Surrender. And they know the enormity of what they're doing -- that's why they're hiding it.
Absurd Britannia Alert: "Sharia Law Sneaked Into Labour Budget," by Kirsty Buchanan for the Sunday Express, December 13 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
THE Treasury plans to rewrite Britain's tax rules to usher in a new wave of Sharia law for the country's financial system.The one-line revelation is buried in the 212-page pre-Budget report.
It is among a string of startling details which barely merit a mention in Alistair Darling's controversial mini-Budget - prompting fresh accusations that Labour is "burying bad news".
The Government wants to tap into the fast-growing Sharia finance market, set to top £205billion a year, and turn London into the "global gateway for Islamic finance".
Many conventional financial products are not Sharia compliant because Muslim clerics view conventional loans, which involve interest payments, as sinful.
The UK Government was one of the first Western countries to issue a state-backed sukuk, an Islamic bond. It now wants to rewrite tax laws to stop Muslim businessmen being unfairly taxed when they try to raise money on their companies.
Conventional loans allow them to take equity out of their business, using the property as collateral, but to be Sharia compliant a Muslim "sells" the business to the bank and then rents it back. That leaves the businessman facing a bill for capital gains tax and the Treasury wants to level the tax playing field.
Mohammed Amin, head of Islamic finance at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: "The UK has become the leading Western country in Islamic finance by taking a series of measures to ensure that Islamic finance is taxed no worse and no better than conventional finance.
"The pre-Budget report continues this progress by including measures to equalise the tax treatment of property refinancing transactions." Ministers are also considering issuing Government bonds to Islamic banks to help them comply with new financial regulations....
Yes, the Islamisation of the British economy continues apace, under the dhimmi 'leadership' of Labour PM Brown.
Here is an excerpt from an article by Dan Roberts, "Castles in the Sand":-
"The Dubai crisis has also thrown a new name into the lexicon of toxic instruments. Just as credit derivatives helped to exacerbate the sub-prime crisis by obscuring who was ultimately exposed to losses, the use of Islamic finance has complicated the reckoning. "Sukuk bonds" are designed to get around religious laws banning the payment of interest for money lending. But one of the most volatile debts in the Dubai World standstill is a $3.5bn Islamic bond due to be repaid in December.
"Because Sukuk bonds replace interest payments with a promise to share profits, investors are effectively owners of the underlying assets, rather than traditional secured creditors.
"Default on this scale has never been tested before, echoing the nervousness in derivative markets when the banking crisis first started. HSBC estimates there is $822bn Islamic finance debt outstanding in the world."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/dan-roberts-on-business-blog/2009/nov/27/dubai-castles-in-the-sand
NGO: Hamas digs up Christian corpses for "polluting the earth":
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1260447421970&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
...And again Nu (Islamic) Labour betray the same people who foolishly voted them into power. The same Labour government that promised the people a vote on the Lisbon Treaty but pushed it through without listening to us. It's as if the whole EU project is being designed as a future Caliphate.....
Role on next year when Labour will be shunned at the elections and the Tories come to power...oh wait ... power? Labour already signed that all away to Brussells.....
I fear the time is approaching faster who a revolution in Europe. I still believe it will start in an Eastern European country (or maybe even Italy) and will spread.
Dark days are ever closer.....
And our Muslim friends wait patiently for it to happen.....
From the story:
The Government wants to tap into the fast-growing Sharia finance market, set to top £205billion a year, and turn London into the "global gateway for Islamic finance".
...
The UK Government was one of the first Western countries to issue a state-backed sukuk, an Islamic bond. It now wants to rewrite tax laws to stop Muslim businessmen being unfairly taxed when they try to raise money on their companies.
About this, Spencer editorializes:
"they know the enormity of what they're doing -- that's why they're hiding it."
