I've written many times about how mainstream media reporters no longer try to maintain even the appearance of fairness, but approach those trying to resist the jihad and Islamic supremacism in the name of freedom and human rights as if the reporters' job was to put us on trial and convict us before the world. Meanwhile, when they deal with Islamic supremacists such as the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf or Reza Aslan, they fawn all over them. A particularly egregious example of this is over at Atlas Shrugs today, where the Swedish "journalist," Eigil Söderin, editor of ETC, www.etc.se, sent Pamela Geller a series of questions related to our Freedom March and the First Worldwide Counter-Jihad Action in Stockholm on August 4.

Geller wrote: "I am running the interview unedited because it vividly illustrates the difference between my real aims and the box the mainstream media wants to put me in." Indeed it does:

Eigil Söderin: What are you hoping will be the outcome of the gathering i [sic] Stockholm?

Pamela Geller: An international freedom alliance.

Eigil Söderin: Why are this meeting being held in Stockholm?

Pamela Geller: For the ease of the European groups attending, and to commemorate the jihad attack that was thwarted there a year ago.

Eigil Söderin: In your view, what sort of organisations poses the greatest threath [sic] to the western world?

Pamela Geller: Those that wish to deny freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equality of rights of women and non-Muslims in our societies.

Eigil Söderin: What is the main goals for the counter-jihad movement?

Pamela Geller: To defend the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equality of rights of women and non-Muslims.

Eigil Söderin: What are you planning to do with the large muslim population in Europe, many of whom have been living here for generations?

Pamela Geller: Ask them to obey Western laws and principles of human rights and reject the elements of Sharia that are supremacist, authoritarian, and deny many of those rights.

Eigil Söderin: Do you want them deported?

Pamela Geller: No.

Eigil Söderin: You have been called islamophobic, what is your response to that critique?

Pamela Geller: "Islamophobia" is a word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to intimidate people into thinking there is something wrong with defending against Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Eigil Söderin: Your blog and Jihad watch [sic] were a great inspiration for Anders Behring Breivik (Spencer name appears mor than 50 times in the manifesto, Breiviks mnetions you blog in the manifesto). Do you support the ideas of Breivik?

Pamela Geller: Neither Spencer or I inspired Breivik any more than did Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, Charles Darwin, John Locke and others he mentions in his manifesto. His manifesto is ideologically incoherent and very far from my ideas; he calls for alliance with Hamas and said at his trial that he was inspired by al-Qaeda. We did not inspire him and do not support his ideas.

This is the media's attempt to smear and destroy those fighting for the preservation of our freedoms.

Eigil Söderin: Do you defend his actions?

Pamela Geller: No. I condemn his actions. His inspirations for these actions were Al Qaeda and Hamas. I have never called for violence but for legal defense of principles of freedom.

Eigil Söderin: On your blog you write about the massacre on Utöya, Norway, 22 july 2011. The blog post have been critizised.
I found the following quotes written by you:

”Utoya Island is a Communist/Socialist campground, and they clearly had a pro-Islamic agenda.”
”Glen Beck was not far off when he compared it to the Hitlerjugend or Young Pioneers. ”
“Note the faces which are more MIddle [sic] Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.”

What do you mean by these words?

Pamela Geller: I did not write that. Those are not my words. Look again. And that last sentence is not even in my blog post.

That was in an article I referred  by the "anti-Mullah" describing the anti-semitism in that camp You will have to ask him.   "ANOTHER LOOK AT THE NORWAY LABOR PARTY PALESTINIAN AFFILIATION"  posted by The Anti-Mullah

Eigil Söderin: Why do you make the point that some of the victims were not ”pure Norwegian”?

Pamela Geller: I did not make that point. It is not in my blog post. It was redacted from the excerpt.

What I said  was "The slaughter was horrific. What these kids were being taught and instructed to do was a different kind of grotesque. There is no justification for Breivik's actions whatsoever. There is also no justification for Norway's antisemitism and demonization of Israel."

Eigil Söderin: Does it make the killings more justifiable in your view?

Pamela Geller: Your question is intellectually dishonest and monstrous. No.

Eigil Söderin: Why did you accuse the terror victims of anti-Semitism?

Pamela Geller: Because the camp taught anti-Semitism.

Halal Games and Anti-Jihad War Apparatus in Islamized London
by Enza Ferreri

London is the most Islamic city to have hosted the Olympic Games ever. There are at least 1 million Muslims thought to live in London, although the figure is likely to be higher.

And these Olympics will be dominated by Islam in more than one way.

London 2012 are the first Games to which every participating country has sent female athletes. Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Qatar had never sent women to the Olympics before. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), under pressure from human rights groups, wanted female athletes from Muslim countries to participate, and threatened Saudi Arabia with a ban in order to achieve that result.

However, the International and the London Olympic Committees had to make many concessions. Behind the conspicuous hijab-wearing women in the Opening Ceremony Athletes' Parade, and the amazing IOC decision to allow a Saudi woman to compete in hijab against judo rules banning fighters from wearing a head covering on safety grounds, there is much more, hidden from public view.

After the UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission's request to have Olympic dates changed so that they would not overlap with Ramadan was rejected, the organizers have bent over backwards to accommodate Muslims.

London will make Olympic history by having for the first time an Olympic Village with areas designated for Muslim prayers. A team of Muslim clerics is available to athletes and officials, and there are faith rooms at the rowing and canoe sprint village and the sailing village. All restaurants and dining facilities at the Athletes' Village will be open 24 hours to allow Muslims to eat in the permitted hours during Ramadan.

Halal meat and meals are available at all times in the athletes' dining facilities, and are very likely to be served to non-Muslims too outside the Olympic Village.

Ramadan and the Olympics overlapped before, but never once had the Committee changed anything to pander to Muslim participation. Even volunteers have been trained absolutely not to hurt Mohammedan sensitivities, albeit inadvertently, and to answer questions in Islamically correct ways. Everyone is to be reminded that within the Olympic site food can be eaten before dawn and after dusk.

And, as The Daily Mail reports:

Ramadan is set to add to London's Olympic traffic woes as thousands of Muslims squeeze into non-Games lanes to worship at the many mosques that surround the Olympic Park.

Every year during the month of August, vast crowds of worshippers descend on east London -- one of the most concentrated Muslim communities in the country -- for nightly prayer.

Local councillor Abdal Ullah said the influx of people to the area, between central London and Stratford, will play havoc with Games road links and traffic hotpsots.

The district surrounding the Olympic Park is home to more than 250,000 Muslims and almost 100 mosques.

The Olympic Park is in East London, an area which has had more Islamic terror suspects arrested in recent years than any similar-sized area not just in Britain, but in the whole of Europe.

The BBC reported that a senior security services official had told the TV
channel that the biggest threat to the Olympics comes from British Muslim extremists, and intelligence services are taking the threat of "a homegrown terror attack" during the Olympics very seriously.

Adding to their concerns, the intelligence official continued, is that for the first time in many years the Games are taking place during Ramadan, so they have to be particularly "sensitive and effective."

In a video interview, a former extremist explained to the BBC that Muslim terrorists may strike during the sacred month of Ramadan thinking that it will be an opportunity for going to heaven.

Foiling attacks has occupied the police and security services for months, the BBC said, and the threat is very real.

And this leads to another record: the most security-conscious, heavily guarded Olympics. The greatest mobilisation of military and security forces in the UK since the Second World War, with more troops deployed than in the war in Afghanistan, and the most heavily secured event in London’s history, are still more records.

Eleven miles of electric fencing charged with 5,000 volts of electricity and topped with razor wire separating the Olympic site from the rest of London; entrances to major venues guarded by soldiers, and surrounding streets patrolled by police heavily armed with automatic weapons, a rare sight in Britain; one of the Royal Navy's largest warships docked on the river Thames as a staging post for military helicopters, some carrying snipers and special forces personnel ready to take out dangerous elements; another of the world's most advanced warships also stationed on the river; 6 missile sites dedicated to intercepting hostile aircraft; surface-to-air missile systems, scanning the skies to down any airborne threats, installed on the roofs of residential buildings; advanced fighter jets patrolling the sky above London; 4 of the most advanced aircraft developed by the European Union enforcing a strict no-fly zone around the city; unmanned drones flying above London to provide surveillance for security forces; helicopters with powerful imaging equipment to identify faces, clothes, even the smallest detail on any suspect individuals; thousands of street cameras feeding data to face-recognition software to spot any known hostile person from the crowds.

Armed FBI, CIA and Interpol officers in their hundreds are in London to help Scotland Yard.

Londoners do not forget the tragic link between Islamic terrorism and these games: London won its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games on 6th July 2005, the day before the 7/7 bombings.

Welcome to the Halal, Ramadan, Jihad Games.

Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based author and journalist. She has been a London correspondent for several Italian magazines and newspapers, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La Repubblica.

Why do they need them? They're getting everything they want right now, without attacks. "Nasser Al-Bahri, Former Bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden: There Will Be Large-Scale Attacks against the West in the Near Future," from MEMRI, July 18 (thanks to JAT):

Following are excerpts from an interview with Nasser Al-Bahri, former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden, which aired on Alaan TV on July 18, 2012.

Nasser Al-Bahri: Since the commander-in-chief [Sayf Al-Adl] returned to Afghanistan, I expect something to happen in the next couple of years. There will be large-scale targets.

Interviewer: What kind of thing? An attack?

Nasser Al-Bahri: Of course, attacks. I expect great strikes against the US and the Western coalition in the near future, because many of the people...

Interviewer: Do you believe that there is coordination between Al-Qaeda and Iran?

Nasser Al-Bahri: Such cooperation is inevitable, due to the military principle: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Sharia coming to the brave new democratic "Arab Spring" Egypt, just as I predicted all along that it would. "Egyptian Coptic teacher arrested for insulting Islam on Facebook: report," from Al Arabiya, July 31 (thanks to Kenneth):

An Egyptian teacher was detained after being accused of posting cartoons on Facebook allegedly insulting Islam, Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) and Islamist President Mohammed Mursi, an Egyptian daily reported on Tuesday.

A Coptic-Christian teacher from the southern Egyptian Governorate of Sohag, Bishoy Kamel, was arrested on Monday for sharing the cartoons on a Facebook page, the online edition of Egyptian state-run al-Ahram daily reported.

The charges were pressed against Kamel by Mohammed Safwat, an Egyptian who claimed that the latter had insulted the newly-elected President as well.

Kamel has admitted managing the Facebook page in question, however, he claimed that he was not responsible for the content of the page, which, he alleged, had been hacked on Saturday, according to the report by al-Ahram Online....

Imagine if a Christian religious academy were spending any time at all training its students "in the use of combat weapons, physical resistance and street fighting." But no one will take any note of this school, despite the active support it is receiving from two governments.

Note also the close collaboration between the Iraqi and Iranian governments on this. That is the fruit of our ill-thought out Iraq adventure. "Iran terror camp shock," from the Gulf Daily News, July 28:

NAJAF, Iraq: A religious academy in Iraq has started training more than 1,500 recruits from Bahrain and other Arab countries in the use of combat weapons, physical resistance and street fighting, it emerged last night.

The training, which began yesterday at a camp about 5km away from a main road between Najaf and Karbala, is funded by Iran, our sister paper Akhbar Al Khaleej reports.

Apart from members of Hawza Ilmiyya Najab, the religious academy, those being trained include citizens from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other Arab countries, the report adds.

Their countries' national flags were flown over the main gate of the camp during the opening ceremony of the camp, it says.

Mohmmed Redha Ali Al Sistani, son of Iranian religious scholar Ali Al Sistani; Iraqi Transport Minister Hadi Al Amiri; Higher Education and Scientific Research Minister and a senior member of Iraq Islamic Dawa Party Ali Al Adeeb; Iranian General Qasim Sulaimani and other members of the State of Law Coalition attended the ceremony.

Iran has allocated $1 million (BD37,800) for the camp, and the amount was handed over to Mohammed Al Sistani by General Sulaimani, the report says.

Of course. Who else could possibly be responsible? The Syrian regime better be on the lookout for Zionist squirrels, and Zionist pigeons, and Zionist rats, and Zionist sharks, and Zionist vultures, and sexually predatory Zionist cats.

"Syria's Foreign Minister Blames Israel for Unrest," by Elad Benari for Israel National News, July 30 (thanks to Kenneth):

Syria’s Foreign Minister on Sunday accused Israel of being behind the ongoing unrest in his country.

During a visit to Tehran, Walid al-Moualem and his Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi, accused Israel of plotting to overthrow the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“The Israeli position towards the crisis in Syria proves that a plot was hatched against the regime in Damascus,” Salehi said, accusing Arab states for adopting what he called “Israel's position” and following it....

In PJ Media today I ask why our politically correct political establishment is surrendering to Islamic supremacists.

Recently the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked the Defense Department to drop yet another counter-terror trainer: the Iranian ex-Muslim Reza Kahlili. Surprisingly enough in this hyper-politically correct age, when it seems as if the Obama administration cannot accommodate Islamic supremacist demands fast enough, the Pentagon refused to budge. This was widely hailed as a rare defeat for CAIR; unfortunately, it is nothing of the kind, and manifests the deeper problem that currently besets the Defense Department and the entire Washington establishment.

Pentagon spokesman James Gregory responded to an inquiry from the Daily Caller about CAIR’s demand:

We can confirm that Mr. Reza Kahlili, who has specialized counterintelligence expertise, occasionally lectures at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA). He’s one of many guest lecturers called upon by JCITA for specific subject matter knowledge. His experiences provide valuable insight to trainees, and he keeps his personal religious beliefs out of the classroom. He does not lecture on or about Islam or any religious treatise, and his personal beliefs are his own.

This was indeed a victory in a certain sense: instead of caving to Hamas-linked CAIR’s demands and dropping the speaker as it has so many times in the past, the Pentagon stood firm and declared that Kahlili was going to speak as planned. However, Gregory was careful to note that Kahlili “does not lecture on or about Islam or any religious treatise, and his personal beliefs are his own.”

Why was this necessary? Why did the Pentagon feel it necessary to assure Hamas-linked CAIR that even though Kahlili was going to speak, he would not be speaking about Islam, and that “his personal beliefs are his own,” i.e., not shared by Pentagon brass? Why can’t Reza Kahlili or others who have discussed the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism be allowed to speak to the Pentagon? At a time when Muslims worldwide believe that the Qur’an and Sunnah command them to wage war against the United States, why should Defense Department analysts be studying anything but the texts and teachings of Islam in order to understand the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us? But of course, in this age of Obama such investigations are forbidden. And the Pentagon hastened to assure CAIR that Kahlili would not cross that red line.

I must therefore respectfully disagree with my friend Michael Ledeen, who has trumpeted this as a victory over CAIR, since Kahlili is going to speak as scheduled. (David Frum has done so as well.) They didn’t say, “A Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group is not going to dictate our choice of speakers,” which is what they should have said when CAIR first started complaining about counter-terror trainers who spoke about Islam (including me). The Pentagon should have pointed out that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department – and that CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Gregory might also have noted that several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror, and that CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Above all, Gregory could have mentioned that CAIR’s California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.

Instead, the Pentagon accepted Hamas-linked CAIR’s false premise that there would be something wrong with bringing in Reza Kahlili to speak about Islam, and implicitly accepted also the idea that Hamas-linked CAIR has a legitimate voice in these matters. And that is, in a word, shameful.

There is more.

Islamic law forbids Christians to build new churches or repair old ones. In places like modern, moderate Indonesia this prohibition often manifests itself as a bureaucratic snafu over permits -- in this case, enforced by the local Muslim people.

"Bandung Church Shuttered Amid Protests," from the Jakarta Globe, July 30 (thanks to Kenneth):

Protestors forced a church in Bandung, West Java, to shut down on Sunday amid claims that it was operating without a permit.

The Batak Karo Protestant Church (GBKP) has been in operation since 2007. But protestors claimed that the congregation agreed not to use the building as a house of worship in a 2011 agreement.

“On Sunday of last week, they used the building for Sunday service,” Amin Safari told Tempo.co. “That is why we sealed the building.”

The protestors also hung a banner on the church’s gate reading, “We the people of RW 06 [a neighborhood unit] hardily reject the use of this building, at Kawaluyan 10, to be used for religious activities.”

The church’s committee secretary said that although they did sign the 2011 agreement, the church has since received all the necessarily permits from the local government to hold services.

“Since June 20 we have held a permit [to hold services] from the Bandung city administration,” Davin told Tempo.co. “We have complied with the legal codes, so the [previous] agreement is no longer valid.”

Amin accused the congregation of manipulating the agreement.

“The majority of the people still reject the church’s activity,” he said.

In FrontPage this morning I discuss the latest moral inversion from Islamic supremacists:

When the International Olympic Committee turned down a request to hold a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, unnoticed in the furor was the shocking moral inversion in the statement from Jibril Rajoub, President of the Palestinian Olympic Committee. In explaining why he opposed the moment of silence, Rajoub said: “Sports are meant for peace, not for racism… Sports are a bridge to love, interconnection, and spreading of peace among nations; it must not be a cause of division and spreading of racism between them [nations].”

Rajoub’s statement strikingly paralleled Islamic supremacist rhetoric about “Islamophobia” in labeling any commemoration of the victims of the Munich jihad attacks “racist” — as if the jihad murderers who perpetrated the attacks, including Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, were the real victims. So the purveyors of “Islamophobia” identify the opponents of jihadist Jew-killers and persecutors of Christians as “bigots” and the destroyers of civility in the world today.

In line with this, Rajoub praised IOC President Jacques Rogge’s refusal to hold a moment of silence: “[Rogge] said that his position not to politicize sports, and his determination to implement the International Olympic Charter represents a victory for freedom in sports.” Of course, it wasn’t those who requested the moment of silence who were “politicizing sports”; the Munich assassins did that forty years ago when they murdered Israeli athletes in order to advance a religious and political cause. Mirroring the way in which Islamic supremacists habitually deploy charges of “Islamophobia,” Rajoub (and Rogge) shifted responsibility from the Palestinian murderers to their Jewish victims.

Last February, Islamic supremacist writer Reza Aslan provided a telling example of this twisted mindset. “Attitudes towards Muslims in the United States are getting progressively more and more bigoted,” he claimed during an address at Colgate University. “Two-thirds of Americans don’t think Muslims should have the same rights or civil liberties as non-Muslims….It is not the result of a slow-moving grassroots sentiment. On the contrary, this is the result of a very well-organized, well-funded campaign by a handful of far-right extremist groups (Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America) to convince Americans that Islam is the enemy.”

Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America: that’s essentially Pamela Geller and me. Did Aslan actually expect the Colgate students to believe that two people are responsible for the alleged “surge in anti-Muslim sentiment”? Obviously, any actual rise in “anti-Muslim sentiment,” or in rightful suspicion of Islamic jihadists and supremacists, is not due to anything we have done, but rather to the activities of Muslims such as Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others like them who have plotted and/or committed mass murder in the name of Islam and are motivated by its texts and teachings — all in the U.S. in the last couple of years.

There is more.

Pamela Geller notes quite rightly: "If it were anyone other than a Muslim supremacist Jew-hater, people would be going to jail. Hamas-CAIR would be demanding jail time under hate crime laws if it had been a Muslim in the pool. Why wasn't this plastered all over the newspapers and cable news networks two years ago? Why have we just heard about it? Why? If these were Muslims, it would still be on the frontpages. We were would have been publicly caned. Seriously, imagine the fallout, but Jews don't even rate an column inch. That's the sharia infused into the culture."

"Pakistani Owner of Swanky Santa Monica Hotel: 'Get the [expletive] Jews out of my Pool,'” by Lori Lowenthal Marcus for the Jewish Press, July 30 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

An upscale hotel on a Santa Monica, California, beach is an odd place to be singled out from a crowd and removed because you are Jewish, but that’s what happened to 18 young professionals who are telling their story to a jury in a discrimination trial taking place in Santa Monica Superior Court this week.

Ari Ryan is the grandson of a Ukranian Jew who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis. Ryan’s grandfather moved to Israel in 1942 and served as a captain in the Israel Defense Forces.

Seventy years later Ryan says he got a small taste of what his grandfather lived through, but rather than in the forests of the Ukraine, it took place at an upscale hotel in Santa Monica. Ryan and more than a dozen others have brought a lawsuit alleging anti-Semitic discrimination against them by a multi-millionaire Muslim American hotel owner.

Two years ago Ryan and other twenty- and thirty-something Jews planned to raise money to send children of fallen IDF soldiers to camp with a charity event at the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica, California.

On the morning of July 11, 2010, Ryan and others arrived at the hotel and began setting up Friends of the IDF banners, literature and piles of shirts for the event guests.

But the event was aborted after, according to one employee’s sworn testimony, the hotel’s owner told staff members, “Get the [expletive deleted] Jews out of my pool.” Then the hotel security and other employees began removing the materials and ordering the guests to leave.

Ryan said, “Anyone wearing a blue wristband,” which identified them as being with the Friends of the IDF, “was asked to get out of the swimming pool and the hot tub.” In fact, no one who was identifiable as Jewish was so much as “allowed to dip their feet in the water.”

Tehmina (Tamie) Adaya, a Pakistani-American Muslim, is the owner of the Shangri-La. Her father, Ahmad Adaya, was a founding partner of the California real estate company IDS Real Estate Group. He also was a founder and benefactor of the New Horizon School for Muslim religious education in Southern California....

Over at Atlas Shrugs I discuss the increasingly common phenomenon of sex slavery sanctioned by the Qur'an:

Bikya Masr reported last week that “a new report from George Washington University professor Michele Clark and Coptic rights activist Nada Ghaly has argued that thousands of young Coptic Christian girls in Egypt are the victim of kidnapping and forced servitude by Muslims in the North African country.” Meanwhile, every day seems to bring fresh reports of Muslim gangs in Britain forcing young non-Muslim girls into prostitution and sex slavery. Muslims from the Twin Cities area ran an interstate sex trafficking ring until they were caught and indicted in late 2010. The dirty secret behind such reports is that this behavior is sanctioned in Islam.

The Qur’an forbids Muslim men to have sexual relations with “wedded women, save what your right hands own.” (4:4) “Prosperous are the believers who in their prayers are humble and from idle talk turn away and at almsgiving are active and guard their private parts save from their wives and what their right hands own then being not blameworthy.” (23:1-6)

Those whom their “right hands own” are slaves, and inextricable from the concept of Islamic slavery as a whole is the concept of sex slavery, which is rooted in Islam’s devaluation of the lives of non-Muslims. The Qur’an stipulates that a man many take four wives as well as hold slave girls as sex slaves. These women are captured in wartime and are considered the spoils of war. Islam avoids the appearance of impropriety, declaring that the taking of these sex slaves does not constitute adultery if the women are already married, for their marriages are ended at the moment of their capture. A manual of Islamic law directs: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled” (Reliance of the Traveller, o9.13).

This is by no means an eccentric or unorthodox view in Islam. The Egyptian Sheikh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni declared in May 2011 that “we are in the era of jihad,” and that as they waged jihad warfare against infidels, Muslims would take slaves. He clarified what he meant in a subsequent interview:

…Jihad is only between Muslims and infidels….Spoils, slaves, and prisoners are only to be taken in war between Muslims and infidels. Muslims in the past conquered, invaded, and took over countries. This is agreed to by all scholars--there is no disagreement on this from any of them, from the smallest to the largest, on the issue of taking spoils and prisoners. The prisoners and spoils are distributed among the fighters, which includes men, women, children, wealth, and so on.

There is more.

5 Slavery In the Quran, Traditions, and Classical Law
What Does Modern Islam Practice?
by James M. Arlandson, Ph.D.

This series of articles is intended for educators, journalists, legislators, city council members, judges, government bureaucrats, think tank fellows, TV and radio talk show hosts, and others who occupy “check points” in society. They initiate dialogues and shape (not to say control) the flow of the conversation. They are the policy and decision makers.

They seem to believe that shariah has no problems; it’s just misunderstood. Its critics exaggerate (and maybe they have been guilty of that in some cases). The critics are probably just “Islamophobic.” Islam, after all, is a world religion, so it deserves respect.

But these same intellectual elites may also have a gnawing feeling that shariah does have problems. Can the critics be all wrong, all the time?

Yet, the decision makers may be afraid of voicing their private fears in public. Nevertheless, overcoming or suppressing their feeling, they still seek ways to incorporate shariah in Western society, slowly, cautiously at first.

Websites that defend shariah have sprung up; their intent, among others, is to alleviate the secret doubts and undue caution of the intellectuals.

To offer one example, we begin with a representative Muslim scholar who proclaims only the positive aspects of Islam’s record on slavery.

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) is made up of religious scholars, most of whom have their doctorates in Islamic law or other Islamic subjects. They have the qualifications and authority to write fatwas (religious opinions or rulings). They use the write-in Question and Answer format.

One questioner asks whether shariah allowed men to have sex with female slaves outside of marriage. The AMJA scholar gives a long answer, and concludes at various points:

...Because of the aforementioned examples of the divine and prophetic instructions regarding slavery, no other nation or religious group in the world treated slaves better than the Muslims did...

Slavery in Islam was colorblind, so there were Asians and Europeans who were slaves as well as the Africans....

...Now, slavery was so established in the joints of the economic, political and social life of the world before Islam that it needed courage combined with wisdom to address the issue of slavery, and that is where God miraculously laid down a system by which all the tributaries feeding into the river of slavery would be cut off except for the captives of war (which helped protect their lives, and it would have been unexpected of the Muslims to be taken as captives if they lost and be mandated to free all the captives if they won). You must also know that in the past due to the scarcity of resources, armies could not keep the captives in prisons and feed them…etc. It was also not always possible to f[r]ee them because then they would regroup and go back to fighting.[1]...

So, the scholar proclaims in the first excerpt that “no other nation or religious group in the world treated slaves better than Muslims did.” Throughout his answer he does not directly answer the question, but speaks in generalities.

In the third excerpt he says, “God miraculously laid down a system” (Islam) that would lead to the cessation of slavery, except the prisoners of war, who might return to the battle, if they were freed.

All this communicates the message: there is nothing wrong with shariah.

Before we begin we acknowledge the obvious and painful truth that slavery is not peculiar to Islam. For many millennia it was universal. The underbelly of the West still practices it, usually in trafficking in sex slaves.[2]

But we must balance out the scholar’s positive assessment of Islam with some dark truths, understanding that the Quran, the traditions, and classical law endorsed slavery.

Here is the Table of Contents, with links:

This was a foregone conclusion from the relentlessly dhimmi IOC. An update on this story. "Saudi woman allowed to compete in hijab," by Michael Holden and Mohammed Abbas for Reuters, July 30:

LONDON (Reuters) - A female Saudi fighter will take part in the Olympic judo competition after being allowed to wear an Islamic headscarf, or hijab, of a specific design, officials said on Monday.

Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shaherkani is one of only two Saudi women to travel to London after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) lobbied the conservative Islamic kingdom to end its refusal to send women to the Games.

But she had said she would only compete if she was allowed to wear the hijab, and judo officials refused, saying it would be dangerous.

A Saudi National Olympic Committee spokeswoman said the committee, the IOC and the International Judo Federation (IJF) had now agreed on an acceptable form for the headscarf.

"They agreed on a design and she will compete wearing this design," Razan Baker said, adding that she did not know how this design looked....

The IJF's regulations for the Olympic Games state that no headgear can be worn, and the federation says there could be a danger to fighters if a hijab is inadvertently used for an otherwise legal strangulation grip.

Yet another Muslim illustrates the high cost of misunderstanding Islam's peaceful teachings -- and still no Muslim organization in the U.S., despite their protestations that anyone who thinks Islam is commanding him to do violence to unbelievers is misunderstanding the religion, has any program designed to teach young Muslims that the jihadist understanding of Islam is false.

