 Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Government officials should depict terrorists "as the dangerous cult leaders they are" and avoid words that aggrandize them, like "jihadists," "Islamic terrorists," "Islamists" and "holy warriors," the Department of Homeland Security says in a paper released Friday. "Words matter," the agency says in the paper, which also suggests avoiding the term "moderate Muslims," a characterization that annoys many Muslims because it implies that they are tepid in the practice of their faith. Read more ...Source: CNN H/T: Jihad Watch
By John Turley-Ewart It’s an issue the Liberal government of Ontario, led by Premier Dalton McGuinty, doesn’t want to deal with — polygamy in the Muslim community. Last week the Toronto Star told the story of Safa Rigby, a 35-year-old mother of five children who recently learned her husband of 14 years had two other wives. Ms. Rigby’s life is in tatters. She followed her husband’s advice that she leave Toronto and live in Egypt for a year on the grounds that it would be better for their children to spend more time in a Muslim country. Now she knows it was a ruse. He used her time there to marry two other women. Read more ...Source: National Post
 A Turkish-born barber, living and working in Saudi Arabia, was recently convicted for the ‘crime’ of apostasy and has been sentenced to death. The man, Sabri Bogday, had a quarrel with a person from Egypt and a Saudi during which he seemingly cursed the name of God. This is of course unacceptable in Saudi Arabia and… as a result, the judges of that country have decided that Bogday deserves to die. With this case it’s important to act fast; on May 1, the Appeals Court confirmed the verdict of a lower court. Bogday isn’t the only person in trouble in Saudi Arabia; a blogger is in trouble as well. ‘On May 5, the prosecution service in Jeddah charged Ra’if Badawi with “setting up an electronic site that insults Islam,” and referred the case to court, asking for a five-year prison sentence and a 3 million riyal (US$800,000) fine. Unknown persons have hacked Badawi’s website multiple times, and have published his phone numbers, work address, and a threat on the hacked site: “Oh you retard, you are in the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him. Underline ‘Muhammad’ with a thousand lines before a thousand swords are put above your neck!” Prosecutors have not investigated the hackers or the death threats against Badawi.’ Read more ...Source: PoliGazetteH/T: Shariah Finance Watch
 By Joe Kaufman After being outed for speaking in front of an organization, the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS-Minnesota) – as the group was calling for the murder of Jews and the waging of war against non-Muslims – United States Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) has gone back for a repeat performance. Yet, while Congressman Ellison continues his outrageous conduct, he still gets rewarded with invites to sit on Congressional entities highly inappropriate for someone such as himself. Why? For well over five years, since at least December of 2002, MAS-Minnesota propagated hatred on its website aimed at Jews and Christians. Up until recently, when the pages containing the offending material were removed, the following quotes could be found on the site: • “The Holy Prophet (and through him the Muslims) has been reassured that he should not mind the enmity, the evil designs and the machinations of the Jews...” • “In view of the degenerate moral condition of the Jews and the Christians, the Believers have been warned not to make them their friends and confidants.” • “If you gain a victory over the men of Jews, kill them.” • “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” • “May Allah destroy the Jews, because they used the graves of their prophets as places of worship.” Read more ...Source: FrontPage MagazineKeith Ellison
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
By Stephen Brown A young female form lying crumpled on a sidewalk. Blood flowing from multiple stab wounds. Police cars. Ambulances. Flashing lights. Emergency personnel working frantically to save an innocent life that had barely begun. It is a scene that is becoming all too common in Western Europe with its growing Muslim population, as the northern German city of Hamburg experienced in May yet another horrifying honor murder of a young female. Morsal Obeidi, barely 16, arrived in Hamburg from the war-torn country of Afghanistan when she was three, probably barely remembering her country of origin in her new homeland. The German Muslim student, who had won a prize in her multicultural school for tolerance and peaceful co-existence with others, was stabbed 20 times by her 23-year old brother, Ahmed, who ambushed her at a commuter train station. Source: FrontPage Magazine
By Robert Spencer In a story Wednesday on a jihadist attack on a wedding party and other jihad activity in Thailand, Agence France Presse added a concluding paragraph that was typical of mainstream media coverage of the Thai jihad and of jihad activity in general. For while AP, Reuters, AFP and the rest never saw a piece of Palestinian propaganda they didn’t like, they also never saw a jihad they couldn’t whitewash. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
ISTANBUL, May 28 (Compass Direct News) – A state prosecutor in western Algeria demanded two-year jail sentences and large fines for six Muslim converts to Christianity yesterday in one of two trials against Christians that have caught the north African nation’s attention in the past week. The same court in Tiaret city yesterday delayed the verdict of a Christian woman facing three years in prison for “practicing non-Muslim religious rites without a license.” Read more ...Source: Compass Direct NewsH/T: Dhimmi Watch
By Iftekhar Hai For years, I’ve been asked what my personal views on homosexuality are, but I’ve always shied away from talking about it openly because homosexual and lesbian behavior are against the teachings of the Quran. Also, I experienced a tremendous inner conflict, having seen that homosexuality has deep roots among Indian and Pakistani Muslims. The Hindu culture has debated the issue of homosexuality and now in the United States, Massachusetts and California have legalized same-sex marriages. The Quran is explicitly clear that God does not condone homosexual behavior. Islamic religious scholars of the Sharia — Islamic laws derived through consensus on the Quran and Hadith — are unanimous in their conclusion that “homosexuality and lesbianism” is a crime. And as a crime, it is punishable. Read more ...Source: Sharia Finance Watch
By Barbara Bradley Hagerty Although polygamy is illegal in the U.S. and most mosques try to discourage plural marriages, some Muslim men in America have quietly married multiple wives. No one knows how many Muslims in the U.S. live in polygamous families. But according to academics researching the issue, estimates range from 50,000 to 100,000 people. Read more ...Source: NPR
By Tufail Ahmad On May 23, 2008, Islamic clerics aligned with Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan delivered sermons during weekly Friday prayers in different mosques across Pakistan to mark the Yaum-e-Khatm-e-Nabuwwat, or the Day of the Finality of Prophethood of Islam's founder the Prophet Muhammad. The Day of the Finality of Prophethood was organized as part of the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat week that began on May 22, 2008. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (Assembly of Pakistani Clergy), which is organizing the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat week, had announced that imams and khutba'a (preachers) would especially highlight the role of the Jewish-Qadiani nexus during the Friday sermons. Ahmadi Muslims are sometimes called Qadianis by hostile Islamic groups, after the town of Qadian in India where their leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad founded the movement in the 1880s. They have been declared non-Muslims in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for allegedly not believing that the Prophet Muhammad is the final prophet of Islam. Read more ...Source: MEMRI
CAIR continues its attempts to overthrow the U.S. government through a tireless legal jihad. This week, two new attempts at bolstering sharia law were brought forth. Read both. Read more ...Source: Creeping Sharia
 In a strongly worded letter, U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) called on the Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), to condemn rampant anti-Semitism at events organized and sponsored by its Muslim Student Union (MSU). The letter pointed out that such an event held just weeks ago, appeared "intended to encourage violence against the State of Israel and propagate the spread of anti-Semitism." MSU events routinely feature anti-Semitic and pro-terror figures, notably Washington D.C.-based radical cleric Mohammed al-Asi and Oakland-based Amir Abdel Malik Ali, an African American convert born Derek Gilliam. Both are known for their high level of vitriol, hatred and support for suicide bombings. The latest event, which took place from May 7 to May 15, was called "Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust." In his letter, Rep. Sherman explained that, "Comparing current Israeli policies to the Holocaust, the systematic murder of the Jewish people of Europe, is clearly anti-Semitic. It wholly demeans the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and vilifies the Jewish citizens of Israel." He also noted that this position is officially supported by the US government, and quoted the State Department's most recent Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism Report as proof. Read more ...Source: IPT NewsMohammed al-Asi
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
By Tarek Fatah Books that will help us understand the conflict of our times: Chasing A Mirage: The Tragic lllusion of an Islamic State The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror Islam & Science: Religious Orthodoxy & the Battle for Rationality Clash Of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism Devil's Game: How The United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam Alms For Jihad: Charity And Terrorism In The Islamic World Great War for Civilisation Read more ...Source: Indigo
Milan, 29 May (AKI) – A mosque on the northern outskirts of the Italian city of Milan is taking the lead in a new initiative to fight drugs. The mosque, in Sesto San Giovanni, is holding on Friday a seminar entitled 'Together with young people against drugs', in collaboration with the region's United Nations office and the local council. The conference is aimed at volunteers from local Islamic communities and others who follow issues affecting young people in other Italian cities, particularly those with high immigration. Read more ...Source: AKI
“No, the death penalty in most Arab and Muslim countries is regulated and applied according to positive laws — man made law — and not according to Sharia’a,” says Tahar Boumedra, Penal Reform International’s (PRI) Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. In an interview with IPS journalist Baher Kamal, Boumedra explains how this issue was debated during a three-day regional conference on the death penalty, which ended in Alexandria on May 14. “Some delegates — they came from nine Arab countries — tried to use Islamic law to argue against the abolition of the death penalty,” says Boumedra. “But actually death penalty laws go far beyond anything Sharia’a law ever sought to impose.” Read more ...Source: IPS H/T: Shariah Finance Watch
This message comes from an Iranian ex-Muslim and lover of freedom in London: Urgent Attention
Another free thinker is to be executed in Iran in the coming days
It is with great regret that I inform all freedom loving people of the world that the Mullahs' terrorist regime is about to execute one of Iran's finest thinkers, a true patriot, scholar and historian.
Dr. Foroud Fouladvand is a dedicated monarchist, a Ferdousi expert as well as expert on the history of Iran and Islam. Read more ...Source: Jihad Watch
By Robert Spencer CAIR's Corey Saylor asks: "Has faith moved from a personal choice to probable cause?" He asks this, mind you, about apparent surveillance of The Islamic Center of San Diego, where, according to the article, "two of the 9/11 hijackers worshiped in early 2000." He asks this, mind you, as a member of a "civil rights" group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas jihad terror funding case in 2007, and which has had several of its officials arrested and convicted on various terror-related charges. Read more ...Source: Jihad WatchACLU
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
CAIR
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
By Robert Spencer Recently Pamela Geller, Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin pointed out that a new Dunkin' Donuts ad featured Rachael Ray wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh. What's wrong with that? People in the Middle East, including Arabic-speaking Christians, wore it long before the establishment of the State of Israel and the invention of the "Palestinian" nationality. But there is no doubt that it has become a symbol of the Palestinian jihad. Charles posts a piece explaining the kaffiyeh as a "symbol of resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle." Michelle Malkin accordingly asks, "It’s just a scarf, the clueless keffiyeh-wearers scoff. Would they say the same of fashion designers who marketed modified Klan-style hoods in Burberry plaid as the next big thing?" Read more ...Source: MSNBC H/T: Jihad Watch
Military action against Iran would be a last resort but the United States and its allies have not done enough to promote the alternative, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Wednesday. John Bolton, who was a leading hawk in President George W. Bush's administration, told an audience at the Hay literary Festival that five years of "failed" negotiation with Iran over its nuclear program had left just two options for dealing with the issue — regime change and use of force. "The use of military force is an extremely unattractive option and only to be used as a last resort," he said, adding he would favor regime change. Bolton said the elements for regime change were present in Iran — the economy was in difficulties, young Iranians could see the possibility of a different life and there were ethnic tensions within the country. Read more ...Source: Reuters
 By Patrick Poole In the early 1980s, the Ohio Division of Travel and Tourism announced a new state tourism slogan: “Ohio, the Heart of It All”. This slogan takes on several new layers of meaning now that international hate sheikh Khalid Yasin has decided to continue his “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland” tour by spending this week delivering his message of hatred, bigotry and violence in mosques all around Central Ohio. Two weeks ago I reported here at FrontPage that Yasin would be appearing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland”, sponsored by a local mosque, Masjid at-Taqwa. Pendra Lee Snyder has followed-up on that story by providing a first-hand account of Yasin’s appearance in Dayton, and how Masjid at-Taqwa prevented her from recording his hate-filled comments. Our reporting here at FrontPage even prompted Dayton NBC affiliate WDTN to cover and question Yasin’s visit. And last week John Perazzo exposed how Yasin was the featured speaker at events in April sponsored by the Muslim Student Association at several college campuses. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
 By Rachel Cooke In Yemen, women belong to men. Most are illiterate. They are arrested in the street. They die in childbirth. In this special report, Rachel Cooke meets the brave few who are campaigning for midwives and against early marriage. Say’un is a town of 30,000 people in the biggest wadi or watercourse, Wadi Hadhramawt, in the Arabian peninsula. Hadhramawt is extremely inaccessible. To get here, we flew from Sana’a, the capital, to the port of Al-Mukalla, and then drove over the desert and down through the lush wadi - it has surely changed very little since Dame Freya Stark became one of the first western women to see it in the 1930s - for nearly five hours. In Say’un, Oxfam is trying to improve reproductive healthcare, chiefly by funding the training of midwives and traditional birth attendants (TBAs). This is more important work than you may realise. In this part of Yemen - rural, religious, isolated - women are often unwilling to be treated by doctors, for the reason that they are men; it would be shameful for a woman to show her body to a man, even if the alternative meant that she might bleed to death. Getting more women into the healthcare system is therefore vital. ‘Our midwives work in the hospital in Say’un,’ says Basima Omer, a doctor involved in the programme. ‘They save lives. But they also go back to their communities with new information about hygiene, high blood pressure …’ She sips her coffee - in the country that gave the world coffee, everyone drinks Nescafé with condensed milk - behind her veil. So how on earth did she become a doctor? She laughs, quietly. ‘Oh, I went on hunger strike for three days until my father agreed.’ Read more ...Source: Guardian
By Leslie Sacks 8 Killed...by Palestinian MILITANT (pg 1, LA Times, March 7, 2008) Militant? Militants are marchers in San Francisco shouting anti-Bush slogans. Militants are protestors scuffling with police at the G8 Summits in Seattle and Rome. Militants are volunteers of The Minutemen patrolling our southern borders. However they are certainly not the terrorist who chose a seminary of unarmed religious youths in the middle of the holy city of Jerusalem and then proceeded to massacre eight of these students, apart from the dozen badly wounded, in a library containing mainly Bibles - Old Testament Bibles, from whence the Koran ironically sprang. In Gaza, messianic crowds danced and celebrated, handing out sweets in an orgy of revenge, the smell of martyrdom already thick amongst the revelers. Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
 BRUSSELS — On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes. In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair. The only adornment is a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY. But it is on the Internet where Ms. El Aroud has distinguished herself. Writing in French under the name “Oum Obeyda,” she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe. She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she bullies Muslim men to go and fight and rallies women to join the cause. “It’s not my role to set off bombs — that’s ridiculous,” she said in a rare interview. “I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.” … The changing role of women in the movement is particularly apparent in Western countries, where Muslim women have been educated to demand their rights and Muslim men are more accustomed to treating them as equals. Ms. El Aroud reflects that trend. “Normally in Islam the men are stronger than the women, but I prove that it is important to fear God — and no one else,” she said. “It is important that I am a woman. There are men who don’t want to speak out because they are afraid of getting into trouble. Even when I get into trouble, I speak out.” After all, she said, she knows the rules. “I write in a legal way,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. I’m Belgian. I know the system.” That system often has been lenient toward her. She was detained last December with 13 others in what the authorities suspected was a plot to free a convicted terrorist from prison and to launch an attack in Brussels. But Belgian law required that they be released within 24 hours, because no charges were brought and searches failed to turn up weapons, explosives or incriminating documents. Now, even as Ms. El Aroud remains under constant surveillance, she is back home rallying militants on her main Internet forum and collecting more than $1,100 a month in government unemployment benefits. “Her jihad is not to lead an operation but to inspire other people to wage jihad,” said Glenn Audenaert, the director of Belgium’s federal police force, in an interview. “She enjoys the protection that Belgium offers. At the same time, she is a potential threat.” … Her latest tangle with the law hints at a deeper involvement of women in terrorist activities. When she was detained last December in connection with the suspected plot to free Nizar Trabelsi, a convicted terrorist and a onetime professional soccer player, and to attack a target in Brussels, Ms. El Aroud was one of three women taken in for questioning. Although the identities of those detained were not released, the Belgian authorities and others familiar with the case said that among those detained were Mr. Trabelsi’s wife and Fatima Aberkan, 47, a friend of Ms. El Aroud and a mother of seven. “Malika is a source of inspiration for women because she is telling women to stop sleeping and open their eyes,” Ms. Aberkan said. Ms. El Aroud operates from her three-room apartment that sits above a clothing shop in a working-class Brussels neighborhood where she spends her time communicating with supporters, mainly on her own forum, Minbar-SOS. Although Ms. El Aroud insists that she is not breaking the law, she knows that the police are watching. And if the authorities find way to put her in prison, she said: “That would be great. They would make me a living martyr.”