This is a reckless observation, but it's a logical explanation to fill the vacuum caused by the lack of an adequate explanation for the West's continuing ignorance of the problem of Islam. England isn't alone in this. As I noted back in November:
From the Wall Street Journal, Friday, November 20:
General Electric Co. became the first major U.S. company to sell an Islamic bond, paving the way for other Western firms to tap religiously minded investors in the Middle East and elsewhere.
On Thursday, the company's GE Capital unit sold a five-year, $500 million Islamic bond, or sukuk, and suggested more was to come.
"We intend to be regular issuers in the sukuk market and are heartened by the support we have seen in this first transaction," GE's senior vice president and treasurer, Kathy Cassidy, said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574545530119764754.html
Are we to conclude, pace Spencer, that the pleasantly upper middle class Kathy Cassidy, and the whole of General Electric whom she represents, also "know the enormity" of what they are doing? And that the Wall Street Journal, which reported this utterly absent the slightest hint of any critical faculty, also knows it's evil but approves anyway, perhaps because they also think it's good for the Western economy?
There are other, subtler, more complex, less simplistic explanations for why Labour buried this detail: it's called knowing dimly that something is politically controversial, without nevertheless being as aware as Spencer is of the "enormity" of what one is doing.
To accuse the West that continues to ignore the problem of Islam and continues to deal with Muslims in various ways -- to accuse those hundreds of thousands who actively do this, and the millions who continue passively to countenance and enable this -- to accuse all these people of evil -- for that is what it means to "know the enormity" of colluding with Islamic sharia for money -- reflects either a strange paucity of analytical sophistication, or a profound alienation from one's own sociopolitical structures. I can't think of a third explanation for this.
Of course I meant "I fear the time is approaching faster for revolution in Europe. I still believe it will start in an Eastern European country (or maybe even Italy) and will spread."
Silly VJ for chatting away while typing.....
:)
Sukuk bonds used by the DubaiWorl have collapsed and the word bond itself means interest which is haram to the Muslims. Islamic banking or normal banking is the same and to add "Islamic" before the word banking means Mohammad aka Allah makes sukuk bonds immune to financial problems. Go ask the Dubaiworld. Idiotic!
Funny how development in the muslim middle east didn't seem to be hindered by the lack of islamic compliant financial instruments in prior years.
Development?
Of course, the following site is useful for monitoring 'Islamic finance' issues:
http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/
Hesp, a third explanation would be short-sightedness in the pursuit of commerce. Britain sees all those high-rolling sheiks and Arab businessmen, awash in petro-dollars, and thinks it can tap into the wealth by become the banking center of the world for Islamic financial products. Those engaged in the effort--British bankers, lawyers, et al who cater to their Persian Gulf clients--are are focused on benefiting their own industry, and they haven't bothered to look under the rock and see all the worms of sharia finance.
Incidently, we have the same problem in the U.S. with major corporations and law firms creating divisions/offices to support Islamic financial products.
dISCOVER A FRENCH EVANGELICAL BLOG ON RADICAL ISLAM
www.avraidire.wordpress.com
I had hoped that the Dubai collapse would disabuse clueless Westerners of the idea that "Shari'ah finance" represented any sort of viable model, but I suppose I was too optimistic.
That we should be asked to embrace a model that has brought nothing but inertia and grinding poverty—with only the short-term example of sheikdoms awash in unearned petro-dollars as an exception—is the height of insanity.
One small point, from above:
Surrender. And they know the enormity of what they're doing -- that's why they're hiding it.
..............
I *don't* think they understand the enormity of what they are doing—not at all. Of course, they do realize that many Britons will be somewhat uneasy with the very idea of Shari'ah finance, but I don't think they have any idea of the ultimate ramifications.
American Delight:
"Hesp, a third explanation would be short-sightedness in the pursuit of commerce. Britain sees all those high-rolling sheiks and Arab businessmen, awash in petro-dollars, and thinks it can tap into the wealth by become the banking center of the world for Islamic financial products."