"Alleged would-be suicide bomber pleads guilty," from The Associated Press, July 30 (thanks to David):

CHICAGO -- A Chicago man accused plotting a suicide bombing overseas and claiming he was inspired by a radical Muslim cleric has pleaded guilty.

The plea Monday from 28-year-old Shaker Masri ends one of the last terrorism trials pending in the Chicago federal court. A plea deal was announced July 12, when Masri's attorney said the agreement was favorable to his client, though he declined to elaborate. Masri's sentencing is Oct. 16.

Masri was arrested in 2010 after the FBI exposed his alleged plot to attend a Somalia training camp to become a suicide bomber for terrorist groups al-Qaida and al-Shabab....

NEW UPDATE July 31: Big Fur Hat responds brilliantly to a commenter over at iOwntheWorld:

Katherine,

This is not a flame war. And I fully expect commenters from WZ to come here and defend your site.

You offer opinion ie: Geller is nuts.
(Dagwaker offers idiocy ie: Spencer is Jewish (as if that would matter, anyway.))

This article offers nothing but facts, and they are not presented to damage WZ’s finances, traffic, or say they suck, or anything of the sort.

Here are the facts:
Zip called Spencer and said “Do not link to my site anymore.”
Spancer asked why.
Zip said because if he did, Pamela might link to that story, and his name would appear on Atlas Shrugs and he wants nothing to do with Atlas.
The discussion ended with Zip saying that Spencer was responsible for the Norway massacre.

When a story was suggested on Twitchy by a contributor, the contributor was told by Jessie Malkin that, “we won’t do anything with Atlas Shrugs.”

Hot Air asked Robert Spencer to produce a series called “blogging the Quran.”
The series was popular and then abruptly pulled by Malkin. Morrissey offered this as a reason – the Obama/McCain election is heating up and we don’t have time for this.
Does anyone believe that excuse?

I think it is important to have these top blogs say publicly what their problem is.

What I am hearing from you (and dagawker) are two simultaneous contradictory arguments -

Weasel Zippers doesn’t back down from blogging about Islam, he does war porn and calls them barbarians and in the comments we call them goatf*ckers, and we piss on them yada yada yada -
but Geller is too toxic.

Do you think that makes any sense to you whatsover, particularly when Geller doesn’t come close to doing, in terms of decorum, what you’re boasting WZ’s does?

Ask yourself this, as well. Spencer and Geller are a team, why does Zip have a problem with Geller and not Spencer? Makes no sense unless it is personal.

Listen, talking about goatf*cking is nice, and dutifully putting up fapping videos of war is great.

With all due respect, the real work is being done in the courts by “that nut” Pamela Geller. What you don’t know, and what Zip doesn’t know, could fill a reservoir. Frankly, you’re way out of your league.
Now, having said that, you’re not just a wee bit curious as to the exact reason the top tier blogs are cutting Pamela out of their incestuous dutch rudder linkage club? Or are you merely content with the marginalizing of one of our top warriors and content that Jihad will be challenged by Zip and the Zip commenting community?

Remove Geller from the landscape and what are you left with?
Stay at home bloggers trying to “make a living” who conspire to damage a woman who has her ass on the line defending the first amendment, for you and I, with her own money.
Tell us all again how Geller is nuts, it was charming.

----------

UPDATE: Big Fur Hat over at iOwntheWorld has figured it out: the blogger being discussed below is Weasel Zippers. Zip and I had once been friendly and actually had been planning to meet again for lunch when he wrote me and asked me to stop linking his posts at Jihad Watch, because then when Pamela Geller would link my posts, a link to his site would show up at Atlas Shrugs, and he didn't want to have anything to do with her because of her exposure of Rick Perry's Islam curriculum. When I responded incredulously, he grew progressively more abusive, finally ending up by repeating the Leftist/Islamic supremacist smear that I was responsible for the Norway murders. He still does cover jihad issues at Weasel Zippers, but not in a way that would trouble anyone who buys the propaganda line, purveyed by both Leftists and Fox, that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been Hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists.

----------

Ah, now it all makes sense -- not just about Malkin, but I also had been quite friendly with the blogger discussed in the email below, until he suddenly and inexplicably began sending me abusive emails demanding that I stop linking to him. It's ironic that a central part of the Leftist/Islamic supremacist myth about freedom fighters is that there is some lucrative "Islamophobia industry" and that people are in this for money and fame, when actually the path to money and fame today is to dissemble and downplay the reality of jihad and Islamic supremacism, and their root causes within Islam itself.

"The Right's dirty little secret," by Pamela Geller over at Atlas Shrugs today:

Actually, it's a big dirty secret.

I could not help but notice, over the past few years, the right wing blogosphere's silence on jihad and Islam. When I started blogging back in 2004-2005, there were literally scores of counter-jihad blogs in an already crowded field. Seven years later, it is a paltry few,  save for Jihadwatch, The Religion of Peace, Creeping Sharia, and political bloggers like Logan's Warning, IOTW, American Power blog, Zilla,  ..... [UPDATE: and The Right Planet].

The first jolt and obvious disconnect was back in 2008, when Michelle Malkin and Hot Air suddenly and without explanation stopped running Robert Spencer's "Blogging the Quran" series and his Jihad Watch v-logs. They were fantastic, informational and needed. Around the time she dropped Spencer, Malkin had a short-lived show on Fox and was trying to get more exposure there, and she also stopped writing as much as she had about Islam and jihad. I was surprised and disheartened at the time, but was unaware that these were just some early signs of a decision by the most influential people on the Right to sanction the jihad and sharia with their silence. Silence is sanction. Malkin still posts on big jihad stories every now and then (as do other right-of-center bloggers), and acts as if nothing has changed and she is still in the fight, but it has gone to the periphery of her concerns.

But this is not about just Michelle Malkin -- not by a long shot. I wrote about her because the evidence in her case is fairly clear. But it is also about all of them: Drudge, Rush, Kathryn Lopez of National Review, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, etc. The email below makes the Right's actions intelligible. It is unlikely -- in fact, inconceivable -- that the blogger described in it, who saw his path to money and traffic in abandoning the fight against jihad and Islamic supremacism, was the only one. Obviously, many others have gone down this road as well. The big blogs on the right never link counter-jihad blogs. They have all but surrendered.

It irked me that the party of constitutional rights and individual rights would adhere to the blasphemy laws under the sharia (do not criticize or offend Islam).

Which is worse: the left's vocal support of the sharia or the right's silence? The silence is more insidious. At least you know where you stand with the left. The following email came from a new blogger who was communicating with me on an unrelated issue. He used to blog at a very well known, well-trafficked right wing blog, one of the biggest. When I made a passing remark about the blogger's negative behavior toward me, the new blogger responded [names redacted]:

Wow. I didn't know you were aware of XXXX's attitude towards you. He is nasty. He hides it well but if you displease him he'll lash out at you.  He got pissed at me when I posted an article that made Rick Perry look bad. He changed my headline and comment.

I posted a link to one of your blog posts in early 2011. Another blogger on the site pulled the link to you and sent me an email saying stay away from posting links to Atlas. He said XXXX [the owner of the blog] would get mad.

I think it also had to do with the fact that XXXX  changed the blog's policy towards Islamic issues. I used to post uncensored stuff about Islam. Pictures with insults to Allah, swastikas on muslim terrorists, cartoons I made saying "Heil Allah!"

In December 2010, XXXX decided to tone down XXXX and make it more like a Hot Air style site. He told me to stop insulting Islam because he wanted to attract advertising and make a living from doing XXXX. I complied with his wishes and toned down not only Islam stuff but other subjects as well. I gradually became disenchanted with posting at XXXX. My daily output became less and less.

Read it all.

This sounds like fun!

Sharia Alert from the democratic new "Arab Spring" Egypt: "Egyptian Businessmen Present: 'Sharia Tourism,'" by Elad Benari for Israel National News, July 30 (thanks to Kenneth):

In what appears to be another expression of the strengthening of Islam under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, Channel 2 News reported on Sunday of a new initiative in Egypt which encourages “sharia tourism.”

The new project, initiated by local businessmen, is directed at the religious sector in Egypt and allows it to take a vacation which follows the rules of Islam.

Two businessmen have launched the initiative as part of a local company called Shouq Travel, and they invite vacationers to arrange their vacation according to Sharia law.

The company’s website says that those who seek a “sharia” vacation may stay in a special hotel and visit specific tourist sites. Women visitors to the sites are required to wear modest clothes and may only be accompanied by a first-degree relative.

Not a second-degree relative!

Anyway, what "specific tourist sites" will be suitable for Sharia tourists? Surely they can't visit the Pyramids or other artifacts of jahiliyya. Maybe they can take in a stoning, or an amputation. The fun never stops!

Channel 2 News noted that when visiting the company’s website, one may see photos of such vacations, including pictures of family riding a jet ski with a bearded father and a mother who is covered from head to toe....

Pamela Geller makes this extraordinary observation:

When Obama spoke about the shooting in Aurora, he used the word “terrorize,” a word he never used when Nidal Hasan killed 13 of our serviceman in a jihad attack at Fort Hood. That was "workplace violence."

Obama knows what he is doing. He wants to drive home the point that "terror" is not Islamic. The Colorado shooting is terror, but Fort Hood is not.

Obama said this about the movie theater murders in Colorado:

“We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason. But while we will never know fully what causes somebody to take the life of another, we do know what makes life worth living.”

He used the same phrase in his address in his exploitative event in Aurora: “Even as we come to learn how this happened and who’s responsible, we may never understand what leads anyone to terrorize their fellow human beings. Such evil is senseless – beyond reason. But while we will never know fully what causes someone to take the life of another, we do know what makes that life worth living.” (minute 2:41)

This is his talking point on the Batman madman.

Yet when it came to the Fort Hood jihad massacre back in 2009, Obama showed no similar curiosity about what “causes someone" -- jihadist Nidal Hasan -- "to take the life of another.” And he did not use the word "terrorize."

Read it all.

You have to hand it to Michael Coren: he goes where other "conservative" talk show hosts should go, but don't dare. In this his point is that non-Muslims should not be forced in non-Muslim countries to change the way they operate their businesses or conduct their affairs in general in order to accommodate Islamic law and practice. But again and again, that is what is demanded.

"Canadian anchor appears on screen in full veil to mock niqab-only TV," from al-Arabiya, July 30:

A Canadian TV anchor appeared in a full face-veil (known in Arabic as the niqab) to present his show on Canadian Sun News TV, ostensibly in a bid to poke fun at the newly-launched Egyptian channel, Maria TV, which features women clad only in the niqab, the Maan News Agency reported on Sunday.

Maria TV, which was launched on the first day of the holy month of Ramadan earlier in July, employs only women in niqab, even for behind-the-camera jobs.

Canadian anchor Michael Coren, dressed in black from head to toe, hosted a Muslim cleric from Toronto at the studio and discussed with him the idea of creating such a channel in Egypt.

Coren asked the cleric why Muslim women dressed “in that weird way?”

The Canadian anchor also asked the imam why Muslim men do not get dressed in black like women. The imam replied saying it is the same reason that persuades Christian nuns to wear their veil in church.

Earlier this month, Coren appeared on his show to talk about a nine-year-old Canadian girl who refused to remove her hijab during a soccer tournament. During his show he said girls in such situations had two choices: remove the hijab or not play soccer.

“It has already been established so many times that the burka, hijab are not religious requirements,” he said on his show, a video clip of which was posted on July 12. “The Quran only demands modesty. Even if it is a religious requirement, so what? We respect your right to wear it but it does not mean we have an obligation to allow you to wear it in a soccer league,” he said.

Pamela Geller notes Haaretz's naked bias: "The aggressively uber-left Israeli newspaper has written a piece on our recent win in the landmark decision of AFDI vs MTA. Of course they cite all the usual uber-left suspects as legitimate sources (like the AFDI Threat to Freedom SPLC and the dhimmi Jewicidal ADL) to smear my organization, but that doesn't surprise you, does it? The media always hunts for quotes from subversives to smear our work. Have they ever sought quotes extolling our organization for our dedication to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, individual rights, and the rights of women and non-Muslims under the Sharia? Ever? Get real. Did they ask me for comment on these smears from the left that they published without any critical examination? Again, get real."

Also: "What I did learn from Cohen's article is that the Jew-hater, Henry Clifford, who is running the anti-Jewish ads, plans to expand his campaign to posters in transit stations in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. Help us counter his lies and propaganda with the facts. Donate to our pro-Israel ads here."

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Coming to an ad near you," by Debra Nussbaum Cohen in Haaretz, July 29:

The pro-Israel group StandWithUs announced it is paying to put posters in Metro-North train stations in suburban New York to rebut anti-Israel advertisements, creating a new battleground in the broader Israeli-Palestinian fight over American public opinion.

The man behind the anti-Israel advertisements is Henry Clifford, a retired investment banker who formed The Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine. Through the group, Clifford spent $25,000 to place posters –purporting to show Israel's seizure of Palestinian territory through a series of maps – in 50 Metro-North stations for a month, ending August 5. He is running the same advertisement in two local newspapers near his Connecticut home and says he plans to expand the campaign to posters in transit stations in Boston and possibly Providence, Rhode Island.

An enforced ceasefire?

But the advertising duel over Israel may come to an end in New York City if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates buses, subways and the Metro-North trains, decides to revamp its policy and stop accepting political, or “viewpoint,” advertisements – a shift currently under consideration, according to agency sources.

The MTA is considering changing its policy after losing a case in federal court for rejecting an anti-Muslim, pro-Israel advertisement. The judge ruled on July 20 that the MTA violated the First Amendment rights of Pamela Geller and her group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, when it rejected its advertisement reading, “In Any War between the Civilized Man and the Savage, Support the Civilized Man.” Lower down it says, "Support Israel; Defeat Jihad," with Stars of David on either side.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed Geller's group and her blog, Atlas Shrugs, hate groups. The MTA formally rejects an advertisement about once a year for not meeting its advertising guidelines, said spokesman Aaron Donovan, but this was the first time in 15 years it rejected one for being demeaning.

In a statement, the MTA said it “is evaluating its existing advertising standards in light of the court’s ruling.”

Charles Moerdler, a member of the MTA board, said the organization has “been carefully studying this for the past week or more to come up with some explanation for where we are and where we ought to be going” on accepting advertisements.

Moerdler, a Holocaust survivor and partner in the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, has prepared a 14-page memorandum related to political advertising and said he is waiting for the right time to present it to the MTA board.

The Anti-Defamation League called Geller’s advertisement “highly offensive and inflammatory” but agreed with the judge that the MTA was wrong to reject it. “We support the court’s conclusion that this is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, yet we still strongly object to both the message and the messenger,” said Ron Meier, the ADL's New York regional director.

Geller, who gained widespread attention for zealously opposing the mosque near Ground Zero, vowed to move forward with her advertisements.

“My ads will be up, whether they’re up in September 2012 or September 2013," she said. "I will pursue that case to the Supreme Court."...

Stoning adulterers is not "extremist"; it is Islamic law. The caliph Umar, one of Muhammad's closest companions, even maintained that it was originally in the Qur'an:

'Umar said, "I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, "We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book," and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession." Sufyan added, "I have memorized this narration in this way." 'Umar added, "Surely Allah's Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him." (Bukhari, vol. 8, bk. 82, no. 816)

"Allah's Apostle" is, of course, Muhammad, who did indeed carry out stonings. Here is the hadith in which he challenges the rabbis about stoning, and in which there is amidst the barbarism and brutality a final act of love and compassion:

The Jews came to Allah's Apostle and told him that a man and a woman from amongst them had committed illegal sexual intercourse. Allah's Apostle said to them, "What do you find in the Torah (old Testament) about the legal punishment of Ar-Rajm (stoning)?" They replied, (But) we announce their crime and lash them." Abdullah bin Salam said, "You are telling a lie; Torah contains the order of Rajm." They brought and opened the Torah and one of them solaced his hand on the Verse of Rajm and read the verses preceding and following it. Abdullah bin Salam said to him, "Lift your hand." When he lifted his hand, the Verse of Rajm was written there. They said, "Muhammad has told the truth; the Torah has the Verse of Rajm. The Prophet then gave the order that both of them should be stoned to death. ('Abdullah bin 'Umar said, "I saw the man leaning over the woman to shelter her from the stones." (Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 829)

Even the monkeys practiced stoning, according to another hadith:

During the pre-lslamic period of ignorance I saw a she-monkey surrounded by a number of monkeys. They were all stoning it, because it had committed illegal sexual intercourse. I too, stoned it along with them. (Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 58, no. 188)

Muhammad's example is, of course, normative for Islamic behavior, since "verily in the messenger of Allah ye have a good example for him who looketh unto Allah and the Last Day, and remembereth Allah much" (Qur'an 33:21).

"Ansar Dine Islamists Stone 'Adulterous' Couple to Death in North Mali," by Anissa Haddadi for International Business Times, July 30 (thanks to Twostellas):

A couple accused of being in an adulterous relationship have been stoned to death in northern Mali, according to a spokesman for Ansar Dine, the Islamist group which controls much of the region.

Sanda Abou Mohamed told the Associated Press that the couple was executed according to Sharia law, the enforcement of which represents Ansar Dine's primary mission.

Reports from eyewitnesses in Aguelhok, near the city of Kidal, suggest the couple were buried up to their necks, and then pelted with stones until they died on 29 July....

“They came to lynch us. They shouted ‘death to Kurds, death to Alevis.’ They told us to leave and threatened to kill us if we did not." The Evli family probably should have just resigned themselves to having to wake up early, seeing as how "Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators."

"Alevi family's home stoned, stable torched in southeastern Turkey," from the Hürriyet Daily News, July 30 (thanks to Lachlan):

The home of an Alevi family was stoned and their stables burned down by an angry mob yesterday after the family allegedly told a Ramadan drummer not to wake them for sahur, the meal before sunrise.

Members of the Evli family in the Sürgü village of the southeastern Malatya province allegedly asked a Ramadan drummer not to drum in front of their home the night of July 28 as they were not fasting and had work early in the morning. The two sides quarreled after the drummer rejected the family’s request.

News of the incident was heard throughout the village and a mob of around 60 people gathered in front of the Evli family’s house yesterday. The group hurled stones at the family's home and said the family members were “Kurds and Alevis.” The small contingent of gendarmerie soldiers in the villlage was unable to contain the crowd so reinforcements were called in from the Doğanşehir district.

The group reportedly chanted slogans, yelled “Allahu ekber,” meaning God is great, sang the Turkish national anthem and said “this family will leave this place.” Evli family members turned off their lights and hid in their homes in terror. The group also set a stable belonging to the Evli family on fire, which prompted the gendarmerie to fire shots into the air.

Security forces were able to disperse the crowd after reinforcements arrived.

Hasan Hüseyin Evli, whose home was attacked, said his family had wanted to live in peace together as Alevis and Sunnis. “We do not want such incidents, we have never hurt anyone,” he said.

Leyla Evli showed journalists the stones hurled at her home by the mob. “They came to lynch us. They shouted ‘death to Kurds, death to Alevis.’ They told us to leave and threatened to kill us if we did not,” she said.

Muslims in Bulgaria recently explained that "Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators."

"Motorcyle gunmen kill four in northern Nigerian city," from Radio Netherlands, July 29 (thanks to David):

Motorcycle gunmen opened fire on the car of a Nigerian air force officer on Sunday, killing the driver and an aide, while two other people were killed in a nearby neighbourhood, authorities said.

It was not clear who was behind the attacks in the city of Kano, the largest in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north, but they resembled similar killings in the past blamed on Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

"A car of one of our officers came under attack this morning," Air Commodore Sani Ahmed said.

"The officer's driver and his orderly were travelling out of town, but as they reached an area called Yan-Lemo, two gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire on the car, killing the two personnel."

The officer was not in the car at the time, he said.

In a similar incident earlier in the day, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead two people outside their house in a nearby neighourhood, said police spokesman Rilwanu Dutse.

A police source said the victims were from the mainly Christian Igbo ethnic group....

Yet more Muslims misunderstand Ramadan, the time of peace and reconciliation. "Mosque explosion kill 5 people in Uruzgan province," by Sadaf Shinwari for Khaama Press, July 30 (thanks to David):

According to local authorities in southern Uruzgan province of Afghanistan, at least five people including an Afghan judge was [sic] killed following an explosion in this province.

The officials further added the incident took place early Monday morning in Tarinkot district after an explosive device went off in a mosque, killing the Afghan judge Taj Mohammad and four civilians.

No group including the Taliban militants have so far claimed responsibility behind the incident.

Local officials blame Taliban group for such incidents as the Taliban fighters frequently use explosive devices as the weapon of their choice to target Afghan and coalition security forces and Afghan government officials.

4 Jihad and Qital in the Qur'an, Traditions and Classical Law
Can Modern Islam Reform the Old Institutions of War and Taxes?
by James M. Arlandson, Ph.D.

This series of articles on Islamic shariah law is written for educators, journalists, judges, lawyers, legislators, city council members, government bureaucrat, think tank fellows, radio talk show hosts, TV and radio talk show hosts, and anyone else who occupies the “check points” in society. They initiate the national dialogue and shape the flow of the conversation. They are the policy and decision makers.

They have heard the critics of shariah and believe they exaggerate. Islam is a world religion, after all. It deserves respect. The critics must be “Islamophobic.”

Yet, these same intellectual elites may have a private, gnawing feeling that there is something wrong with shariah, as it relates to the modern world. Can the critics be all wrong, all the time? Which side should they trust – their private doubts or their natural tendency to trust world religions?

Defenders of shariah post articles and fatwas (religious rulings or opinions) saying, essentially, there is nothing wrong with shariah. Their intent, among others, is to alleviate the private doubts.

For example, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) consists of a team of religious scholars, most of whom have their doctorates in Islamic law or other Islamic subjects; they have the authority to write fatwas. Their site is set up in the write-in Question and Answer format.

An enquirer asks for clarification about the jizyah tax, which was (and is) imposed on non-Muslims living in Islamic lands (taxes and jihad go hand-in-hand in Islam, as this entire article demonstrates).

The questioner writes:

Kindly clarify to me: Are Muslims ordered to humiliate non-Muslims under their rule according to [9:29] while taking the jizyah from them to put pressure on them to revert to Islam?

Then the questioner quotes Quran 9:29 (omitted here, but see below) and continues with a quotation from a Muslim scholar:

. . . Jizyah is “the payment in exchange for the right to life of the individual dhimmi [citizen liable to the jizyah tax], and it must be renewed annually. It is also punitive, and justified by the evil of the dhimmis ... The payer is also insulted and humiliated when he pays. The tax is thus a means of pressing a dhimmi to convert, a humiliation, an expression of his conquered subject status, and an assertion of Muslim superiority." Besides, "the jizyah should not be accepted when payment is made through an intermediary. The payer should come in person & remain standing: he who is collecting should be sitting ... The tax collector should shake the clothing of the payer, saying, ‘Pay the jizyah, O dhimmi.’ The tax collector can also say, ‘O Jew, enemy of God, pay!’"

In its entirety here is the reply by the Muslim scholar at AMJA:

Jizyah is an amount of money assessed by the Muslim state, and required from the non-Muslims who live in the Muslim state to pay in order for the Muslims to protect them.

Our history shows clearly how just and kind Muslims were during their Golden Period when they used to accommodate non-Muslims and enjoy the mercy and justice of Islam together.[1]

There is too much confusion about jihad and the lesser known word qital. This confusion has been circulating around the web for years. This article is designed to shed some light on the topic.

To get a fuller picture of jihad and qital, we look at their religious purpose, their rules, and their material spoils.

Here is the Table of Contents, with links:

"They committed sins there. They get drunk so action must be taken." Drunkenness: sin. Smashing up a bar so that people can't drink there: not a sin.

Ramadan mubarak from modern, moderate Indonesia: "62 arrested for Indonesian Ramadan bar-room blitz," from Sapa-AFP, July 30 (thanks to David):

A group of 150 youths -- some as young as 13 and carrying swords and golf clubs -- raided the De Most bar late Saturday, smashing bottles of alcoholic drinks and damaging the property, said Hermawan, chief detective for South Jakarta police.

"Of the 62 arrested most are minors, and some...were armed with Samurai swords, sickles and golf clubs," said Hermawan, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

"They shattered the windows and door and smashed bottles, saying they wanted all bars shut to ensure the month of Ramadan is not tainted," he added.

Twenty-three people face charges of damaging property while four are additionally charged with carrying sharp weapons.

The group called itself the Prophet's Defenders Council, Hermawan said.

"It is usual for me and my followers to raid sinful places during Ramadan," the group's alleged leader, 33-year-old Habib Bahar was quoted as saying by the Kompas.com news website after the arrests.

"They committed sins there. They get drunk so action must be taken," said Bahar, who was also arrested.

In previous years Islamic groups have raided places serving alcohol, but Saturday's attack was the first this year since the fasting month of Ramadan officially began on July 21.

Authorities have ordered bars and nightclubs to close during the holy month, but the ban is not strictly enforced.

Ninety percent of Indonesia's population of 240 million identify themselves as Muslim but the vast majority practise a moderate form of Islam.

...and do nothing to rein in sword-wielding "youths."

Facing fines or six months in jail for not being pious enough. "11 nabbed for not fasting — Daud," from the Borneo Post, July 30 (thanks to David):

MIRI: Eleven Muslims have thus far been nabbed by the Sarawak Islamic Religious Department (Jais) for not fasting during the month of Ramadan which started on July 21, said Assistant Minister in the Chief Minister’s Department Datuk Daud Abdul Rahman on Saturday.

Out of the 11 caught, four were from Kota Samarahan, three each from Kuching and Miri, and one from Mukah.

Daud told reporters after presenting assistance to 200 children of Hamidah Yakub Orphanage Complex that the 11 would be charged in court.

For first offenders, they could be fined up to RM1,000 or imprisoned up to six months or both. For subsequent offences, the maximum fine is RM2,000 or a maximum jail term of one year.

“The arrests were made not to embarrass the individuals, but to let them know that they should respect the month of Ramadan. They should have been practising their duties as a Muslim, to fast during this Holy month, and not to eat at open food premises,” said Daud.

He cautioned that Jais would continue to keep a hawk eye on food premises throughout the state to ensure all Muslims toe the line.

Except maybe dhimmi appeasement, one would hope. "Romney: ‘No option should be excluded’ in stopping a nuclear Iran," by Holly Bailey for Yahoo! News, July 29:

JERUSALEM—Speaking against the backdrop of the historic Old City, Mitt Romney signaled he supports Israel's right to "defend itself" against its enemies and said "any and all measures" should be considered in the world's efforts to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

The Republican candidate said preventing a nuclear Iran should be America's "highest national security priority." And while he argued that diplomatic efforts should continue, Romney insisted that all options should be on the table in dealing with Iran, including a military strike.

"We should employ any and all measures to dissuade the Iranian regime from its nuclear course, and it is our fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures will do so," Romney said in an outdoor speech at Mishkenot Sha'anamim, a cultural center in Jerusalem. "In the final analysis, of course, no option should be excluded. We recognize Israel's right to defend itself, and that it is right for America to stand with you. "

Romney pushed back against criticism that those arguing in favor of leaving the military option open are "reckless and provocative and inviting war." "The opposite is true. We are the true peacemakers," Romney said.

He argued that the threat of military action would put more pressure on the ayatollahs in Iran, whom he accused of "testing our moral defenses."

"They want to know who will object and who will look the other way," Romney said. "My message to the people of Israel and the leaders of Iran is one and the same: I will not look away, and neither will my country."

In a message sure to appeal to Jewish voters, with whom Republicans are aiming to make inroads ahead of November's election, Romney repeatedly emphasized the "shared values" and "shared interests" between the United States and Israel....

As the number of Muslims in France and other Western countries continues to rise, we will see more and more of this rejection of Infidel law. Muslims will demand more and more accommodation to Sharia, and increasingly ignore the laws of the secular society -- and once their numbers grow large enough, some of these Muslims will attempt to impose Sharia in its entirety upon the Infidel polity.