This is what happens when you treat war as a police problem. It didn’t work like that during the Good War. Source: Jules Crittenden
 By Ali Alyami In recent years, Hezbollah has been playing a dangerous game with the Lebanese government. By exploiting multiple pressure points simultaneously, Hezbollah is making remarkable advances in its radical Shia agenda. Earlier this month, Hezbollah seized the mostly-Sunni Muslim West Beirut by force. This ultimately forced the US-backed Lebanese government to join a new unity coalition that gives Hezbollah 11 seats out of 30 in the cabinet, giving them veto power over any decision of the Lebanese government. They were not pressured to disarm in return for this new political power. Additionally, they are allowed to keep their separate telecommunications network and surveillance equipment at Beirut's airport, and are allowed to reinstall the airport security chief linked to the group. Understandably, Washington has and will continue to bet on its own horse, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Meanwhile, the West is exacerbating the situation by aiding autocratic Arab regimes outside Lebanon who are playing Washington for a fool. More so than any other Arab regime, the Saudi ruling family knows full well that if Hezbollah takes over Lebanon completely, it could form a united front with Iran, Syria, Hamas and Muqtada Al-Sadr's martyrs against Israel, the US and pro-American autocratic Arab regimes, especially the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance. In the long term, such an alliance poses a tremendous threat to Saudi Arabia and its traditional dominance of the Muslim world. But what would happen if this scenario actually played out, and who would inexorably benefit? Read more ...Source: IPT News
By Robert Spencer There is a great deal of whining victimology in this article. I have not reproduced below the material about the disproportionate percentage of Muslims in European prisons. There is in the article, of course, no consideration at all of the possibility that they might commit crimes at a higher rate than the general population, out of their contempt for non-Muslims and non-Muslim society and law. But note below Parvez Ahmed's wild claims that the PC American establishment, for all its fear of talking about jihad and its tiptoeing around the ideology that motivates the jihadists, is actually at war with Islam, and his relativistic "terrorism is in the eye of the beholder" nonsense. And then remember: this guy is, in the eyes of the government and media establishments, a leading American "moderate." Read more ...Source: Jihad WatchParvez Ahmed
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
An Australian Muslim group charged Wednesday that a Sydney council's refusal to allow an Islamic school to be set up in its area was a "victory for racism". Camden Council, on Sydney's south-western outskirts, unanimously rejected the application for a 1,200-pupil school on Tuesday night, prompting cheers from hundreds of residents who attended the meeting to oppose the plan. Read more ...Source: AFP H/T: Dhimmi Watch
By Chris Serres MINNEAPOLIS - A group of Muslim workers allege they were fired by a New Brighton, Minn., tortilla factory for refusing to wear uniforms that they say were immodest by Islamic standards. Six Somali women claim they were ordered by a manager to wear pants and shirts to work instead of their traditional Islamic clothing of loose-fitting skirts and scarves, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil liberties group that is representing the women. Read more ...Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
Tehran, 28 May (AKI) - Ten Iranians who converted from Islam to Christianity in recent months have been arrested in the southern city of Shiraz. According to Goodarz, a spokesperson for the Iranian converts, more than 35 of them have been arrested since the beginning of the year. Goodarz himself has taken refuge in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The new Majlis or Iranian parliament which met for the first time on Tuesday will be discussing in the coming weeks proposed laws presented by the government to reform the penal code. Under the new law, anyone born to a Muslim father who decides to renounce Islam and convert to another faith, faces the death penalty. Read more ...Source: AKI
CATHOLIC Cardinal George Pell has weighed in to the row over an Islamic school in western Sydney, saying he has no objection to Muslim schools. Camden Council last night voted unanimously against a proposal to build an Islamic school for 1200 students, citing various issues including traffic problems.
The decision would taint Australia's multicultural image, the Islamic Council of NSW warned today.
Speaking at a World Youth Day media conference, the Archbishop of Sydney said Muslims deserved a fair go. Cardinal Pell told media he always encouraged people to be open to the rights of people from all faiths. “Everybody in Australia has the right to a fair go, so do the Muslims,” he said. “We certainly believe in religious schools.” A Muslim youth worker told reporters the Camden Council decision, condemned as racist by one Islamic group, would not give a bad impression of Sydney to pilgrims visiting for World Youth Day. Mazem Bakhour, a representative from the Lebanese Muslim Association, said the school issue should not cause a problem for the Catholic youth event. “I guess, at the end of the day, to the Muslim community, World Youth Day is about unity between religions,” he said. “That's what we are going to focus on ... mainly just trying to focus on seeing the similarities between faiths.” Pope Benedict XVI will meet the Australian leaders of other faiths during World Youth Day. Camden residents had been unfairly portrayed as “rednecks” over the rejection of the Islamic school, the NSW Opposition said. Liberal leader Barry O'Farrell said he did not believe race was an issue in the decision. “Whenever these issues are determined, they should be determined and decided on the basis of facts, not emotion, on the basis of planning considerations, not irrelevant issues,” Mr O'Farrell told reporters today. “I regret that, at times, media coverage of the issue focused more on issues irrelevant to the planning considerations. “The point here is we've seen an attempt to portray Camden and that region as rednecks. I agree with the mayor, I think that's an unfortunate perception.” Islamic Council of NSW president Ali Roude said the rejection was not a surprise. “We have seen a history of reaction from local residents against the establishment of places of worship and schools so it was not a surprise,” he told ABC Radio. “It does not help the image of Australia because we take pride as Australians as a country that's succeeded and (has) set an example to the whole world that we can live together.” The schools' backers - the Qu'uranic Society - have not ruled out making an appeal to the Land and Environment Court. Source:The Australian
 By Joe Kaufman Samar Jarrah: “It’s fascinating that some people who are supposedly terrorism experts and are advising this country are spending time to write about you moving up and changing your career. I mean, it’s not like belittling you in any way, but I thought they would have much more important things to do.”
Ahmed Bedier: “Yeah, I mean, well, if they think you’re a terrorist, then they want to watch your movement.” (WMNF, True Talk, May 23, 2008) After five long years, Ahmed Bedier is now gone from the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); forced out, according to the group, so that it could move in another direction; stepped down, according to him, in start of a new project. Whatever the real reason may be, while Bedier may have left CAIR, he continues to foment radical Islam. Since the beginning of 2003, Ahmed Bedier has served in an official capacity for CAIR, holding positions as Communications Director of CAIR-Florida and Executive Director of CAIR-Tampa. Read more ...Source: FrontPage MagazineAhmed Bedier
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
 At age 16, all Morsal Obeidi wanted was to live the way other girls in Germany do. She paid dearly: Obeidi's brother stabbed her 20 times. Her murder has sparked a renewed debate in Germany about the failure of many immigrant families to integrate into Western society. Morsal is buried one week after her death. In the morning, the women wash the body, cleansing it of its earthly sins, in keeping with tradition. The teenage girl's thin body is covered with stab wounds, evidence of the knife that was plunged into her torso. The women wrap the body in linen and lay it into a coffin made of a light-colored wood. At noon, six men lift the coffin to their shoulders and begin walking, leading a procession of 200 men and women dressed in black. Ghulam-Mohammed Obeidi, the father -- who lost his daughter and now, more than likely, his son in a single night -- is at the center of the group. They walk along a path that leads to the new Muslim section at the back of a cemetery in Hamburg's Öjendorf neighborhood, to where a group of construction workers stand leaning against an excavating machine. The women stop as the men carry the coffin to the grave, which is lined with boards, a rectangular hole in the ground with pale sand piled up around its edges. This is where the story ends, with the body of a stabbed girl being brought to her grave. Her name was Morsal Obeidi, and she was 16. Born in Afghanistan, she died a few days ago, in a parking lot in Hamburg. Read more ...Source: SpiegelH/T: Atlas
Tehran, 27 May (AKI) - A top Iranian cleric from the northeast, Ayatollah Ahmad Elmalhoda, has reportedly called feminists "whores and foreign spies". "These whores, clutching a piece of paper in their hands to gather signatures, are working for foreign powers and want to destabilise the Islamic Republic," said Elmalhoda. He is the highly influential prayer leader in the northeastern holy Shia city of Mashad. Elmalhoda has called on the government to "intervene decisively against these whores, because it is improper to leave them to act with impunity." A few weeks ago, Elmalhoda said women who do not wear the Islamic veil as instructed "turned men into animals." Read more ...Source: AKIH/T: Atlas
Why do two officials of the the American Jewish Commitee and the vice president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago sit on the advisory board of the Catholic Theological Union's Bernardin Center together with Safaa Zazour the board president of CAIR Chicago? In 2005 Pipeline News published an article "Jews for Jihad?" and exposed the AJC's misguided interfaith efforts which included CAIR. The head of the AJC's Middle East and Counter Terrorism division Yehudit Barsky labelled CAIR "extremist" yet two high ranking officials of the AJC Chicago, Emily Soloff and Regional Director Jeffrey Levine are listed as advisory board members of the CTU despite knowing about the radical Islamists on the board and having read Scott Alexander's, (the director of the CTU's Catholic Muslim Studies Program) justification of terrorism in the Fawaz Damra case? Read more ...Source: Militant Islam Monitor
By Pendra Lee Snyder As reported last week at FrontPage by Patrick Poole, “Islamic Hatred in the Heartland,” the Dayton, Ohio-based Masjid at-Taqwa held a fundraising event on the campus of Sinclair Community College featuring international hate sheikh Khalid Yasin. The mosque’s fundraiser managed to draw over 275 people to an auditorium that seats about 300. American Congress for Truth-Dayton chapter president Ruth Quast and I attended the event to see exactly what message our Muslim neighbors were bringing into our community. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
TEHRAN (AFP) A male defender of the feminist cause in Iran has been sentenced to a year in prison, the moderate Kargozaran newspaper reported on Monday. Amir Yaqoubali is a supporter of the "One Million Signatures" petition campaign launched in June 2006. According to a feminist website, he was arrested as he collected signatures. The campaign seeks to change the Islamic republic's laws on marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody by collecting signatures both online and in person. Read more ...Source: AFP
 IT was the unlikeliest of settings and the unlikeliest of scenes: more than 10,000 music-lovers, many wearing traditional Islamic hijabs, gathered on the banks of historic Dal Lake in Indian Kashmir, defying terrorist threats to rock to a "musical jihad for peace" staged by Pakistan's biggest band, Junoon. The band performed for thousands on the banks of the lake, situated on the fringe of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, where Ravi Shankar taught George Harrison, The Beatles guitarist, to play the sitar in the 1960s. The event was hailed yesterday as a major development in attempts by the two South Asian nuclear-armed neighbours to improve relations after decades of confrontation over Kashmir, a territory targeted by Osama bin Laden as part of his global jihad. "Something great has happened to Kashmiris after ages, and we rocked," said Kashmir University student Arshi Gouse, 20. "Music's a tremendous healer and I'm sure such events will succeed in defusing hatred between India and Pakistan." The concert was held amid controversy after Pakistani extremist group Hizbul Mujahideen denounced it as an outrage. Demanding that the Pakistan Government bar Junoon from playing, Hizbul Mujahideen leader Syed Salahuddin declared: "When Kashmiris watch semi-nude Pakistani female dancers perform before the Indians, they will get disappointed with Pakistan." The jihadi chief said the show would have a "negative impact on the disputed status of Kashmir" and would send a wrong message to the international community that "Kashmir is an integral part of India". Junoon is Pakistan's biggest Sufi band and plays a fusion of western and eastern music. Source: The Australian
By Marylou Barry What is ISNA, and why do U.S. religious groups want to partner with it? First, a little background… The Islamic Society of North America, the largest group of its kind in this country, devotes several pages of its extensive Web site to its “partners,” the secular and religious organizations with which it claims to “dialogue” – and whose established reputation, understandably, could help ISNA earn some badly needed credibility points. Co-founded in 1981 by now-imprisoned felon Sami Al-Arian, ISNA serves as an umbrella for numerous Wahhabi Muslim groups in North America. It receives funding from the Saudi government and has been identified by the U.S. State Department as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which also spawned Hamas. According to the New York Times it represents a third of the mosques in the United States, although Shia sources claim that 80 percent of U.S. mosques are currently under Saudi control. As long ago as 2003, terrorism expert Stephen Schwartz testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security that ISNA already was operating at least 324 mosques in the U.S. through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). Read more ...Source: Marylou's America
By Jim Brown Critics of a private Saudi academy renting a local government building in northern Virginia warn the school promotes a virulent form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Fairfax County, Virginia, supervisors voted last week to continue leasing property to the Islamic Saudi Academy, despite concerns over the K-12 school's past use of classroom material that promoted hatred against Jews and Christians. In October, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a report harshly criticizing the Saudi educational system, and called on the State Department to shut down the Islamic Saudi Academy. Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, says Saudi schools teach students that in order to safeguard Islam, they must "violently repress and even physically eliminate" non-Muslims. Read more ...Source: One News Now
By PAUL REVOIR Last night Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said the police were differentiating between criminals on the basis of race. He claimed, driven by fear of race riots in places like Blackburn and Oldham, officers were "overtly sensitive" and not clamping down on the sordid practice. His controversial comments in this week's Panorama reignite a massively controversial issue which exploded over a Channel 4 documentary in 2004. That programme which claimed Asian men in Bradford were grooming under age white girls for prostitution was pulled from C4's schedules. This was because police claimed at the time that it could provoke racial violence during the local election campaign.A muslim leader has accused the police of failing to tackle Asian gangs suspected of prostituting young white girls. Officers are accused of being "over cautious" when investigating Muslim criminals because they fear being branded racist. Read more ...Source: Daily Mail
By Jonathan Constantine Movroydis and Reut Cohen The University of California-Irvine is a sprawling campus in Orange County. The institution, located between the Santa Ana Mountains and the shore of the Pacific Ocean, is not only home to some of the best minds in science and engineering, but also to some of the most virulent supporters of radical Islam in America — and a school administration bent on capitulating to them. The university’s Muslim Student Union (MSU) holds several annual events, at which members unashamedly voice support for terrorist groups and denounce Israel, America, and the Western world. Past events hosted during the group’s annual anti-Israel week have had titles such as “Hamas: the People’s Choice” and “Israel: The 4th Reich.” Speakers have included Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, and Anna Balzter. Read more ...Source: Pajamas Media
Cairo, May 25 (DPA) An Egyptian farmer who suspected his 16-year-old daughter was having an affair hanged her and then beheaded her body in the southern province of Bani Soueif, it was reported Sunday. The local daily Al-Akhbar said Abdel-Samad, 46, turned himself to the police after the killing. It said a police investigation showed the father suspected his daughter of having an affair. So-called honour killings are not unusual in Egypt and other countries of the Middle East, where families murder female members for having brought “shame” on their name. Such killings often involve a female member refusing an arranged marriage or having a relationship that the family considers to be inappropriate. Source: DPA