My two explanations weren't meant to explain the problem of why the West continues to deal amicably with Muslims, but rather to explain why anti-Islam critics (including those who insist they are not "anti-Islam" per se) continue to misapprehend that problem. And they continue to misapprehend the problem by offering -- or often by logically implying -- one of only two ways to explain it (or sometimes by vacillating between these two ways):
1) all these Westerners who continue to deal amicably with Muslims are stupid
2) all these Westerners who continue to deal amicably with Muslims are evil.
I'm afraid your third explanation as you describe it falls into slot #1 -- unless the Westerners seduced by those oil-rich sheiks are fully aware of the evil of Islam, and yet still deal amicably and profitably with them. If they are fully aware, they must be evil. If they are not fully aware, then they must be stupid -- or lazy. There is no third explanation within this paradigm. Your description that the Westerners involved "haven't bothered to look under the rock and see all the worms of sharia finance" amounts to laziness. It doesn't suffice to explain the amount of denial going on throughout the West. Hundreds of thousands of relatively decent intelligent politicians and businessmen and academics throughout the West cannot all be stupid, or lazy, or a combination of both, only about this one gigantic problem. If sharia law were the system of a trans-national racist White Power society, for example, there would have been long ago investigations and an accelerated learning curve, followed swiftly by international censure, condemnations and punishment.
So your description is no excuse for this laxity and disregard. It is more than mere laziness, more than mere stupidity -- and it cannot be evil. Rather, it is a phenomenon we must describe as quantum ignorance, a more or less intelligent worldview that has built up a complex reasoning to endow Muslims with extra-ordinary deference, privileges and respect -- all hinging on the PC MC doctrine of anti-racism, since Muslims are perceived to be an ethnic people (or collection of ethnic peoples), augmented by an escalating but semi-conscious fear of Muslim violence.
This is not right on topic, but in the following story (in German), Switzerland's SVP, the largest of the two political parties responsible for the brave and Churchillian initiative to ban Recep Erdogan's bayonets from Swiss soil, have come up with a new proposal for a referendum: one that would, based on the principle that the Swiss people's voice should be the ultimate authority over Swiss matters, would prevent Swiss laws and popular initiatives from being invalidated by quaint international treaties, bodies and Eurabian activist judges.
Compare that to the British elite's surrender... It seems clear to me that the Swiss are slowly accomplishing peacefully what, one day, victims of betrayal by their political elites (the Brits and the Swedes more than anyone else) will be forced to try to accomplish by force if they don't want their countries to become new Somalias on what is now still European soil.
It all sets tax law on its head for the sole purpose of religious compliance. Worse yet, there are unintended consequences that make Sharia "lending" more attractive to investors. The unintended consequences will drain off lending pools to conventional borrowers and raise rates on conventional borrowers to compensate for the tax code advantages granted to Sharia financing.
Example: Current tax law: You have a rug business and you need a loan. The bank lends you funds or otherwise underwrites the loan. Banks don't really lend you the money, they borrow from the central bank and then sell your loan to investors. The bank then services the loan for the investors based on the spread & fees they have built into both ends of the loan.
The borrower deducts interest as an expense (if allowable by code) and the investor includes interest income (unless excluded under the code).
When and if the loan goes bad, the borrower may have to include income from relief of debt, and may take other business losses on assets used to satisfy the debt or judgment. The investor will take a capital loss as he is just an investor and not in the business of selling rugs and will deduct the allowable portion of any legal expenses paid/incurred to collect. He will be out the amount loaned, less principal payments, less the value of the moldy rugs he can get his hands on.
Now the rub.
Example: The new Sharia compliant "loans".
The widget maker now sells a portion of his business and leases it back in some sort of SILO (sale and lease back transaction). (Note for many years aggressive taxpayers have been using SILO and LILO transactions for tax evasion purposes-this new law will create loopholes big enough to run a truck through).