"Muslims Who Attacked Police Refused to Recognise French Law," by Cheradenine Zakalwe for Islam Versus Europe, July 28 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A couple of days ago, I posted France24's account of the Muslim mob attack on police in Marseilles while they were trying to do an identity check on a burka-wearing woman.

Le Figaro also published a report on it, which has some interesting details the France 24 account left out, notably those that relate to the Muslims declaring that they refused to recognise French law.

It is around midnight. Two police officers are patrolling in the IIIe arrondissement of the city, close to the Es-Suna mosque. They then see a woman dressed in a burka. As the law authorises them to do, they decide to check her identity. When the officers approach the young woman, she starts to yell and tries to strike one of them. According to the statements of the police officers, Louise-Marie, 18 years old, said that she refused to submit to the identity check "because she didn't recognise French law".

Immediately, a man of around 40, intervenes to help the young woman. According to the statement, he yells that "this was his place and the police don't make the law here." Within a few minutes, around 50 people are encircling the two police officers. Several of them start to strike them and try to knock them down. However one of the police officers manages to make a radio call to colleagues. A police woman arrives to reinforce them and tries in her turn to arrest the veiled young woman. But she reacts violently and bites her forearm....

More Obama betrayal of a loyal ally. "U.S. sees Israel as spy threat," by Matt Apuzzo for the Associated Press, July 29 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.

The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.

It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched.

In a separate episode, according to two other former U.S. officials, a CIA officer in Israel came home to find the food in the refrigerator had been rearranged. In all the cases, the U.S. government believes Israel's security services were responsible.

Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.

In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency's Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel....

Romney said in a speech this past week that Israel was "one of our fondest friends," and he criticized Obama for what he called the administration's "shabby treatment" of the Jewish state....

As I explained here, the jihadists consider these murders to be acts of piety. "Officials: 7 Iraqi police killed in attacks," from AP, July 29:

BAGHDAD (AP) – Two bombings and a drive-by shooting Sunday killed seven Iraqi police in a former al-Qaeda stronghold in the western part of the country, authorities said, another sign of the militants' resurgence.

The attacks before dawn around the city of Fallujah also wounded nine police. They come a week after the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq announced a deadly campaign to reclaim parts of the country the Sunni insurgency was forced to leave before the U.S. military pulled out last December.

After the attacks Sunday, security forces sealed off all roads leading into Fallujah and imposed a curfew on the city, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Officials said two explosives-packed cars blew up within a few minutes of each other in Fallujah and the nearby village of Karma as security patrols drove by, killing three policemen. Fifteen minutes later, a gang of gunmen fired on a Karma police station, killing four. The gunmen escaped.

The casualties were confirmed by local hospital officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information to reporters.

Fallujah was the site of some of the bloodiest battles of the war in 2004 between U.S. forces and the Sunni insurgency. In 2007, some local tribal leaders in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq's Sunni-dominated western Anbar region joined forces with the American troops and forced al-Qaeda to retreat in what was a turning point of the war.

Now, however, al-Qaeda in Iraq is seeking to make a comeback in Anbar and other Sunni areas, launching dozens of deadly attacks in the days since last weekend's statement by Islamic State of Iraq leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that the militant group would push back into its former strongholds .

Al-Qaeda's local wing in Iraq is known as the Islamic State of Iraq, and has for years had a hot-and-cold relationship with the global terror network's leadership....

And so Obama is supporting the advent of yet another Sharia state.

Meanwhile, note that Britain's newest export is jihad. "Foreign Office investigates reports of Britons among Islamist kidnappers of journalists in Syria," by Colin Freeman in the Telegraph, July 28 (thanks to Banafsheh Zand):

The Foreign Office is investigating reports that British citizens are among Islamist fighters who kidnapped a British photographer and his Dutch colleague in northern Syria.

John Cantlie and Dutchman Jeroen Oerlemans were held by the group for a week after they accidentally came across their camp while crossing the border from south east Turkey to report on the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

During their time in captivity they were threatened with death unless they converted to Islam, and both were shot and slightly wounded when they attempted to flee barefoot. They were freed on Thursday night after a group of Free Syrian Army soldiers turned up the camp and angrily demanded that they be released.

Mr Cantlie has not yet spoken of his ordeal, but Mr Oerlemans told Dutch media that some of the gang, which is reported to have been between 30 and 100 strong, had "Birmingham accents".

A source close to the incident told The Sunday Telegraph that there possibly at least six men with British-sounding voices, including one with a heavy south London accent.

"Nobody is quite sure yet how many, but these people generally travel in small groups of about half a dozen," the source said.

The camp members also reportedly included people from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Chechnya, with no Syrians present. The source added that "round 40 per cent" of them apparently spoke English, although it was not clear what nationalities they were.

The possibility of British nationals or residents being present among the group will be of concern to the Government, which has done much in recent years to try to stop British-born Asians and Arabs enlisting with foreign jihadist movements.

The reports come amid growing concern that groups of Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda factions are attempting to join the rebel movement in Syria.

Speaking to Dutch media, Mr Oerlemans said that he and Mr Cantlie spent much of their time blindfolded. He told the NRC Handelsblatt newspaper: "One of the black jihadists freaked out and shouted: 'These are journalists and now they will see we are preparing an international jihad in this place.'"

The group accused them of being spies, and considered holding them for ransom, said Mr Oerlemans. He added: "As soon as Assad has fallen, these fighters want to introduce Islamic law, Sharia, in Syria."...

Somehow these Misunderstanders of Islam didn't get the memo that Ramadan is a time to "reconcile differences and seek peace."

"Pak police assault 2 men for having soft drink," from PTI, July 29 (thanks to David):

Islamabad: Two men were detained and assaulted by policemen in the Pakistani capital for having a soft drink at a popular tourist spot during the period of fasting in the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The two men - Anwar Abbas and Malik Saeed - were detained while they were having a soft drink inside a car at Daman-e-Koh, a viewpoint overlooking Islamabad, on Friday afternoon.

The incident was reported to Islamabad police chief Bani Yamin, who assured action will be taken against the officials involved in the incident, the Dawn newspaper reported today.

Abbas said: "I was not fasting and knowing that it would be ethically incorrect to have a drink in front of people, I chose a place where no one was present."

In the meantime, a police constable came and said taking drinks during fasting is a violation of the Ramazan Act and a serious crime.

He said he told the constable that he was not fasting and was having the drink at an isolated place where no one was present.

"I also told him that it was not their job to stop anyone from eating during the time of fasting but the constable insisted that he has to implement the teachings of Islam," Abbas said.

The constable called two more policemen and they took Abbas and Saeed to a nearby police post.

After a heated argument, the policemen "removed their belts and started beating us", Abbas said.

After a while, when the policemen felt the situation was getting out of control, they let the two men go.

The men reported the matter to the Kohsar police station and to Islamabad police chief Bani Yamin, who assured them that action would be taken against the policemen.

Abbas said police officials had started offering apologies and their seniors were approaching him to withdraw the complaint.

An unnamed police officer said the action of the policemen was against the law and ethics.

"We condemn when Taliban do the same act but now police are doing it in the federal capital, which shows the presence of hardliners in the law enforcement agencies," he said.

Former Islamabad Distract Bar Association general secretary Riasat Ali Azad said there was no provision in the Pakistan Penal Code that prohibited eating at public places.

"It is a religious and moral obligation of a citizen to avoid eating but police cannot restrict them by force. Just like it is our duty to say prayers five times a day but police cannot force any person to go to the mosque," he said....

Actually, oddly enough, it is Islamic jihadists who misunderstand Islam so spectacularly as to deploy these bombs. And U.S. officials will always be one step behind those who spend all their days plotting how to please their god through blood and murder.

"US on lookout for terrorists using upgraded underwear bombs," from the Associated Press, July 27 (thanks to Kenneth):

US security officials are on the lookout for upgraded underwear bombs containing a new type of explosive, it has been disclosed.

The revelation follows analysis of a bomb intercepted by a CIA operation in Yemen.

John Pistole, the US transportation security administrator, told an audience at a security forum in Aspen, Colorado that the device smuggled out by a double agent earlier this year was an upgrade from the underwear bomb carried by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on to a Detroit-bound airliner at Christmas 2009.

"We found in the underwear plot, part 2 … that a different type of explosive had been used than the previous one," Pistole said.

"So we have gone back and recalibrated all the equipment and we have been working with our canine to detect this different type of explosive."...

More Misunderstanders of Islam and Ramadan sow mayhem in the name of Allah in Tatarstan. "Fight over Islam, money and power brings violence to Volga," by Thomas Grove for Reuters, July 27 (thanks to Maxwell):

KAZAN, RUSSIA - Not far from glitzy boulevards where an oil boom has sent up stadiums and high-rises overlooking the Volga River, women in headscarves wander through Islamic bookstores selling pamphlets on the institution of sharia in Russia.

Kazan, capital of Russia's mainly-Muslim Tatarstan region, has long had an image as a showcase of religious tolerance. But that reputation was shattered last week by car bomb and shooting attacks carried out only hours before the start of the holy month of Ramadan.

On the wall outside the bookshop, a flyer in the local Tatar language calls Muslims to unite against the region's top religious leader, Mufti Ildus Faizov, who was wounded in the attacks which also killed his deputy.

"Things will only get worse here and Muslims will be the ones who suffer the most," said Anisa Karabayeva, 43, her face framed by a white hijab, or traditional headscarf.

We see that the victimhood game is played even in Tatarstan.

"Will there be more bombs? Probably," she says flatly, standing in front of a display case stocked with Korans and prayer rugs.

The attacks came against a background of anger among many Muslims who complain that the authorities in Tatarstan are restricting Islam in the name of fighting radicalism. It is a dispute that also involves a struggle for money and influence in the increasingly prosperous oil-producing region....

"Today Islam is growing strongly in Kazan... But there are different sects and movements that you simply cannot control," said Ramil Mingarayev, an imam at the al Marjani Mosque.

"We try to fight radicals, we have tried to clean our city of them, but there are hidden mosques, where they gather and distribute forbidden literature, in basements and in the forests."

Some of those fears arise from threats made by North Caucasus militants far away. Russia's most wanted man, Chechen Islamist guerrilla leader Doku Umarov, called for an uprising among Russia's Muslims last year, mentioning Tatarstan by name.

"I want to appeal to the Muslim brothers who live on Russian-occupied Muslim land... I call on you to destroy the enemies of Allah wherever you are. I call on you to destroy them where your hand reaches and to open fronts of jihad," he said in a video posted on insurgency-affiliated website Kavkaz Centre.

SELLING TOURS

Since becoming head of the Tatarstan branch of the Russian state's Spiritual Directorate of Muslims in April last year, Faizov has been praised by Kremlin authorities for what they say are measures to clamp down on radical sentiment and encourage traditional forms of Islamic practice seen as more moderate....

"It's good we have the authorities. Without them there would be chaos," said Zakhid Anovarov, a burly 20-year-old student with a thin black beard.

"But it's not a just system because it's a man-made system. If we were governed by shariah, then life would be better, more just," he said of the Islamic law code....

Zarifa Kamilova came to Kazan in 2004 to escape the aftermath of the second Chechen War in her hometown of Grozny, where federal forces had toppled a separatist government.

Like other Chechens in Kazan, she was drawn to its Muslim majority and the possibility to find work. But she says she fears pressure by the authorities will marginalize Muslims, leading more and more of them to radicalism.

"I have already taken five books off my shelves this year because they were considered too radical," she said, referring to an ever-expanding list of literature outlawed by Russia's Justice Ministry. She and other Muslims say they have felt increasing pressure since Faizov assumed his post.

"This alone is turning normal people into radicals. It's not that more people are becoming radical it's that their definition is encompassing more and more people," she said....

TAKEN IN THE NIGHT

In his battle with radical Islam, perhaps none of Faizov's efforts were as divisive as his demand that imams of all mosques undergo a course in traditional Hanafi Islam, the movement traditionally associated with Tatarstan.

In December, angry Muslims stormed the main mosque in the town of Almetevsk, 270 km (170 miles) and for hours refused to let local religious authorities enter. The confrontation was eventually defused by Faizov, but resentment still burns.

Near Almetevsk, in the village of Novoye Nadyrovo where roosters and chickens wander freely along gravel paths, authorities removed the local imam, Ilnar Kharisov, from his post a few months ago. Friends say he was detained on Friday night, the day after the explosions in Kazan....

"They've taken all the good imams away and they've replaced them with clowns in their places and they protect them there with police. People are very unhappy here," said a neighbour of Kharisov who gave his name only as Ramil.

What's that, Ramil? Clowns, you say? Reza Aslan is now an imam in Tatarstan?

The "Arab Spring" has led to jihad groups operating with impunity in the Sinai.

"Sinai Jihadi group says responsible for Israel attack in June," from Reuters, July 28 (thanks to Voice of the Copts):

(Reuters) - An Islamic Jihadi group based in Egypt's Sinai has posted a video showing it carried out a cross-border attack in June, killing one Israeli at a border barrier construction site and raising doubts over Egypt's security control over the desert peninsula.

Since the overthrow of U.S.-aligned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the security grip has loosened over Sinai and groups of militant Islamists have spread across its northern part, attacking police stations and a pipeline exporting gas to Israel and Jordan.

An online video posted on Friday featured members of a new group named "Magles Shoura al-Mujahddin" wearing military outfits and choosing as their target an Israeli security patrol and a border town.

The men who according to the video carried out the attack, identified as Egyptian Abu Salah and a Saudi, Abu Hozaifa, said they sought revenge for "Muslims' blood" and dedicated the attack to Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda's leader.

"We will head shortly to execute a double suicide operation targeting the Jewish enemy forces on the Egyptian borders," Abu Salah said, reading out from a piece of paper before the attack with a black flag in the background covered with religious slogans.

Israeli officials said soldiers killed both attackers.

Another Jihadi group named "Ansar Bayt al-Maqdes" claimed in an online video last week its responsibility for gas pipeline blasts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in April that Sinai was becoming a lawless "Wild West" but his government has since signaled more confidence in the new Egyptian government's ability to restore order.

Egyptian security sources said they were investigating information in the videos and were aware of the existence of some Jihadi elements but had no information on these two groups.

"These groups might be very small Jihadi cells in Sinai," a security source told Reuters.

In the video, Jihadis were seen monitoring the border spotting Egyptian and Israeli army sites before identifying a weakness point along the border and choosing two Israeli Jeeps and a border town on the Israeli side as their targets....

According to the news site Massai Ahram, Egypt’s Shura Council announced in a statement that it has agreed to begin taking steps to release convicts who have been imprisoned in Egyptian prisons for years from the nations two most notorious terrorist organizations, Islamic Jihad and Al Gama’a Al Islamiya—including several held under tight security and on death row by presidential decree for committing especially heinous acts of terror in Egypt.

According to Tarek al-Zomor, the formal speaker of the Islamic party and a member of Parliament’s Shura Council, they have already begun taking steps to release 40 prisoners from Islamic Jihad and Al Gama’a Al Islamiya. Zomor refused to release their names until they have all been released onto the streets of Egypt.

During a televised interview earlier this week, Dr. Safwat Hegazy, a popular preacher in Egypt, known for his desire to unify the Arab world into a "United Arab States”—with Jerusalem for a capital—dropped the Western language and made clear what it is the Muslim Brotherhood ultimately seeks: a caliphate and world domination, which even the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood maintains is the group's mission.

In the interview, which Coptic Solidarity has translated with subtitles (click here), Hegazy simply declares: "If you read the literature of the Muslim Brotherhood, you will find in the literature of the Brotherhood, that which they can never abandon: The Islamic Caliphate and mastership of the world. Yes, we will be masters of the world, one of these days” (emphasis his).

The seriousness of recent calls to legalize sex slave “marriages” in Egypt as a way to allow Muslim men to have premarital sex within the bounds of Sharia was recently demonstrated by the fact that many Islamic authorities—including Egypt’s Grand Mufti and the Grand Imam of Al Azhar—made it a point to condemn the practice as contrary to Islam.

While it is refreshing to see Islamic leaders reject this perverse call, it is typical to see others portraying it as a foreign conspiracy. For instance, after rejecting the notion of sex-slave marriages, Dr Muhammaad al-Mukhtar al-Mahdi, a professor of Islamic studies at Al Azhar, said “the crime is not that someone suggested it, but that someone made it easy for him to say and spread such things among the people,” adding that “this is a matter that international Zionism stands behind.”

In other words, Wael al-Ibrashi, the Egyptian liberal talk show host who first aired this matter, followed of course by the default bad guys, “international Zionism,” are the true “criminals”—not the self-proclaimed “expert” at Islamic jurisprudence who studied at Al Azhar and came up with this idea of sex-slave marriages in the first place (click here for original story).

Morsi has already called for the Blind Sheikh, who plotted to murder thousands of Americans by bombing the World Trade Center and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in 1993 (although he only succeeded in bombing the first of those targets), so he will almost certainly bring up this issue when he comes to Washington to meet his foremost patron, Barack Obama. And if Obama wins reelection, he will probably comply.

"Son of 'Blind Sheikh' threatens US embassy employees," from Al-Masry Al-Youm, July 27 (thanks to Benedict):

The son of Omar Abdel Rahman, a Jama’a al-Islamiya leader known as the “Blind Sheikh” who was convicted of terrorism charges in the US in 1995, threatened to organize a protest at the US Embassy in Cairo and detain the employees inside.

Abdallah Abdel Rahman’s threat came during a press conference organized by the sheikh’s family near the highly fortified American embassy compound on Thursday evening.

Abdel Rahman demanded that President Mohamed Morsy intervene for the release of his father as he did in the case of Egyptian journalist Shaimaa Adel who was detained for nearly two weeks for covering protests in Sudan then flown back to Egypt on a plane with Morsy.

He called for applying the “principle of reciprocity,” saying that every American detained in Egypt should be put in solitary confinement and refused visitors like Egyptian prisoners are in the US. He said that his father has been treated badly in US prison.

Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman is “a wronged man whose case has been fabricated, and he should be retried because some witnesses retracted their statements, which they made because of pressure from the former regime,” said Aboud al-Zomor, a member of Jama’a al-Islamiya’s Shura Council who was in jail until the revolution for being involved in the assassination of former President Anwar Sadat.

Following the press conference, Abdel Rahman’s family distributed a statement to attendees that calls on Morsy to form a committee to visit the sheikh in prison, check his health and assign him legal counsel to file a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice over his long-term solitary confinement.

The email below was sent to a list that calls itself "Islam Female Leadership." It calls for contributions from "scholars" (i.e., politically correct dhimmi pseudo-academics) to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women of Oxford Islamic Studies.

The list below of "topics requiring scholarship" is drastically incomplete, don't you think? Doesn't the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women need contributions about honor killing (not just "honor"), female genital mutilation, divinely-sanctioned wife-beating, child marriage, talaq divorce, the devaluing of women's testimony, the inequality of women's inheritance rights, and all the other injustices that women must endure under Islamic law?

If you have an idea for a paper, write in (politely and calmly) to Anne Whittaker, asking her if the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women is going to cover these issues revolving around the institutionalized oppression of women in Islam, and if not, why not?

Subject: contributing to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women
From: Hilary Kalmbach
Date: Fri, July 27, 2012 3:34 pm
To: ISLAM-FEMALE-LEADERSHIP@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Dear list members,

Please see the message below about the possibility of contributing to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women. If you are interested in contributing, please get in touch directly with Anne.Whittaker@oup.com.

Best wishes,

Hilary

Call for Submissions from Oxford University Press

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, one in a series of five reference works on Islamic studies, will be published in 2013 as a part of Oxford's award-winning reference program, which includes The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World and Oxford Islamic Studies Online.

The Encyclopedia is currently seeking submissions from 500 to 4,000 words. Scholars worldwide who are interested in contributing to this major work of scholarship are encouraged to contact Anne.Whittaker@oup.com.

Topics requiring scholarship include:

* Medicine: Contemporary Practice
* Barakah
* Fitnah
* Taliban
* Honor
* Bazaar
* Tabaqat
* Education: Women's Religious Education
* Gender Construction: Contemporary Practices
* Aga Khan Foundation
* Financial Institutions
* International League of Muslim Women
* Relics
* Bahrain
* Cinema: North African Women's Contributions
* Da'wah, Women's Activities in
* Women's Philanthropy, Contemporary
* Women's Rights
* Algeria
* Popular Religion: Europe and the Americas
* Fatwa
* Social Reform and Women: Social Reform in Southeast Asia
* Cottage Industries and Handicrafts
* Human Rights
* Warriors, Contemporary Women

Anne Whittaker
Development Editor
Oxford University Press

There is a "surge in violence" in Thailand since Ramadan began. Somehow these Misunderstanders of Islam didn't get the memo that Ramadan is a time to "reconcile differences and seek peace." And oddly enough, they misunderstand Islam and Ramadan in exactly the same way as the Muslims in Bulgaria who somehow got the crazy idea that "Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators." What an odd coincidence!

"Militants shoot dead 4 soldiers in restive Thai south," from AFP, July 28 (thanks to S.B.):

BANGKOK: Militants shot dead four soldiers and wounded two others early on Saturday in Thailand's volatile south, an army spokesman said, as a surge in violence since the start of Ramzan continued.

The group of six soldiers were attacked as they patrolled a road in the Mayo district of Pattani province.

"About 20 armed militants on three pick up trucks opened fire at a team of soldiers once they get close to them," Colonel Pramote Prom-in, southern army spokesman, said.

Pramote said four soldiers were killed in the attack and two more were wounded as they returned fire.

The incident came after a roadside bomb killed five policemen in nearby Yala province on Wednesday....

Authorities had warned that militants were likely to step-up attacks during the Islamic holy month.

So many misunderstanders of Islam!

A nation that places such restrictions on the freedom of conscience of its citizens ought not to be allowed to compete in the Olympics. But that, of course, would be in a sane world.

Muhammad said: "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him" (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Yet Muslim spokesmen such as Harris Zafar, Mustafa Akyol, Salam al-Marayati, M. Cherif Bassiouni, and Ali Eteraz (among many others) have assured us that Islam doesn't punish apostasy. I expect that Zafar, Akyol, al-Marayati, Bassiouni, and Eteraz will immediately be jetting over to Riyadh to explain to the Saudis that they're getting Islam all wrong, wrong, wrong, and should stop investigating this conversion case immediately.

"Saudi court to look into alleged apostasy case," from Gulf News, July 26 (thanks to NA):

Dubai: A Saudi court is expected to look into an unprecedented case of a foreigner converting a local Muslim woman to Christianity.

According to Sabq news website, the court in Al Khobar in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia will review the case submitted by the public prosecutor after a man filed a suit against a Saudi and a Lebanese for their alleged role in converting his daughter to Christianity and smuggling her out of the country. She is now reportedly living in a church in Lebanon. The woman, 28, was working in a company in Al Khobar where the two men were also employed. Sabq said that the investigation has concluded that the role of the Saudi national was to assist in smuggling the woman out of the country. Both defendants have been freed on bail pending the trial and the Lebanese has been reportedly barred from leaving the country.

But don't worry. The world will almost certainly be spared the loss of all those peerless Saudi athletes: the IOC will cave, throwing safety considerations out the window. Whenever there is a conflict between Islamic practice and Infidel practice, Infidel practice must give way, say the Islamic supremacists -- and so far the Infidels have been happy to oblige.

"London 2012 Olympics: Saudi Arabia threaten to withdraw from Olympics over judo headscarf ban," by Jacquelin Magnay for the Telegraph, July 27:

Saudi Arabia have threatened to withdraw from the London 2012 Olympic Games unless female judo athlete Wujdan Shahrkhani is allowed to wear her headscarf in competition.

The International Olympic Committee has organised an urgent meeting with Saudi Arabia national Olympic committee officials, the international judo federation, and London Olympic organisers to try and avert the Saudi withdrawal.

"Yes we have heard that the Saudis are not happy and we will have an urgent meeting, certainly in the next two days," an IOC spokesperson told Telegraph Sport.

The issue is particularly sensitive as the IOC president Jacques Rogge had spent many months attempting to ensure Saudi Arabian women were participating in the London Games, despite initial reticence by the Saudi royal family.

Saudi Arabia had been the only country which appeared not to be sending any female athletes to the Games.

But just weeks ago, the IOC announced that two female athletes would represent Saudi Arabia at the Games: Shahrkhani in judo and Sarah Attar in track and field....

Once again the media characterizes a jihad attack and a defensive response as a "clash," as if both sides were morally equivalent. One must imagine the Philippine army descending without warning upon peaceful, innocent Muslims, weakened from Ramadan fasting -- and when you do imagine that, you've understood the perspective of the mainstream media. "Clash with al Qaeda linked group kills 11 in Philippines," from AFP, July 26 (thanks to Kenneth):

MANILA: Philippine forces clashed with Muslim extremists on a southern island Thursday, leaving seven soldiers and four militants dead, the military said.

Elite rangers battled members of the al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group on the troubled southern island of Basilan, with three soldiers and two insurgents also wounded in the clash.

“Firefight is ongoing as of this report,” the military statement said.

It was the latest in a series of deadly clashes in the heavily-forested island of Basilan, a stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf.

The group was founded in the 1990s with seed money from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Two branches of the Muslim Brotherhood coming together for the meeting. One has the open support of the U.S. Government. How long will it be before the other one does as well?

"Egypt's Mursi meets Hamas PM Haniyeh in Cairo," from Reuters, July 26 (thanks to Kenneth)"

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh met Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi on Thursday in an official visit that signaled a big shift in Cairo's stance toward the Hamas movement after the election of a Muslim Brotherhood head of state in Egypt.

A Palestinian official said the head of Egyptian intelligence had promised measures to increase the flow of fuel supplied by Qatar to Gaza via Egypt and needed to ease the small Palestinian territory's power shortages.

But there was no immediate sign that Cairo was ready to open up its border with Gaza to the extent sought by Hamas, something analysts partly attributed to the influence still wielded by the Hosni Mubarak-era security establishment.

"Mursi's heart is with Hamas but his mind is elsewhere," said Hany al-Masri, a Palestinian political commentator. "He will give them as much as he can but he won't be able to give them much because his powers are restricted," he said....

Not to worry. Obama could make a few phone calls and get this straightened right out; in any case, watch for it to be swiftly resolved.

But Pakistani officials assure us that that hasn't happened. And we know how trustworthy they are. "Pakistan shamed by visa scandal," by Stephen Moyes for The Sun, July 24 (thanks to S.B.):

PAKISTAN’S president yesterday ordered the arrest of criminals behind an Olympics visa racket exposed by The Sun.

A dozen passport officials have been suspended.

An aide said Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and President Asif Ali Zardari were appalled after we exposed corrupt officials offering potential terrorists the chance to sneak into Britain with the Pakistan Olympic squad.

Rehman Malik added: “The visa scandal is shocking.

“President Zardari and Prime Minister Ashraf have asked me to arrest those responsible for defaming Pakistan. Those responsible will be punished accordingly.”

Embarrassed Pakistan officials also rang Downing Street yesterday to confirm they are doing all they can to find the gang ringleaders.

A dozen Pakistan passport officials were suspended yesterday and others were taken into custody.

Those suspended include the general manager of the Lahore passport office which arranged for an undercover Sun investigator to obtain bogus travel documents for £600.

And senior politician Abid Chodhary, who offered our man a UK visa plus a letter confirming he was part of Pakistan’s Olympic entourage for £7,000, has been banned from leaving the country.

The Dream Land travel agency in Lahore, whose staff put The Sun in touch with corrupt officials, was closed yesterday. Arrests are expected soon.

Mr Malik said he had personally contacted the British authorities to assure them no terrorists would be allowed to slip into London 2012.

Oh, well, that's a relief!

