiritual leader Habib Rizieq said last November that assassinating U.S. President George W. Bush was religiously permissible. "If a soldier kills his enemy," says Lubis, "would you call that violence...
...hate Bush because he is an American or because he is a Christian," says Sobri Lubis, spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front, which helped organize Sunday's anti-Bush rally and is infamous in Indonesia for sending thuggish vice squads to nightclubs and bars to expose lax Muslims. "We hate him because we think he is a war criminal and he has made the lives of Muslims miserable...
...rights activists attribute the scourge of homophobia in Jamaica largely to the country's increasingly thuggish reggae music scene. Few epitomize the melding of reggae and gangsta cultures more than Banton, who is one of the nation's most popular dance-hall singers. Born Mark Myrie, he grew up the youngest of 15 children in Kingston's Salt Lane - the sort of slum dominated by ultraconservative Christian churches and intensely anti-gay Rastafarians. Banton parlayed homophobia into a ticket out of Salt Lane. One of his first hits, 1992's Boom Bye-Bye, boasts of shooting gays with Uzis...
...Beat That My Heart Skipped By day (and often enough by night) Thomas Seyr works for his thuggish father as a "property manager." Realistically speaking that means brutally removing tenants and squatters from apartment buildings so they can be converted to more profitable uses. But he is haunted by the career he abandoned-as a promising concert pianist, which his mother also once was. It's an improbably melodramatic premise-Golden Boy reset in Paris-and also a remake of the American film Fingers. But that reckons without the canny direction of Jacques Audiard and the appealing work of Romain...
...many Syrians who have grown impatient with the thuggish tactics of the Assad regime, the U.N. investigation into Hariri's death is likely to stoke more outrage. The report not only provides a rare glimpse into the workings of Syria's police state; if its findings are true, it also makes a devastating case that Assad family members were complicit in state-sponsored murder. The report, quoting an unidentified Syrian witness "who claims to have worked for the Syrian intelligence services in Lebanon," says that senior Syrian and Lebanese security chiefs first decided to kill Hariri last September. A month...