 A Malaysian lawmaker told parliament that there would be fewer marital problems and a lower divorce rate if Muslim women were taught to accept polygamy, news reports said yesterday. Ibrahim Ali, an independent parliamentarian, proposed moves to address the issue in response to complaints that women were always blamed for marital issues. “Such problems happen because women cannot accept polygamy. From a preventive point of view, what about doing a big campaign so that women can accept polygamy?” Ibrahim was quoted saying in the Star daily. The ethnic Malay Muslim lawmaker said women who are pregnant or who have “problems” when they hit their 50s do not understand that men still want to “have fun.” Fuziah Salleh, an opposition lawmaker, had earlier questioned the qualifications of Islamic Shariah court counselors as she had received complaints from women that they were forced to take the blame for most marital problems. “They are not counseled but given ‘advice.’ And every time, they are told that the woman is to be blamed. If it is a family problem, they must be patient. If they are beaten up, they must also be patient,” she said. Read more ...Source: AFP H/T: Shariah Finance Watch
 Safa Rigby holds her youngest of five children in their home, May 21, 2008. Rigby had
it all. Four great kids. A faithful husband. Then she found out about his other wives.As Toronto mother describes her ordeal, imam admits he has 'blessed' over 30 unionsBy Noor Javed There were no pleasantries, there was no small talk. Safa Rigby had expected to hear her husband's voice when the phone rang one morning. Instead, the caller didn't even bother to say hello. "You think you know your husband. You don't know him at all," said the man, a friend of her husband's. "His car is parked outside my house right now. He is with my ex-wife. They just got married last week," the man said. It took a minute for the news to sink in. Then she called her husband of 14 years, demanding to know if what she had just been told was true – that while she spent a year in Egypt raising their four children in a more Islamic environment, he had used it as an opportunity to marry not just one, but two other women in Toronto. Read more ...Source: The Star
 Barack Obama's "policy" on negotiating with Iran without preconditions has Britain greatly worried and possibly violates three UN security council resolutions. Officials in Washington and Europe fear that Obama's policy on Iran threatens to undermind the West's tough stance towards Tehran in recent years. So much so, in fact, that according to yesterday's Times Online story, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband met yesterday with all three presidential campaigns. But, according to the Times Online, Obama's team of foreign policy advisers had a meeting Wednesday with Miliband, at which Miliband questioned Obama's declared willingness to meet with leaders from rogue states such as Iran. The Times Online article continues: British intelligence chiefs are understood to have identified Iranian nuclear proliferation as the second greatest security threat, behind Islamic terrorism but ahead of renewed aggression from Russia. There is also deep concern about Iran’s support for Iraqi Shia militias or terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. “The role of Iran as a source of instability in the region is undoubtedly a concern,” Mr Miliband said this week. “No one can watch armed militias coming on to the streets in defiance of UN resolutions with equanimity.” Exact accounts of the conversation with Mr Obama differ and there is certainly acute anxiety on the part of the British not to be seen as stoking political controversy in America’s presidential elections. In the past week Mr McCain has repeatedly hammered Mr Obama for what he claims is a “naive” commitment to hold direct talks with foreign dictators.
In a televised debate last summer, Mr Obama was asked if he would be willing to meet the leaders of countries such as Iran and Cuba without preconditions during his first year in office. He replied: “I would.” But this week he appeared to pull back, saying he would still be willing to meet Iranian leaders but not before what he described as “preparations” — and not necessarily with President Ahmadinejad. Nevertheless, Mr Obama says that “tough but engaged diplomacy” — of the type carried out by President Kennedy or President Reagan with the Soviet Union — would represent “a different approach, a different philosophy” to the “failed Iran policy” of the current administration. Mr Miliband, in a press conference with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, reiterated Britain’s support for the united front on Iran adopted by the US and its European allies, which he believes is beginning to pay dividends. “Our position, jointly, has always been that as long as Iran exercises responsibilities, then it will be able to forge a more productive and positive relationship with the international community,” Mr Miliband said. An aide later told The Times that the Foreign Secretary was being very careful to avoid direct criticism of any presidential candidate’s positions. But the same source added: “We know Obama wants to engage more, but we don’t know what route he will take or what he means by ‘no pre-conditions’. It has not unravelled yet and, when it does, we will be able to see where it converges or conflicts with what we’re doing.” A Foreign Office spokesman later said: “I just want to stress that David Miliband is not confused about Obama’s policy. It would be quite wrong to say that.” Mr McCain’s foreign policy chief, Randy Scheunemann, would not comment on his own meetings with Mr Miliband. But he said: “Obama’s position is obviously different to that of Britain and France. Otherwise Prime Minister Brown and President Sarkozy would have already met the President of Iran without conditions. Although Britain — unlike the US — maintains diplomatic relations with Iran, the West has been more or less united in seeking to isolate the Iranian leadership. The US, Britain, France and to some extent Germany have pressed for tighter sanctions against Iran, including measures directed against the country’s ruling elite, for failing to comply with UN resolutions calling for a halt to its uranium enrichment programme. British intelligence chiefs are understood to have identified Iranian nuclear proliferation as the second greatest security threat, behind Islamic terrorism but ahead of renewed aggression from Russia. There is also deep concern about Iran’s support for Iraqi Shia militias or terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. “The role of Iran as a source of instability in the region is undoubtedly a concern,” Mr Miliband said this week. “No one can watch armed militias coming on to the streets in defiance of UN resolutions with equanimity.” [Submitted by kmacginn via Hummers & Cigarettes.]
A man identified as Ahmad (53) killed his 17 years old daughter, identified as Farzaneh, on May 7, in the central city Isfahan, reported several Iranian newspapers. Farzaneh was kidnapped earlier and was held captive by her brother-in-law, for ten days, the father told reporters. In order to save the family’s honor, he then decided to take her life. Read more ...Source: Stop Fundamentalism
 Police escort murder suspect Ahmad O., who
allegedly stabbed his sister 20 times in an honor killing.By Barbara Hans Ahmad O. stabbed his sister more than 20 times because the 16-year-old girl didn't live her life according to his values. Women's rights advocate Seyran Ates is now calling for German society to intensify its efforts to stop honor killings. "A girl isn't a whore if she goes out," she says. Morsal O. was 16, a young girl with joie de vivre. She laughed a lot and she was a go-getter. She was a good student, had ambition and a lot ahead of her in life. But she was murdered on Friday, May 9. Her 23-year-old brother Ahmad, with the help of a cousin, lured her to a parking lot near a subway station in the German port city of Hamburg under a false pretense and stabbed her 20 times with a knife. If Morsal had known she would be coming face to face with her brother, she probably wouldn't have gone that evening. The two hadn't been on talking terms for quite some time, and Ahmed had threatened his sister repeatedly. Just before her murder, Morsal had sought refuge from her family, who moved to Germany from Afghanistan 13 years ago, at a number of city social facilities, most recently living for more than a year in a youth safe house. But she never succeeded in entirely breaking off contact with her family. Read more ...Source: Spiegel
By Shwan Mohammad Medics in Iraqi Kurdistan said on Saturday that they had seen a surge in violence against women in May, with both so-called "honour" killings and female suicides on the increase. "At least 14 women died in the first 10 days of May alone," a doctor told AFP in the region's second largest city of Sulaimaniyah. "Seven of them took their own lives, the other seven were murdered in still unexplained circumstances" -- apparently the victims of "honour" killings. "Over the same period, we recorded 11 attempted self-immolations. These women were so desperate they set fire to themselves," the doctor added, asking not to be identified. According to Kurdish regional government figures, in Sulaimaniyah province alone more than 50 women attempted suicide by burning in the first four months of the year and another eight tried to hang themselves. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq has regularly highlighted "honour" killings of Kurdish women as being among the country's most severe human rights abuses. Most such crimes are reported as deaths caused by accidental fires in the home. Aso Kamal, a 42-year-old British Kurdish Iraqi campaigner, says that between 1991 and 2007, 12,500 women were murdered for "honour" reasons or committed suicide in the country's three Kurdish provinces. The Kurdish autonomous region runs its own affairs and has enjoyed relative peace and growing prosperity since the US-led invasion of 2003, while Arab areas of Iraq have been plunged into sectarian warfare. But crimes against women continue despite campaigns by human rights activists and repeated condemnation by women members of the regional government and parliament. Most of the attacks are carried out by close relatives who believe the victims' behaviour to have been immoral. Desperate to escape the cycle of domestic violence, many women turn to suicide. The Kurdish region's first centre dedicated to tackling domestic violence against women opened in Sulaimaniyah last October, and provides psychological support and legal advice to victims in complete confidentiality. "Even if the phenomenon is deeply embedded in the historical roots of our region, it has become alarmingly commonplace in recent months," Layla Abdullah, president of the separate Kurdish women's rights group the Aram Shelter, said. "In 2004, 48 female victims of domestic violence found refuge at the association in order to escape death," Abdullah said. "The number rose to 71 in 2007, and now it stands at 25 for the first four months of this year," she added. In 2002 the Kurdish government abolished a law which reduced the penalties for those convicted of "honour" crimes, but this has still not eradicated the violence, according to those fighting to protect Kurdish women's rights. In November 2007, Kurdish human rights minister Aziz Mohammed acknowledged that domestic violence occurred in northern Iraq. "Domestic violence, sexual abuse, death threats, insults, forced marriages, kidnapping, being forced to leave school... these are the problems which confront the women of Kurdistan," a ministry report said, adding that most victims were between 13 and 18 years old. Paradoxically, Kurdish women are deeply involved in the region's political process with 28 in the 111-seat parliament and three holding ministerial positions. "Suicide attempts by traumatised women are on the increase," said Bakhshan Zangana, who heads the parliamentary women's group. "We must discuss and find a solution to this situation. Suicide is clearly one of the consequences of domestic violence and cruelty." Source: France 24
Radical Turkish Islamists organize nights in many Turkish cities under the slogan, "A free Al-Quds, A world without Israel", where Hamas and Hizbullah are glorified, Israel and Western countries demonized, and jihadist speeches are delivered. The frequency of similar events in the mainly Kurdish southeast and east of Turkey with large number of participants are attributed to the intense efforts to Islamize the local population in these areas. Following are excerpts from the speech that the radical Islamist activist Nureddin Sirin delivered in Van in which he targeted Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan along with the U.S. and Israel: "[...] Bush went to Saudi Arabia after Israel and he is going to Egypt. American lackeys Egypt, Jordan and Saudi's betrayal of the Islamic umma is just as grave as the Zionists' cruelty, massacres, tortures, murders. The responsibility for the embargo that Gaza faces today, lies primarily with Egypt that keeps the gates closed - not America or Israel. Yes we say that Israel will not be standing for another six years. That Saudi regime, the occupier of holy Mecca and Madine that calls itself the servant of holy places! No, you are the servants of America and f Israel! You are their accomplices! If it wasn't for your treachery, if Mecca wasn't under your occupation, if Kabe wasn't occupied, Al Quds wouldn't be occupied either. [...] When Hizbullah fighters for 33 days striked Zionist Israel the heaviest blow in their history, Saudis, Egypt and Jordan conspired with the conspirator Fuad Siniora of Lebanon. They and Siniora told Israel, "Finish this Hizbullah"! [crowds repeatedly Allahu Akbar ...] Read more ...Source: MEMRI
By LIBBY QUAID STOCKTON, Calif. - Republican John McCain on Thursday rejected endorsements from two influential but controversial televangelists, saying there is no place for their incendiary criticisms of other faiths. McCain rejected the months-old endorsement of Texas preacher John Hagee after an audio recording surfaced in which the preacher said God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land. McCain called the comment "crazy and unacceptable." He later repudiated the support of Rod Parsley, an Ohio preacher who has sharply criticized Islam and called the religion inherently violent. McCain issued a statement Thursday afternoon announcing his decision about Hagee. Read more ...Source: APMuslims Against Sharia applaud Senator McCains' decision to sever ties with Islamophobic bigots Hagee & Parsley
 An officer of Pakistan’s Anti-Narcotics Force showing
narcotics seized in February. Virtually all Muslims,
except the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other reprehensible
groups, hold a deep loathing for anyone involved in the
manufacture, distribution, or consumption of drugs.By JAMES EMERY Religion and nationalism are the refuge of scoundrels, so it was no great surprise to learn that Haji Baz Muhammad, the Afghan criminal mastermind who has made millions of dollars from narcotics trafficking, said he was selling heroin in order to wage a jihad against the United States. The Taliban, who've earned over $1 billion in the narcotics trade under the dubious guise of religious warriors, claim they are promoting drugs to attack the West. I suppose the Taliban consider the fact that millions of Muslims have become addicted to their drugs is collateral damage in their so-called "jihad." The Koran bans the use and involvement with all intoxicants and mind-altering substances in the second surah, verse 219 and the fifth surah, verse 90. Wine and mind-altering substances are referred to as "khamr" derived from the Arabic word "khamara", which means to veil or conceal. Muhammad said that every intoxicant is "khamr", and that every khamr is "haram" (the Arabic word for forbidden). Read more ...Source: Middle East Times
By David Schenker In a lengthy interview published today in the online Arabic news service Elaph, Supreme Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Mohammed Akef was asked: “Regarding resistance and jihad…do you consider Osama Bin Laden a terrorist or an Islamic Mujahid?” Akef’s answer: “In all certainty, a mujahid, and I have no doubt in his sincerity in resisting the occupation, close to Allah on high.” This statement provides some insight into the current thinking of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It should prompt a reassessment in the West of the now dominant view that the MB in Egypt is committed to non-violence and democracy. Read more ...Source: Counterterrorism BlogMohammed Akef
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
Ahmad Jibril: "Why did they bring the [Jews] here? Can you believe they talk about historical myths, from 3,000 years ago or more, in which God promised to give Abraham the land from the Nile to the Euphrates? Just imagine, the Master of the Universe, who is absolute justice, brings these people and says to them: 'You own this land and everything on it.' Then they say that in the days of Jacob, they were given Palestine, the Promised Land. "One should know, however, that history and archeology have yet to prove that a Jewish state was ever established on the land of Palestine, or that such a state survived and gave rise to civilizations, and so on... It is said that gangs controlled Jerusalem, Hebron, and Nablus, and that later, they were uprooted, just like any other gang. They did not give rise to a civilization. The Arabs and Muslims lived for 700 years in Andalusia. Why shouldn't we claim that Andalusia is our homeland?"[...] More ...Source: MEMRI
By M. Nissimov, Y. Mansharof and A. Savyon In late January 2008, the Media Supervision Committee of Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance ordered the closure of the women's movement monthly Zanan, which had appeared in Iran for 16 years. The order came after the magazine published an investigative article on istishhad (i.e. martyrdom) operations. The conservative news agency Fars reported, citing a knowledgeable source, that the magazine had been shut down for "breaking the law and defaming military and revolutionary institutions, including the Basij," and for "publishing reports and [raising] issues that undermine [society's] spiritual security, morale, and ideological strength, and that create a sense of insecurity in society and discredit the status of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran." Read more ...Source: MEMRI
By Janet I. Tu Some local Muslim community members are upset about a training course for local law enforcement, saying it could promote stereotypes and ethnic and religious profiling. The program, called "The Threat of Islamic Jihadists to the World" and conducted by a Miami-based company, began Thursday and continues today at the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission campus in Burien. It is billed as providing insight into the formative phases of Islam, the religion's different branches, radical Islam and how to respond to terrorist acts. But Arsalan Bukhari, president of the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the program appears to be linking an entire religion to terrorism. Read more ...Source: Seattle Times