"Forbidden to you are your mothers and daughters, your sisters, your aunts paternal and maternal, your brother's daughters, your sister's daughters, your mothers who have given suck to you, your suckling sisters, your wives' mothers, your stepdaughters who are in your care being born of your wives you have been in to -- but if you have not yet been in to them it is no fault in you - and the spouses of your sons who are of your loins, and that you should take to you two sisters together, unless it be a thing of the past; God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate; and wedded women, save what your right hands own." (Qur'an 4:23-24)

Will the Islamophobia never end? "US professor says Coptic girls being kidnapped, forced into servitude in Egypt," by Joseph Mayton for Bikya Masr, July 27 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

CAIRO: A new report from George Washington University professor Michele Clark and Coptic rights activist Nada Ghaly has argued that thousands of young Coptic Christian girls in Egypt are the victim of kidnapping and forced servitude by Muslims in the North African country.

“Women and girls who are found indicate they were befriended by friends or relatives of their kidnappers, or the kidnappers themselves, drugged and then taken in a well-organized plan.

“Others, like a young mother who testified before the Helsinki Commission last week, were snatched by violent strangers in broad daylight. Her would-be abductor shouted to bystanders while dragging her to a waiting taxi, ‘No one interfere! She is an enemy of Islam’,” said a report highlighting the new report.

The report, which detailed Clark and Ghaly’s latest description of violence against young Coptic women, goes on to say:

Abduction, many who return home indicate that they were raped and told they could not go home because their families would never accept them back. Many are beaten; others are forced into domestic servitude. They are not allowed to leave where they are held without a member of their captor’s family keeping watch. They eventually are brainwashed into thinking the only way to be safe is to convert. Their families, who have been searching frantically for their daughters, sisters and wives — without any help from the police — often never discover their fate. The lucky ones find out via YouTube and other websites that their daughters are alive and have converted. While some conversions could be legitimate, overwhelming evidence points to abduction, forced marriage and coerced conversion persecuting the Coptic population.

Clark is not new to her outspoken coverage of the plight of Coptic women, issuing near annual reports on the situation, which some observers say embellishes and delivers a picture that is far from accurate.

In recent years, Coptic Christian advocacy groups have lambasted the Egyptian authorities for allegedly not forcing the return of Coptic girls to their families after they have allegedly been kidnapped by Muslim men. Police and media have reported scores of missing women over the past few years and many quickly return to their families without much explanation.

Some Coptic families have alleged that the women were kidnapped by Muslim men and forced to undergo conversion to Islam.

But some women’s rights advocates here argue that these are not kidnappings. More often, they see these cases as cries for help by young women in the socially conservative Coptic community, which traces its church to the first century when, by traditional belief, the apostle Mark founded it in Egypt as the first Christian church in history.

In particular, rights activists say the missing young women draw attention to customs among traditional Copts, particularly the lack of access to divorce and the practice of arranged marriages.

“A key reason for the so-called ‘kidnappings’ is that Coptic women have no right to divorce,” Nehad Abul Komsan, head of the Cairo-based Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights and now leading member of the newly re-established National Council of women, told Bikyamasr.com in a previous interview on the subject.

“This means that if their parents tell them they are going to marry their cousin, they have to submit to this and have no choice . . . So they turn to Islam, not because of a spiritual belief in the religion but because it gives them more of an opportunity to choose their life’s path,” she said.

Once returned to their families the women’s absences often remain unexplained and the ongoing controversy has served as flashpoints for long-simmering tensions between the Coptic and Muslim communities.

One of most reported cases is of Irene Hanna Labib, who was allegedly kidnapped from Sohag, some 500 kilometers south of Cairo, in 2009. According to AINA’s reporter, Mary Abbelmassih, the Egyptian police in the area are refusing to go after her abductor. She argues that Labib’s kidnapping is part of the “Islamization business” and part of the way Egypt’s Muslim population are attempting to rid Egypt of Christians.

She quotes Magdy Khalil, a Copt and researcher, who says “abducting and converting Coptic girls to Islam is not only a result of the paranoid and racist incitation against the Copts, it is an organized and pre-planned process by associations and organizations inside Egypt with domestic and Arab funding, as the main role in seducing and luring Coptic girls is carried through cunning, deceit, and enticement, or through force if required.”

But Komsan said her organization has received numerous reports from Coptic women who seek their help in deciding what to do with their lives, especially in a situation when legal divorce is not an option.

She said another major factor spurring young Coptic women to flee their families is the move in the 1990s by Coptic Christian churches to forbid conversion to another Christian sect in which they might have found more freedom.

“It is not necessarily a societal problem; it is more religious issues that face women in our society,” said Abul Komsan.

“Women face leaders that force them to do things that they do not have any desire to do. They do certain things, such as running away from their family and converting to Islam, because it is the only way to get out of their designated role their family has for them.”

Laura, a Coptic woman in her mid-20s living in Alexandria who asked that her surname not be used, agreed. She said that while a few of the kidnappings may be authentic, most of the media reports are based on fabrications made by the families to disguise their daughters’ dissatisfaction.

“We, as Coptic women, have to deal with what our priests tell us and force upon us on a daily basis and often many women just can’t take it any longer so they just leave their families and run off with a Muslim man,” she says.

Because of the alleged kidnappings, more women are coming to her organization for counseling, Abul Komsan says, and many ask for advice about whether to leave or stay.

Muslim leaders have condemned the alleged kidnappings as contrary to Islamic thinking. Al-Azhar’s former grand sheikh Sayyed Al-Tantawi told Al-Ahram a few years ago that “these actions are contrary to Islam and we hope to receive more information concerning alleged kidnappings and would like to have an open dialogue with our Christian brothers and sisters in the country.”...

Actually, kidnapping infidels and enslaving them is fully sanctioned in Islamic law: "As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them. Allah, may he be exalted, says, 'When you encounter those [infidels] who deny [the Truth=Islam] then strike [their] necks' (Qur'an sura 47, verse 4)" — Abu’l-Hasan al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah (The Laws of Islamic Governance), trans. by Dr. Asadullah Yate, (London), Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., 1996, p. 192.

Naila Afsar would probably have become another victim of Islamic honor killing if this case had not come to the attention of authorities. And at least for now, they weren't dhimmi enough to ignore it and allow Naila to be murdered. "Muslim grandmother who kidnapped and drugged her own daughter because she wouldn't marry the 'right' man is jailed," by Graham Smith for the Daily Mail, July 27 (thanks to David):

A devout Muslim grandmother has been jailed for four years for kidnapping and drugging her own daughter after she refused to marry the man her family wanted her to.

Mother-of-eight Shamim Akhtar, 59, was jailed with her son Shamrez Khan and her son-in-law Zahid Mahmood for abusing Naila Afsar, then 23, out of 'some misplaced sense of warped family honour'.

Khan, 34, was given a five-year sentence and Mahmood, 37, was jailed for four years at Burnley Crown Court today....

Akhtar, of Bradford, was found guilty of kidnap, false imprisonment and two counts of administering a drug after a four-week trial at Preston Crown Court earlier this year.

Khan, of Bradford, and Mahmood, of Accrington, Lancashire, both pleaded guilty to the same offences part-way through the same trial.

Mrs Afsar's family had lined up a marriage for her with her cousin but, after some time together, she decided she wanted to end that relationship, the court heard.

She came under sustained pressure from her family in Bradford to the extent that she fled to Newcastle, where she thought they would not find her.

In Newcastle, she met postgraduate student Afsar Saddiq. They started a relationship and later married.

Once settled, Mrs Afsar tried to re-establish a relationship with her family but they began to pressure her again to divorce and restart the relationship with her cousin.

Things came to a head in January 2010 when Khan, his mother and others travelled to Newcastle, broke into Mrs Afsar's flat and threatened her and her husband.

She was taken to Accrington where various attempts were made to change her mind.

At one point her mother said to Mrs Afsar that she was 'worse than a prostitute, you should be killed', the court heard.

Judge Newell said: 'She resisted these attempts and she stood up to you.'

He said Khan, who was effectively the head of the family, pushed and slapped his sister.

Khan thought his sister's actions had 'brought shame and disgrace on the family, had impugned their honour'.

Eventually, Mrs Afsar was made to drink a milky liquid which contained the drug lorazepam - described in court today as a 'date rape drug'.

She was bundled into a car in an attempt to force her to go from Accrington to Bradford, against her will....

I am confident that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is jetting his way to Saudi Arabia right now, so as to explain to the authorities there that Sharia is benign and completely compatible with Western notions of human rights.

Islamic Tolerance Alert from the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places: "Sri Lankan at Risk of Being Beheaded for Praying to Buddha," from The Chakra, July 26 (thanks to David):

A Sri Lankan youth employed as a domestic aid has been arrested in Saudi Arabia for praying to a statue of Lord Buddha, which is considered an offence according to Islamic Sharia law. According to the Bodu Bala Sena, the youth bearing passport no. 2353715 identified as Premanath Pereralage Thungasiri has been arrested by Umulmahami Police, which is a grave situation. While the youth is a Buddhist, the charge levelled against him is that he paid obeisance to the Buddha at the house where he was employed.

The Bodu Bala Sena organisation further said those employed in Muslim-majority countries are prevented from practicing their religious faiths, and if found to do so are punished severely. Recently a Sri Lankan woman was arrested for gazing at a child at a shopping complex, where she was accused of witchcraft, on the grounds that she had a black cord around her wrist.

On prior occasions too many Sri Lankan female domestic workers were forced to embrace Islam, and wear the traditional attire, while so far four Sri Lankan youth have been beheaded in that country. (Source: Ceylon Today)

Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocratic monarchy where the religion of Islam is the official religion. Non-Islamic proselytism and conversions are illegal and conversion by Muslims to another religion (apostasy) carries the death penalty. Under Saudia [sic] Arabia Sharia Islamic law, children of Saudi parents are considered Muslim, regardless of the country or the religious tradition in which they may have been raised.

Islamic Jew-hatred, sanctioned by the IOC. "Lebanese Olympic Team Demands Barrier Separation From Israel Squad," from Algemeiner, July 27 (thanks to David):

The Lebanese judo team forced International Olympic Committee officials to erect a barrier between themselves and the Israeli judo squad, Friday afternoon in London, just hours before the Games’ opening ceremony, reports Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot.

Both teams were scheduled to train inside London’s ExCeL center but Lebanon’s team did not want to be seen by the Israeli one, and IOC officials heeded to the Lebanese’s demand after the team’s coach demanded separation.

This is not the first time Middle Eastern judo teams have caused a political stir. In February, Egypt’s Ramadan Dawris defeated Arik Zeevi of Israel, but afterwards, Dawris refused to shake the hand of his competitor....

According to AFP, “Muslims on Friday [today] set fire to Christian homes in a village near the Egyptian capital after a fight between a Muslim man and a Christian laundry worker who singed his shirt while ironing it, police said. At least one person was wounded as Muslims and Coptic Christians also traded fire bombs, police officials said.”

AFP gives no more details; however, Al Masrawy does. According to it, the Christian man, Samih Nasim, burned the shirt of the Muslim man, Ahmed Ramadan, this last Wednesday, leading to a brawl between the two Egyptians. The next day, Thursday, “the Muslim, with approximately 20 of his followers, went to the Christian’s home to attack him. Expecting this, the Christian was prepared and climbed to the highest point of his roof, hurling Molotov cocktails at the Muslims,” injuring one.

As a result, Friday, today, the Muslim man returned “with approximately two-thousand Muslims” burning and plundering Christian homes, and wounding several people, in the latest example of Collective Punishment for Egypt's "dhimmi" Copts.

Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but "the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour 'provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.'" And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that "Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values."

In light of all this, until authorities get the courage to tell the truth about honor killing, there will be many more such murders.

"Cop kills sister for not withdrawing case," by Rana Yasif for the Express Tribune, July 26 (thanks to David):

A woman was shot dead on July 20 by her brother, a police constable, for not withdrawing a case registered against him in April.

Tariq Shah, their elder brother of the deceased, said Najma, 35, part of the Sharqpur Inter College for Girls’ cricket team, used to wear pants and ride a motorcycle. He said he and his brothers did not approve of it. He said they had warned her several times but she did not stop.

Police said on April 23, Sajid and Wajid, beat Najma with clubs. She was rescued by some neighbours. She filed a case against her brothers and an uncle, Naseer Shah, under Sections 354 (assault)/452 (House-trespass for intentional assault) and 379 (theft) with Shahdara police.

Her father, Sarwar Shah, complainant in the FIR, said that her brothers had wanted her to withdraw the case, but she had refused. Sajid Shah has yet to be arrested.The investigation officer said the suspects were on bail till July 28. He said they were not cooperating in the investigation. He said he will write to the court about this and their bails will be cancelled.

The account of the "dispute" these Afghan guards had with the Australian troops doesn't ring true. It is much more likely that they were more Taliban infiltrators, like so many of their brethren who have turned and fired upon the NATO troops who were training and paying them.

"Afghan NATO Guards Defect to Taliban After Dispute," from Deutsche Presse-Agentur, July 25 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Twenty Afghan guards for the NATO-led Australian forces defected to the Taliban after a dispute with the soldiers in southern Afghanistan, police said Wednesday.

"The Australian soldiers beat the Afghan guards after some verbal disputes in a military camp in Charchino district of Uruzgan province," district police chief Wali Dad said.

Wildly unlikely that "the Australian soldier beat the Afghan guards," given the Western nations' thoroughly dhimmi rules of engagement. And which side are you on, Wali Dad?

The angry guards set the security towers on fire and defected to the Taliban, taking weapons and ammunition, he said.

The defection occurred two days after a police chief and 12 of his men took weapons and joined the Taliban in western Farah province.

Did someone beat them, too, or did they just return to those who always had their loyalty?

Now, wait a minute. Didn't Barack Obama say that al-Qaeda was on the ropes? In any case, this is yet another indication of the impossibility of distinguishing jihad terrorists from peaceful Muslims -- an impossibility that is regularly killing our troops in Afghanistan. "15 Iraqi Officials Quit in Protest Over Qaeda Threat," by Rod Nordland for the New York Times, July 27 (thanks to Bill):

CAIRO — Fifteen neighborhood officials in the Iraqi city of Baquba have resigned to protest what they say is the government’s inability to protect them from Qaeda infiltrators, Iraqi officials said Friday.

The development was yet another indication in the past week of efforts by Al Qaeda to stage a resurgence in Iraq.

The resignations of the officials, known as mukhtars, was confirmed on Friday by Abdullah al-Hiali, the head of the City Council in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province. He said the officials resigned “to save their family members’ lives because of living under threats from Al Qaeda and militants.”

Mukhtars are representatives elected in each neighborhood in Iraqi communities, and they act as liaisons between residents and the government. There are about 100 of them in Baquba, a city north of Baghdad with a population of about half a million. A total of 50 have resigned since January, Mr. Hiali said.

He said that eight mukhtars had been assassinated in Baquba this year in Al Qaeda’s effort to gain control of neighborhoods, particularly in the west of the city. In addition, seven family members were killed in those attacks, Mr. Hiali said. Most were carried out by so-called “sticky bombs,” explosives attached to the underside of victims’ cars, he added.

Baquba was a Qaeda stronghold during the Iraq war, and the former Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed just outside the city in an American airstrike in 2006....

Clearly this exchange (watch it below) indicates that the Obama Administration is indeed contemplating ways to circumvent the First Amendment and outlaw criticism of Islam: blasphemy laws would, if they succeed, be coming to the U.S. If this, happens, it's all over. If the U.S. adopts blasphemy laws, that would be the end of any resistance to jihad, as we will be rendered mute and thus defenseless against its advance. (I hope one of you will bake a cake with a file in it and come visit me in prison.)

Surely the First Amendment will prevent this, you say? The First Amendment does not automatically enforce itself. And if those charged with guarding and protecting it are determined to do away with it, they can hedge it around with nuances and exceptions that will render it as toothless and essentially void as the Second Amendment already is in some areas of the U.S.

"DOJ official refuses to promise that DOJ will NEVER advance an anti-blasphemy law," by Patrick Poole at PJ Media, July 26:

A stunning exchange took place today when Assistant AG Tom Perez of the DOJ Civil Rights Division refused to commit to the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution that it would never advance a law criminalizing the right to criticize any religion.

The non-commital answer by Perez was in response to a question asked by Rep. Trent Frank (R-AZ): “Will you tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?”

Read it all.

Over at Gatestone Institute (via RaymondIbrahim.com), the June persecution report is out. The introduction follows:

U.S.-backed rebels are committing Christian genocide in Syria, where they are sacking churches and issuing threats that all Christians will be cleansed from rebel-held territory. A mass exodus of thousands of Christians is taking place, even as mainstream Western reporters like Robert Fisk demonize those same Christians for being supportive of the secular regime.

The bloody jihad waged against Nigeria's Christians, which has seen hundreds killed this year alone, now includes plans to kill Christians with poisoned food, as part of the Islamic organization Boko Haram's stated goal of purging Nigeria of all Christian presence.

During Egypt's presidential elections, Al Ahram reported that "the Muslim Brotherhood blockaded entire streets, prevented Copts from voting at gunpoint, and threatened Christian families not to let their children go out and vote" for the secular candidate.

Meanwhile, under President Obama, the U.S. State Department, in an unprecedented move, purged the sections dealing with religious persecution from its recently released Country Reports on Human Rights. Likewise, the Obama administration insists that the Nigerian crisis has nothing to do with religion, even as Obama offered his hearty blessings to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood president, in the midst of allegations of electoral fraud.

Categorized by theme, June's assemblage of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity.

It is not permissible according to Sharia, they said. And it's true: Sharia forbids Christians in the Islamic state to build new churches or repair old ones. And while stories like this one are common enough, the iron dogma in the U.S. that Sharia is benign and completely compatible with Constitutional freedoms must never be questioned.

"Churches should not be built in Islamic countries, say preachers," from the Arab Times, July 27 (thanks to David):

KUWAIT CITY, July 26: A group of Islamic preachers claimed that churches should not be built in Islamic countries particularly in the Arabian Peninsula following the issuance of an approval for constructing a church in Jleeb Al-Shuyoukh, reports Al-Watan Arabic daily.

Undersecretary of Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs Mutlaq Al-Qarawi stressed that the ministry is not responsible for issuing licenses for building churches, and only receives the applications for licenses, which they refer immediately to the Municipality for review.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Nazem Al-Misbah pointed out that the Fatwa and Legislation Department should be questioned for such issues, stressing that based on his knowledge about Islam, it is forbidden to build churches in the Arabian Peninsula.

Adding to the Sheikh Nazem’s comment, Sheikh Mohammad Humoud Al-Najdi said building churches in Kuwait should be prohibited, as Kuwait is a part of the Arabian Peninsula.

Furthermore, Sheikh Sayed A-Rifae Al-Husseini expressed displeasure towards Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, and the Municipality for approving the construction of a new church in Jleeb Al-Shuyoukh, stressing that it is not permissible as per the Sharia.

He added that giving excuses such as it is a matter of human rights and international norms to build it, is not acceptable, as Islam comes first, and people should respect religion first before serving humanity or anything else.

Yadi was a teacher of the Qur'an. How did he come to misunderstand Islam so spectacularly as to urge warfare during classes on the Book of Peace, and to teach people how to make bombs? It's a real puzzler for the learned analysts in Washington, but they will never be able to solve it because they're already forbidden to examine the texts and teachings of Islam to see if they could have had anything to do with inciting and inspiring a man like Yadi. Meanwhile, Yadis all over the world keep going to Qur'an classes, but don't be concerned about that: surely they won't all misunderstand its peaceful teachings.

"Court Handed Down Five Years in Jail for Terrorists Instructors," from the Jakarta Globe, July 27 (thanks to David):

The West Jakarta Court sentenced two men to five years in prison in connection with the April 2011 suicide bombing of a police station in Cirebon, West Java.

Yadi Supriadi and Nanang Irawan were found guilty of teaching suicide bomber M. Syarif how to make a bomb. Yadi had previously urged Muslims to wage war against the nation’s enemies of Islam during Koran recitation classes, telling listeners that they should make a bomb.

“Yadi has been convincingly proven to be guilty of committing [acts of] terrorism,” presiding judge Haswandi said.

Both men have been convicted to teaching Syarif how to make a bomb.

On April 15, 2011, Syarif died in a suicide bombing of the Adz-Dzikra mosque inside the Cirebon police headquarters. Thirty-one people were injured in the blast, which killed Syarif.

The defense argued that Yadi only taught Syarif about hating so-called enemies of Islam, not how to make a bomb.

The judge rejected the claim, saying that there was evidence that Yadi told his followers how to make a bomb.

“How could we say that the [training] efforts are not related to terrorism,” Haswandi said....

How indeed?

There are many on what can broadly be called the counter-jihad Right who think that if they trim their message, start talking about "radical Islam" and "moderate Muslims," or even the peaceful religion that has been Hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists, they will dodge the fire from Hamas-linked CAIR and be able to work against jihad without interference from the politically correct Left and the Islamic supremacists. Hamas-linked CAIR encourages this kind of thinking, most egregiously in its "Islamophobia" report, in which it declared that there was criticism of Islam and jihad that was not "Islamophobic," but provided no examples.

They couldn't offer any examples because there aren't any: in reality, anyone and everyone who does anything effective to resist jihad and Islamic supremacism is charged with racism, bigotry, and "Islamophobia," no matter how much they dissemble about the roots of the problem within Islam and how much they hide behind non-representative "moderates" with their own private non-traditional Islam, such as Zuhdi Jasser and Irshad Manji.

And so now it is Reza Kahlili's turn. They've already gotten me and others purged from government and law enforcement training materials, without any investigation into whether or not what we were saying was true. And now they're swooping in on the replacements, and once they're gone, if anyone replaces them who says anything close to the truth, they'll start whining about him as well. Right now our politically correct political establishment is handing the Islamic supremacists everything they want, so now is their time to strike, and to drive all of the truth about Islam and jihad out of the training of those in the front line of the resistance -- and they know it.

I must therefore respectfully disagree with my friend Michael Ledeen, who has trumpeted this as a victory over CAIR, since Kahlili is going to speak as scheduled. (The appalling David Frum has done so as well.) The Pentagon, in its statement saying that Kahlili would not be dropped, assured Hamas-linked CAIR that Kahlili would not be speaking about Islam. They didn't say, "A Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group is not going to dictate our choice of speakers," which is what they should have said when CAIR first started complaining about me and others. Instead, they accept Hamas-linked CAIR's false premise, that there is something wrong with bringing in Reza Kahlili to speak about Islam, and implicitly accept also the idea that Hamas-linked CAIR has a legitimate voice in these matters. And that is, in a word, shameful.

"CAIR pushes DoD to drop ex-CIA operative lecturer, claims anti-Islam," by Caroline May at The Daily Caller, July 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):

The Council on American Islamic Relations is urging the Pentagon to drop a former CIA operative inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a lecturer at the Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy.

The group claims that the views of the former operative, who has been teaching, writing and lecturing about the dangers Iran poses to the West under the pseudonym Reza Kahlili, is anti-Islam and promoting his own agenda as a former Muslim.

“This is yet another unfortunate example of our nation’s military and counterterrorism personnel being trained by individuals who weaken America’s security by promoting their own religious and political agendas,” wrote CAIR national Executive Director Nihad Awad in a letter sent to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Monday.

According to Kahlili, who reports for The Daily Caller on a freelance basis, his lectures at the JCITA are about the intelligence operation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, not Islam. He noted, however, that CAIR’s distaste for him probably stems from the intersections between the two.

“CAIR is likely upset with my articles and news pieces on the fact that the guards intelligence also runs operations out of Islamic centers and Mosques,” Kahlili explained to TheDC in an email. “If they truly care about the Islamic community in America and the sanctity of the Mosque, they should welcome such information and help authorities to weed out such operators from ordinary Muslims so that another 09/11 does not take place.”...

CAIR is the largest Muslim advocacy group in America and was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial....

Update: The Pentagon provided TheDC with a statement of support for Kahlili, Wednesday.

“We can confirm that Mr. Reza Kahlili, who has specialized counterintelligence expertise, occasionally lectures at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA),” Pentagon spokesman James Gregory wrote in an email to TheDC. “He’s one of many guest lecturers called upon by JCITA for specific subject matter knowledge. His experiences provide valuable insight to trainees, and he keeps his personal religious beliefs out of the classroom. He does not lecture on or about Islam or any religious treatise, and his personal beliefs are his own.”...

This death threat came in to ABN after I interviewed Pamela Geller in a show on "Islamophobia" last Monday night. I posted an expurgated version of this death threat already, but the unexpurgated version gives the full flavor of the opponents we face in fighting for freedom and human rights. Pamela Geller has the full audio, plus a transcript:

Now listen to me, asshole: if you ever disrespect my belief, I'm going to personally find ya, ok? If you ever disrespect Islam ever again, I'm going to personally find you all, ok? Take what I'm saying very fucking seriously, ok? And I fucking mean it. I'm going to personally find you all, ok? Your life will be a fucking nightmare. Take what I'm saying very fucking seriously. And start to learn how to respect other people's belief system. This is not freedom of speech. You're being a fucking dickhead. I'm going to personally find you, if I ever see your fucking ass. Don't be disrespectful of other people's belief system, ok? Fucking asshole dickhead. I'm gonna find you. You'll see it. You'll fucking die.

Pamela notes quite rightly: "If Daisy Khan or Huma Abedin had received this threat, the police would be on 24-hour guard at their house. But no one will take notice of this one."

UPDATE: Samar at ABN sent me this email:

Fyi I filed a report w the FBI just for the record. I found it a little odd; they said they'd need a more specific threat like a date/time specified for an attack to consider it a serious threat and take further measures.

They also said they can't assume it's a religious-related threat because the caller didn't say he was coming after us "in the name of Allah." The threat needs to be worded the right way.

Pamela Geller has the amazing story of today's hearing on our AFDI lawsuit against Detroit SMART transit:

What began as a clear first amendment issue has exploded into a landmark case regarding the the status of Islam as a political entity. Today the Detroit Transit Authority (SMART), a government entity, argued before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that our "Leaving Islam" ad was political because Islam is political. At least two of the three judges seemed to go along.

If the Court rules against us, it will be ruling that Islam is political and that Sharia is a political program -- something that other government agencies have strenuously denied. If that happens, will Islam and Sharia deserve the protection of a religion?

The case was argued today before 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Raymond Kethledge, John Marshall Rogers and Algenon L. Marbley. Chris Hildebrand, the lawyer for Detroit SMART, began by referring to and based his whole argument on our recent victory over the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority in another First Amendment case about a completely different ad (a pro-Israel ad). Hildebrand argued that the Judge in that case, Paul Engelmayer, had said that that ad was political, and thus that the MTA had to accept it in accord with their guidelines. Hildebrand asserted that our "Leaving Islam?" bus ad, which Detroit SMART rejected, was also political, and thus was rightly rejected by SMART, which (in contrast to the MTA) does not take political ads. His client, said Hildebrand, does not reject ads because they're provocative (as he claimed that ours was), or controversial, but because they're political, and SMART does not and will not take political positions.

Judge Rogers then told him that he had gotten SMART into a "blurry area" to be making a distinction between the political and religious. Hildebrand countered that while the ad may be anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, and anti-Sharia (actually it was designed wholly and solely to offer help to people whose lives were threatened), it was also political. Judge Marbley then pointed out that an imam, who would issue a fatwa (referring to the part of our ad that asked, "Is your family threatening you? Is there a fatwa on your head?") was not an elected official.