The tax authorities recognize that the rug business was (wink wink) not really sold, and build in some sort of non-recognition, excluding that income from tax. Thus when the rug seller "borrows", he takes a deduction for "rent" (wink wink). The investor is now a business partner (wink wink) so he now includes rental income. God, or in this case Allah, only knows if now he is allowed to take losses and deductions related to the rug business as if he is a partner? This is all fine and dandy, for the investor, if the business operates at a loss. However, if the rug business operates at a profit, then the investor who has no partnership interest past that of rent-must declare income and pay tax on profits he cannot draw upon nor ever receive. That inclusion of income would create additional basis in the "rental" transaction that will affect gain or loss on the end of the contract. Obviously, one can see the straining and pushing that will be required to push the code through the eye of the Sharia needle.
Should the loan go bad:
The rug seller will have defaulted upon a liability for "rent" (wink wink) as if he had a long term lease. The investor will sue the rug business for the outstanding receivable for "rent" (wink wink). The rug business will declare gain or loss on the sale of assets used to satisfy any judgment. The investor will now be able to take an ordinary loss (wink wink) for any deficiency in the judgment over what is due and owing. Essentially it will convert the capital loss treatment to an ordinary loss treatment. As capital losses by code are limited to the extent of gains, a capital loss may require years to recover or may never be recovered, whereas ordinary losses are always recovered in the period that they are suffered.
This analysis does not consider other complications, such as imputation of interest provisions of the code which would serve to complicate the issue. In the current simplified example if all goes well the rental expense and the rental income would at least be in balance. But if one were to attempt to bifurcate the "principal and interest" portions of the rent payments, balance would fall by the wayside. The borrower considers it all as "rent" (wink wink) so he would deduct the full payment, interest and principal. (Currently, on any loan only interest is deductible, principal would not be.) The investor is not going to want to include principal in income unless it is consider Original Issue Discount. So the investor will perform a discounting calculation to determine (impute) what portion of each payment is interest/rent and what is principal, and will only include the "rent"/interest portion as income. Now we have an out of balance situation where the rent deductions do not equal the "rent"/interest income on the same transaction.
So to recap, for religious reasons, the government is willing to make astounding changes to long standing portions of their code. These changes will enable both the Sharia finance objective and the unintended consequence of enabling tax shelter structured transactions. Further it will create a host of problems, from a loss of balance in income and deductions and will create a situation where investors will favor Sharia lending to gain certain advantages such as ordinary losses in the more risky ends of investments (assuming that losses can be taken as if a partner), and partnership income can be avoided.
In substance, if not in legal form, this transaction is a secured loan and the rent is interest. By equalising the tax treatment, the tax laws are acknowledging that the sale is not real and the "Sharia compliance" is a sham. And of course Islam has always put the letter of the law before the spirit.
For more detail on this type of transaction, see my piece: An Unislamic Tax Loophole at New English Review.
Here is the main website for Sharia Compliant financing
Global Islamic Fiance Center
http://gifc.blogspot.com/
VAT TAX and Ireland how they plan to squeeze it through the needle
http://gifc.blogspot.com/2009/10/ireland-outlines-tax-laws-for-shariah.html
Islamic finance still hot even after Dubai fiasco
http://gifc.blogspot.com/2009/12/islamic-finance-still-profitable-aside.html
Australia is considered as ripe for Islamic financing, etc.
Predatory parasitic governments need a source of wealth to tap in order to remain in power.
Having run out of other people's money, as the expression goes, the Euro gov'ts will now start maneuvering to tap into gulf oil money. That that entails rewriting their laws to implement an environment congenial for medieval minded theocratic totalitarians bothers them not at all.
Their mission is to retain power.
What happens to the European citizen is not of much interest to them.
Sure they have a bit of business to do around election time. But that is in large part a formality.
Power is all.
Some wise men who were ahead of their time:
All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there's no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don't seem to matter very much anymore.
All the lies we were told,
All the lies of the people running round,
Their castles have burned.