A Christian doctor is being held in a Pakistan jail while religious extremists demand that he be publicly hanged for blasphemy. Dr. Robin Sardar, 55, is facing a possible death sentence after an envious friend claimed he made offensive remarks about the Quran and Muhammad’s beard, according to a report by the International Christian Concern, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights group. Sardar’s former friend, Muhammad Yousaf, became jealous of the Christian’s professional success and financial status, so he filed a First Information Report May 5 with police, claiming the doctor had made derogatory statements about the prophet. According to Sardar’s nephew, a mob of more than 200 Muslims wielding guns, sticks and kerosene oil attacked the doctor’s home and medical offices following the report to police. The men, wearing green turbans to represent their Islamic faith, broke into Sadar’s home, shattered windows and ruined the family’s furniture in their residence and clinic. Read more ...Source: John's Blog
WASHINGTON is still reeling from two strategic defeats this week in its regional showdown with arch-foe Iran, and several key policy-makers have claimed the hardest blow came from staunch ally Israel. The Jewish state's decision on Wednesday to restart peace talks with Syria came at a particularly difficult time for the Bush administration. It followed a decision by Lebanese leaders hours earlier to cede veto power to the Iranian-backed Opposition, consolidating the rising influence of the radical regime and its key partner, Damascus. Both hardline nations emerged emboldened by the two moves, while the US saw them as a slap in the face, a senior US official was quoted as saying in The New York Times. The Israeli decision to re-engage Syria exposes a significant strategic division between Jerusalem and Washington, both of which rarely diverge on Middle Eastern policy. The announcement of indirect talks between Syria and Iran, to be brokered by Turkey, did not come as a surprise to Washington, which had been briefed on contacts between the two sides over the past two years. However, the forewarning did not mitigate the shock of the decision being made at such a pivotal point in the showdown between the hawkish Bush White House and the equally hardnosed leadership of Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr Bush had invested much of the remainder of his foreign policy political capital in a peace track with the Palestinians - one he personally tried to rejuvenate last November. Discussions between the three sides have, at best, inched along throughout the year and have been marred by a mutual reluctance to usher in trust-building measures. As talks with the Palestinians continued to falter, Israel increasingly felt there was a better chance of reaching an agreement with Syria. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office also believes there is a much better chance of any deal signed with the Syrians being implemented because the issues to be discussed relate mainly to territory. The Palestinian peace track is a tangle of more complex issues, which involves moving hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and dispersing billions of dollars in compensation as part of a final-status settlement. Syria has long been a key player in Palestinian politics. Current President Bashar al-Assad and his late father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled the totalitarian state for more than 30 years until his death in 2001, have backed several outlawed groups, including Hamas, as well as sheltering their leaders. But Mr Assad Jr's strong alliance with Iran since the turn of the century, and particularly since the election of Mr Ahmadinejad in late 2005, has put Washington on almost a cold war footing with both Syria and Iran. Mr Bush has disavowed any high-level contact with either country for the past three years, claiming both have eagerly fuelled the insurgency in Iraq, which has US forces pinned down five years after the 2003 invasion. The White House also accuses the two allies of attempting to gain control of Lebanon, a goal that was advanced on Wednesday when the US-backed Government of Fouad Siniora capitulated to Opposition demands. While in Jerusalem for Israel's 60th anniversary just over a week ago, Mr Bush used a speech in the Israeli parliament to warn against appeasing regional strongmen and those prepared to use force for political gain. "He isn't home a week and the dictators and forces of violence have triumphed," said former US national security official Bruce Reidel, quoted in a US newspaper. Israel says the key reason for kick-starting talks with Syria is to try to peel it away from its links to Iran. This is also a main aim of Mr Bush. However, the US has doggedly stuck to a policy of punishing Damascus by isolating it economically and attempting to force it to the negotiating table by attrition. Israel had previously marched arm-in-arm with the US on its approach to Syria, and continues to enforce a hardline stance against two of Syria's key patrons, Hezbollah and Hamas. However, Mr Olmert's office said it had received a missive from Damascus within the past fortnight, which convinced it that such a dramatic divergence from the US was a worthy gamble. Source: The Australian
 By Clare M. Lopez When the Director of National Intelligence declares publicly that "We try not to refer to 'jihad' as something that's bad," even though he knows that the United States (U.S.) and all of civilized society is engaged in an existential struggle with the forces of Islamic Jihad, it is hard to fathom what he could possibly be thinking. Only a few short weeks ago, we were told that referring to jihad might somehow legitimize our enemies. Of all of our leaders charged with the defense and protection of our Constitution, DNI Michael McConnell bears a special responsibility to understand clearly the identity of the enemy and the nature of the threat he poses. He also has a professional responsibility to communicate that honestly to the American people. The refusal of DNI McConnell and, apparently, the rest of the Bush administration, to acknowledge the obvious linkage between terror in the name of Islam, and the Islamic faith, goes beyond absurd: it is dangerous to national security because it prevents the U.S.'s top officials from crafting an appropriate strategic policy to defend us. Willful ignorance of the fundamental doctrine of Islamic Jihad, as defined by Islamic scriptures, scholarly consensus, and historians cannot change what is written, what is believed, and what is lived by those who would destroy our Constitutional system and replace it with Sharia. It doesn't matter in the end whether we agree or disagree with the doctrine of our enemies, or judge it good or evil: if that is what guides the enemy's behavior towards us, then that is what we must deal with. It is also irrelevant that more peaceful methods for propagating Islam, such as Da'wa, do exist, or that there indeed is a "Greater Jihad" (the inner struggle to better oneself). Neither Da'wa nor the "Greater Jihad" employs warfare or terror to replace liberal democracy with Sharia. But the "Lesser Jihad" does. Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
Sharia is creeping at an alarming pace, and in all aspects of American life. It appears the "Fairness Doctrine" which was shot down recently, is attempting a back door comeback in the form of "localism" in radio programming. The seemingly ubiquitous Council on American Islamic Terrorism Relations, or CAIR, has made its way into this discussion. The gist of the proposal is that radio licensees would be required to "convene and consult with permanent advisory boards," such as CAIR, who would discourage discussion of topics such as jihad, islamic terrorism, etc. Read it and weep, then sign the petition or contact your representatives. Read more ...Source: Sun HeraldH/T: Creeping ShariaFCC
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
HOW do you know when things are going well for the US and its coalition allies in Iraq? When you see virtually nothing about it on your television screen or in the papers. When President George W. Bush announced a surge of US forces in Iraq, he was almost universally condemned as compounding already bungled and failed policies. In the first several months of 2007, the news seemed bad and the media were full of it, declaring it a failure and a disaster. But as things began to get better on the ground, events faded from our screens. Al-Qa'ida, which had controlled Sunni areas such as Anbar province, was virtually driven out. The same thing happened in and around Baghdad. Remaining al-Qa'ida forces retreated to the northern city of Mosul, where they are now under pressure from Iraqi and US forces. This extraordinary achievement, the virtual destruction of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, occurred in less than a year. Critics say this was all because of a revolt of the Sunnis, particularly tribal leaders, repelled by al-Qa'ida's monstrous excesses against their people, and the threat al-Qa'ida posed to the traditional wielders of power in those regions. It's true that revulsion among Sunnis in those provinces against al-Qa'ida was a crucial factor. That began to emerge tentatively in mid 2006. But it was the additional US troops subsequently provided by way of the surge that turned a flicker of tribal resistance into a wildfire that has engulfed al-Qa'ida. Al-Qa'ida in Iraq still exists and is still capable of significant acts of barbarity, but it has suffered a catastrophic strategic setback, not just militarily but much more importantly in terms of its political and moral legitimacy among Iraqis. Now let's look at Basra, the southern oil-rich city that had been entirely out of the central government's control, run by criminals and by various Shi'ite militias. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched an attack on those forces with little notice to the Americans or the British. These attacks were not particularly well organised and at first stumbled, with some Iraqi forces surrendering to the militias. Guess what? Lots of media coverage and a broad consensus it was a fiasco that brought into question the success of the surge and the credibility of training Iraqi forces. But it has largely disappeared from your pages again, hasn't it? That's because after some initial setbacks, and with artillery and air support from the Americans and the British, the Iraqi forces have turned the situation around entirely. They have defeated the Shi'ite militias in that city. This has been written up as an Iranian-sponsored peace deal. Yet Maliki has gained enormous prestige from his determined effort in reasserting central control over what was a rebel city. But Maliki has not stopped there. Over the past few weeks, he has launched the Iraqi army, with some US military backup, against the Mahdi Army militias in Baghdad. Those militias had responded to their setbacks in Basra by launching concerted mortar attacks on the Green Zone where the Government and the US and other embassies reside. These militias were concentrated inside Sadr city, a region of Baghdad with well over a million people. This was Moqtada al-Sadr's power base. The Iraqi army has now entered Sadr city, in force and unchallenged, after a few weeks' fighting. The Iraqi Government has for the first time taken control of the whole of Baghdad. What about on the political front? Well, vital laws, long demanded, have been passed setting out regional powers, amnesty for Sunnis, scheduling provincial elections, providing for de-Baathification and agreeing a budget. This is a political system that is dealing with monumental problems more effectively than the US Congress is dealing with long recognised deep-seated problems of health, social security, the environment, energy and many other matters. When US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi measures the Iraqi parliament's achievements against those of the US Congress on her watch, she should be deeply embarrassed rather than lecturing them on benchmarks. A vital factor in all this has been the performance of the Iraqi army, the one Iraqi institution relatively free from sectarianism and which has carried out most of the frontline fighting in Basra and Baghdad. The Iraqi army is growing in confidence in its military planning, operational discipline, and overall capability. But the key reasons for the change in Iraq is that the surge was just one part of a more fundamental change on the part of the US. The replacement of the arrogant defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld by Richard Gates, together with the arrival of generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, has been followed by a demonstration of sophisticated, subtle and creative use of new military operational doctrines, carefully integrated with political manoeuvring at local, regional and national level, between and within the various political and religious forces. This has been combined with a focus on local economic and social development bringing much needed employment. Moreover, US diplomacy over Iraq, including with Iran, most of which has been conducted in private, has brought them some way down the track to a workable outcome that will not leave Iraq an Iranian sphere of influence. Such unexpected adroitness and skill is a welcome relief after the bunglings of 2003 to 2006 dictated by Rumsfeld's wilful blindness to the exploding insurgency and the self-delusion of Vice-President Dick Cheney that the US would be greeted as liberators. In the end, it is the Iraqis who will decide whether Iraq becomes a united federation with a genuinely democratic government that suits their values, which is economically successful, which stands independent from outside domination, and which lives in peace with its neighbours. Of course this is not guaranteed. But from being a very long shot in early 2007, and although plenty can still go wrong, I would now put their chances of success at better than even. For giving the Iraqis this opportunity, the US and its allies deserve the credit, but you can be sure they won't get it. You can be equally sure that if this does eventually come to pass, it will receive little acknowledgement in the media. For some remarkable reason, it seems we are now more comfortable with failure and find success hard to bear. Source:The Australian
 By Joe Kaufman Over time, an obvious rift has formed between members of the Islamic and Jewish faiths, mostly due to an intense hatred of Israel and not-so-subtle anti-Semitism emanating from the Muslim community. One fairly large group of Jews, the Reform Jewish Movement, has sought to change this, by extending an olive branch to its enemies. The result has been a strange partnership between the Jewish group and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization with a dangerous past – and present. On the top of the “Interfaith” section of the ISNA website, one finds a picture of the National Director of ISNA, Sayyid Mohammad Syeed, shaking the hand of the President of the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ), Eric Yoffie. It’s no different than the handshake that took place between Yasser Arafat, the deceased ex-terrorist leader of the PLO, and Yitzhak Rabin, the deceased former Israeli Prime Minister, on the White House Lawn, in September of 1993. And like the ’93 handshake, its purported show of friendship is meaningless, if not offensive and dangerous. In July of 1981, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) was incorporated in the state of Indiana. At the time, it shared its incorporating address with the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a group created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in 1963, and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a Hamas financing center. Read more ...Source: FrontPage MagazineArthur Waskow
Latest recipient of the Retarded Rabbi Award
Note that the Indian Mujahideen have accused Khalid Rasheed and his colleagues of apostasy. This is the jihadists' consistent line: that they represent the truth and purity of Islam, and those Muslims who reject their perspective are, in effect, rejecting Islam. It is a potent appeal in the Islamic world, and one it would behoove us to understand -- but instead, the PC straitjacket has both liberals and conservatives ignoring, denying, or downplaying it, and pretending that the battle within Islam has already been won by the "moderates" -- who in reality haven't even articulated an Islamically consistent position that has won any widespread acceptance among Muslims. Read more ...Source: Daily TimesH/T: Jihad Watch
By Stephen Brown It makes one wonder whose side Holland is on. Dutch police arrested last week a controversial Amsterdam caricaturist for allegedly publishing cartoons which discriminate against “Muslims and people with dark skin.” “We suspect him of insulting people on the basis of their race and belief, and possibly also of inciting hate,” said a spokeswoman for the Amsterdam public prosecutor. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
By Matt Korade To better understand the Quranic basis of jihad as practiced by extremists without sifting through a library of interpretations, you should read one book above all others, says Lt. Col. Joseph Myers. “The Quranic Concept of War,” by Pakistani Brig. Gen. S.K. Malik in the late 1970s, isn’t much studied in the West. But it should be, Myers said, if America, and more specifically, the U.S. military, wants to gain a better understanding of the enemy in the war on terrorism. Malik attempts to teach his readers about the doctrinal aspects of “Quranic warfare,” said Myers, who wrote a paper on the subject published in Parameters, the Army War College quarterly, and delivered a presentation at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa annual conference in April. Read more ...Source: CQ Politics
By Nina Shea Already dogged by a reputation for promoting religious extremism abroad and repression at home, the government of Saudi Arabia now faces growing resentment at the soaring price of oil. As is their custom, Saudi rulers have responded with a public relations campaign. It's a campaign built on deception. On May 8, Saudi royals placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Times of London, and other papers proclaiming that a charity founded by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud, a nephew of King Abdullah and the world's 13th-richest person, had been honored by the pope. Directly under a Koranic passage on tolerance, the headline declared: "Alwaleed bin Talal Humanitarian Foundation, representing Kingdom Foundation, awarded the Pontifical Medal by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican." Read more ...Source: The Weekly Standard
 FoxNews and The Associated Press reported last week that UBS AG, a Swiss bank, is being sued by American victims of terrorist attacks that took place in Israel. The lawsuit was filed on Friday in federal court in Manhattan, listing several suicide bombings and rocket attacks between 1997 and 2001. The attacks had been attributed to Hamas and Hezbollah, considered terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
Previously, UBS was fined $100 million in 2004 for sending money to Iran, Cuba, Libya and Yugoslavia, although the bank never admitted the accusations.