Hildebrand then dropped the bomb that has extraordinary implications for the debate about anti-Sharia laws and the status of Islam in the United States: he said that yes, imams have a religious function, but they also "control Sharia law," and Sharia is political. Marbley said that that might be so in Iran, but not in Detroit, where they had a purely religious function. Hildebrand then dug in even deeper, saying that imams in Dearborn deal with Sharia on both a religious and political basis. When Marbley then asked him how our ad was different from one that SMART accepted from an atheist group, calling on people to become atheists, Hildebrand said that it differed because Islam is not only religious, but also a "political series of laws." Marbley then pointed out that the same thing could be said about the Catholic Church, since the Vatican was a political entity, and that could be used to rule out advertising from Catholic groups. Hildebrand then argued that our ad was both religious and political, and that the reference to a fatwa made it primarily political and not religious -- which would only be true if Sharia itself is primarily political and not religious.

Judge Kethledge seemed to go along with this argument, telling our own lawyer, Robert Muise (who ably argued for our side), that Sharia is "arguably" political as well as religious. Judge Rogers then outrageously compared our ad to an ad repeating a vile and disgusting blood libel against the Jews as part of Jewish law (which it most certainly is not, but the death penalty for apostasy most certainly is part of the sharia) -- showing the truth of his and Marbley's admission that they knew next to nothing about Islam (or Jewish law). Clearly they were unaware of Islam's death penalty for apostasy. If they did, they would never have said that our public service ad constituted "scorn and ridicule."

Kethledge clearly had his mind made up already, getting testy with Muise and helping Hildebrand with his case, inviting him when he returned to the stand to explain why our ad -- designed to save lives -- constituted "scorn and ridicule" of Muslims and thus was also disallowed on those grounds according to SMART's guidelines. This entangled SMART in a self-contradiction: Hildebrand said that they didn't disallow our ad because it was "controversial" but also that our ad constituted "scorn and ridicule" -- but none of the judges seemed to notice and certainly no one challenged Hildebrand on this. Hildebrand did not, and could not, explain why our ad constituted scorn and ridicule, and instead simply kept asserting that it did. He did not argue his case persuasively, but with Kethledge and also Rogers so clearly on his side, he had a clear advantage.

If SMART wins, however, the implications for the status of Islam and Sharia as political will be enormous. Incalculable. SMART may end up winning the battle for Sharia in the U.S., but losing the war.

"We're too frightened to talk...They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away. We were constantly accused of working for the regime. And Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed."

Not that the "pro-democracy" movement in Syria has anything to do with Islam.

"Christians Flee from Radical Rebels in Syria," by Ulrike Putz in Spiegel, July 25 (thanks to David):

Thousands of Syrians are fleeing into neighboring Lebanon -- not entirely due to fear of the Assad regime. The country's minority Christian population is suffering under attacks waged by rebel troops. In the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, Christian families are finding temporary refuge, but they are still terrified.

There had been many warnings that the Khouri* family wouldn't talk. "They won't say a word -- they're too scared," predicted the mayor of Qa, a small market town in northeastern Lebanon where the Khouris are staying. "They won't even open their door for journalists," said another person, who had contacted the family on behalf of a non-governmental organization.

Somehow, though, the interview was arranged in the end. Reserved and halting, the women described what happened to their husbands, brothers and nephews back in their hometown of Qusayr in Syria. They were killed by Syrian rebel fighters, the women said -- murdered because they were Christians, people who in the eyes of radical Islamist freedom fighters have no place in the new Syria.

In the past year and a half, since the beginning of the uprising against Syria's authoritarian President Bashar Assad, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled their homes and sought safe haven abroad. Inside the country, the United Nations estimates that 1 million people have left their homes to escape violence and are now internally displaced. The majority are likely to have fled to escape the brutality of Assad's troops. Indeed, as was the case at the start of the Syrian civil war, most of the violence is still being perpetrated by the army, the secret services and groups of thugs steered by the state.

With fighting ongoing, however, the rebels have also committed excesses. And some factions within the patchwork of disparate groups that together comprise the Free Syrian Army have radicalized at a very rapid clip in recent months. A few are even being influenced by foreign jihadists who have traveled to Syria to advise them. That, at least, is what witnesses on the ground are reporting in Qusayr, where fierce fighting has raged for months. Control of the town has passed back and forth between the two sides, at times falling into the hands of the regime and at others of the rebels. Currently, fighters with the Free Syrian Army have the upper hand, and they have also made the city of 40,000 residents a place where the country's Christian minority no longer feels safe.

Campaigns against Christians

"There were always Christians in Qusayr -- there were around 10,000 before the war," says Leila, the matriarch of the Khouri clan. Currently, 11 members of the clan are sharing two rooms. They include the grandmother, grandfather, three daughters, one husband and five children. "Despite the fact that many of our husbands had jobs in the civil service, we still got along well with the rebels during the first months of the insurgency." The rebels left the Christians alone. The Christians, meanwhile, were keen to preserve their neutrality in the escalating power struggle. But the situation began deteriorating last summer, Leila says, murmuring a bit more before going silent.

"We're too frightened to talk," her daughter Rim explained, before mustering the courage to continue. "Last summer Salafists came to Qusayr, foreigners. They stirred the local rebels against us," she says. Soon, an outright campaign against the Christians in Qusayr took shape. "They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away," she says. "We were constantly accused of working for the regime. And Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed."

Grandmother Leila made the sign of the cross. "Anyone who believes in this cross suffers," she says.

Foreign Jihadists in Combat in Qusayr

It is not possible to independently corroborate the Khouri's version of events, but the basic information seems consistent with what is already known. On April 20, Abdel Ghani Jawhar involuntarily provided proof that foreign jihadists are engaged in combat in Qusayr. Jawhar, a Lebanese national and commander with the terrorist group Fatah al Islam, died that day in the Syrian city. An explosives expert, Jawhar had been in Qusayr to teach rebels how to build bombs and accidentally blew himself up while trying to assemble one. Until his death, Jawhar had been the most wanted man in Lebanon, where he is implicated in the deaths of 200 people. Lebanese authorities confirmed his death in Syria. The fact that the rebels had worked together with a man like Jawhar fomented fears after his death that the ranks of insurgents are increasingly becoming infiltrated by international terrorists.

The Khouris' decision to flee Syria last year is partly attributable to the almost daily threats that they, as well as other Christians in town, began receiving. And yet it was also a product of the fact that fighting in the city had simply become unbearable. "The bombs were falling right in the middle of our neighborhood. We can't say who was firing them -- the rebels or the army," a family member says. During a break in the firing on one bitterly cold winter day, the family finally left. "We arranged a car and drove to Lebanon. It's only a 45-minute trip."

Rim's husband also fled with them. His fate was sealed when he drove back to Qusayr on Feb. 9. He had owned a mini-market in his hometown and he wanted to go back and get food to take back to his family in exile. His family only knows what happened to him because of the stories relatives and friends who remained in Qusayr have shared. "He was stopped at a rebel checkpoint near the state-run bakery," says Rim. "The rebels knew he was a Christian. They took him and then threw his dead body in front of the door of his parent's house four or five hours later."

Grandmother Leila makes the sign of the cross again. It wasn't only her son-in-law who got killed. Her brother and two nephews were also killed. "They shot one of my nephews, a pharmacist, in his apartment because he supported the regime," she says....

Oh, well, then, we should never ever vet them! "Napolitano: ‘Historically’ DHS Hasn’t Vetted U.S. Citizens Against No-Fly List Before They Take Flight Lessons," by Edwin Mora for CNS News, July 25 (thanks to Ron):

(CNSNews.com) -- Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told lawmakers today that, historically, her department has chosen not to vet U.S. citizens against the no-fly list before they take flight lessons at American flight-training schools because the law that deals with screening such people is unclear.

However, when asked to comment on a Tranportation Security Administration (TSA) official who said that U.S. citizens on the no-fly list are not vetted prior to taking flight lessons, Napolitano said, back on July 19, that the official may not be aware of all the security precautions in place to stop a no-fly list person from getting a pilot’s license.

Maintained by the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), the no-fly list is comprised of individuals who are not allowed to board a commercial aircraft for travel in and out of the United States. The list, created in response to the 9/11 attacks, contains about 10,000 names, including that of U.S. citizens.

At a hearing today of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking-member of the committee, asked Napolitano, “Last week, we were told that American citizens can be trained to fly planes and not be vetted against the no-fly list. We were told that foreigners are vetted through a robust process -- that would only start once they are cleared. The question was whether or not a process can be put where anyone, before they’re admitted into a flight school, would be vetted and the testimony from the department at that time was it couldn’t be done. Have you looked at that since that testimony was presented to this committee?”

“I have,” said Napolitano.

Rep. Thompson then asked, “What is your position on it?”

Napolitano said, “Well, the answer is yes, there’s a distinction between U.S. citizens and foreign persons who are seeking to get flight training. With respect to U.S. citizens who may be on one of our watch-lists, they’re a variety of ways that we can and do keep abreast of their activities.”

“I don’t want to go into those in open setting, but the law is somewhat unclear as to whether we can vet a U.S. citizen prior to their application for certification from the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration],” said Napolitano.

“So the department historically has taken the position that we cannot formally vet them, any U.S. citizen before that application,” she said.

Later, a ranking committee member said, “Right now, you also admit that that’s a problem,” in reference to the non-formal vetting of U.S. citizens on the no-fly list who want to attend flight school.

Napolitano said, “It can be a gap, but, again, let me just say it can be a gap that would be easily filled a number of ways and those for whom we actually have watch-list information, there’s a variety of ways we receive information about possible flight school training, but it would be nice to tidy up the law a little bit.”...

Yes, it would be so very nice!

No Compulsion In Religion Update from Gaza: "Gaza Christians sense pressure to convert to Islam," by Nidal al-Mughrabi for Reuters, July 26 (thanks to David):

(Reuters) - Two conversions that a Christian family says were forced have strained relations between a tiny Palestinian Christian community in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip and the Muslim majority.

Hundreds of Christians have staged protests in Gaza's main church in the past week, demanding the return of members of their community of 2,500, whom they said were kidnapped by Islamist proselytizers and forced to convert to Islam.

Christians are blaming the Hamas-affiliated Palestine Scholars Association and its chairman Salem Salama, a senior member of the Islamist Hamas movement.

Hamas has run Gaza since its forces seized control of the coastal enclave in 2007, ousting security services loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas of the secular Fatah movement.

Hamas officials reject the church's accusations, saying two Christians, a man and a woman, converted freely to Islam. The woman, who had left her husband, brought along her three daughters aged 12, 9, and 6 who are now being taught the Koran.

The 24-year-old man told reporters he had become Muslim of his own free will and wanted to go back to his family, should they accept him as a Muslim. A day later, he returned home.

It was not possible to speak to the newly converted woman, Hiba Daoud, but in a video clip made by a pro-Hamas news website she tells her family it was her decision to become a Muslim.

"We are living with a (Muslim) family, they bring us all we need, they teach us how to pray and everything," said Hiba, wearing a full Muslim dress and a scarf covering her hair.

"I love you all, I hope no one feels upset with me, it was my decision which I made months ago."

But her aunt, Fatin Ayyad, says Hiba spoke under duress.

"We are increasingly worried about our sons and daughters. If those people joined Islam of their own will it would not have been a problem. But they were under pressure," she said.

"SPLIT IN RELATIONS"

Only nine Gaza Christians are known to have converted to Islam in the past half-dozen years, an insignificant number. Yet the church and some congregants see the latest conversions as the thin end of the wedge and say they are being targeted.

"There is a big split in relations now," said Ayyad. "Some groups want to spread division between Muslims and Christians."

At the Islamic Scholars office, Salama rejected accusations of forced conversions. He said 11 Christians, including non-Palestinians, had come to his office in the past five months to become Muslim.

"No one is forced to change his religion. This is the instruction of our holy book Koran," said Salama.

Greek Orthodox Archbishop Alexios, who has served the Christian community in Gaza for 12 years, demanded that the Hamas administration help return the woman and her daughters to her home in order to calm tensions.

"We do not want any problem. We want peace and harmony to prevail among us," Alexios told Reuters at the church, located next door to a mosque in downtown Gaza City.

"We are not strangers. Christians did not come from the outside. Christians are part of the Palestinian body and not a strange body," he said at a protest held after the Sunday prayer sermon attended by around 70 worshippers.

Christian-Muslim relations in Gaza are historically far less turbulent than in Egypt, where Copts complain of persecution, or Iraq, where Christians have been targeted for attack.

A Gaza church was bombed in 2009 by al Qaeda-influenced Islamists but since then, Alexios says, churches have been safe. He praised the cooperation of Hamas, but he accused Salama's association of trying to cause friction between the religions.

Hamas security forces have cracked down on radical Islamist cells accused of attacking Christian symbols including a church and a cemetery.

Hamas says it practices a moderate Islam. Palestinian law makes all residents equal before the law regardless of race, gender, color or religion and gives them freedom to practice their religious rituals, without disturbing public order.

Islamic law forbids Christians in an Islamic state to make public display of their faith.

In the past five years, two Gaza Christians have been murdered, one by a Muslim friend over a debt, the other in murkier circumstances still not resolved. It was rumored he had been killed by Islamist radicals for trying to convert Muslims....

Some Gaza Christian families say their children are the target of "brainwashing" attempts by Muslim activists. Daoud's mother said her daughter Hiba was stalked by fellow employees at the Islamic University, who said she needed to become a Muslim.

"My daughter lived in a struggle with them. She did not do this of her own choice," she said.

Alexios said Gaza Muslims and Christians had lived in harmony for 1,600 years. Hamas is not to blame for those now trying to spoil relations, he said, because it wants political contacts with countries of the Christian world....

Good dhimmi!

Sharia and Western law are incompatible and the conflicts will inevitably grow, but the Infidels are standing their ground on this one in the UK. For now. At least until they get hit with a cascade of "Islamophobia" charges. Dr. Zaid al-Saffar is already playing the victim. "You can't use sharia law in divorce deal: Muslim hospital consultant told to pay ex-wife maintenance despite claims he owes her nothing under Islamic rules," by Steve Doughty for the Daily Mail, July 25 (thanks to David):

A Muslim hospital consultant was told yesterday that he must pay his ex-wife maintenance even though under Islamic rules he believes he owes her nothing.

A judge told Dr Zaid Al-Saffar that he must follow ‘the rule in this country’ and share his money.

The Appeal Court decision means Dr Al-Saffar must pay £60,000 to his former wife, academic Hanan Al-Saffar.

The ruling sounded a warning to Muslim couples who believe their marriages are ordered according to sharia law and agree to be bound by Islamic courts.

Lord Justice Ward told Dr Al-Saffar: ‘The rule in this country is that you share and the starting point is equal division.

‘You came out of the marriage without having made your wife any substantial capital payment.’

He added: ‘Life is sometimes hard; do not be consumed with bitterness.’

But Dr Al-Saffar said after the case: ‘By playing the system and pretending to be a victim she got everything, which I think is totally unfair.

‘Family law in this country is biased against Muslim people.’...

Family law in Sharia states is biased against women.

Viewer feedback received by ABN on July 24 (the day after I filmed a show on "Islamophobia" there interviewing Pamela Geller) from a pious Muslim who wanted to register his disapproval of the network's programming.

Over at FrontPage Magazine (via RaymondIbrahim.com) I discuss the latest "hoax" claims by the same mainstream media that, when the day comes and the Pyramids are attacked—just like when the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11—will wring their hands and shake their heads, wondering, "Who knew?" "How?" "Why?" Then, because they still cannot comprehend Islam's teachings and history, they will, as ever, cite "grievance" or "poverty" or "political oppression" as the real reasons behind this latest atrocity, calling for more Western engagement and head-sticking in the sand:

Because the article "Calls to Destroy Egypt's Great Pyramids Begin" went viral on the Internet—read nearly 400,000 times on FrontPage Magazine alone where it first appeared—as expected, the infamous "hoax" charge has been made to lull the West back to sleep.

According to Daily News Egypt's "Another hoax: cleric calls on President Morsy to destroy Giza Pyramids," the calls from the Bahraini cleric I cited "urging President Mohamed Morsy to destroy the Giza Pyramids were issued from a parody Twitter account online, the Daily News Egypt has learned."

That's all—that's the "proof" that this story is a "hoax": Daily News Egypt (DNE) "has learned" that someone was "impersonating" the Bahraini cleric. Unlike my article, DNE offers no evidence, no links, no proofs to back its story: "Just believe us—you'll feel better," seems to be the message.

Some questions: If, as DNE suggests, this was a hoax to scare people over the rising influence of Egypt's Islamists, why did the hoax perpetrators choose a cleric from Bahrain, a small, foreign nation—why not parody an Egyptian cleric, which obviously would've made for a much more effective "hoax"?

More importantly, why does DNE not address the other sources I had cited—including Egypt's very own Salafi party, which is on record calling for the elimination of Egypt's pyramids? Even Elaph, "one of the most influential websites in the Arab world," documents that both the Bahraini cleric and Egypt's Salafis are calling for the Pyramids' destruction.

Needless to say, DNE's hoax charge was quickly disseminated by others, who added their own "logic." For example, after quoting DNE as evidence, one Kate Durham, writing in Egypt Today, focuses on portraying me as having an "agenda" (which, of course, I do: safeguarding the Pyramids).

Likewise, after quoting the DNE report, RT's "Holy hoax: Radical Islamists call on Egypt to destroy pyramids" offered a revisionist history that truly resembles a "hoax," arguing that "demolishing the pyramids was prohibited during the 7th century—so the structures remained untouched."

Really? This almost suggests that the Arabian marauders, who invaded Egypt in the 7th century, pillaging and destroying, were "respectful" of the "cultural significance" of the Pyramids—perhaps designating them as "tourist attractions"? What about 8th century Caliph Ma'mun, who—as this comprehensive English-language fatwa dedicated to explaining the Islamic obligation of destroying pagan monuments, including the Pyramids, puts it—"wanted to destroy the Pyramids in Egypt and he gathered workers but he could not do it"?

What about 12th century Bin Yusif, Saladin's son and ruler of Egypt? He attempted to destroy the Pyramids, and had an army of laborers work day and night to dismantle Menkaure's Pyramid, only to quit after eight months, realizing the futility of the task, though his vandals did manage to leave a large vertical gash in the Pyramid's north face (see here). What about Egypt's Mamlukes who, with the advent of gun powder, used the "pagan" Sphinx for target practice, effacing its nose?

After citing the DNE report, Huffington Post's Llewelyn Morgan offers his assurances: "Let's be crystal-clear about this right here. The answer to the question in my title ["Are the Pyramids Next?"] is a mile-high, neon "NO". The pyramids of Giza are under no threat whatsoever, and neither is any of the rest of Egypt's glorious archaeological record."...

Just in case you thought the old one wasn't bloody enough, Ramadan, the month of renewed Islamic piety, is going to bring more. "Al Qaeda announces 'start of a new stage of jihad' in Iraq," from the Buenos Aires Herald, July 25:

Al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq has claimed responsibility for scores of attacks across the country against mostly Shi'ite Muslim targets this week which killed and wounded hundreds of people.

The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) said in a statement posted on radical Islamist websites today that it was behind the recent attacks, which it called its "Destroying the Walls" campaign and said was the start of a "new stage of jihad".

At least 116 people were killed and about 300 wounded in bomb and gun attacks yesterday, by far the bloodiest day of violence since US troops withdrew in December. A day earlier 20 were killed in bombings as part of a co-ordinated surge of violence.

"The Ministry of War has mobilized its sons and mujahideen brigades and their military groups in a new blessed foray in the holy month of Ramadan," the ISI statement said.

"Simultaneous and co-ordinated jihadist operations have swept across the country in a spate which stunned the enemy, made him lose his sense and showed the failure of intelligence and security plans which filled the world with noise and bluster."...

Anywhere Muslims and non-Muslims live in close proximity with one another, there are "clashes." "Assam, India: Bodo tribe, Muslim clashes kill at least 35, displace 170,000," by Kristin Deasy for the Global Post, July 25 (thanks to Twostellas):

Four days of violent clashes between India's native Bodo tribespeople and Muslim immigrants has taken at least 35 lives, officials said today, while another 170,000 are estimated to have fled their homes in the facing of rising violence in India's northwestern Assam region, reported Agence-France-Press.

India deployed the military to the region, but violence raged overnight with reports of nine people killed and angry residents setting one another's homes on fire, said The Hindu. 

Assam police chief JN Choudhury told reporters today that the "situation is tense and we are getting additional paramilitary troopers," reported AFP. A curfew has been in place in the region for several days, and the New York Daily News earlier said officers had been given orders to shoot on sight in order to stamp out unrest. 

Al Jazeera reported groups of people shooting weapons indiscriminately in crowded areas over the weekend. Several people have been reported brutally killed. Police on Sunday said villagers had found a six-month-old baby on a river bank near a dead woman's body, according to Al Jazeera. 

The Bodo tribe and Muslim settlers have been locked in territorial disputes for years, but BBC News reported that the recent violence appears tied to the killing of four young people by an unknown man in a predominantly Bodo tribal area on July 20.

Over 200 ethnic and tribal groups live in the volatile Assam region, said Al Jazeera.

You'll die laughing! "Police officer caused major terror alert after ringing colleagues with a coded ‘bomb threat’ for a joke," by Ryan Kisiel for the Daily Mail, July 25 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

A police officer caused a major terrorism alert after ringing a busy port with a hoax bomb threat.

PC Hatef Nezami, 48, rang colleagues at the police Special Branch office with a coded message that a device was placed in a busy port.

Specialist terrorism staff were so concerned by the call's authentic nature that they started preparing for a full terrorist attack.

The constable, who has completed a regional Special Branch terrorism course, said that a bomb was on a Condor ferry based in Poole, Dorset.

However at the time of his call, the ferry was actually sailing across the English Channel packed full of people travelling to the Channel Islands.

Mr Nezami is believed to have tried to call back to reveal his 'joke' call but was unable to do so for half an hour as staff were engaged on all the available phone lines alerting authorities.

Remarkably, the Daily Mail understands that Mr Nezami, who has worked as a detective, has not faced criminal or disciplinary proceedings and was simply placed on uniform patrol at another station.

The maximum penalty for making a hoax bomb threat is a prison sentence of seven years.

Mr Nezami was seen leaving his three-bedroom townhouse in Bournemouth in police uniform before travelling to a local police station on two days last week.

It is a major embarrassment for Dorset Police which is currently in a major security operation patrolling the upcoming Olympic sailing events in nearby Weymouth.

All officers have had leave cancelled and specialist firearms teams from forces across the country have been drafted in to patrol the stretch of water near where the bomb hoax was said to be.

Senior officers in the force are frustrated that the matter has not been taken further and believe a criminal investigation should be launched....

I was on The Speakeasy with Guy Green a few days ago -- here is an mp3 of the interview.

Rapidly Islamizing Turkey is clearly itching for jihad war against Israel, something that would have been unthinkable just three years ago. And of course, in any sane age the prospect of a jihad mass murderer who glories in the killing of civilians meeting with a head of state, any head of state, as if he were a respectable individual, would have been likewise unthinkable. "Turkish PM, Hamas leader meet," from Associated Press, July 25 (thanks to Joshua):

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during the opening ceremony of Mimar Sinan mosque in Istanbul July 20, 2012. REUTERS/Osman Orsal State-run television says Turkey’s prime minister has met exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal to break the daily fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. TRT television says Wednesday that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hosted Mashaal at his residence in Ankara on Tuesday evening.

Ties between Turkey, NATO’s biggest Muslim member, and the Islamic militant Hamas, which rules Gaza, have been developing since Turkey’s alliance with Israel collapsed over a deadly raid by Israeli troops on a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza in 2010.

In January, Hamas premier of the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, visited Erdogan at his Istanbul home.

And make no mistake -- that jihad is coming. But even then the learned analysts who assured us in January 2011 that the "Arab Spring" was a flowering of democracy and pluralism will neither admit their mistake nor be called to account.

"Mursi: Recognition Of Peace Agreement With Israel – Conditional; MB Calls For Jihad To Liberate Palestine," from MEMRI, July 23 (thanks to Lachlan):

Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi'

Throughout his campaign and also since his election, Egyptian President Muhammad Mursi has stated that he accepts the peace agreement with Israel. For example, in a meeting with newspaper editors following his election, he said that Egypt would honor the agreement,[1] and in his inauguration speech at Cairo University, he said that he carried a message of peace to the world, that he would uphold Egypt's commitments as part of international treaties and conventions it has signed, and that "Egypt [would] never turn to a policy of aggression."[2]

At the same time, Mursi is careful to qualify his statements and say that Egypt's acceptance of the peace agreement depends on Israel's honoring of this agreement – an assertion that is open to various interpretations. For example, in a televised interview before the elections, he said that Israel's honoring the agreement meant making peace with all the peoples of the region, implementing the Palestinians' right of return, and establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.[3] On another occasion, he said that Israel's attack on Gaza constituted a violation of the peace agreement.[4]

These qualifications to the acceptance of the peace agreement with Israel might serve Mursi and the MB as a means of exerting pressure on Israel and the U.S., by demanding concessions in return for a continued honoring of the agreement on Egypt's part.

Moreover, the MB apparently intends to maintain a division of labor between the president and the MB party and movement. Mursi adheres to protocol and international requirements in his policies and statements; moreover, he emphasizes that he does not represent the MB party or movement in his role as president, while the MB movement, on the other hand, is much blunter in its statements on Israel and adheres to its longstanding ideology. Thus, in his sermons in the recent weeks, MB General Guide Muhammad Badi' has been taking a violent, hard-line stance and calling for jihad to rescue Palestine and Jerusalem.

The following are excerpts from some of his sermons:

Badi': Every Muslim Must Wage Jihad To Rescue Palestine And Jerusalem

In his July 5, 2012 weekly sermon, Badi' stated: "Every Muslim must act to save Jerusalem from the usurpers and to [liberate] Palestine from the claws of occupation. This is a personal duty for all Muslims. They must participate in jihad by [donating] money or [sacrificing] their life, in order to save [Palestine] and the men and women imprisoned [in Israeli jails], as well as [Jerusalem], the destination of the Prophet's Night Journey and the first Qibla [direction of prayer] in [Islam], and in order to enable all those who were expelled to return to their homeland, their homes and their property..." Addressing all Muslims, Badi' said: "Do not be ashamed to declare jihad for the sake of Allah, because your life and glory [depend on it], as well as the departure of the occupier from your country, the restoration of your holy sites, and the safety of your home..."[5]...

Read it all.

3 Mosque and State In Early Islam
Can Modern Islam Keep the Two Separate?
by James M. Arlandson, Ph.D.

This series of article about Islamic shariah law is written for educators, journalists, legislators, city council members, judges, lawyers, government bureaucrats, think tank fellows, TV and radio talk show hosts, and everyone else who occupies the “check points” in society. They initiate the national dialogue and shape the flow of the conversation. They are the policy and decision makers.

They have heard the critics of shariah and conclude they exaggerate and may therefore be “Islamophobic.” Islam is a world religion, after all. It deserves respect.

On the other hand, these same decision and policy makers may also privately sense something is wrong with shariah as it relates to the modern world. Can the critics be all wrong, all the time? But the elites are afraid of voicing their feelings publicly.

Yet, overcoming or suppressing their doubts, they may be tempted to incorporate or refer to shariah laws in their policies, laws, school curricula, and decisions.

In this article, we explore the subject of mosque and the state. In this case mosque not only means the physical building, but also the entire religion, in some contexts.

In early Islam, the mosque and state were merged.

Merging the mosque and state leads to most of the issues laid out in the entire series of articles.

Here is the Table of Contents, with links:

MOSQUE AND STATE IN MUHAMMAD’S LIFE

Growth of His Military

Growth of His Prophethood

Religious Laws Multiply

Executive

Legislator

Judge

Summary

MOSQUE AND STATE IN THE EARLY CALIPHATE

Oath of Allegiance to Abu Bakr in the Mosque

Umar Requires Obedience at His Inauguration in the Mosque

Ratification of Uthman’s Caliphate in the Mosque

Ali Accepts His Caliphate in the Mosque

Absolute Obedience

Executives

Legislators

Judges

Summary

MODERN ISLAM

Moderate Views

Traditional Views

CONCLUSION

MOSQUE AND STATE IN MUHAMMAD’S LIFE

His military power, prophethood, and religious laws all roll into one. It is no coincidence that his military power is the basis of his calling and religion. This sets the institutional genetic code for Islam.

