Veli Sirin German Director, Center for Islamic Pluralism
Veli Sirin is a leader of the Alevi Islamic youth movement in Germany, composed of Germans of Turkish and Kurdish ethnic origin who adhere to secular politics, and other contemporary values, and oppose the encroachment of fundamentalism in Turkish governance. They make up at least 20% of the population of Turkey.
Sirin, a Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Germany, participated in the 2009 panel sponsored by the Hudson Institute, New York, on the Durban Review at the United Nations in Geneva. He was also a contributor, for Germany, to that year's publication by the Center for Islamic Pluralism of A Guide to Shariah Law and Islamist Ideology in Western Europe, 2007-09, an extensive study of Shariah agitation, at www.islamicpluralism.org, and posted at www.islamicpluralism.de
Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician who helped the U.S. locate Osama bin Laden, has been in jail in Pakistan since he was arrested days after the raid on bin Laden's compound in 2011. In 2013, he was granted a retrial, with a new charge that appears politically motivated: charged with murder in regard to the death, eight years earlier, of a patient he had treated. Afridi has gone on a hunger strike protest his unspeakable prison conditions -- including torture. His former lawyer, Samiullah Khan Afridi, was murdered by the Taliban in March 2015.