The article is below (emphasis added) ...
Victims of Hamas and Hezbollah Sue Swiss Bank for Helping Fund Terrorists Tuesday , May 13, 2008 NEW YORK — American victims of terrorist attacks in Israel have filed a lawsuit seeking more than $500 million from UBS AG, saying the Swiss bank made it possible for Iran to fund the terrorists. The lawsuit says the Zurich-based bank provided dollars to Iran in violation of trade sanctions and Iran funneled the money to terrorist groups. "UBS knew full well that the cash dollars it was providing to a state sponsor of terrorism such as Iran would be used to cause and facilitate terrorist attacks by Iranian-sponsored terrorist organizations," the plaintiffs say. Their lawyer, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, said in a phone interview from Tel Aviv that the bank is liable "as much as Iran or the terrorists" for the damage caused. UBS rejects the allegations, saying they were without merit. "We will defend ourselves vigorously," said Serge Steiner, a UBS spokesman in Zurich. In 2004, when UBS was fined $100 million for sending dollars to Iran, Cuba, Libya and Yugoslavia, the bank said "very serious mistakes were made" but did not directly admit to the accusations. The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Manhattan, lists several suicide bombings and rocket attacks between 1997 and 2001 and attributes them to the militant Hamas and Hezbollah groups, which the Unites States considers terrorist organizations. Darshan-Leitner said she used Israeli security reports and news accounts to find out who was responsible for the attacks. The more than 50 plaintiffs include several Americans directly wounded — and in one case, killed — by the attacks, as well as their spouses and children. They claim UBS, which has offices in New York and elsewhere in the U.S., violated an American law that prohibits "any United States person from knowingly engaging in financial transactions with the government of a country designated as a state sponsor of terrorism." The lawsuit asks for at least $500 million in compensation for the victims and an unspecified amount in punitive damages. Plaintiff Rachel Rothstein, now a 25-year-old student in Los Angeles, said Monday she was a 15-year-old in Jerusalem on Sept. 4, 1997, when she and friends went to a pedestrian mall after school. "We were shopping for a surprise party for a friend and we walked into a triple suicide bomb," she said. She suffered chest and shoulder injuries and two years later was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Asked about suing UBS, she said, "It feels right, in that if they were the ones providing the funding, they are responsible. I was very upset when I heard the bank had sent money to Iran." Another bit of nasty business in "neutral" Switzerland's history.
[Submitted by kmacginn via Hummers & Cigarettes]
Google says most videos sponsored by terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda don't violate its community guidelines By Heather Havenstein YouTube has refused a request from US Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) to remove all videos sponsored by terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, contending that most of them don't violate its community guidelines. Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Monday called on the Google Inc subsidiary to remove video content produced by terrorist organizations that showed assassinations, deaths of US soldiers and civilians, weapons training, "incendiary" speeches and other material intended to "encourage violence against the West." Read more ...Source: Computer WorldDhimmiTube
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
BAGHDAD - Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible - a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad. Read more ...Source: AP H/T: Jihad Watch
Artist Ellen Vroegh almost fell from her chair when she was called up yesterday by Huizen municipality. Because several Muslim men had complained about her abstract paintings of half-naked women, the pieces had been removed from the municipality building where they had been displayed. Vroegh: I feel severely discriminated! this passes all bounds. Must Dutch men now integrate in their own country? After the Nekschot affair, now you get this. Soon art will land up at the stage." Source: Islam in Europe
A radical Islam preacher was hired by the government as a computer expert. Jamal A., AKA Aboe Ismail, therefore had access to the IT-network of the defense ministry. The preacher is related to the As-Soennah mosque in the Hague, and serves as imam Fawaz's righthand man. Sympathies with the Taliban in Afghanistan had been expressed in the mosque. Read more ...Source: Islam in Europe
By ALISA TANG KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Gunfire broke out Thursday at a protest in western Afghanistan against a U.S. sniper in Iraq who used a Quran for target practice and officials said a NATO soldier and two civilians were killed. Read more ...Source: AP
By Sid Shahid Now we know what happens to the voice of moderate Muslims who confront the Islamist establishment. This weekend we witnessed yet another exhibit of the personal invective which comes out of some mosques against pious Muslims who decide to publicly engage these mosques on their two-faced stances. On May 17th, 2008, the Islamic Center for Peace (ICP) in Fort Myers, Florida, posted a laborious, poorly written, tangential tirade in response to Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser's recent commentary entitled "The war of Ideas: Revealing the Moral Weakness and Hypocrisy of the Islamist Imam (Part 2 of 2." (also note Part I of this commentary here). The ICP mosque posted this, it would seem, out of their anger at Dr. Jasser and the results of the April 5, 2008 event in Naples, Florida, where their Imam debated Dr. Jasser over the Islamic state's ideological threat to the U.S. Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
 Nidra Poller reports from the Paris courtroom on the Dreyfus-like affair: Presiding judge Laurent Trébucq of the 11e Chambre d'Appel announced the verdict in the al Dura case at 1:50 PM today. It only took her two minutes to say in her sweetest voice: Philippe Karsenty is acquitted, the plaintiffs--France 2 and Charles Enderlin--are dismissed. The French word for "dismissed" is "déboutés"...to our ears it sounds like they got a kick where it does the most good. French mainstream media were not there to hear the news. They left it all for a small band of courageous journalists, such as Véronique Chemla, who has been covering the trials with notable distinction (in French) for Guysen Israel News, a film crew from ARD German TV, reporters from Yedioth Aharanot, Haaretz, and Honest Reporting / Take a Pen, Elisabeth Levy (www.causeur.fr), and of course me. Philippe Karsenty was nearly in tears as he made his first recorded statement (for ARD)....a message of reconciliation that should be spread as widely as the message of hate carried by the al Dura blood libel. He said he had fought not only to defend his own honor, but to defend Israel, the Jews, and the free world. He hopes that his acquittal will be heard as a warning to those who have been spreading evil falsehoods that enflame Muslims and lead them to senseless violence. Read more ...Source: Atlas
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh says he will "cut off the head" of any homosexual caught in his country. Addressing supporters at the end of his meet the farmers tour here Sunday, Jammeh also ordered any hotel or motel housing homosexuals to close down, adding that owners of such facilities would also be in trouble. He said the Gambia was a country of believers, indicating that no sinful and immoral act as homosexual would be tolerated in the country. He warned all homosexuals in the country to leave, noting that a legislation "stricter than those in Iran" concerning the vice would be introduced soon. Read more ...Source: Afrik.comYahya Jammeh
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
CAIRO - A popular Japanese cartoon is sparking off outcries in the Muslim world where some fear it could fuel a backlash not seen since European papers carried cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and a Dutch lawmaker released a controversial film earlier this year. Read more ...Source: Japan Today
 By John Perazzo If an organization stood accused of supporting a fanatical religious movement that seeks to create a global empire wherein women are oppressed, homosexuals are executed, and all faiths other than Islam are expressly outlawed, would that group try to discredit such accusations by providing a public forum for an individual who proudly and vocally embraces precisely those ideals? Yes, if that organization was the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which recently commissioned a religious bigot and apologist for terror named Sheikh Khalid Yasin to speak on its behalf. During the first week of April, the MSA invited Yasin to appear at five college campuses -- Minnesota State University, St. Cloud State University, Sinclair Community College, the University of Minnesota, and Washington State University -- to rebut charges about the organization’s countenance of religious bigotry and Islamic terror. Those charges were featured prominently in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW), a national event organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP). Held in the fall of 2007 and again in the spring of 2008 on more than 100 college campuses nationwide, IFAW sought to familiarize students with radical Islam’s quest to conquer the world in the name of Allah, and to eviscerate its every perceived foe in the process. Moreover, TAP called on student groups like the MSA to condemn terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who exemplify Islam's most extreme and dangerous faction. Read more ...Source: FrontPage MagazineKhalid Yasin
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
‘Jihad’ is extracted from the source, ‘Jaahada’ and it measured upon the fourth verb structure, which means interaction between two sides, al-Mufa’ala. Another example is ‘Al-Khisaam’ which means to quarrel and is extracted from its roots source – Khaasama. Also, there is the example of ‘Jidaal’, which means to discuss or to argue and is taken from the root source ‘Jaadala’. Read more ...Source: Pakistan Daily
By Douglas Farah There was good news on freedom of speech front yesterday, as the Wall Street Journal won a complete victory in a libel case involving terror finance issues. The lead reporter, the venerable Glenn Simpson, is now 4-0 since 9/11 in these types of cases. While the victory is a testament to his tenacity and care, it is also a testament to the courage of the WSJ in willing to fight and win these cases. Most are lost simply because the will to fight has gone out of so much of the media, who would often rather settle than protect the truth. A brief summary: The Tribunel Correctionel in Paris issued a ruling in Ancienne Bauche SA v The Wall Street Journal Europe. The Journal, editor Michael Williams and reporters Glenn Simpson and Benoit Faucon, were all acquitted on charges of felony and civil libel. Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
 By Jeffrey Imm An unresolved question remains who in the U.S. Government is accountable for the wartime "war of ideas" against Jihadists. Last fall, Sen. Joe Lieberman questioned the FBI, the DHS, the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) about their organizations' role in the "war on ideas" against Jihadists. The answer was a giant shrugging of shoulders. The Washington Times reported that: "FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III revealed during the hearing that the FBI has no counterideology response other than its 'outreach' to Muslim-American communities so they 'understand the FBI' and address 'the radicalization issue.'" Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff also said nothing is being done domestically to battle Islamist extremist ideas. The department's incident management team, he said, is focused on civil rights or civil liberties - not fighting terrorists' ideology." "Retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, said the intelligence community does not conduct any battle of ideas against terrorists in the United States unless there is a foreign connection." Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
 They're back, and the TT will have to admit that the Finnish Islamic Islamist Party has come a long way since its "coming out party back in September in 2007. They're already sporting a "pimped up" web site with a clear political agenda spelled out for the electorate to see. FIP spokesman, Abdullah "former neo-Nazi & Communist" Tammi, has been very busy putting together a cohesive Islamist program in order to take advantage of the upcoming elections his party has been planning to participate in. The Tundra Tabloids of course wishes both Abdullah Tammi and his Islamist party all the worst possible luck in meeting their goals, may they forever face an uphill struggle in their Islamist endeavors. I think that a closer look at the FIP's party platform is in order, let's see just how far reaching their goals actually are. Scoring from 1 to 5, with greater number being the best, lets see how the FIP's values and agenda fares. Read more ...Source: Tundra Tabloids
 What began as a peaceful screening of the documentary, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, Monday afternoon at Columbus (Ohio) State Community College turned to shouts and intimidation as Muslim students confronted students in attendance and Islamofascism Awareness Week event organizers. The video screening was part of Columbus State’s Islamofascism Awareness Week activities hosted by the campus chapter of the Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP), which runs through Wednesday. Read more ...Source: Central Ohioans Against Terrorism
In 2007, MEMRI posted a number of reports listing Islamist websites, forums, and blogs hosted in the West that support warfare against Coalition forces in Iraq and/or feature jihadist incitement and propaganda. This report lists Iranian websites (most also hosted in the West) which are affiliated with the Iranian regime and are used by it to disseminate its ideology. 1. The website of the Islamic Revolution Document Center - used by the regime to disseminate propaganda. www.irdc.irISP: Performance Systems International Inc., Washington DC, U.S. Read more ...Source: MEMRI
By Isambard Wilkinson MILITANTS linked to al-Qaeda have set up training camps to teach children how to conduct suicide attacks, say senior officers in the Pakistani military. The army said on Monday it had overrun one such camp in territory where the notorious Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud operates. Militants had transformed a government-run school near the village of Spinkai in South Waziristan into what one officer described as a "nursery for preparing suicide bombers". Read more ...Source: Sydney Morning Herald
 Source: World Islamic Mission H/T: Pakistan.ru
 With Islamic teachings, rock music and outreach to schoolchildren, ex-Indonesian premier Abdurrahman Wahid fights for a vision of moderate Islam he says was shaped in part by his experiences with an Iraqi Jewish friend. In its telling, the story of a notorious lynching of Jews is not unusual. The storyteller, however, is: Abdurrahman Wahid, the former Indonesian president, and a leading Muslim scholar. In an interview with JTA, Wahid, who traveled to the United States and then Israel in recent weeks to preach his message of Muslim tolerance, revealed the root of his understanding of the risks and perils of Jewish existence. Wahid was a 29-year-old student at Baghdad University in 1966, earning his keep as a secretary at a textile importer, when he befriended the firm's elderly accountant, an Iraqi Jew he remembers only by his family name, Ramin. "I learned from him about the Kabbalah, the Talmud, everything about Judaism," Wahid recalled of the four-year friendship that included long lunches, quiet walks and talks at the city's legendary Hanging Gardens. Wahid has spoken about this friendship before -- it is featured in his biography by Greg Barton, "Abdurrahman Wahid: Muslim Democrat, Indonesian President" -- but on this recent tour Wahid added to the account his memories of Jan. 27, 1969. In 1968, the Iraqi government effectively had come under the control of Saddam Hussein, whose title at that time was deputy to the president, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. At Saddam's behest, Iraqi courts had convicted 14 Iraqis – nine of them Jews – on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel, and they were hanged that day in Baghdad's Tahrir Square, just steps away from where the textile firm had offices. Ramin came to his friend Wahid and wept, wondering what would become of Iraq's ancient Jewish community. "I said, 'This is not only your fate, it is my fate,' " said Wahid, now frail and in a wheelchair. Wahid said he decided then that "the Islamic people should learn" about the Jews and their faith. Ramin's worst fears were realized: The community that dated to the Babylonian exile heard Saddam's message loud and clear, and by the early 1970s it had dwindled to barely a hundred Jews. By 2007 there were less than 10, according to media accounts. Wahid, however, made good on his pledge. Best known as the president who shifted Indonesia to democracy from 1999 to 2001, Wahid then was forced out due to a combination of financial scandals and hard-liners who opposed his attempts to liberalize restrictions on political groups and the country’s Chinese minority. Wahid also has gained prominence for his insistence on introducing the world's most populous Muslim nations to certain truths about the Jews. As an opposition leader, he broke new ground by visiting Israel in 1994. The apex of this effort, conducted jointly with the LibForAll Foundation, a group that promotes moderate Islam, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was the Holocaust conference last year in Bali, Indonesia. At the conference, which was attended by survivors and Jewish and Muslim clergy, Wahid called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "liar" for denying the Holocaust. Wahid, 67, continues to promote his message with LibForAll, founded in 2003 by C. Holland Taylor, a scholar of Southeast Asia and a telecommunications magnate. Wahid, who says he plans to run for president again in 2009, brings to the venture his prestige as the scion of a family of Javanese Islamic scholars. Earlier this month he attended a Wiesenthal Center tribute dinner in his honor and then traveled to Israel to participate in Israeli President Shimon Peres' conference celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary, "Facing Tomorrow." This Jewish component is just part of Wahid’s larger effort to promote an ideology of moderate Islam. He wants to demonstrate that the radical factions are not pre-eminent and to promote a faith that preaches equality for women and tolerance of non-believers. Taylor says the strategy is to reach political, religious and cultural leaders -- even pop stars -- and through them to "trickle down" the message of Wahid's moderate Islam. "We work with top leaders," Taylor said. "These individuals are able to drip their message down to a grass-roots levels." LibForAll recruits respected, moderate Muslim leaders in Indonesia to endorse and write tracts repudiating the radical brand of Islam promoted by Saudi-funded advocates of Wahhabi Islam. The organization also is disseminating a 30-lesson video curriculum called "What is Islam" that advances a pluralistic vision of the faith throughout thousands of Islamic boarding schools in Indonesia. One of the project's highest-profile coups was getting rock star Ahmad Dani, whose group, Dewa, has been likened to U2, on board with the program. Dani has recorded a single taking on Laskar Jihad, Indonesia's radical Islamist terrorist group. The song is called Laskar Cinta -- "Warriors for Love." Taylor says plans are under way to translate the videos and tracts into Arabic and other languages. "We feel that Indonesia has the cultural capital to be a leader in the struggle," he said. This strategy might make headway in countries where moderate Islam has roots -- Malaysia, Turkey and some East African nations -- but Taylor does not have a clear plan of action for how this strategy is supposed to work in places such as Saudi Arabia, which has few Islamic moderates. Wahid says moderate Islam stands a greater chance of triumphing over Islamic radicalism once Western leaders stop trying to accommodate Islamic extremists. Saudi Arabia, in particular, remains the primary funding source for the global spread of fundamentalist Islam. "Don’t give any kind of recognition to the fundamentalist view of Islam," Wahid said. "The Saudis have a double-pronged thing: the first is to give assistance to fundamentalists, on the other side to show the 'humanist' side of Islam. These things cannot be reconciled."