Growth of His Military

Muhammad grew in his calling, as his ministry began in 610 A.D. (so says tradition). At first he considered himself a messenger, and in fact he kept that title for the rest of his life. The title "messenger" or "apostle" is related to the word “send” and appears in its various forms about 360 times in the Quran, but only twenty times it is applied to Muhammad in Mecca, and 167 times to him in Medina.[1]

This two-city division of his ministry is important for many reasons, but for our purposes it is because he had no military or even a small band of warriors to protect him from persecution while he lived in his hometown Mecca. So he was peaceful and the chapters of the Quran that were given then and there are also peaceful.

However, when he migrated to Medina in 622, he developed a band of raiders that grew into a large army. There he became warlike, and the chapters revealed there also endorsed war. In any case, why was there such a dramatic increase in the title of messenger? The possible answer is that the increase corresponds to his sense of mission.

As he grew in his power, his confidence increased proportionately, and so did the sense of his own calling. Muhammad was sent or commissioned to the inhabitants of Medina and then to the whole world.

Certain verses in Chapter 2 (a Medinan chapter) say to wage war on the unbelievers.

190 Fight [q-t-l] in God's cause against those who fight [q-t-l] you, but do not overstep the limits: God does not love those who overstep the limits. 191 Kill [q-t-l] them wherever you encounter them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is more serious than killing [q-t-l]. Do not fight [q-t-l] them at the Sacred Mosque unless they fight [q-t-l] you there. If they do fight [q-t-l] you, kill [q-t-l] them – this is what such disbelievers deserve – 192 but if they stop, then God is most forgiving and merciful. 193 Fight [q-t-l] them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God. If they cease hostilities, there can be no [further] hostility, except towards aggressors.[2] (Quran 2:190-193)

The word for fighting in those verses is not jihad, but the more restricted word qital or qatala which can only mean slaying, fighting, warring, killing and slaughtering. Further, at first glance the verses talk about self-defense, and that is partially true because Muhammad claimed that he had the right to go back to the sacred shrine in Mecca (“the Sacred Mosque” in v. 191) and worship there, but the Meccans were preventing him. For their side of the issue they claimed it was their shrine to begin with and only they had rightful ownership of it, and Muhammad was conducting aggressive raids on their caravans to weaken Meccan trade.

See the article The Mission of Muhammad and the Sword for more discussion of his goal to get back the Kabah shrine in Mecca.

What is interesting is the clause in v. 193, “fight them until...worship is devoted to God.” This means that Muslims can fight the polytheists – those who worship many gods – until they worship the one God of Islam. The Meccan shrine must come under Islam. So the cause of war is not strictly self-defense, for Muhammad has a higher goal, to take over the shrine. Or he could have left it alone.

Muhammad collected the tribute he won after his successful wars. In one section of the hadith called One-Fifth of the War Booty, he is reported to have received money from Bahrain. He told the envoy to spread the money out in the mosque. “Narrated Anas: Money from Bahrain was brought to the Prophet. He said, ‘Spread it in the Mosque.’ It was the biggest amount that had ever been brought to Allah's Apostle.” The rest of the hadith shows him and his followers scooping it up and
giving it away.[3]

See the next article in the series for more discussion about jihad and taxes.

Not that this has anything to do with Islam, of course. "Shocking Taliban propaganda video captures the moments leading up to massive suicide bombing at U.S. base that killed two Americans," from the Daily Mail, July 23 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

A suicide truck bomber calmly tells a cameraman of his plans to ‘take revenge’ moments before blowing himself up at a U.S. base in a chilling new Taliban video.

The documentary-style video was released this week by the al-Qaeda-friendly Islamist group.

The brazen assault was carried out on June 1 at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost, Afghanistan.

ABC News reported the details of the video on Monday.

'Those who came here insulting Islam and the Koran, I will take revenge on them,' the driver says from behind the wheel, waving to the camera before driving off.

The next shot shows the truck moving toward the base.

A chanting of ‘allahu akbar’ can be heard on the video as the truck moves forward before exploding in a massive fireball.

The same explosion is then seen from a two separate angles as the music plays....

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 30
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23 / Part 24 / Part 25 / Part 26 / Part 27 / Part 28 / Part 29

And that is exactly, according to Gibb, what Saladin had achieved several hundred years earlier: he had saved Islam. Saladin reintroduced the Sharī‘a, and closed the rifts within the Community: “[Saladin] saw clearly that the weakness of the Muslim body politic, which had permitted the establishment and continued to permit the survival of the crusading states, was the result of political demoralization. It was against this that he revolted. There was only one way to end it: to restore and revive the political fabric of Islam as a single united empire, not under his own rule, but by restoring the rule of the revealed law [Sharī‘a], under the direction of the Abbassid Caliphate.” [1]

Gibb wrote in Saladin: “If the war to which he had vowed himself against the Crusaders was to be a real jihad, a true ‘Holy War’, it was imperative to conduct it with scrupulous observance of the revealed Law of Islam. A government that sought to serve the cause of God in battle must be not only a lawful government, duly authorized by the supreme representative of the Divine Law, but must serve God with equal zeal in its administration and its treatment of its subjects. In brief, Saladin’s object was to restore to Islamic politics the reign of law, a concept that had become for the contemporary princes not only an empty phrase but an absurdity”. [2]

Thus certain “sections of contemporary Muslims” are one with “contemporary princes” of Saladin’s times in their contempt for the Sacred Law, Sharī‘a. Saladin was not, says Gibb, a great military general or strategist, nor was he a successful administrator; the real explanation of his success lies elsewhere: “Himself neither warrior nor governor by training or inclination, he it was who inspired and gathered round himself all the elements and forces making for the unity of Islam against the invaders. And this he did, not so much by the example of personal courage and resolution-which were undeniable- as by his unselfishness, his humility and generosity, his moral vindication of Islam against both its enemies and its professed adherents. He was no simpleton, but for all that an utterly simple and transparently honest man. He baffled his enemies, internal and external, because they expected to find him animated by the same motives as they were, and playing the political game as they played it. Guileless himself, he never expected and seldom understood guile in others -- a weakness of which his own family and others took advantage, but only (as a general rule) to come up at the end against his single-minded devotion, which nobody and nothing could bend, to the service of his ideals.” [3]

Saladin’s achievements were moral, religious and spiritual; he was not someone motivated by “personal ambition and lust of conquest, and who merely exploited religious catchwords and sentiments to achieve their own ends”, rather, “his career involved distinctive moral elements which gave his initial victory and subsequent struggle with the Third Crusade a quality of its own”. [4] His moral and religious convictions resulted in Muslim unity, and a revival of Islamic values.

[1] H.A.R.Gibb. The Achievement of Saladin, in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 35, no.1 (Manchester, 1952) pp. 44-60.
[2] H.A.R.Gibb. The Life of Saladin. Foreword by Robert Irwin. London: Saqi Books, 2006, [1st Edn. Oxford University Press, 1973], p. 19.
[3] H.A.R.Gibb. The Achievement of Saladin, in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 35, no.1 (Manchester, 1952) pp. 44-60.
[4] Ibid. p. 44.

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

"According to the woman, the men issued threats and said: 'You are a bad Muslim', and 'you bring shame to Islam because you went to a party on a day of Ramadan.'"

Attending a party during Ramadan: haram. Beating up a young woman who attended a party during Ramadan: halal, and pleasing to Allah.

Eurabia Alert: "Young woman beaten for being a 'bad Muslim,'" from The Local, July 23 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Police in the south of France have launched an investigation after a woman claimed she was beaten up by seven men in Viviez for attending a party during Ramadan.

The young woman, originally from Morocco, was driving home from the party on Friday night when two other cars trapped hers, newspaper Midi Libre reports.

The men are reported to have beaten her up before leaving without saying anything.

After they had left, the woman drove home. Shortly afterwards, she headed towards the local police station to report the attack.

On her way to the station, the seven men tracked her down again and assaulted her a second a time.

According to the woman, the men issued threats and said: “You are a bad Muslim”, and “you bring shame to Islam because you went to a party on a day of Ramadan.”

At Atlas Shrugs I discuss Ramadan: politically correct myth versus reality.

Another Ramadan is upon us, and no less an authority on Islam than Barack Hussein Obama has assured us that the Muslim month of fasting is a time in which Muslims “cherish family, friends, and neighbors, and to help those in need.” Meanwhile, in Minnesota a bank robbery defendant has secured a postponement in hearings on his case until after Ramadan, successfully convincing a judge that there are “two tenets that must also be adhered to during Ramadan: The faith calls for not engaging in conflict and argument; and to work to reconcile differences and seek peace.”

Meanwhile, a group of Muslims in Thailand were so filled with pious fervor as Ramadan began Friday that they murdered one infidel and injured seven in two jihad bombings. And in Bulgaria, a hitherto unknown jihad group calling itself “Qaedat al-Jihad” (Jihad Base) claimed responsibility for the jihad mass murder of Jewish tourists in Bulgaria last week, and explained: “The month of Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God’s messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators. One of our groups aided by Allah managed to bomb a bus full of Jewish tourists, plunderers of holy lands, after careful tracking. The holy war is not confined to a particular arena and we shall fight the Jews and the Americans until they leave the land of Islam.”

So which is it? Is Ramadan a time to “cherish family, friends, and neighbors, and to help those in need,” and to “reconcile differences and seek peace,” or is it “a month of holy war and death for Allah”?

It is easy to assume that Obama and the accused Minnesota bank robber are simply being disingenuous, or even (although this is certainly much less plausible) ignorant of the fact that Ramadan in Islamic tradition is often associated with violence. But in fact, what they say isn’t really false, it’s just so incomplete as to be seriously misleading. Ramadan really is a time during which Muslims are exhorted to renew their religious fervor. Hence it is a time when they’re supposed to grow more generous and kind toward their fellow Muslims. However, the Qur’an says: “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and those who are with him are severe against disbelievers, and merciful among themselves” (48:29). If the Ramadan imperative is to become more devout, the Muslim who applies himself diligently to the Ramadan observance will become more merciful to his fellow Muslims and more severe against the unbelievers.

Murdering infidels in Thailand and Bulgaria thus doesn’t contradict the spirit of Ramadan; it embodies it. The Kavkaz Center, a website operated by Chechen jihadists, explained in a 2010 article that the idea of Ramadan as a time for warfare against infidels went back to Muhammad’s time: “The month of Ramadan in the life of the Prophet (pbuh) and the righteous ancestors was a month of forthcoming. The greatest battles during the lifetime of the Prophet (pbuh) occurred in this blessed month, the month of jihad, zeal and enthusiasm.”

Barack Obama is severely misleading the American people when he focuses exclusively upon Ramadan’s exhortation to charity (the part of the Qur’an verse about being “merciful” to one’s fellow Muslims) without mentioning its imperative to terrorize infidels (the other part, about being “severe” toward the unbelievers.” But as we have seen just last week in Thailand and Bulgaria, all too many Muslims around the world are fully aware of that part of the Ramadan observance, and are ready to carry it out.

There is more.

Ramadan is, according to Barack Obama, a time to "cherish family, friends, and neighbors, and to help those in need." Or else.

"Kuwait police arrest, detain man for drinking in public during Ramadan," from Bikya Masr, July 24 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

DUBAI: It is illegal to drink or eat in public in Kuwait during the holy month of Ramadan, where Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset.

Over the weekend, Kuwaiti police said they made the first arrest of someone who failed to abide by their strict conditions during the holy month.

Police have indicated that a police patrol saw an “Asian drinking water from a bottle during the day.”

When the man was approached by officers and asked why he was not fasting, the man told them his sect “had not yet started fasting.”

Police disregarded the excuse and arrested him.

Under Kuwait law, anyone caught drinking or eating in public during fasting times is detained and held until after the Eid holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.

MTA Violated Rights of Group, Judge Says New York Times:

Pamela Geller, executive director of the group that sought to place
the ad, called the decision “a victory for freedom-loving people.”

Judge: MTA Violated First Amendment By Rejecting The Word “Savages” In Pro-Israel Ads Gothamist

Judge Rules Against MTA in Favor of Pro-Israel Ads Algemeiner

Judge says MTA wrongly blocked bus ads critical of Israel's enemies SILive.com

AFDI First Amendment Victory: Pro-Israel Ads Must Run Attacking Jihad Right Side News

MTA Crimped Free Speech, Judge Rules Wall Street Journal

New York bus system can't bar pro-Israel, ‘defeat Jihad’ ads Reuters 

We won the free speech battle, but the war isn’t even close to over. Your contribution will get these ads up in New York and California. It is critical in the war of ideas. The enemedia is at war with the truth. Help us fight in the information battle-space.

On Friday, we won a huge victory for the freedom of speech. A Federal Judge ruled that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority had violated our First Amendment rights by not allowing us to run our pro-Israel ad.

Now we can run our pro-freedom, pro-Israel, anti-jihad ads all over the country – if only we have the resources to do so.

All over the country, we can tell the simple truth that the media fears to tell: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Defeat jihad. Support Israel.”

The First Amendment still exists, even in this age of Obama, and Muslims aren’t a protected class in the U.S. – at least not yet.

This is great news. But these ads aren’t cheap. We are running these ads in New York, California, DC and NY's Metro-North. The least expensive run for ads in the New York City subway system is $10,000.

Islamic supremacists and Hamas front groups, funded by unsavory, shadowy figures overseas, are running anti-Israel hate ads all over the country. We intend to match them city for city. The court ruling shows that we have just as much right to tell the truth as they do to spread their lies, and we intend to do it.

We’re also continuing our lawsuit against Detroit’s SMART transit system for refusing to run our ads offering help to Muslims who want to leave Islam but are threatened for doing so: we already won that case, but Detroit’s dhimmi authorities still won’t put our ads up.

Everywhere they restrict our First Amendment rights, we will sue. Everywhere. And everywhere we win – and we will continue to win – we will put up our ads in defense of truth, freedom and human rights.

But the costs continue to mount. We do so much with so little. We are not backed by wealthy foundations or philanthropists, and do not have a massive donor base. We depend solely on you: on individuals who value the freedom of the individual and the dignity of the human person. Without your support, we would not have been able to get this far. Now that we have won the battle for free speech, please help us follow
through and place as many ads as we can.

Please donate via Paypal to writeatlas@aol.com or tax-deductible to director@jihadwatch.org. We don’t get salaries and we don’t have a staff. Your contribution will go entirely to our work for freedom. And for that, may God bless you.

Mailing address:
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What are you getting so excited about, you greasy Islamophobe? Don't we hear every day about priests, ministers and rabbis drawing guns during sermons about how the believers must make war against unbelievers and subjugate them?

This one's from Syria. Video thanks to Pamela Geller.

Looks like a niqab to me, not a burqa

Because they don't dare challenge "cultural practices," you see -- that is, they don't dare challenge Muslims, even when they're doing something that violates Islamic law: buying alcohol. In Canada, as increasingly all over the West, the multiculturalist imperative is to let Muslims do whatever they want, no matter what it is, or be charged with "Islamophobia."

"LCBO sells booze to 14-year-old wearing burka," by Terry Davidson for QMI Agency, July 24 (thanks to Mike):

TORONTO - Three liquor stores recently sold booze to a 14-year-old boy whose identity was hidden because he was wearing a full-length burka and face veil at the time, a Sun News Network exclusive has found.

The teenager, clad in an Islamic female's traditional garb of a burka, headscarf and facial covering, shopped in three different LCBO stores north of Toronto last Wednesday.

In each location, the Grade 8 student paid cash for a bottle of sambuca liqueur.

Ontario's Liquor Licence Act requires that before liquor is sold, government-issued photo ID -- a drivers licence, for example -- must be inspected if the buyer is suspected of being under the legal drinking age of 19.

Under the LCBO's Check 25 program, employees can ask for ID from people who appear under age 25 -- a policy implemented in 1997 to prevent young people who appear older than their actual age from purchasing alcohol.

The stunt was co-ordinated and video recorded by Sun News Network host David Menzies, who has made a career out of lambasting Canada's politically correct institutions.

Menzies said the unopened bottles -- totalling just over $80 -- were promptly taken from the teen.

But Menzies suggested the fact the boy was never asked to uncover his face or show photo identification at multiple store locations reveals a deeply ingrained reluctance on the part of Canadian institutions to challenge cultural practices, even when they conflict with broader societal goals such as preventing underage drinking....

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia—the authority who called for the destruction of all churches in the region—recently condemned a new Saudi Arabian satellite TV series, which was scheduled to air during Ramadan, on the life of Islamic prophet Muhammad’s companion and second caliph, Omar ibn al-Khattab. The series is supposed to tell the story of the early days of the Muslim caliphate, including, most likely, the Islamic conquests, since many non-Muslim nations, such as Egypt, were conquered during Omar’s reign.

What is interesting is why the Grand Mufti is condemning this series, calling it a “crime deserving of punishment": It “depicts the lives of the caliphs and companions [of Muhammad] in a movie, exposing them to discussion by every depraved person, making them vulnerable to slander and criticism.”

In short, it seems he wants the obscurities of early Islam to remain obscure—perhaps like how Omar allegedly used to strip female sex-slaves in public whenever they were overly-dressed—lest their exposure lead to renewed criticism of Islam and its early followers, otherwise known as the salaf al-salah, the “righteous forefathers” whom Wahabbis and Salafis, like the Grand Mufti, pattern their lives after—and, hence, come into constant conflict with the modern world.

In "Who is Telling the Truth about Islam?" Wolff Bachner interviews me for the Inquisitr. A snippet follows:

WOLFF BACHNER:

Raymond, recently a study for the the U.S Office of Naval Research entitled “Identifying Terrorist Narratives and Counter-Narratives: Embedding Story Analysis in Expeditionary Units,” was published by several scholars at Arizona State University. They concluded that “Islamist extremists stress self-defense, not world domination.” After decades of violent terrorism and calls for the re-establishment of the caliphate, beginning in the modern era with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and the racist, antisemitic brutality of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem and his followers, non- Muslims still cling to the idea that Islam is a religion of peace. They hold to a demeaning belief that all the problems would disappear if we just helped the “poor Muslims” overcome their poverty and oppression.

Despite all the claims of Islam’s peaceful intentions, the Muslim Brotherhood now rules the Arab world’s most populous nation, Egypt, and its leader, Dr. Muhammad Badi had this to say, “The Imam (M.B. founder, Hassan al-Banna) delineated transitional goals and detailed methods to achieve this greatest objective, starting by reforming the individual, followed by building the family, the society, the government, and then a rightly guided caliphate and finally mastership of the world.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, who speak for the majority of Egyptians, as well as having great influence throughout the Muslim world, have been quite open, when speaking in Arabic, about their desire to make Islam the only religion in the world and that Islam should rule the entire planet under a new caliphate.

Who is telling the truth?. The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that gave birth to Hamas and al-Qaeda or the so called “experts at the University of Arizona? Is Islam about social justice or world domination?

RAYMOND IBRAHIM:

Let me just offer you some facts, Wolff: In their voluminous literature—in their fatwas, treatises, books—these groups are unequivocally clear that their objective is domination—Islamic domination, the enforcement of Sharia law, and the subjugation of all infidels. Moreover, this domination is rooted in Islamic law, which commands that jihad be upheld in perpetuity until, in the words of the Koran, “all religion is for Allah” (8:39). For example, as the editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, I am extremely well acquainted with the writings of Al Qaeda, especially the writings of the current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri (formerly of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood). In Al Qaeda’s Arabic writings that are directed to fellow Muslims, they make absolutely clear that hostility for all non-Muslims, including Americans and Israel, is a doctrinal matter decreed from on high for Muslims. It has nothing to do with whether non-Muslim nations are “fair” or “unfair” to Muslims; it has everything to do with the fact that they are non-Muslims—infidels, whom Muslims are doctrinally obligated to subjugate and humiliate. Indeed, Koran 9:29 even names the Christians and Jews, the “People of the Book,” as needing to be fought until they “pay tribute [jizya] and feel themselves utterly subdued.” Of course, Al Qaeda drops this rhetoric in its writings and communiqués directed to Western nations. Then, the theme is the one that the “experts” you cite have swallowed hook-line-and sinker—that Al Qaeda’s terror is in “retaliation” to Western foreign policy.

In fact, some years back, I juxtaposed the writings of Al Qaeda—primarily the late Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri—to show how they contradict themselves depending on whether they were talking to the West (“we attack you because you are unjust”) or whether they were talking to fellow Muslims (“we must attack the West because our religion commands it”). My findings, which I titled “An Analysis of Al-Qaeda’s Worldview: Reciprocal Treatment or Religious Obligation?” can be read here. At one point, bin Laden even asserts that “Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue… Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam… Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”

As for the Muslim Brotherhood, it must be acknowledged that, if their tactics differ from Al Qaeda—the former primarily relies on non-violent propaganda, the latter on sheer violence—their goal is identical: the enforcement of Sharia law, with all the whippings, beheadings, amputations, sexual segregation, religious discrimination, death for apostates, and international hostility that entails. Western analysts and leaders seem to have fallen for the Muslim Brotherhood as the “alternative” to the “extreme radicals,” the Salafis like Al Qaeda, without realizing that the Muslim Brotherhood works incrementally, step by step, phase by phase, decade after decade to achieve its goal of Islamic domination. And just like Al Qaeda, the Brotherhood also has been vocal about its ultimate goal, “mastership of the world.”...

Last night I interviewed Pamela Geller on my new Jihad Watch television show on ABNSAT. Watch it now: 90 minutes of truth!

This comment showed up tonight at YouTube, on the three-year-old video of me speaking at a press conference on the Rifqa Bary case in Florida in September 2009:

hahha this bastard needs to get killed the whole world hates jews not only muslims death to jews

It was posted by HONEYSAMIYA09, who from the looks of his YouTube channel appears to be a pious Muslim.

Will there be national coverage of this death threat, and police and federal protection, as Huma Abedin has received? Of course not. Death threats against counter-jihadists are not news, because everyone knows, although no one admits, that Islamic supremacists can be violent. But when an Islamic supremacist like the Imam Rauf or a high-profile Muslim like Huma Abedin is (supposedly) threatened, that's man-bites-dog news, because everyone knows, although no one admits, that counter-jihadists are not violent at all. (And of course Abedin was threatened by a Muslim anyway, probably in a clumsy ploy to enhance her privileged victim status.)

Register now, space is limited. September 11, 2012, UN Plaza Millennium Hotel, 3:00 pm - 7:00 pm. Email PamelaGeller@gmail.com.

SION to Hold International Congress and Media Workshop to Address Islamic Supremacist War Against Free Speech

NEW YORK: The first session of the International Freedom Defense Congress, the operating body of the human rights organization Stop Islamization of Nations (SION), will be held in New York on September 11, 2012. The principal focus of the Congress will be a media workshop pertaining to Islamic supremacist attempts to restrict the freedom of speech in the free world, and the smear campaigns against freedom fighters in newspapers and media institutions in the West.

"The objective of this first-of-its-kind workshop is to develop media-related mechanisms to address the smear campaigns," SION said in a statement. It will also address the media's double standard regarding Islam and other religions, as epitomized in March 2012 by the New York Times' running of an anti-Catholic smear ad and rejection of a SION ad telling the truth about Islamic jihad.

It said the workshop will discuss at length the reasons behind and the results of the Western media's offensive campaigns against freedom of speech and the truth about Islam, jihad, Islamic supremacism and Muslims, which it added still occur from time to time.

"The workshop will represent a quantum leap in media action, as it discusses, beyond rhetoric, the practical steps to address the phenomenon of the Islamic war against free speech," SION President Pamela Geller said.

Freedom fighters from all over the globe, journalists, intellectuals and academicians will be among the participants in the workshop, which will consist of brainstorming sessions to develop mechanisms for cooperation with external partners, and to develop an action plan to address the phenomenon of the Islamic war against free speech.

The organisation noted that the workshop is of particular importance as it is the first ever to address the implications of Resolution 16/18 of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the stated goal of which is to "combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of, discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief," but which is actually designed to restrict truthful speech about Islamic supremacism and jihad, so as to render the West mute and defenseless before the advancing threat of jihad and Sharia.

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2011, was backed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the most recent Istanbul Process Conference in Washington in December.

This is widely viewed as a significant step toward furthering OIC efforts to destroy the freedom of speech and impose Sharia blasphemy laws on the free world.

"We are holding this Congress on the eleventh anniversary of the day jihad came to America in order to strike a blow for freedom," Geller said.

SION President Geller is the author of Stop Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books) and The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America (Simon & Schuster). SION Vice President is the acclaimed author and Islam expert, Robert Spencer, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad (both Regnery).

The SION Board of Advisers also includes Oskar Freysinger, a Swiss Parliamentarian and member of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), who won international renown for his leadership of the successful campaign against the construction of minarets in Switzerland; Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media (AIM) and a leader of the struggle to keep the jihadist propaganda network Al-Jazeera off American airwaves; Dr. Ashraf Rameleh, President of Voice of the Copts, an international organization standing up for the human rights of Coptic Christians and all religious minorities against religious bigotry and intolerance; Dr. Ali Sina, the renowned ex-Muslim author and founder of FaithFreedom.org; Dr. Wafa Sultan, the ex-Muslim human rights activist and author; the German pro-freedom activist Stefan Herre of Politically Incorrect; the Israeli author Dr. Mordechai Kedar; the Hindu human rights activist Babu Suseelan; Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE); and Canadian publisher and free speech defender Ezra Levant.

Speakers at SION's International Freedom Defense Congress will include Kedar, Rameleh, Sina, Kincaid, and Gravers, as well as Danish free speech advocate Lars Hedegaard; Italian human rights activists Magdi Christiano Allam and Valentina Colombo; English politician and freedom fighter Paul Weston; and renowned Muhammad cartoonist Lars Vilks. More speakers will be announced shortly.

SION stands for:
-- The freedom of speech - as opposed to Islamic prohibitions of "blasphemy" and "slander," which are used effectively to quash honest discussion of jihad and Islamic supremacism;
-- The freedom of conscience - as opposed to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy;
-- The equality of rights of all people before the law - as opposed to Sharia's institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims.

Join the SION Facebook group here.

2 What Is Shariah?
Its Two Main Foundations: the Quran and Hadith
by James M. Arlandson, Ph.D.

This series of articles about Islamic shariah law is intended for educators, journalists, judges, legislators, city council members, government bureaucrats, think tank fellows, TV and radio talk show hosts, and everyone else who occupies the “check points” in society; they initiate the national dialogue and even shape the flow of the conversation – they are the decision and policy makers.

They have heard the critics of shariah and believe the critics exaggerate. The intellectual elites may even believe the critics are “Islamophobes.” Islam is a world religion, so it deserves respect, after all.

Yet the elites may also have gnawing doubt that the critics are at least partially accurate. Can they be all wrong, all the time? The elites have heard disturbing reports coming out of the Islamic world, and even in their own world.

Defenders of shariah post articles online seeking to allay the secret doubts of the intellectuals. This series quotes extensively from the defenders. The apologists seem to have one main goal in mind: to communicate the message that there is nothing wrong with shariah.

As to the purpose of this present article, it defines the terms and identifies the major legal scholars.

We begin with the Quran and hadith, the two main sources or foundations of shariah, and then move on to shariah itself.

Table of Contents:

THE QURAN

HADITH

SHARIAH

“CLASSICAL” AGE

CONCLUSION

THE QURAN

Islam flows out of the life, words, example and revelations of Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, messenger, or apostle, sent from Allah. The revelations he got from his deity were mainly recited on the mosque pulpit in Medina. Some of the earlier ones were cited in various places in Mecca, like the Kabah shrine where the black stone is housed, or in the marketplace.