Now I see change,
But inside we're the same as we ever were.
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Living this way, each day is a dream.
What am I, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Now another century nearly gone,
What are we gonna leave for the young?
What we couldn't do, what we wouldn't do,
It's a crime, but does it matter?
Does it matter much, does it matter much to you?
....
here is a list of Sharia Compliant banks and investment firms, you may be surprised who is here. The complete list can be found at Shariah Finance Watch,
http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/shariah-compliant-banks/
Shariah Compliant Banks
Alpha Natural ResourcesAsset Acceptance Capital Corporation
Aviva Plc
AXA
Barclays PLC
BNP Paribas Group
Citibank, N.A.
Credit Agricole, S.A.
Deutsche Bank AG
Dow Jones & Company Inc.
Equity Insurance Group Limited
Goldman Sachs Group
HBOS plc
HSBC Holdings plc
INVESCO Perpetual
Julius Baer Group
Maersk Logistics
Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.
Morgan Stanley
NYSE Euronext
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Singapore Power
Wink wink
What a bunch of winkers.
Saying that "interest" is a sin is insane. Sure, charging excessive interest especially to the vulnerable could be said to be a sin but that isn't what these people are even talking about, they are talking about standard normal interest for use of money over time. Even if you don't charge interest per se, there is the time value of money and that cannot be changed. Maybe we should take these fools up on their interest is sinful program and borrow trillions of dollars from them at zero interest. They don't need to worry, we will pay them back in one thousand years guaranteed. What is so wrong about these evil people playing like they are so pious that they won't allow interest is that they merely hide the interest charges, or the time value of money, in the financial products without calling it interest. There is no way around that. Unless those filthy people are ready to lend at zero percent interest then they should be told to go straight to Hell. The only reason the dhimmis in the West want to deal in this IS BECAUSE THEY WANT TO PROFIT FROM THE HIDDEN INTEREST! Though some of them are probably such fallen dhimmis that they would probably be willing to lend to the Muslims at zero percent just to prove what good dhimmis they are! To make a comparison to something no one can avoid in the news lately, these people profiting from interest in this way, saying one thing in public but doing another behind the scenes, are worse than anything Tiger Woods did in portraying the wholesome family image but doing something different behind the scenes.
Seriously, if you are not a Muslim you HAVE to be offended by these people. There is nothing that they won't exploit in their pathetic effort to suggest that they are BETTER than you! They are so pious that they can't even participate in normal financial transactions with you, a dirty lowly infidel who charges or pays interest. What a dirty disgusting person you are! Islam can not be allowed in the West.
The UK is going to go broke in no time if they accept this deception.
Watch this video. It's obvious the British economists haven't: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_emH9gy7KI
And Spencer onf Sharia Finance: http://vodpod.com/watch/1221554-sharia-finance-class-at-mit
This video: http://www.radicalislam.org/content/sharia-finance-explained
And read this: http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/
And this: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p17571.xml
Sort of a Heads the Mohammedans win Tails the Mohammedans win deal hey. Shariah Finance must be the most perfect example of Mohammedan HYPOCRISY there can be. You don't pay interest oh! no you SELL them your business then RENT it back over the years and finally own it again. Except of course the "RENT" you pay will be the equivalent of what you would pay if you borrowed the money and paid INTEREST for the same period. Now there'e a surprise and Mohammedan HYPOCRITES and idiotic Western moonbats don't get it. LOL
Sort of a Heads the Mohammedans win Tails the Mohammedans win deal hey. Shariah Finance must be the most perfect example of Mohammedan HYPOCRISY there can be. You don't pay interest oh! no you SELL them your business then RENT it back over the years and finally own it again. Except of course the "RENT" you pay will be the equivalent of what you would pay if you borrowed the money and paid INTEREST and the capital back for the same period. Now there'e a surprise and Mohammedan HYPOCRITES and idiotic Western moonbats don't get it. LOL
"Abu Dhabi bails out Dubai with $10 billion"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6955636.ece
related:
If this is not repealed you can say goodbye to London as a leading financial centre. People can whine and complain all they want about the amount of money bankers make, but the truth is that workers in the City contribute millions of pounds to London's (and Britain's) economy, on top of the large amount of taxes they already pay. Alisdair Darling should be careful what he wishes for.