Original piece is http://jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20080519hollandtaylor0519.html
 Mehmet Görmez, a senior lecturer
in hadith at Ankara University and
the vice-president of religious
affairs, heads the "Hadith Project."By Daniel Pipes Accounts from Turkey suggest that the government is attempting a bold re-interpretation of Islam. Its unusually named ministry of religion, the "Presidency of Religious Affairs and the Religious Charitable Foundation," has undertaken a three-year "Hadith Project" systematically to review 162,000 hadith reports and winnow them down to some 10,000, with the goal of separating original Islam from the accretions of fourteen centuries. The hadith reports contain information about the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. They augment the Koran and have had a major role in shaping the Shari‘a (Islamic law), thereby deeply influencing Muslim life. Despite their importance, Muslim reformers have devoted little scrutiny to them, due to their vast size, unwieldy nature, and the challenge of discerning "sound" from "weak" hadiths. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
By Clare M. Lopez SPECIAL REPORT: The Bush administration has decided that calling the enemy by his name is too risky, too politically incorrect, or oddly, somehow too laudatory. And so, henceforth federal agencies of the United States government are to refrain from identifying the Islamic jihad with words that in any way convey genuine understanding about the links between terrorism and religion in the war that has been launched against Western liberal democratic civilization. Read more ...Source: Middle East Times
 By Phyllis Chesler Old News: The sisters, Sarah and Amina Said, are still dead; their father-murderer, Yasir Abdul Said, has not yet been found; the mainstream media continues its uncanny silence. What's New: The reward for Said's capture has been doubled and Tissy Said, his wife and the mother of the two murdered girls, has been ejected from the home of her extended Muslim family. Her beloved son, Islam, (from whom she would not willingly part), has been sent away from her. The Said family presumably want him to be "around a man" (his paternal uncle in New York City) and not around his mother. According to Tissy's great-aunt, the brave, outspoken, Gail Gartrell: "I feel Tissy is in grave danger from her own son. This is what I think his uncle is working through with Islam in New York. I fear his return. All the nieces and nephews in the Said family are accusing Tissy of this being her fault. They have turned on her. They blame her for allowing her daughters to see American boys. She has become the enemy. When I spoke to Tissy, she seemed more upset about this betrayal than about anything else. She told me she did not care if he (Islam? or Yaser?) killed her or not. Now, her spirit is broken since her Muslim family has walked away from her. Tissy told me that she wants to be buried next to her daughters." Read more ...Source: Chesler Chronicles at Pajamas Media
By Patrick Poole What began as a peaceful screening of the documentary, "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West", Monday afternoon at Columbus (Ohio) State Community College turned to shouts and intimidation as Muslim students confronted students in attendance and Islamofascism Awareness Week event organizers. The video screening was part of Columbus State's Islamofascism Awareness Week activities hosted by the campus chapter of the Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP), which runs through Wednesday. According to TAP president Josiah Lanning, commotion began during the first screening of the documentary film and continued to escalate throughout the afternoon. According to Lanning, an individual who identified himself as an Iraqi Muslim began loudly arguing with audience members. After continuing to disrupt the discussion period following the screening, the individual complained that the group was allowed to show the film and warned Lanning not to show the film again. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook The Arabs who became refugees in 1948 were not expelled by Israel but left on their own to facilitate the destruction of Israel, according to a senior Palestinian journalist writing in a Palestinian daily. This plan to leave Israel was initiated by the Arab states fighting Israel, who promised the people they would be able to return to their homes in a few days once Israel was defeated. The article in Al-Ayyam concludes that these Arab states are responsible for the Arab refugee problem. Read more ...Source: Palestinian Media Watch H/T: Jihad Watch
By Farhan Bokhari Amid cries of 'Allah o Akbar' (god is great), a young boy, barely 12 years old, lifts his machete and strikes at his victim who is lying on the ground, all tied up for the kill. Waving a 'V' for victory sign with his right hand, the boy picks up the severed head and shows it around to the chants of applause from an audience gathered in a remote part of the region straddling the mountainous range which divides Pakistan and Afghanistan. The performance in this chilling episode which may simply shock most people around the world, is the case of militant justice meted out to supposed traitors. It involves Al Qaeda and the Taliban slapping exemplary punishment to an individual suspected to be a spy for the government. More ...Source: CBS
 BRUSSELS, May 19 (UPI) -- As President George W. Bush wraps up his trip to the Middle East, controversial Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, a passionate supporter of Bush and the U.S. war on terrorism, called on him to drop his "double agenda" in the region by ending support to Islamic states like Saudi Arabia. Wilders, who briefly achieved global notoriety when he released his anti-Koran film "Fitna" in March, told United Press International that the United States should not overlook Saudi Arabia's flagrant bad governance and human-rights abuses. "American relations with Saudi Arabia should be revised," he said, adding that Saudi Arabia's status as a major oil producer should not mean that its track record ought to be overlooked. "Saudi Arabia is no good and won't be for the foreseeable future," he said. "I think supporting Saudi Arabia is a bad policy and shows a double agenda," said Wilders. But he demurred at the suggestion of sanctions or military action -- "it's not like they should invade tomorrow" -- suggesting only that the desert kingdom be subject to the same standards as other U.S. allies like Israel. [...] Read more ...Source: UPI H/T: Jihad Watch
 By Joe Kaufman CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded, in June of 1994, as part of a Hamas-related quad of groups known as the Palestine Committee. Since then, CAIR has lost a number of its representatives due to terrorist activity, and it has been named by the U.S. government as a co-conspirator for a Hamas financing trial. Yet, of the four groups in the committee, CAIR is the only one that still remains in existence, leading to the question: If terrorism won't bring down CAIR, what will? The answer may very well be in its status as an American organization – its non-profit tax status. United States Representative and co-founder of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus, Sue Myrick, is one of a growing number of lawmakers to speak out against CAIR. As reported in World Net Daily, in December 2007, she stated, "Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States." Recently, Representative Myrick released a personal ten-point agenda, entitled 'Wake Up America,' put out, according to her office, "to alert and educate Americans to terrorist threats here at home posed by radical Islamic extremists." Point number four in the agenda states, "Will call for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) 501(c)(3) non-profit status which restricts 'lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.'" Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
 BY TAWFIK HAMID Recently, the Bush administration opened up a sad new front in the war on terrorism: a battle against words. Yes, the federal government has begun a concerted effort to make certain terms effectively off-limits in official communications. It's all included in a new memo prepared by the Extremist Messaging Branch of the National Counter Terrorism Center, called "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication." "It's not what you say but what they hear," says the memo, in bold, italic lettering. Among the verboten (or think-twice-before-you-say-them) words: "Jihadist" and "Mujahedeen" (which should be replaced by "violent extremist" or "terrorist") and "Islamo-fascism." In the eyes of the feds, the use of such terminology boosts support for radicals by giving them an air of religious credibility, and turning off moderate Muslims who might otherwise sympathize with our anti-terror cause. As a Muslim reformer - who once counted himself among the world's Islamists and jihadists before turning away from terrorism and toward liberalism - I consider this a tragically flawed understanding of the war on terrorism in which we are now engaged. Read more ...Source: NY Daily NewsH/T: Shariah Finance Watch
A French film championing freedom of expression against attempts by Muslim activists to censor caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed highlighted a key front in the culture wars at the Cannes festival. "It's Hard Being Loved By Jerks" by Daniel Leconte takes as its subject a bitter legal battle by the editor of a French weekly who was acquitted last year on charges of offending Muslims for reprinting the offending cartoons. Read more ...Source: Islam in Europe
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Monday that Paris had resumed contacts with Hamas. "It would be hard to say the contrary," Kouchner told Europe 1 radio when asked to confirm a report in Le Figaro newspaper on French contacts with Hamas.
According to AFP, Kouchner defended the contacts as essential for French diplomacy in the region, while insisting they remained limited. "These are not relations, they are contacts," he said. "We are not the only ones to have them. We are not charged with any kind of negotiation."
He added: "We have to be able to talk if we want to play a role, if we want our emissaries to be able to get into Gaza." Source: Al BawabaBernard Kouchner
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
By David Nordell Rachel Ehrenfeld is completely right to point out in her article just published here, 'The Saudi Spell,' the risks attached to the newly-announced policy of the Bush Administration to promote nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia. However much the United States (and European countries, led by Britain) try to pretend that Saudi Arabia is a friend and ally of the democratic West, the Saudis are fair-weather friends at the very best, and for the foreseeable future, the onus should be entirely on them to prove the extent and strength of their friendship with the democratic world. Read more ...Source: Terror Finance Blog
An English-language Web site that unabashedly promotes the work of Islamic terrorists has responded to a FOXNews.com profile of the site by assailing "the Kuffaar behind FOX News." Kuffaar, roughly translated, means "unbelievers." Read more ...Source: Fox News
SIX Australian-based Muslim clerics who are leaders of the Islamic community in the country are on the payroll of the Saudi Government, receiving allowances of up to $2000 a month. The Australian can reveal for the first time the identity of the clerics - some paid through the Saudi embassy in Canberra, others directly from Riyadh's Dawah (preaching) Office - who receive between 3500 and 7000 Saudi riyal ($1975) a month. The payments to the six - who include former Howard government adviser Amin Hady and Melbourne Somali imam Isse Musse - are part of Saudi Arabia's multi-billion-dollar campaign to transform its hardline image in the West. However, Sheik Hady told The Australian there were as many as 14 others in the country being paid by the Saudis. The other four clerics on the list provided early last year by the embassy to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade are understood to be Yousef Hussein, from al-Taqwa Mosque in Melbourne's southwest; Indian imam Mohammad Anas, from Auburn's Omar Mosque in Sydney's west; Mohammad Mahet Dahir, from the Albanian Australian Islamic Society; and West Australian Somali community leader Mohammad Abdullah Ahmed. Security contacts say ASIO held no concerns about the clerics. Saudi Arabia has pumped more than $120 million into Australia since the 1970s to fund mosques, Islamic groups and clerics to propagate Wahhabism, the puritanical brand of Islam espoused by al-Qa'ida. The Malaysian and Indonesian governments have also funded Islamic initiatives in Australia. Sheik Hady defended the allowance he has received since his arrival in Australia more than 25 years ago, saying it came with no strings attached. "So far, they never tell any of the preachers what to say and what to do," said the Indonesian imam at Zetland Mosque, in Sydney's inner south. "We are fully independent of what we do ... they never instruct that this is what we should teach and this is what we should not. "I don't think there is any notion with Wahhabism being imposed by anyone." He refused to be drawn on how much money he received from the Saudis, but said there were as many as 20 clerics on Riyadh's books. "There are many - there are 15 to 20 people," he said. While Sheik Hady refused to name others on the Saudi payroll, it is understood that Canberra cleric Mohammad Swaiti - revealed in April last year praising jihadists in a sermon - was being paid by Riyadh. Sheik Hussein said he dealt directly with Riyadh's Dawah Office, which employed him on its programs to teach Islam before he migrated to Australia 23 years ago. The Jordanian-born imam, a graduate of Saudi Arabia's Islamic University of Madinah, said he gave his allowance from Riyadh to the community. "There's an opinion about taking money for teaching Koran and is it halal (permissible) or haram (forbidden)," he said in an interview conducted in Arabic and English. Asked if he received any orders about what to preach, he said: "No, we're Muslim, we don't say what we want, we say what the Koran and the prophet Mohammed want us to understand and to say, and that is what we teach the people. We don't teach people our opinion." Sheik Dahir migrated to Australia a decade ago after graduating from King Saud University in Riyadh, and admitted having received an allowance from the embassy, but said he was no longer on the payroll. Sheik Anas said he received an "irregular" monthly clerical allowance of between $1500 and $1600 for "for the betterment of Muslims on the grounds of religious education".