Then he moved to Medina in A.D. 622, because the Meccans were going to kill him. But the revelations did not stop. He recited them in various places like the marketplace, on his travels, and in the mosque itself.

They were written down in the Quran several decades after he died. Since they came directly from Allah, the Quran is sacred and inspired. It is binding on all Muslims, if they interpret it correctly.

The Oxford Dictionary of Islam says the Quran is:

. . . The book of Islamic revelation; scripture. The term means “recitation.” The Quran is believed to be the word of God transmitted through the Prophet Muhammad. The Quran proclaims God’s existence and will and is the ultimate source of religious knowledge for Muslims. The Quran serves as both record and guide for the Muslim community, transcending time and space. Muslims have dedicated their best minds and talents to the exegesis and recitation of the Quran because the Quran is the criterion by which everything else is to be judged; all movements, whether of radical reform or of moderate change, whether originating at the center or at the periphery of the Islamic world, have grounded their programs in the Quran and use it as support.[1]

What is so striking about that excerpt is that the Quran transcends time and place. It is cross-cultural and ahistorical; that is, it is applicable to any society today and in the future. The second feature in the excerpt is that the Quran judges all movements of change and reform.

The Quran was written in a time (the seventh century) and a place (Arabia, and specifically the Hejaz or western Arabia). To believe that every verse can be brought forward and applied to the modern world means that the reform of Islam is very difficult.[2] The Quran is a very conservative book, religiously speaking, to say the least.

THE HADITH

However, not everything Muhammad did or said made it in the sacred book. In fact, most of what he did or said did not make it in. But he had close companions and others who remembered his words and deeds.

Soon after his death they loved to tell stories about him. “I remember what Allah’s messenger said in this situation.” Or “we were with Allah’s apostle when we fought the pagans at such-and-such battle.” “The prophet ruled that this or that action should be punished or forgiven.” These are the oral traditions, handed down from one generation to the next.

Eventually, some conscientious Muslim scholars observed that the traditions may have been distorted and grew to be unreliable and unsound or were never reliable or sound in the first place. The scholars sifted them by requiring a chain of narrators to be of utmost integrity and honesty.

Did the traditions contradict clear verses in the Quran? Then they were rejected. Yet there still are some passages which contradict statements of the Quran; occasionally hadith are even abrogating the Quran. One example is the hadith of stoning the adulterers which takes priority over the verse of the Quran which demands flogging. Nonetheless, most hadith were rejected if they contradicted the Quran.

Next, were the various passages embarrassing? They were suspect – too bad since embarrassing ones may have the chance of being the most reliable, because a devout and reliable Muslim of authority would never frivolously pass on a tradition that he believed would embarrass his prophet, so the transmitter believed it was true.

In any case, collectors and editors wrote them down in their books, and this body of writing is called the hadith, which may be defined briefly as the reports and narrations and traditions of Muhammad’s deeds and words that take on a sacredness and a binding force. Sometimes they report on the words and deeds of his closest companions who carry their own special authority.

In addition to that brief definition of the hadith, let’s find a more official one. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam says:

Hadith: Report of the words and deeds of Muhammad and other early Muslims; considered an authoritative source of revelation, second only to the Quran (sometimes referred to as sayings of the Prophet). Hadith (pl. ahadith; hadith is used as a singular or a collective term in English) were collected, transmitted, and taught orally for two centuries after Muhammad's death and then began to be collected in written form and codified. They serve as a source of biographical material for Muhammad, contextualization of Quranic revelations, and Islamic law. A list of authoritative transmitters is usually included in collections. Compilers were careful to record hadith exactly as received from recognized transmission specialists... The science of hadith criticism was developed to determine authenticity and preserve the corpus from alteration or fabrication. Chains of authority and transmission were verified as far back as possible, often to Muhammad himself. Chains of transmission were assessed by the number and credibility of the transmitters and the continuity of the chains (isnad). The nature of the text was also examined. Reports that were illogical, exaggerated, fantastic, or repulsive or that contradicted the Quran were considered suspect. Awareness of fabrication and false teaching has long existed but became a major issue in academic circles in the twentieth century due to early reliance on oral, rather than written, transmission. Traditionally, the body of authentic hadith reports is considered to embody the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad.[3]

In the New Encyclopedia of Islam Cyril Glassé, a Muslim, says that the hadith traditions form the foundation of Islamic law and there was the need to write them down so the community could refer to them:

The Hadith were accorded the role of basis of law in Islamic jurisprudence by the universally accepted methodology of ash-Shafi'i [see below]. It then became inevitable that as Islam unfolded in History, the need for the tangible support which Hadith could provide for intellectual and cultural developments called forth the "missing" or "unspoken" Hadith that were now required. If in the first centuries the standard by which Hadith were measured was that of an impeccable isnad, the growing needs of an expanding Islam of later times added de facto another, one of verisimilitude in the eyes of a developed and sophisticated religious community.[4]

Then Glassé says that great care was taken by reliable hadith editors and collectors to get the traditions right.

The collections of Bukhari and Muslim were scrupulously compiled in the first two and a half centuries of Islam. Their authenticity was assured by the criterion which the people of the time found most valid, that of an authoritative isnad, or chain of transmission. The method was based on the assumption that it was unthinkable for God-fearing men to lie about matters which they held sacred; each human link in the chain vouchsafed the others. If in the isnad there were persons whose integrity could be doubted for any reason, however small, the authenticity of the Hadith was to that extent weakened. Biographical study also served to establish the plausibility of the transmissions. Naturally, fabricated Hadith also had fabricated isnad, but criticism of the matn [text of the hadith] would be equivalent to dogmatic discussions of Islam itself – thus analysis discussions turned around the isnad, but often as euphemism for a discussion of the contents.[5]

As noted, Bukhari[6] (d. 870) and Muslim[7] (d. 875) are considered the most reliable, with Bukhari carrying the most weight. We also occasionally use Abu Dawud[8] (d. 875), another authentic collector and editor.[9]

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 29
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23 / Part 24 / Part 25 / Part 26 / Part 27 / Part 28

C.2 SIR HAMILTON GIBB.

Two biographies appeared within a few months of each other in the early 1970s -- Sir Hamilton Gibb’s The Life of Saladin from the works of ‘Imād ad-Dīn and Bahā’ ad-Dīn in 1973, and Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz’s Saladin in 1972. No two works of history could be more different; where Gibb’s Saladin is highly idealised, relies largely on two hagiographical primary sources, and where the Muslim leader is seen as an exemplary hero of Islam, Ehrenkreutz paints a critical portrait of a ruthless and ambitious politician, and relies on diverse Arabic primary sources such as Ibn al-Athir, who passed some harsh judgements on the Kurd.

Sir Hamilton Gibb was preparing The Life of Saladin shortly before his death in 1971. He had already written extensively of Saladin in various learned journals. His biography is terse, well-footnoted, and written entirely from the Muslim perspective. Every Crusader defeat is a triumph, and every Muslim rout is defended as not being as bad it seems.

I think we need to have some idea of Gibb’s general views on religion and on Islam in particular to appreciate what he admired in Saladin, and what he believed was his true achievement. Gibb was an intensely religious man who worried that Islam was exposed to great dangers, and would be attacked by the corroding acids of the twentieth century: “The external pressure of secularism, whether in the seductive form of nationalism, or in the doctrines of scientific materialism and the economic interpretation of history, has already left its mark on several sections of Muslim society”. But the greatest danger to Islam was “the relaxation of the religious conscience and the weakening of the catholic tradition of Islam”. In modern times, Gibb feared that the Muslims would discard the Sharia, the Sacred Law, with disastrous consequences, “Modern governments…when they legislate changes in the sphere of the Sharī‘a have done so because by influential sections of contemporary Muslims the classical Sharī‘a is regarded as no longer adequate and sufficient interpretation of the moral imperative. Yet if the Sacred Law is wholly dethroned the link with the historic Community is broken; and the popular movements have demonstrated that the appeal to the Sharī‘a can still be an effective instrument to energize the demand for social justice. Thus the task before the spiritual leadership of Islam today is not to fight a stubborn rearguard action, but to close the widening rifts within the Community by enlisting its creative participation in the effort to reformulate and reactivate the Sharī‘a as a valid way of life in the new and changing conditions”. [1]

[1] H.A.R.Gibb. Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1st Edition, 1949], p. 131.

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

Dr. Yassir al-Burhami, a prominent figure in Egypt’s Salafi movement and vice president of the Salafi Call—the same sheikh who seeks to punish Muslim apostates, condemns Mother’s Day, and advocates deceiving Israel—has just issued a fatwa, published in the “Voice of the Righteous Salaf,” forbidding Muslim taxi-drivers and bus-drivers from transporting Coptic priests to their churches, which he depicted as “more forbidden than taking someone to a liquor bar.”

This analogy, of course, does not begin with Sheikh Burhami, but traces back to some of Islam’s early giants, including Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim, who agreed that “building churches is worse than building bars and brothels, for those [churches] symbolize infidelity, whereas these [bars and brothels] represent immorality.

The logic is simple: It is better to profess Islam and sin, than to profess Christianity and not sin—for the latter denies the veracity of Islam, and hence is much more abominable. In this context, the Muslim who transports a priest to his church where he will preach Christianity—a message that contradicts Islam—is a terrible crime.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Yahoo headlined this story "Bachmann's accusations lead to threat against Huma Abedin," thereby giving the impression that some greasy Islamophobe, driven mad by Bachmann's "hate speech," had threatened the pure, the innocent, the unjustly accused Abedin. Only when you go to the original story do you find out that it was a Muslim who threatened Abedin. Was he expecting not to get caught, and hoping to give the impression that some counter-jihadist had threatened her, thereby advancing her claim to victim status and discrediting her accusers, as in the cases of so many Muslims who have faked hate crimes against themselves? Or is he an anti-Muslim Brotherhood but nonetheless violent-minded Muslim?

The former possibility is much more likely.

Once again, also, note the double standard when it comes to threats. Muslims like Abedin and Daisy Khan get special police protection when threatened. Threats to counter-jihadists, including the many, many threats I have received from Muslims and their Useful Idiots, get a perfunctory investigation at best, and are largely ignored.

"Weiner wife under guard," by Larry Celona in the New York Post, July 22:

Police and federal officials have placed security around ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, after a New Jersey man threatened her, law-enforcement sources said.

An individual, described as a Muslim man, made the unspecified threat after Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) last week claimed Abedin’s family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and asked for a probe to see if she is helping the Islamist organization.

The man was questioned by the NYPD and the State Department and has not been charged, sources said.

Don't get all exercised over this, you greasy Islamophobes. After all, priests and ministers and rabbis throw acid in the faces of women who get out of line all the time, don't they? Don't they?

"Kashmiri acid attack victim let down by law," from India Today, July 23 (thanks to Lachlan):

She waited for justice for seven years but it was all in vain. Gul Naaz came to know earlier this week that a court has exonerated the men accused of throwing acid on her and leaving her disfigured for life.

Her fault: She had dared to open a beauty parlour in Kishtwar district of Jammu.

"Two men who threw acid on me were arrested. They were kept in the police station for a night and released the next day. The case went to the sessions court. I was called once to record my statement. I was told that I'll be called again, but it never happened," Naaz, 34, said.

"The police informed me on Tuesday that the case has been closed and the accused exonerated by the court," she said, adding that she plans to file an appeal against the decision.

In 2006, Naaz, who has three children, opened a beauty parlour in Kishtwar to earn her livelihood as her husband had suffered serious injuries in a traffic accident.

She said two men - Sajjad Ahmad and Liyqat Ali - told her to close down the beauty parlour or she would have to face serious consequences.

"I just laughed at Sajjad, who was also the imam of a local mosque. I thought they were joking. But one day they executed the threat," Naaz said.

The attack damaged one eye completely. "Whatever money I had, I spent that on my treatment. All these years I have gone through hell for nothing and those who did it are roaming freely," she said....

Still more indication of the madness of our adventure in Afghanistan, and of the impossibility of distinguishing Islamic jihadists from peaceful Muslims who are genuinely on our side. Not that anyone cares. "NATO: 3 western advisers killed in Afghanistan," from The Associated Press, July 23 (thanks to Bill):

KABUL, Afghanistan—Three civilian police training advisers, two American and one British, were killed over the weekend by an Afghan policeman at a training academy in western Afghanistan, Afghan officials and a NATO official said on Monday.

In a separate incident, the NATO official said two service members with the U.S.-led coalition were wounded on Monday when an Afghan soldier opened fire on them in northern Afghanistan. No other details have been disclosed about that shooting....

Afghan security forces or militants dressed in their uniforms have been killing a rising number of coalition forces, but they have not been specifically targeting civilian contractors working for the coalition. So far this year, 26 foreign troops have been killed in this type of attack....

Still, it's better than doing nothing vis-a-vis a state that has demonstrated its treachery and support for jihad terror again and again and again. "House votes to cut $650M in Pakistan aid," by Jeremy Herb for The Hill, July 19 (thanks to Lachlan):

The House voted to cut U.S. aid to Pakistan by $650 billion in the defense appropriations bill Wednesday night in the latest jab at Pakistan by Congress.

The amendment to cut aid by $650 million, proposed by Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), passed on the floor in a voice vote. Initially, Poe had proposed cutting the aid by $1.3 billion, but he withdrew that amendment and agreed upon half the amount.

“Pakistan seems to be the Benedict Arnold nation in the list of countries that we call allies,” Poe said on the floor. “They have proven to be deceptive and deceitful and a danger to the United States.”

Poe's amendment passed during consideration Wednesday evening of the $608 billion defense appropriations bill, where debate on amendments continues Thursday.

Islamabad and Washington have had a tenuous relationship the past two years, after Pakistan shut down supply lines into Afghanistan for seven months.

The supply lines, which were shut down after NATO troops killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan-Pakistan border, re-opened last month after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized for the attack....

In PJ Media this morning I discuss the truth about yet another one of the people Michele Bachmann is alleged to have falsely accused: Mohamed Elibiary.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and four other representatives are now being accused of McCarthyism over the letter they sent to defense, diplomatic, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies asking them to investigate Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the U.S. government. The implication is that Bachmann, like McCarthy (at least according to liberal myth), hurled false accusations damaging to the careers and livelihoods of innocent people. What no one is bothering to establish, however, is that the allegations are actually false, much less that they will damage anyone’s career.

The questions swirling around Department of Homeland Security official Mohamed Elibiary are a case in point. Bachmann’s letter to DHS’s inspector general states that Elibiary has “extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood” and “sympathy for Islamist causes,” and accuses him of “gain(ing) access to classified documents.”

Last week, Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX), one of the signers of the letters asking for investigation of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration, asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about Elibiary. Gohmert put this question to Napolitano: “Are you saying before this Congress right now, that as secretary of Homeland Security, that it is a lie that Mohamed Elibiary downloaded material from a classified website using the secret security clearance you gave him? Are you saying that’s a lie?”

Napolitano responded: “I’m saying that is inaccurate. That is correct.” But when Gohmert pressed her on what was inaccurate about it, Napolitano began talking about prejudice against Muslims, and then said: “I’m saying that he … as far as I know … he did not download classified documents.” Gohmert saw through that immediately, responding: “One of the games that gets played by some people who come up here and testify is that they have somebody not provide them with adequate information so that they can come in her and say ‘so far as I know,’ ‘not to my knowledge,’ that kind of thing, and they obscure the truth.” Then he asked Napolitano: “Has Elibiary’s status on Homeland Security Advisory Council changed?” Napolitano said that it had not.

Thus it is clear that Elibiary has not suffered any career difficulties because of these allegations. It is also clear that as long as Barack Obama remains president, he will not. Napolitano, in fact, was anxious to protect him, parrying Gohmert’s questions and only reluctantly giving him straight answers.

So where is the McCarthyism? Is it that the allegations against Elibiary are self-evidently false?

Not by a long shot. Napolitano did not refute investigative journalist Patrick Poole’s findings, reported at PJ Media last year. Poole noted that “Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet.” According to Poole, Elibiary approached “a left-leaning media outlet” with reports marked For Official Use Only that he said demonstrated rampant “Islamophobia” in the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).  The media outlet declined to do a story, but what was Elibiary doing shopping the Official Use Only documents in the first place?

There is more.

He didn't know! He didn't know!

In FrontPage this morning I discuss the roiling controversy over Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's call for investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the government -- specifically with regard to Congressman Keith Ellison:

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has accused Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) of having a “long record of being associated” with the Hamas-linked Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Evoking the days of McCarthyism, a common charge being leveled at Bachmann these days, Ellison responded: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.” He accused Bachmann of religious bigotry:

“I think she has a very narrowly prescribed definition of who belongs and who doesn’t. And there’s a whole bloc of people she don’t like. I think she thinks that we’re evil because we don’t understand God the way she does….It’s also about marginalizing and alienating a certain group of Americans who she does not view are American enough.”

Not content with that, he accused her of petty attention-seeking:

“But you have to ask yourself, you know, why did she make this so public? Why did she seem to be seeking public attention for these allegations she was making? If she really had actionable intelligence, why wouldn’t she go to the agencies that investigate these things? I think the answer is clear that she wanted attention. That was her goal all along.”

The only problem with Ellison’s wounded-martyr stance toward Bachmann’s accusations is that what she said is true: Ellison really does have a “long record of being associated” with Hamas-linked CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As long ago as 2006, Ellison’s closeness to Nihad Awad, co-founder of Hamas-linked CAIR, was a matter of public record. Awad, who notoriously said in 1994 that he was “in support of the Hamas movement,” spoke at fundraisers for Ellison, raising considerable sums for his first Congressional race. According to investigative journalist Patrick Poole, Ellison has appeared frequently at CAIR events since then, despite the fact that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.

Poole explains that “according to Justice Department, Awad is a longtime Hamas operative. Multiple statements made by federal prosecutors identify Awad as one of the attendees at a 1993 meeting of US Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Committee leaders in Philadelphia that was wiretapped by the FBI under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant. The topic of discussion during that 1993 meeting was how to help Hamas by working in the U.S. to help sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords.” But none of that fazed Ellison.

CAIR is also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Awad and CAIR’s cofounder, Omar Ahmad, were officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) before founding CAIR. A captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document lists the IAP as one of the Brotherhood’s allied groups in the U.S.

And as for the Muslim Brotherhood itself, in 2008 Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. What is the Muslim American Society? The Muslim Brotherhood. “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” So reported the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb. The Muslim American Society, according to Steven Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “is the de facto arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. The agenda of the MAS is to … impose Islamic law in the U.S., to undermine U.S. counterterrorism policy.”

There is more.

1 Introduction to a Series on Islamic Shariah Law
The Scope and Reach of Shariah in Western Societies
by James M. Arlandson, Ph.D.

This series of articles on Islamic shariah law is intended for judges, lawyers, legislators, city council members, educators, journalists, government bureaucrats, think tank fellows, TV and radio talk show hosts, and anyone else who occupies the “check points” in society; they initiate the national dialogue and shape the flow of the conversation in society. They are the decision and policy makers.

As intellectuals, they may believe the critics of shariah exaggerate (and maybe some are guilty of it). Islam is a world religion, after all. It deserves respect.

They are also moral relativists who believe in tolerance for all religions. At first glance, this is a commendable outlook.

Even Thomas Jefferson said, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my legs.” [1]

In essence Jefferson was saying that beliefs that do not harm us monetarily or physically should be tolerated. Islam has neutral and even positive aspects to it – they do no one any real damage in those ways. Therefore, those specific parts should be tolerated in a religiously diverse society like America.

The Five Pillars are examples. Muslims are required first to declare their faith in a formula statement; second, pray five times a day; third, give a charity tax; fourth, fast during Ramadan; and fifth, take a pilgrimage to Mecca. We can include parts of Islamic theology, like the oneness of Allah, or other rituals like washing before entering a mosque or never eating pork.

All of these things are part of shariah – divine Islamic law, which traces its origins ultimately back to the Quran and Muhammad’s example or life. None of these words and rituals harms society. It is true that a required charity tax could be interpreted as harming one’s income, which “picks my pocket,” but in a free country outside of Islamic civilization one does not need to join Islam, or one could leave it.

If Muslims were to follow only the positive and harmless practices and rules in shariah, the world would enjoy a lot more peace.

Unfortunately, however, this series of articles is not about the harmless parts of Islam, but the harmful ones. Many parts of shariah have rules that are incompatible with the modern era. This series has to expose those teachings of shariah.

Even Thomas Jefferson had his limits. He sent in the marines to take back captured American merchant sailors and to open up the trade routes that were hampered by the Muslim Barbary pirates in North Africa, who had sold the captives into slavery or demanded a ransom. [2]

In some cases Islam does pick our pockets and break our legs.

TEN ITEMS OF CONCERN

And here we begin with some basic concerns about Islamic aggressive policies, whether formally part of shariah or not. These ten items are the tip of the iceberg, representing others.

Item One

At this time, fifty court cases in twenty-three US states involve shariah

The Center for Security Policy finds fifty “relevant” or “highly relevant” cases on the appellate level where shariah has entered into consideration and where some judges defer to it.

Our findings suggest that Shariah law has entered into state court decisions, in conflict with the Constitution and state public policy. Some commentators have said there are no more than one or two cases of Shariah law in U.S. state court cases; yet we found 50 significant cases just from the small sample of appellate published cases. Others state with certainty that state court judges will always reject any foreign law, including Shariah law, when it conflicts with the Constitution or state public policy; yet we found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where Shariah was found to be applicable in the case at bar. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections. This is a serious issue and should be a subject of public debate and engagement by policymakers. [3]

An objector may ask about Jewish law or Catholic canon law. In reply,

[T]here is literally no instance of Jewish law or Christian canon being applied in a state court where a litigant is likely to be deprived of a constitutional liberty. And, the reason this is so is because neither of these religious laws occupy the space of authoritative state law. Sharia is problematic precisely because it is the secular law in almost all of the Muslim world, either as the law of the land simply or as the authoritative law in matters of family relations and citizenship or what is sometimes referred to as “identity law” in those Muslim countries which require their citizens to declare a religious affiliation for their “identity” cards — such that the law treats Muslim citizens differently from non-Muslims. [4]

That is, Jewish law and Catholic law are different from Islamic law. The former laws do not “occupy the space of authoritative state law,” while Islamic law does.

Item Two

Muslim judges, lawyers, and jury members, living in the West, must try to implement shariah, whenever possible

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) is made up of religious scholars, most of whom have their doctorates in Islamic law or other Islamic subjects; they have the credentials to write fatwas (religious rulings or opinions). They advocate Muslim judges and lawyers and jury members actively implementing Islamic law, while they work in the Western system. They must realize that Islamic law is superior to Western law.

Furthermore, since attorneys are representative of their clients, it is permissible to practice law within the scope of permissible, just, and legitimate cases that are filed to demand a right or alleviate a grievance. Similarly, it is permissible to study, teach, and understand man-made laws for the purpose of realizing the superiority of the Islamic laws, or practicing law in an environment that does not recognize the sovereignty of the Islamic law, intending to defend the oppressed people and retrieve their rights. This is, however, contingent upon the possession of enough Islamic knowledge, in order to avoid becoming an unwitting participant in sinful actions and transgressions. [4]

AMJA says judges and jury members must “maintain displeasure in [their] hearts” about man-made (i.e. Western laws) and their decisions must “be in compliance with Islamic law.”

In addition, one should judge between people according to Islamic law as much as one can. Furthermore, while in this position, one should maintain displeasure in his heart to the man-made laws. Needless to say, this ruling is an exception that is governed by the aforementioned provisions and restricted to necessity only. AMJA further clarified that it is permissible for Muslims to serve as members in a jury proceeding, with the stipulation that their opinions be in compliance with Islamic law and with the intention to establish justice for all. [6]

Item Three

Shariah courts are strong in the UK

In 2008, while arguing for the need to formally introduce Sharia law into the law of the United Kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed Sharia law was “inevitable” in the UK. He denied it was an “alien” system and called for “constructive accommodation” of Muslim law. He did this in a calculated and provocative manner, while denying a place for its more “extreme punishments.”

It is unlikely that many members of the Muslim community would be satisfied with an Anglican primate determining the limitations of the Quran and Sharia law.

This argument was rapidly followed by the Lord Chief Justice: Lord Phillips helpfully said there was a place for Sharia law, particularly in mediation. He lamented the “widespread misunderstanding” of Sharia law. The newly established Muslim Arbitration Tribunals immediately put a picture of the Lord Chief Justice on their website in appreciation of his endorsement.

In the United Kingdom, the many thousands of Sharia courts can quietly go about their business of implementing “justice” in a form totally “alien” to the Judeo-Christian tradition, denying human rights to many of our citizens — particularly women.

The “constructive accommodation” of Muslim law reached a logical conclusion with the declaration this year of Sharia law controlled zones in a number of areas geographically spread over the country, where the Islamist militants enforce their will. Their posters declare: “No music or concerts, no porn or prostitution, no drugs or smoking, no gambling, no alcohol.” A reign of terror has begun, with threats of implicit violence against anyone who “insults” Islam, changes religion, or fails to dress appropriately. I have already been contacted about assisting two individuals subject to Islamist threats.

The police stand passively by, adhering to their diversity training. [7]

Item Four

Highly placed Muslims use labels like “Islamophobia” to stifle legitimate criticism of Islam [8]

Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (formerly Organization of the Islamic Conference), an international organization consisting of 57 member states and based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, writes that “Islamophobia” is finding a home among critics of Islam, because, these critics claim, Islam does not respect freedom of expression.

Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim attitudes and activities, known as Islamophobia, are increasingly finding place in the agenda of ultra-right wing political parties and civil societies in the West in their anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalism policies, as was evident in the manifesto of the Norway killer. Their views are being promoted under the banner of freedom of expression while claiming that Muslims do not respect that right. [9]

The “Islamophobia” charge is related to shariah only when it is wielded like a weapon against critics of shariah. The term seeks to stifle free speech.

On the positive side, the professor’s statement in other places does condemn violence against non-Muslims and calls for dialogue among people of different faiths. But he also writes: “The Islamic faith is based on tolerance and acceptance of other religions.”

However, this series, especially the first few installments, contradicts his claim. “Islamophobia,” a term invented to stifle critics, is not the problem. “Religiophobia,” which is Islam’s fear and dislike of other religions, especially when they are dominant and it is not, is the problem.

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 28
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23 / Part 24 / Part 25 / Part 26 / Part 27

In other words, Lane-Poole is saying that to be a true Muslim you must pursue the totalitarian goal of turning the entire world Muslim, with the sword when necessary; that a true Muslim is not tolerant. In his world view, and the world view of all true Muslims, Christians and Jews are inferior, and treated accordingly -- as dhimmis. But Lane-Poole and all other apologists of Saladin do not write of the plight of non-Muslims in Islamic society. Certainly Lane-Poole was aware of Saladin’s limitations, the necessary limitations of true Muslims, but does not spell out the consequences of such beliefs for non-Muslims. But I shall indeed look at the treatment of Jews and Christians during Saladin’s times later in the essay.

Nonetheless, Lane-Poole’s history is written entirely from the Muslim point of view, a perspective that Gibb was also to take. Lane-Poole’s account was the first account in English that took the trouble of going to the original Arabic sources, Bahā’ ad-Dīn, Imād ad-Dīn, Ibn al-Athir, and for that reason is of historical importance.

But Lane-Poole pays little heed to Saladin’s early years, especially the Egyptian. And he seems to have been the originator of the view that Saladin, in his younger days, was essentially a shy retiring, unambitious youth who preferred a quiet seclusion to court intrigues, politics and war.

His literary tastes were theological, and loved to hear passages from the Koran explained, and the origins of Traditions traced. He longed for nothing more than the discourse of pious men. But then he had greatness thrust upon him. He was dragged to Egypt against his will, but once there he acquired a passion for Jihad, a desire to found a Muslim empire strong enough to drive the infidels out of the land.