The Financial Times:
“I can’t tell you how many people have called me from London asking to move,” a senior Wall Street banker said. “The question all the banks have now is: who the hell wants to be in the UK? Some businesses will definitely leave.”
One investment banking chief said the “contract between government and business is broken”, warning that up to 40 per cent of the City’s activities were “mobile” and would move overseas to more welcoming jurisdictions, such as Switzerland and the US.
Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers Association, said: “Viewed from abroad, London may well look now like a significantly less attractive place to build a business.”
SMW already knows a few people who have resigned recently because of conditions in the UK, this number is certain to grow. Many expats here will tell you the only reason they have stayed "this long" is the money - and with that gone you can be sure all these hard-working productive people will take themselves and their money elsewhere.
Hesperado just made a pathetic attempt to give me a virus on another thread:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/12/hypocrisy-saudi-arabia-the-country-that-wont-allow-churches-or-synagogues-calls-for-boycott-of-switz.html
Hopefully Mr. Spencer has more dignity than Hesperado, and will ban Hesperado form the site. Hesperado cannot debate, so he resorts to methods such as these. BTW, Hesperado, I did not fall for your little trick, and my computer is just fine, you pathetic human.
Ladies and gentlemen
observe the Mohammedan dave742 making the most appalling accusation against Hesperado - who has, curiously enough, been one of his most consistent and persistent opponent within the threads, for months.
I do not for one minute suppose that Hesperado or any other non-Muslim poster here would *knowingly* offer, in any thread, a link containing a virus: because we know that not only the immediate interlocutor, whoever it might be, but any other member of the community, not to mention any innocent random visitor lobbing in here via google in future, might also click on the link in the course of following the argument.
DDA:
[I do not for one minute suppose that Hesperado or any other non-Muslim poster here would *knowingly* offer, in any thread, a link containing a virus]
Great. Click on this link provided by Hesperado:
http://www.cs102175.com/click.php?s=1&k=670136751&pub=249#
This link was provided by HIM, not me. Go right ahead. Trust Hesperado, and click on it.
I've read virtually every posting Hesperado has ever made at this site.
I've also read every posting you've ever made, 'dave'/ dawood.
I trust Hesperado.
I *don't* trust you.
So I'm not going to click on a link inside any posting made by you, not even if it looks exactly like something that someone else has given.
dda:
[I trust Hesperado.]
Fine. Go to this link:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/12/hypocrisy-saudi-arabia-the-country-that-wont-allow-churches-or-synagogues-calls-for-boycott-of-switz.html#comments
Go to Hesperado's post on December 13, 2009 at 9:47 PM, and click on the link in his post that looks like this:
http://www.cs102175.com/click.php?s=1&k=670136751&pub=249#
The link is in his post, so you can trust it. Show your trust in Hesperado. Go click on the link now.
dda:
NOW.
Re. Sharia finance:
The Barnabas Fund offers a useful, inexpensive, plainly written little booklet entitled, 'Understanding Sharia Finance', written by apostate from Islam Dr Patrick Sookhdeo.
I recommend it to all jihadwatchers, especially those who have any connections with the 'money' world (business, finance, accounting, taxation), or know someone who does.
It may be obtained online from their website; just go to their homepage
https://barnabasfund.org/UK/Home/
and then click on the link entitled 'resources' and select 'Barnabas Books' from the dropdown menu which will appear, then when that comes up, click on 'select all'.
If you're Australian it will cost you only $17.00.
A good book for bank employees and executives to have on their desk.