 ONDON -- "This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can't afford to suggest that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.
The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side? Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that "the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leadership, among others, that Muslims could not have the technological know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-sports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of Al Qaeda's guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al Qaeda's own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings)? Why all the talk about American military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the present discontents? Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn't very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Koranic analysts. For a vast number of "believing" Muslim men, "Islam" stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God — the fear more than the love, one suspects — but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of "their" women; the sermons delivered by their mullahs of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over — "Westoxicated" — by the liberal Western-style way of life. Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or so in growing radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief." These Islamists — we must get used to this word, "Islamists," meaning those who are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from the more general and politically neutral "Muslim" — include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Shiite revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world. This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington's thesis about the clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists' project is turned not only against the West and "the Jews," but also against their fellow Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there's little love lost between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal. Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a fictionalized Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to blame all its troubles on the West and, in particular, the United States. Then as now, some of these criticisms were well-founded; no room here to rehearse the geopolitics of the cold war and America's frequently damaging foreign policy "tilts," to use the Kissinger term, toward (or away from) this or that temporarily useful (or disapproved-of) nation-state, or America's role in the installation and deposition of sundry unsavory leaders and regimes. But I wanted then to ask a question that is no less important now: Suppose we say that the ills of our societies are not primarily America's fault, that we are to blame for our own failings? How would we understand them then? Might we not, by accepting our own responsibility for our problems, begin to learn to solve them for ourselves? Many Muslims, as well as secularist analysts with roots in the Muslim world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks Muslim voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist hijacking of their religion. Yesterday's hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, a k a Cat Stevens) are improbably repackaging themselves as today's pussycats. An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: "The disease that is in us, is from us." A British Muslim writes, "Islam has become its own enemy." A Lebanese friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that in the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, public criticism of Islamism has become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need for a Reformation in the Muslim world. I'm reminded of the way noncommunist socialists used to distance themselves from the tyrannical socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless, the first stirrings of this counterproject are of great significance. If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar. Many of them speak of another Islam, their personal, private faith. The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
 By BARRY GEWEN Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji are two of the most prominent and outspoken critics of what they and others see as “mainstream Islam.” Brilliant, dynamic women — the overused word “charismatic” is not inappropriate for either one — they have each rebelled against a Muslim upbringing to become public figures with large and devoted followings. Both are successful authors: Ms. Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, “Infidel,” was a New York Times best seller; Ms. Manji’s combination memoir-polemic, “The Trouble With Islam Today,” has been published in almost 30 countries. They are firm and unyielding in their support for the West, feminism, reason, freedom — and they have paid a price: both have been targets of death threats and have required protection; in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s case, around-the-clock protection. Yet though they are allies on one level, their approaches to Islam are strikingly different, with one working outside the religion and one within. Neither one can be considered a spokeswoman for a significant Muslim constituency in the Middle East. (Indeed, their most sympathetic audiences are probably Western.) But their differences have implications for all the big issues the West grapples with in considering the Muslim world. How much popular support do terrorists have? Is a secular Middle East possible, and what’s the best way to promote it? Is Islam itself an enemy of the West? Ms. Hirsi Ali is an avowed atheist whose criticisms can be seen as attacks not only on radical Islamism but on the religion of Islam over all. George W. Bush was wrong, she says, when he announced that Islam was being held hostage by a terrorist minority: “Islam is being held hostage by itself.” About the 9/11 attacks, she declared: “This is Islam,” and “not just Islam, this was the core of Islam.” The attacks forced her to decide “which side was I on?” she writes in “Infidel.” And further, “Where did I stand on Islam?” Her book is the story of how she chose the West. For Ms. Manji, there has been no such either-or choice. She is a practicing Muslim who — though she can be as caustic about her coreligionists as Ms. Hirsi Ali — seeks to change her faith from within. As founder and director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, she assists other maverick writers and scholars who dissent within their communities. “What I want,” Ms. Manji has said, “is an Islamic Reformation,” and in contrast to Ms. Hirsi Ali, she adds, there is “no need to choose between Islam and the West.” Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of “Infidel,” says the positions of the two women “can’t possibly be reconciled.” Both Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji come from non-Arab Muslim backgrounds. By itself, this may be one reason for their opposition to Islamic orthodoxy, which they see as inherently Arab, or Arab-dominated. Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Somalia, and lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya before fleeing to the Netherlands when she was 22 to avoid an arranged marriage. When her family was in Saudi Arabia, she remembers her father’s complaining that the Saudis had perverted the true Islam. “He hated Saudi judges and Saudi law,” she writes. “He thought it was all barbaric, all Arab desert culture.” Ms. Manji was born in 1968 in Uganda, but her family, part Egyptian and part Indian, moved to Canada when she was 4 to escape Idi Amin. She is even more insistent than Ms. Hirsi Ali in drawing a distinction between Islam and Arab tribal culture, its “dictatorship from the desert.” Who elected the Saudi monarch “to be Islam’s steward?” she asks. “We’re not in the Saudi sand dunes anymore.” Ms. Manji has a broader and more flexible idea than Ms. Hirsi Ali of what Islam is and can be. Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence.” Ms. Manji, on the other hand, is convinced that her religion can escape what she sees as its Arab domination. “We need a take-no-prisoners debate about Saudi Arabia, a cauldron of duplicity.” The writer Paul Berman suggests that the difference between them may be due to the fact that Ms. Manji was raised in the warm, liberal, welcoming precincts of British Columbia, where religion could be a comfort rather than a burden, where pluralism was an assumption, a fact of life. (Ms. Manji was kicked out of her Islamic religious school for asking too many questions, but before that she had been cared for at a Baptist church, and at age 8 even won its Most Promising Christian of the Year award.) Ms. Hirsi Ali’s early years, by contrast, consisted of dictatorship, war, patriarchy, genital cutting, confinement and beatings so severe that she once ended up in a hospital with a fractured skull. Ms. Manji offers her own support for Mr. Berman’s conjecture: “Had I grown up in a Muslim country, I’d probably be an atheist in my heart.” No element more thoroughly informs the work of both women than feminism; its influence on their thinking can hardly be overstated, and in this sense they might be considered crown jewels in the history of the modern women’s movement. Yet because they are risking their lives for their beliefs — constantly, every day — they may have more in common with antitotalitarian dissidents like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn than with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. As feminists, Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji are demanding more than equality; they are very self-consciously challenging the foundations of an entire way of life. “The most important explanation for the mental and material backlog we Muslims find ourselves in,” Ms. Hirsi Ali has said, “should probably be sought in the sexual morality that we were force-fed from birth.” Her first book, a collection of essays, was entitled “The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.” In the Netherlands, she devoted herself to helping Muslim women, in her words, “develop the vocabulary of resistance,” and she continues the fight from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she is a resident fellow. Ms. Manji, too, sees feminism as the linchpin for Islamic reform. “Empowering women,” she says, “is the way to awaken the Muslim world.” But she is not only a committed feminist (bad enough in the eyes of Muslim conservatives). She is also an open lesbian — a rebel twice over. The difference between them “really is between those outside of a faith and those still within it,” says Ms. Manji’s friend the writer Andrew Sullivan. “Hirsi Ali has abandoned faith for atheism. Irshad has taken the harder path, I believe.” The two women have known each other for four years, since Ms. Hirsi Ali interviewed Ms. Manji for a Dutch newspaper, and they discussed their continuing relationship in e-mail interviews. They immediately bonded — understandably enough. “I could not believe she was not an atheist,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “and she could not believe that I had become one.” When Time magazine named Ms. Hirsi Ali one of its “100 most influential people” for 2005, it was Ms. Manji who wrote the comment on her. Ms. Manji admires Ms. Hirsi Ali’s determination to speak truth to power, saying that “Ayaan’s defiant distrust of Muslim authorities can help generate debates that move us closer to honesty.” But, inevitably, the differences between them create tensions since, in their eyes, what is at stake is nothing less than the future of Islam. Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “Irshad is the most admirable person I know who is trying to achieve change from within,” but she agrees with Mr. Hitchens that “from an intellectual, logical perspective,” Ms. Manji’s religious faith and her own secularism can’t be reconciled. Mr. Hitchens himself believes that it’s a self-defeating exercise for a declared lesbian to try to bring about an Islamic Reformation. Ms. Manji detects a certain incoherence in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s views: “She wants Muslims to reform, but she also seems to believe that Islam is inherently retrograde.” Ms. Manji says her own position “is that Muslims can reform while remaining faithful precisely because the Koran has the raw materials to be thoughtful and humane. It’s we Muslims who must develop the courage to change.” For her part, Ms. Hirsi Ali replies, “I make a distinction between Islam and Muslims.” That is, “I picture the defeat of Islam as large swaths of Muslims crossing the line and accepting the value system of secular humanism. This is not a matter of one religion defeating another, it’s a matter of value systems which cannot coexist.” Clearly, this is a debate of importance not only to Muslims but to non-Muslims as well, and for a Westerner listening in, the best way to understand it may be to translate it into the language of European history. Irshad Manji sees herself as moving Islam into the 16th century; Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants to move it into the 18th. It’s as if Luther and Voltaire were living at the same time. Source: The New York Times H/T: AC
Continuing in our series of analysis and reposts in the debate over terminology to define Islamic terrorists is commentary from Patrick Poole at American Thinker, and Jim Guirard of the TrueSpeak organization. Poole’s piece was published a few weeks after the Doug Farah piece in Part 2, and shortly thereafter, Jim Guirard responded (more to Farah’s revelation of Stephen Coughlin’s analysis) with “TrueSpeak Responds.” Read more ...Part 1Part 2Source: Creeping Sharia
By Atlas We must purge this satanic and misogynist "custom" from Western societies at once. AT ONCE, I tell you. It must be snuffed out like the life of these girls dying at the hands of their Islamic familial oppressors. Read more ...Source: Atlas
By Daniel Greenfield
Thursday, May 15, 2008 Unlike the Egyptian Copt, the Iranian Bahai, the Kashmiri Hindu, the Kosovo Serb, the moderate Muslim or the Gaza Jew-- the Polar Bear is not an endangered species. Unlike even the native Londoner or Parisian who still speaks his or her native tongue and attends a church rather than a mosque, the Polar Bear isn’t even threatened. The Polar Bear population has actually been on the rise and while theoretical climate change computer models may claim that the Polar Bear will be in trouble-- all told the Polar has it pretty good. For one thing, unlike the threatened populations mentioned above, the Polar Bear can fairly safely cross from floe to floe without expecting to encounter a suicide bomber, an Iranian missile or some hate imprinted denizen of the Middle East who has been fasting for a month and thinks Polar Bears are an abomination unless draped in black sackcloth. That is the Polar Bear is fairly safe because unlike the rest of us, it lives far up North and well away from any major Islamic population centers, which are the real threat. While liberals have been vociferously insisting that the “mythical” threat of terrorism cooked up by Karl Rove in an ideological laboratory somewhere with a Bunsen Burner and a team of cooking experts is no match for the “real threat” of Global Warming, the casualty tolls from Islamic Terrorism vs Global Warming would testify otherwise. I would not pity the Polar Bear myself. For one thing he is better adapted to dealing with the real world than the liberals who would protect him are. When a Polar Bear is attacked, he does not blame himself for the attack or agonize over whether he has any right to defend himself or not. He does not agonize over whether his species has any right to exist or wonder why his attackers hate him. As such it is likely that Polar Bears will outlive Western liberals, once the latter have succeed in finally decimating the societies they live in and the civil and military elements that protect them from the consequences of their own suicidally willful stupidities-- of which declaring the Polar Bear an endangered species is only a minor footnote. If Liberals had any sense at all, instead of placing Polar Bears on the endangered species list, they should be placing themselves there. After all the number of countries and places, habitats if you will, where one can be an Atheist, a Homosexual, mock religion, draw cartoons, engage in transgressive performance art or demand that your country surrender to the enemy is rapidly shrinking. It doesn’t take a computer model to estimate that the number of places where one can successfully be a liberal will continue going down as countries grow more and more Islamically oriented. Polar Bears could better survive moving to Pasadena than Liberals could survive under an Islamic regime. But of course Polar Bears deserve protection far more than Western Dhimmitude Liberals do. After all the Polar Bears are not actively destroying their own habitats, attacking the people who are trying to protect them or otherwise ensuring their own destruction. Ultimately the worst thing about the liberal agenda is that like a virus it is self-destructive, undermining even the conditions for its own existence. In limited doses liberalism can keep a society honest. In unlimited doses it sends the society into toxic shock. More liberalism only produces the civil pollution that is a case of Liberalism frantically injecting the toxin that will kill it first and foremost. No Polar Bear would ever be that stupid.
"GO home, Osama," was not a particularly clever insult. "Go to hell, you educated pigs," was much better, although a little unexpected. Waleed Aly, a counter-terrorism expert and founding member of the new SBS comedy Salam Cafe, reckons there came a point where the racist insults he received in the street stopped offending him and started making him laugh. "The funniest thing is the one-liners you get," he said. "How can you compete with comedy like that? After a while it stops being offensive and just starts being funny." Salam Cafe, the brainchild of the show's regular panel members Mr Aly, Ahmed Imam and Susan Carland, takes a rare look at the funnier side of the issues that affect Muslims. The show includes regular comedy skits, panel discussions and, disturbingly for Australia's international image, vox pops providing viewers with an insight into some of the inaccurate perceptions of Islam. A visit to Adelaide by the show's roaming reporter and stand-up comedian Nazeem Hussein revealed some of the misconceptions. One respondent thought Islam was a country "somewhere in Iraq", while another wasn't sure what Muslims were, asking if they "eat people?" Ms Carland, a politics academic and a convert to Islam, said she believed the show would appeal to a wider audience because it took the Australian approach of self-deprecation. "People like the fact that we are willing to laugh at ourselves and our situations," she said. "You either reclaim what can be a really grim situation with humour or you get frustrated, mad and dejected." She said the panellists drew on real situations they had faced because of their faith. "The show isn't about Islam but Muslims," Ms Carland said. "We are trying to show people the human side of the religion because they seem to think we're not human. There's so much ignorance and fear." With characters such as Uncle Sam, a wildly boisterous tunic-wearing Muslim uncle, and Fatima "Teems", a teenybopper who has frequent clashes with her father, and with segments such as "Where's Osama?" and "Extremist Makeover", the show was bound to ruffle a few feathers. Although most of the feedback on the show's website was positive, some viewers did not hide their distaste. One comment read: "ur guys just destroying the religion. allah should burn ur guys in hell fire. u bastards." Another read: "I can't believe SBS are wasting taxpayer dollars on this religious propaganda." Ms Carland said she was surprised that so much of the feedback was positive. "I expected it to be a lot more 50-50," she said. "We do get emails like, 'I can't believe you Muslims are laughing' but most of what we hear is a lot more positive." Mr Aly, too, was pleased by the response. "There are a lot of people who are just happy to see Muslims on TV that are not terrorists." Salam Cafe debuted with 165,000 viewers, slightly more than Newstopia, which previously occupied the Wednesday night timeslot.
 By Rachel Ehrenfeld As if Saudis flying civilian airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington, DC, were not enough, the Bush Administration is now supporting the development of “civilian nuclear power” in Saudi Arabia. In a feeble attempt to deflect criticism, the Administration published its agreement with the Saudis to “Improve Peace And Stability In The Region Through Nuclear Cooperation,” detailing the kingdom’s commitments to participate” in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI).” This agreement, according to the While House press release (May 16), is to “ensure a smooth supply of [Saudi} energy to the world.” Judging by previous Saudi compliance with and adherence to agreements with the U.S. (like stopping funds to terrorist organizations such as Hamas), expect a Saudi nuclear weapon as fast as their trillions of petrodollars (your money) can buy. Instead of neutralizing Iran’s nuclear facilities, the U.S. now openly contributes to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. What remains to be seen is who will use its nuclear weapons against the U.S. or Israel first, the Saudis, or Iran? Read more ...Source: Terror Finance Blog
 These murderers didn't think "jihad" was something badAs intelligence agencies try to recruit Muslims, they don't want to give them the impression that they're against jihad! And of course they are making no effort whatsoever to determine what kind of "jihad" the applicants think is just great. "Intel agencies seek help recruiting immigrants," by Pamela Hess for AP, May 16 (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist): McLEAN, VA (AP) - The U.S. is its own worst enemy when it comes to the desperately important task of recruiting immigrants as spies, analysts and translators in the war on terror, new Americans are telling intelligence officials. The government's policies raise suspicions and fear in the immigrants' home countries and disturb potential recruits here who might otherwise want to help.
The U.S. knows it needs the help. At the heart of a Friday summit with immigrant groups was a stark reality: The intelligence agencies lack people who can speak the languages that are needed most, such as Arabic, Farsi and Pashtu. More importantly, the agencies lack people with the cultural awareness that enables them to grasp the nuances embedded in dialect, body language and even street graffiti. Read more ... Source: AP H/T: Jihad Watch
The American Textbook Council recently published a review on how many text books in public schools give a light touch to Middle Eastern history, Islam and Jihad. (FSM published it; you can find all five parts here.) If public school texts are alarming, what should we think about texts being provided by the Saudi government to children attending private Islamic academies? The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) is taking action regarding such a school in Fairfax County, Virginia. They've asked Fairfax County Supervisors to delay the renewal of the Islamic Saudi Academy's (ISA) lease until a review of the school's curriculum has been completed by federal officials. Read more ...Source: Family Security Matters
The U.S. needs a foreign policy that “looks at the root causes of problems and dangers.” Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that “ they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims.” He knows these movements aren’t going away anytime soon (“Those missiles aren’t going to dissolve”), but “if they decide to shift, we’re going to recognize that. That’s an evolution that should be recognized.” Read more ...Source: New York Times H/T: Jihad Watch
Many scientists — 40 percent according to a 1997 poll — believe in some form of God. This isn't big news to scientists, but might surprise people who rely on mainstream views of science. A handful of those folks — including Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate in physics and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, argue that the natural world and the world of faith are relatively separate, yet personally reconcilable domains. " I think that we are all comfortable with the idea there are plenty of things in our lives that we will deal with outside of the scientific paradigm," Phillips told about 70 members of the public who attended the discussion of these issues between himself, Shermer and AEI theologian Michael Novak. " And while I think faith is a particularly important part of our lives that we should deal with outside of the scientific paradigm, it is certainly not the only one." Phillips, a Methodist, also drew from science to make his argument in favor of God's relevance, saying physicists know there are things that are " really, really improbable, but they are not really impossible according to the laws of physics ...! From what I know about physics, it's not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it."In her booklet, philosopher Mary Midgley, who was not at the AEI event, states that science is just one worldview that has come to prevail. Science and religion need not be at odds."What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people's worldviews at most other times," she writes. "Scientism ... by contrast, cuts [the setting of human life in] context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself. It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning ... that makes science and religion look like competitors today."Worldviews that transcend that competition or dichotomy are offered in the booklet by Kenneth Miller, Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy and Stuart Kauffman. (Miller, the lead witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial of 2005 (in which Judge John E. Jones III barred intelligent design from being taught in a Pennsylvania public school district's science classes), takes the classic Darwinian "grandeur in this view of life" approach. God is behind it all.) He rejects claims that the God hypothesis makes no sense, stating that "... to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organized religion would be like rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity."Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, takes a slightly New Age tack, saying we must "heal" the schism between science and religion by "reinventing the sacred" and evolving from a supernatural God to a "new sense of a fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe." In other words, he suggests that we can get around the divide between science and God if we come up with a new concept for God that focuses on the wonders of nature, among other things. This new concept is a global cultural imperative, Kauffman writes, if we are to overcome fundamentalist fears and reunite reason with humanity and the mysteries of life. A middle ground that incorporates science more than the other God-friendly writers is offered by Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan. Science hasn't necessarily made belief obsolete, " but instead you must find a science-friendly, science-compatible God," he writes. And that is possible, he claims, calling this entity a " scientific Creator." Hoodbhoy thinks that God can be seen as operating within the laws of physics, tweaking outcomes in small ways that have big impacts by relying on phenomena we have observed already in the universe, such as the butterfly effect (in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings alters the atmosphere in a way that ultimately alters the path of a tornado). In his own words, here are some things She (yes, Hoodbhoy uses the female pronoun) could do, Hoodbhoy writes: "Extraordinary, but legitimate, interventions in the physical world permit quantum tunneling through cosmic wormholes or certain symmetries to snap spontaneously. It would be perfectly fair for a science-savvy God to use nonlinear dynamics so that tiny fluctuations quickly build up to earthshaking results — the famous 'butterfly effect' of deterministic chaos theory."Hoodbhoy ends by saying that God is neither dead nor about to die. There is still plenty of "space for a science-friendly God as well as for 'deeply religious non-believers' like Einstein ... Unsure of why they happen to exist, humans are likely to scour the heavens forever in search of meaning." A total of 5,000 copies of the booklet became available on May 2. Free copies can be obtained at www.templeton.org. Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com
The recent DHS policy to eliminate words like jihad, mujahideen, and caliphate from U.S. counter-terrorist language (so as not to legitimize self-proclaimed jihadists) has been praised by pro-Islamist groups and questioned by anti-Islamist groups. Are taqiya-wise Wahhabists behind the new Western lexicon? Read more ...Source: Creeping Sharia
Part II of our look at some of the history behind the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy to ban or replace words like jihad delves further into Walid Phares’ notion that “this theory of Hiraba and Mufsidoon are representing the views of classical Wahabis and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Read more ...Source: Creeping Sharia
I don't understand the world. Won't someone help me!!! "Bomber who struck Canadian troops was 10 years old!"I said it before and I will emphasis it one more time, it's not Islam so much as the culture in the Middle-East that is seriously warped. Military sources say a bomb that wounded two Canadian soldiers near Kandahar on Friday was carried by an 10-year-old boy and was detonated by remote control, killing the boy.
Few details of the attack were immediately available. The soldiers were on foot patrol at about 10 a.m. local time when the bomb exploded.
The Canadian Press quoted a military spokeswoman, Capt. Amber Bineau, as saying the boy is thought to have been wearing an explosive vest when he walked up to the patrol.
She condemned the attack as a "last ditch-attempt" by militants to disrupt the progress of Afghan and NATO forces in establishing security in the country.
"These types of attacks demonstrate a weakness in the insurgency and do not impede the resolve of those who work to make Kandahar province a safe and stable environment," she said in a statement.
There was no official confirmation of the bomber's age or how the bomb was triggered.
In a separate attack not involving NATO forces Wednesday, a suicide bomber dressed in a burka struck a police station in the western province of Farah, killing 12 people and wounding 27 others.
Initial reports said the bomber was a woman, but the Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said it was carried out by a man named Mullah Khalid wearing the burka as a disguise. Anyone who would use a 10 year old boy for this type of action should be shot on the spot. No trial, no excuse, just bang! End of problem. As an example here is how they deal with kidnappers in China.Kidnapper and Chinese Negotiator ...  'I have 3 demands or I'll kill the boy!'  Negotiators assess the situation from next door.  Head Negotiator dispatched  Negotiations begin  Negotiations concluded Here in the West, we would block off the street, take 12 hours to talk him out of it, spend $5 million giving him a fair trial, and pay his food and lodging for life. No wonder their products are cheaper than ours. Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com
By Patrick Poole Dayton NBC affiliate WDTN-TV covers our story about international Islamic hate sheikh Khalid Yasin's speech tomorrow evening at Sinclair Community College. For more background on Yasin's hatemongering, extremist statements and virulent conspiracy theories, see our original post. And just for clarification, this report states that I didn't return a request for an interview, which might be because I'm traveling out-of-state, and reporter Holly Samuels emailed me at 2:18pm for a 5pm report. Glad she gave me plenty of time to respond! Source: Central Ohioans Against Terrorism
West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have apologised for accusing the makers of a Channel 4 documentary of distortion. The apology and the promise of £100,000 were made at the High Court on Thursday. Read more ...Source: BBC H/T: Islam in Europe
By Adrian Morgan Dominic Whiteman has been European Director of the private intelligence-gathering network, VIGIL www.vigilnetwork.com since its inception in 2005. VIGIL was set up in the wake of the 7/7 London al Qaeda attacks by Dominic Whiteman and others, originally to form a bridge between former military and intelligence personnel and the authorities. VIGIL soon became an international network of experts - ranging from linguistic experts to banking experts - and involved itself in the secret provision of intelligence to mostly British and American authorities with the aim of preventing extremism and terrorism. During his time as head of VIGIL Europe, some changes have happened, particularly in British society: the extreme Islamist sect Hizb ut-Tahrir has come closer to being banned, legislation has been changed on UK libraries' stocking of extreme literature and Tamil Tiger funding networks and their kingpins across Europe have come to the attention of the police. Read more ...Source: Family Security MattersH/T: Gramfan
 Gregorious Nekschot is quite the equal opportunity offender, having penned cartoons offensive to Catholics and Jews (e.g., Muhammad molesting Anne Frank) alongside his emphasis on lampooning Islam and Muhammad. What did he get arrested for? Lampooning Islam and Muhammad. Thomas Landen at the Brussels Journal has the story: The Dutch authorities have arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot (a pseudonym. Nekschot means deathblow, litt: "shot in the back of the neck"). The judicial authorities in Amsterdam said yesterday that the cartoonist was arrested as a suspect for the criminal offense of "publishing cartoons which are discriminating for Muslims and people with dark skin." Prior to the Islam-related complaint, the "dark skin" aspect doesn't seem to have mattered as much. And by the way, how does a cartoon discriminate? The cartoonist was arrested on Tuesday, while the police searched his house for "discriminating evidence." His computer, backups, usb sticks, mobile phone and a number of drawings were confiscated. Nekschot was released two days later but it is possible that he will be charged following a complaint in 2005 by the Dutch imam Abdul Jabbar van de Ven, an indigenous Dutchman who converted to Islam. Read more ... Source: Spits (Dutch)H/T: Dhimmi Watch
On May 11, 2008, the secular government in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) finalized a deal with the Taliban groups for the implementation of shari'a in the province's seven districts. The Pashtun nationalist government in the NWFP, which came to power last month, had vowed to talk to the Taliban in order to establish peace in the region. The talks were held between the government, Pakistani Taliban and the outlawed Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e -Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Shari'a). Read more ...Source: MEMRI
Conservatives in the Egyptian parliament have made female genital mutilation (circumcision) legal again in Egypt. The conservatives succeeded in striking several laws that had been passed by the parliament's religious Shura Council in the past. The laws canceled also include a law limiting marriage age to 18 and up, a law permitting a mother to register a child on her name and a law allowing neighbors of a family that beats its children to report the beatings to the police. One of the parliament's members said that the law permitting a mother to register a child on her name "encourages adultery." A Cairo appellate judge who is also the legal advisor to the Council for the Mother and Child said that the decision to strike the laws contravened international agreements signed by Egypt. Read more ...Source: Israel National NewsH/T: Atlas
An Afghan hijacker who forced an airliner to fly to Britain is now working at Heathrow, it has been disclosed. Nazamuddin Mohammidy, 34, was one of a gang of nine that threatened to blow up an internal flight in Afghanistan, along with 173 passengers and crew, unless they were granted political asylum. Read more ...Source: Telegraph
 A leading Republican congresswoman is urging President Bush to use his scheduled visit with Saudi Arabia's king on Friday to lobby for reform in Saudi textbooks. U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, R-NC, wrote to President Bush May 5 expressing concern that Saudi reforms may be focused internally and not on alleviating the threat radicalized Saudi citizens pose internationally. "While Saudi Arabia is our ally in the Global War on Terrorism, the textbooks used to educate their children, as well as some of our children who attend schools receiving Wahhabi-funds, are spread a dangerous ideology that attacked us on 9/11 and continues to threaten the United States and its allies around the world," Myrick wrote. It is not clear whether the President will act on Myrick's request or whether the Saudis would listen. His trip to Saudi Arabia reportedly is focused on marking the 75th anniversary of formal relations between the two countries. President Bush also is expected to press King Abdullah to increase oil production. A similar request in January was ignored. Few would argue with the need to decrease oil prices. But Myrick's letter was meant to remind President Bush there are other issues with the Saudis that require discussion. Read more ...Source: IPT News
 Source: Atlas
 By Tarek Fatah In August, 1990, 45 representatives from Muslim countries, under the auspices of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, signed the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. The result leaves much to be desired. Although successive Islamic declarations on human rights have tried to present themselves as compatible with the principle of universal basic rights, a number of severe contradictions exist between these declarations and Western constitutionalism. The most important is that Islam does not accept separating religion from the state and societal affairs. According to Articles 23 and 24 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, all rights and freedoms are subject to Islamic sharia. In this framework, human rights lose their unconditional character and their focus on the protection of the individual vis-a-vis any kind of power. Hence, within Islamic states there is an unavoidable blurring of religious and political authority, which has an important impact on the implementation and interpretation of human rights. Consider Morocco, for example. It is a relatively secular state, yet Morocco's King Hassan presents himself as a direct descendent of the Prophet. In Iran the role of Islam in defining the state is made clear in its constitution. Article 2 stipulates that "The Islamic Republic is a system based on belief in: The One God, His exclusive sovereignty and right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands ..." Read more ...Source: The National Post H/T: Shariah Finance Watch
At YouTube they remove anti-jihad videos at the merest whiff of protest from Muslims. But they have no qualms about hosting a channel for Harkat Ul Mujahideen, a group that is listed by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization, with dozens of snuff films and jihad videos: YouTube - HarkatulMujahideen's Channel. Read more ...Source: LGFH/T: Shariah Finance WatchUpdate: Apparently YouTube will remove anything that might offend GihadisDhimmiTube
Latest recipient of The Dhimmi Award
By Jeffrey Imm What do the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), and the Daily Kos all have in common? They are all seeking to define the enemy as other than "jihadists". Read more ...Source: Counterterrorism Blog
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