Lane-Poole concluded, “Thenceforward his career was one long championship of Islam. He had vowed himself to the Holy War.”

Lane-Poole was, like Walter Scott, a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, brought up on ideas put forth by philosophers like William Robertson [1], who argued that non-European civilizations were at least the equal of, and perhaps even superior to, Western civilization. Lane-Poole clearly considers the Saracens far superior to the Crusaders. He wrote, “But the students of the Crusades do not need to be told that in this struggle the virtues of civilisation, magnanimity, toleration, real chivalry, and gentle culture, were all on the side of the Saracens”. This is quite an extraordinary statement. Lane-Poole is willing to overlook, minimize, or justify the acts of cruelty and barbarism of the Saracens under Saladin, but not of the Crusaders. He had the Enlightenment contempt for Christianity, which prejudices pervade his account of the Crusaders. It shows through on other occasions, as when he mocks the very notion that anyone could possibly have the True Cross; what of imitations, he asks sarcastically. “There were doubtless several 'True Cosses' -- and imitations”, wrote Lane-Poole. I cannot imagine him mocking Muslim beliefs in the same way; there were enough examples of absurdities in the Islamic faith had he so wished, including the superstition that Muhammad ascended heaven from Jerusalem on Buraq -- a steed with wings and a “handsome head”. Lane-Poole was also writing at a moment in history when Islamic culture and civilization was at a low ebb, and to kick it at a time when it was on its knees and so degraded was not very gentlemanly. Least of all was Islam a threat to the West, and hence he could quietly disquisit on Jihad without thinking it would ever pose any dangers.

[1] William Robertson, An historical disquisition concerning the knowledge which the ancients had of India, Edinburgh, (1791).

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

As JihadWatch has reported, 100 percent of convicted rapists in Oslo have non-Western background. According to the Oslo police, non-Western immigrants rape because they are brought up with a view of women that makes them more likely to become rapists. It would be more precise to say that they just follow their religion, which allows them to rape non-Muslim women.

In 2010, 51.5 percent of all convicted rapists had immigrant backgrounds:

Translated by Nicolai Sennels, BT July 22: "Every second convicted rapist has an immigrant background":

Iraqis, Iranians, Turks and Somalis are dramatically overrepresented among convicted rapists in Denmark. More than half of convicted rapists in 2010 have immigrant backgrounds, according to official data from Statistics Denmark. 32 ​​with a Danish background and 27 migrants and 7 descendants of immigrants, totaling 34, were convicted of rape in 2010. In the last seven years, more than one out of three convicted of rape was either an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants: 156 of the 450 convicted rapists since 2004 has an immigrant background. Immigrants and their descendants account for only ten percent of the Danish population.

I know beforehand that many on the left and their accomplices, as well as representatives of the Muslims, will try to criticize this article, so I'll give the iron facts to support my opinion.

During the attack in Bulgaria, I was in Tel Aviv. While there, I heard the statement of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, about the participation in the terrorist attack by Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence.

When we spoke to Daniel Seaman, the Deputy Director of the General Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, about this attack, he told me, "Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, are conducting a terror campaign against Israeli targets around the world. In recent months alone, attempts against Israelis in India, Thailand, Georgia, Kenya and Cyprus have been proven to have Iranian and Hezbollah involvement. Iran was also involved in an attempt to murder the Saudi ambassador to the USA. Iran is a source of international terror and the international community can no longer stand idly by." And it is absolutely true.

Iran and its intelligence these days are not what they were thirty, twenty or even ten years ago. They have become better, stronger and smarter.

"Eternal" talks on the Iranian nuclear program and the so-called "financial sanctions and embargoes" have brought about the result that Iran has strengthened itself both financially and militarily.

Iranian intelligence put down its roots in countries in which previously had no access, even in allies of the U.S. and the EU. And it is not surprising that they may have ties to Al Qaeda, especially considering the fact that Iran shares borders with Afghanistan.

Earlier I wrote about a Bank of Azerbaijan, "Royal Bank," about which the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan wrote letters to the State Department accusing it of laundering money for Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. For this reason, the links between al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence have been known for a long time.

A few days ago, the spiritual leader of Muslims of the Caucasus said that the Shiites and Sunnis should unite, and that the unity of Muslims is necessary for the protection of Islamic values, as the enemy is trying to bring discord among Muslims.

Even during the first Jihad of the Mujahideen in Chechnya, the Mujahideen were sent to Chechnya via Turkey and the other part through Iran. Many Chechen businessmen sponsoring jihad in the Caucasus have business in Turkey and Iran. I have personally met with several leaders of the mujahideen who were transported from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iran to Azerbaijan, and from Azerbaijan to Chechnya. Earlier I wrote about Vaha Ibragimov, who was involved in ferrying mujahideen to Chechnya. He had just shipped them across Iran.

Iran has always both directly and indirectly supported terrorist organizations, but it has never before been so close to developing nuclear weapons. In addition, after the terrorist organizations Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Taliban in Afghanistan have become partners in peace of Barack Obama, why should Iran scare anyone? Shouldn't it also be recognized as a party in the peace process?!

According to preliminary information, the perpetrator of the terrorist attack in Bulgaria was not an Iranian by birth. But this does not prove that he was not given Iranian money and aided by Iranian intelligence.

The essence of intelligence is precisely that: to achieve the goal -- in this case, intimidation, and to spread doubts about what appropriate decisions Israel should make. The Defence Minister and Prime Minister of Israel promised that the mastermind of this attack would get a harsh response.

To sow doubts among the Israeli leadership does not work, but other countries will be asked: where was Iran in this, if the terrorist act was carried out by al-Qaeda? At this time, world leaders do not wish to take tough measures against Iran's nuclear program; that is, they do not want to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, and they followed this with a request that Israel not take harsh measures against the instigators of a terrorist act, as Iran's involvement is not proven.

The Deputy Chairman of the Knesset Committee on Defense, Faina Kirshenbaum, told me about the existence of an Islamic lobby that intends to make the entire Middle East Islamic, green, conducting terror attacks against the state of Israel -- the only democracy in the region.

How strong is the Islamic Lobby? This is what we will learn in the near future. But one thing is certainly not in doubt: Islam is not a peaceful religion.

Tune in at abnsat.com, tonight at 5PM Pacific, 8PM Eastern. I'll be discussing "Islamophobia" with special guest, live via satellite, Pamela Geller.

Well, yes, this sort of thing does happen in Pakistan, but remember the thousands who demonstrated against Osama and al-Qaeda, and the "hijacking" of peaceful Islam? No? You don't remember that? What's that? It never happened, either in Pakistan or anywhere in the world? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?

"‘Desecration’ of holy Quran sparks wild protests," from the Daily Times, July 19 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

LAHORE: Thousands of residents and shopkeepers of Misri Shah Main Market took to the streets against the alleged desecration of the holy Quran on Wednesday.

The residents of Katchupura, Misri Shah, said that two men had a quarrel, during which one of them, Shafiq, got emotional and allegedly tore up the holy book.

This sparked a massive protest, with people coming out of their homes to condemn the act. The protesters burnt tyres and strongly denounced the desecration of the holy Quran. They demanded an independent probe into the incident to bring the culprit to justice. An FIR has been lodged in this regard.

The first of its kind. Ruining tourism -- and seen by liberals as the “forced Islamization of the country.” "TunisAir suspends serving alcohol on flights during Ramadan," by Monzer Beldiafi for Al Arabiya, July 22:

In the first initiative of its kind, the Tunisian flag carrier Tunis Air decided to ban offering alcohol in its flights during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, stirring anger of liberal activists who accused the government of Islamizing the country by force.

The decision was slammed by several Tunis Air senior employees as well as owners of hotels and travel agencies who complain of the negative impact the ban is bound to have on their businesses, especially that Tunisia is frequented by large number of European tourists.

Those working in the tourism sector expressed their concerns over potential future losses in the number of tourists especially that the country was experiencing a boom before Ramadan.

“Hotel occupancy reached 100 percent in June in Hammamet, Sousse, and the island of Djerba,” al-Habib Ammar, general manager of the Tunisian National Tourist Office, told Al Arabiya.

Ammar added that tourism in Tunisia was regaining its strength following the revolution that toppled the regime of former president Zein al-Abedine bin Ali.

“We had expected that tourism will be better this year than before the revolution.”

The ban also infuriated liberal activists who viewed it as an attempt towards the “forced Islamization of the country.”

Through a campaign they launched on social networking websites, those activists also slammed other similar decisions like the closure of restaurants and coffee shops during the day in Ramadan in what they saw as a flagrant violation of personal freedoms.

In the same vein, several restaurants and coffee shops close during Ramadan based on a decision issued by the Ministry of Interior, which was not the case during bin Ali’s secular rule....

Somehow these Misunderstanders of Islam didn't get the memo that Ramadan is a time to "reconcile differences and seek peace." And oddly enough, they misunderstand Islam and Ramadan in exactly the same way as the Muslims in Bulgaria who somehow got the crazy idea that "Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators." What an odd coincidence!

"5 NATO troops die in Afghanistan," by Rahim Faiez for the Associated Press, July 22:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Five NATO service members have been killed in roadside bombings in Afghanistan during the past two days, while Afghan officials reported Sunday that four civilians died when hundreds of shells and rockets were fired from neighboring Pakistan.

The artillery shells hit homes along frontier areas from which insurgents have in the past staged cross-border attacks.

The Afghan government has not yet openly blamed the Pakistani military for the artillery barrage, which reportedly hit districts in the eastern provinces of Nuristan and Kunar. Both are considered insurgent hotbeds, and militants allied with both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban regularly cross the mountainous border in both directions.

Pakistan has railed against Afghan and NATO forces for not doing enough to stop the rising number of cross-border attacks, which it says have killed dozens of members of its security forces. However, there has been little sympathy from the U.S. and Afghan governments, which have long complained Pakistan gives sanctuary to militants fighting in Afghanistan crossing the border in the opposite direction.

In the latest reported cross-border violation, nearly 400 rockets and shells were fired into Afghanistan on Saturday and killed at least four people in Dangam district along the border, according to Kunar provincial police chief Gen. Ewaz Mohammad Naziri.

He said those attacks and others in nearby Nuristan had led hundreds of families to flee the area.

There is little or no Afghan or NATO military presence in the area and large swaths of the region are controlled by insurgent groups. The information could not be independently verified because the area is largely off-limits to reporters.....

Imam Rauf is no doubt jetting to Kuwait as we speak, so as to explain to these hoteliers that they are getting Sharia all wrong, wrong, wrong, and that it is completely compatible with Western notions of human rights. "Kuwaiti defies hotel security to kiss wife," from Emirates 247, July 22 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A Kuwaiti man defied an army of security men at a five-star hotel in the oil-rich Gulf emirate to finish a long kissing session with his wife in the main hall.

A visitor to the hotel in Kuwait City shouted to the security men when he saw the man was engaged in an “obscene act” with his wife in the hotel lobby, the Kuwaiti Arabic language daily Alanba said.

“Many security men came to the Kuwaiti and asked him to stop the kiss and leave the hotel,” the paper said.

“The man got mad and screamed at them, saying ‘this is my wife.. My pleasure," he then continued kissing before leaving the hotel," the report stated.

The paper said the hotel management reported the man to the police and provided them with his car number.

Somehow these Misunderstanders of Islam didn't get the memo that Ramadan is a time to "reconcile differences and seek peace." And oddly enough, they misunderstand Islam and Ramadan in exactly the same way as the Muslims in Bulgaria who somehow got the crazy idea that "Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators." What an odd coincidence!

"Bombs kill 20 and wound 80 across Iraq," from Reuters, July 22 (thanks to Ima):

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs in two towns south of Baghdad and in the Iraqi city of Najaf killed a total of 20 people on Sunday and wounded 80, police and hospital sources said, in one of the most violent days of the past two weeks.

Three car bombs killed 11 people and wounded 38 in Mahmudiya, a town 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, according to police.

The first detonated in a car in a parking lot, the second in another car as police arrived at the scene and a third at the town's police station, the police sources said.

In Madaen, a town 30 km (20 miles) southeast of the Iraqi capital, two bombs killed five people and wounded 14 in a crowded market, police and hospital sources said.

And car bombs planted in a busy trading street in Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, killed four people and wounded 28, Interior Ministry sources said....

"The Muslim lads kicked up a stink last year over the food they received for Ramadan. And guess what? The authorities gave in and gave the green light. It's a f**king liberty. If the non-Muslims asked for this, they'd be told where to go."

Indeed.

"Fellow inmates express anger over Muslims getting microwaves during 'Ramadan fast' in UK jail," from ANI, July 21 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

London, July 22 (ANI): Muslim prisoners being provided with microwaves in the jail to warm up food during their Ramadan fast has sparked off fury among other inmates in a jail in Leicestershire.

Lags at the Gartree lifer's jail are furious over the Muslims getting special treatment.

According to the Daily Express, Muslim inmates had moaned over the quality of last year's grub, which was served cold in flasks at the end of the fasting period, following which they threatened to strike.

"The Muslim lads kicked up a stink last year over the food they received for Ramadan. And guess what? The authorities gave in and gave the green light. It's a f**king liberty. If the non-Muslims asked for this, they'd be told where to go," the paper quoted an inmate, as saying....

And then the Muslims claimed victimhood status. We have seen this so many times before. "Rape-Murder of a Buddhist girl by Muslims led to riots: Myanmar Ambassador," by Mumtaz Alam Falahi for TwoCircles.net, July 22 (thanks to Maxwell):

New Delhi: Amidst spreading anger among Muslims in India over the killings of Muslims in Myanmar, the Embassy of Myanmar in New Delhi has come up with first official and detailed explanation about the violent clashes, its origin and the measures the Government of Myanmar has adopted to control the situation and provide relief to the victims.

According to Myanmar Ambassador Zin Yaw, what has happened recently in the Rakhine State of Myanmar was violent clashes and riots between Buddhists and Muslims in the state – it was not one-sided killing of Muslims by another group with the support of the state. According to Yaw, only 79 persons comprising members of both communities have been killed in the riots that started on 30th May 2012. He termed the photos of mass killings of Muslims as fake and described the reports as baseless accusations. He further said that the violent clashes began after the rape and murder of a Buddhist girl by three Muslims in Rakhine State on 28th May.

The ambassador has made this clarification in reply to a letter by Dr Tasleem Ahmed Rahmani, President, Muslim Political Council of India. Mr. Rahmani had written to the ambassador on 19th July seeking appointment for a meeting of Muslim leaders with the ambassador over the reported killings of Muslims in Myanmar....

Main points of the letter of Myanmar ambassador
-- On 28 May this year, a Rakhine Buddhist girl was raped and killed by three Muslims in Kyaukpyu district of Rakhine State. The perpetrators were arrested and put in police custody.

-- On 30 May, 100 people including relatives of the girl and villagers came to the police station asking police to hand over the accused to them. Police refused and opened fire to disperse the mob.

-- On 3 June in a town called Taunggup, a group of about 300 Rakhine Buddhists attacked 10 Muslim passengers on a bus travelling to Yangon. All 10 were killed on the spot. This led to violent clashes between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims. The situation went out of control.

-- Curfew was imposed by the State Government on 8 June 2012. However, clashes continued. State of Emergency was declared in Rakhine State by the Union Government on 10 June. Army was called in to control the situation. The situation is now back to normal completely.

--During the clashes, both Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims, 79 persons in total, were killed and many injured. It is totally untrue that hundreds or thousands have been killed and that those killed were Muslims. The deaths were caused by either group to each other, not by others. Houses and property worth millions of dollars were destroyed. Thousands of victims have become homeless.

-- The government formed on 6 June 2012 an Investigation Committee headed by the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs to investigate all aspects of the unfortunate incident and submit a report to the President.

-- 30 Rakhine Buddhist suspects have already been detained so far.

-- Relief camps, 72 in total, have been set up separately for Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims. Basic needs of food, clothing and medicines of the victims have been met by the government.

-- In coordination with the government, UN agencies in the country, including UNHCR, UNFPA, WFP and UNOCHA, and INGOs have also been providing humanitarian assistance to the victims.

--Lt. Gen. Thein Htay, Union Minister for Border Affairs and for Myanmar Industrial Development, accompanied by Mr. Vijay Nambiar, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, officials from UN agencies, 15 Muslim leaders from Yangon visited Rakhine State recently

Full text of the letter of Myanmar ambassador

Dear Dr. T.A. Rahmani,
I would like to provide you the following information:-

On what happened:
On 28 May this year, a Rakhine Buddhist girl was raped and killed by three men near one of the villages in Kyaukpyu district of Rakhine State, which is bordering Bangladesh.

Through the investigation conducted by Kyaukpyu district police force, three persons, all Muslims, were exposed to be the perpetrators. They were put under protective custody in Kyaukpyu Jail on the morning of 30 May for fear of revenge from relatives of the deceased girl.

Relatives of the deceased girl and fellow villagers, about 100, went to the police station on the afternoon of 30 May and asked the police station to bring to them the three suspects. The police officers, who are Buddhists, did not allow them to enter the station compound and rejected their claim by saying that action would be taken against the three suspects in accordance with the law. This testifies to respect for law and the rule of law in the country. Unsatisfied with the response from the police officers, the relatives and fellow villagers attempted to enter the police station which compelled the police officers to fire five shots to disperse them.

On 3 June in a town called Taunggup, a group of about 300 Rakhine Buddhists attacked 10 Muslim passengers on a bus travelling to Yangon. All 10 were killed on the spot. The news on killing of 10 Muslims spread to the immediate neighbourhood and Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists in the neighbourhood attacked each other. This communal violence spread quickly to other parts of Maungtaw and then to Buthidaung, Sittway and Yathedaung townships in the Rakhine State where Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims have been living since long. The situation went out of control....

During the unfortunate incident, both Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims, 79 persons in total, were killed and many injured. It is totally untrue that hundreds or thousands have been killed and that those killed were Muslims. The deaths were caused by either group to each other, not by others. Houses and property worth millions of dollars were destroyed. Thousands of victims have become homeless. Both Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims suffered as a result of the lawlessness of a few....

Comment of the Embassy:
The Embassy of Myanmar sincerely hopes that you be well aware that violent clashes take place sometimes not only between different religions but even between different sects of the same religion. Whenever such ugly things happen, not only those who start but also who have nothing to do with such things suffer. The Embassy firmly believes that regardless of what religion one professes, all must live together peacefully based on respect for each other and laws of the country in which we reside. The recent clashes between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims in the Rakhine State of our country are very unfortunate and the Embassy feels very sorry for all the victims without any reservation.

In Myanmar, Muslims are not only in Rakhine State but also elsewhere as those who profess other religions in the country. Buddhist pagodas and monasteries, Christian churches, Islamic mosques and Hindu temples exist side by side in many cities/towns/localities of the country. This can happen because of the deeply rooted religious tolerance in the country.

Fake photos or false information have been spread with an ill intention to agitate Muslims around the world by attempting to create the impression that Muslims are being discriminated or killed in Myanmar and that such acts are state sponsored. Such are unsubstantiated accusations. Please do not be misled by them.

I would like to request you to kindly share this information with your colleagues.

I wish you and your colleagues all the best.

With warm regards

Zin Yaw
Ambassador

Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but "the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour 'provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.'" And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that "Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values."

In light of all this, until authorities get the courage to tell the truth about honor killing, there will be many more such murders.

"Afghan man kills two daughters in 'honour killing,'" from AFP, July 22 (thanks to Lachlan):

AN AFGHAN man killed his two teenage daughters when they returned home four days after running away with a man in a southern village.

The father, who shot the girls, has been detained on murder charges in Nad Ali district in the southern province of Helmand, a hotbed of the Taliban insurgency, provincial police spokesman Farid Ahmad Farhang said.

"He killed two of his daughters. His daughters had run away with a young man four days ago. When they returned home their father killed them," Mr Farhang said.

Police have issued an arrest warrant for the young man, who is said to be working as an interpreter with NATO forces in the southern province, Mr Farhang said.

Relations between men and women outside marriage are strictly controlled under Islam and infringements are harshly punished by most families in the troubled Central Asian nation.

So-called "honour killing" is a common practice in Afghanistan, an ultra-conservative Islamic nation which has been at war for most of the past three decades.

"Ultra-conservatives" in the U.S. don't practice honor killing, but AFP would rather say that than "devout Muslim." Mustn't displease the politically correct, doncha know.

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 27
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23 / Part 24 / Part 25 / Part 26

Though he is often accused of romanticising the life of Saladin, a careful reading of Lane-Poole’s biography of the Kurd shows that he was perfectly aware of the limitations of Saladin’s putative magnanimity. Robert Irwin misconstrues Lane-Poole entirely when he writes what he apparently takes to be a witty put-down of the historian: “In Lane-Poole’s view, Saladin’s ‘chivalry to the crusaders was the good breeding of a gentleman’. The Saladin created by Lane-Poole’s pen was very gentle gentleman, a rather quiet scholarly figure (not perhaps so very different from Lane-Poole himself)”. Ho! Ho! Ho! Except the laughs are on Irwin who fails to read Lane-Poole attentively. First, Lane-Poole criticises Lessing for turning Saladin into a European, “The main defect, however, of Lessing’s delineation (considered historically) is that it is too European. His Saladin is no real Saracen, as Scott’s.” Thus, Lane-Poole would not have dreamed of depicting Saladin as an Englishman like himself. Lane-Poole continues, “The set purpose of ‘Nathan the Wise,’ as a motive-drama, to preach toleration, and to silence the bigoted criticism of worthy pastor Goetze, compels Lessing to hold up Saladin as a type not only of a good Moslem, but a tolerant. The former he was, beyond question; but tolerance was not his virtue [Ibn Warraq’s emphasis]; his chivalry and clemency were in act, not in thought. He could be kind to Christians, but he never doubted that they must eventually go down into the Pit. He had a holy horror of philosophy, free-thought, ‘broad views’, and all manner of heterodoxy. The only cruel act recorded against him, outside the retaliations of war, was the deliberate execution of a ‘philosopher’- a mystic Sufi. Like many fanatics [I.W.’s emphasis], he could better tolerate the flat opposition of other religions than heresy within the pale of his own creed. His chivalry to crusaders was the good breeding of a gentleman; it did not touch his intellectual appreciation of their errors. He had a gentle soul and a soft heart, but they did not dispel his conviction that Christians were ‘fuel for Hell’. He is a type of a true Moslem of the purest breed; Lessing gives him a theological latitude which he would have indignantly disowned”.

Earlier in his summing up of Saladin’s life and character, Lane-Poole wrote, “his religion was all the world to him. In this alone he was fanatical….In nothing did he show his religious zeal more fervently than in the chief and supreme duty of Moslems, the Jihad or Holy War. Naturally averse to bloodshed, even unwarlike, as he was, he was a changed man when it came to fighting the infidels. To wage God’s war was a genuine passion with him, his whole heart was wrapped up in it, and to this cause he devoted himself, body and soul”. The totalitarian nature of Jihad is nowhere better expressed than in this anecdote that Lane-Poole repeats from Saladin’s biographer Bahā’ ad-Dīn, “Saladin even dreamed of wider battles for the faith: when the Franks should e driven out of Palestine, he told his secretary [Bahā’ ad-Dīn], he would pursue them over the sea and conquer them, till there should not remain one unbeliever on the face of the earth.”

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

And that's entirely reasonable. Remember: in Muslim countries, you should follow and respect the customs and practices of Muslims. And in non-Muslim countries, you should follow and respect the customs and practices of Muslims. Sharia Alert from modern, moderate Abu Dhabi: "Abu Dhabi in dress modestly plea to non-Muslims," by Anwar Ahmad for The National, July 21 (thanks to Kenneth):

ABU DHABI // Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority has urged non-Muslim visitors to dress conservatively during the day, avoiding short skirts, tight trousers and low-cut tops in public.

Swimwear is acceptable at private hotel beaches, but tourists should "use common sense in selecting swimwear" for public beaches, a spokesman said.

The authority has also requested that passengers take care when dealing with taxi drivers as many will be fasting while working.

Good etiquette requires people not to drink, eat or smoke in public.

"You can eat and drink in the privacy of your own room but please do not offer food or drink to a Muslim," the spokesman said.

Safiya Darweesh Al Qubaisi, cultural and handicraft development officer at the tourism authority, said: "One important benefit of fasting is that it helps you to understand the suffering and pain of the poor. It also allows human beings to understand how those who do not have enough money for a meal survive through the day."

A foretaste of what is coming, now that the Muslim Brotherhood is taking power in Egypt. "Shots fired from Egypt at Israeli troops, none hurt," from Reuters, July 22 (thanks to Ima):

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Gunshots fired across the border from Egypt on Sunday hit an Israeli army bus but caused no casualties, a military spokeswoman said.

The attack, in the central sector of the porous desert frontier, may heighten Israeli fears of an erosion of security in the Egyptian Sinai given the political upheaval in Cairo.

A Sinai pipeline built to supply Israel and Jordan with gas was blown up in a separate incident on Sunday, the 15th such sabotage since the start of a popular revolt that toppled the U.S.-aligned Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February last year....

In "Rep. Keith Ellison Rewrites History on his Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR Ties," at PJ Media, July 21, the peerless investigator Patrick Poole uncovers Rep. Keith Ellison's extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-linked CAIR, which Ellison is working hard to cover up:

The most recent salvo in the kerfuffle between Minnesota congressmen Michele Bachmann and Keith Ellison finds Ellison attacking Bachmann for her statements made on Glenn Beck’s radio program on Thursday, where she said:

GLENN:  Okay.  So when you wrote this letter, then Keith Ellison comes out.  And Keith Ellison is ‑‑ he has a record of being the Mafia hitman.

CONGRESSWOMAN BACHMANN:  Well, he has a long record of being associated with CAIR and with the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR is an unindicted co‑conspirator, as stated in the large terrorist financing case that we’ve had in the United States of America and so he came out and essentially wanted to shut down the inspectors general from even looking into any of the questions that we were asking. So he wanted to shut it down.  In response I wrote another letter back to Keith Ellison, a 16‑page letter which I would encourage all of your listeners to go and read this letter. It’s what I call a bulletproof letter. I have 59 footnotes with one example after another of the penetration of the Muslim Brotherhood into the federal government…

In response, Ellison told the Huffington Post:

“I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said with a laugh.

In fact, it is his denial that is laughable.

But this weekend Ellison doubled-down on his denial, telling Politico:

I support American institutions. I don’t know enough about [the Muslim Brotherhood]. What I know about them is that in Egypt, one of their candidates has ascended to the presidency. I’ve never met that person. But I do think the United States should have a foreign policy where we talk to foreign leaders of all kinds. But no, I don’t have any, I don’t have any Muslim Brotherhood connections that she’s talking about.

According to Ellison’s impeccable logic, since he hasn’t met Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader and new Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, therefore he has no knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But a mountain of evidence of his contacts with and support of Muslim Brotherhood front groups – identified as such by the U.S. Government – shows that the Muslim Brotherhood definitely knows who he is.

Rewind to 2008 when Keith Ellison went on a 16-day hajj trip to Saudi Arabia paid for by the Muslim American Society (MAS) to the tune of $13,500.

As Scott Johnson at Powerline noted at the time that Ellison had conflicting stories about who paid for the trip:

The Star Tribune first reported on Ellison’s hajj in two puff pieces by Mitch Anderson this past December. Anderson first reported the statement of Ellison spokesman Rick Jauert that Ellison had paid for the trip himself. When Anderson returned to the story, he got such deep stuff from Ellison as this: “This is just me trying to be the best person I can be.” In the second story Anderson also reported that the MAS Minnesota paid for Ellison’s trip to Mecca, though Anderson didn’t pause to note the discrepancy between his two stories on this point.

As Fox News reported on the MAS sponsorship of Ellison’s trip, Ellison returned the favor to his benefactors by speaking at the 2007 and 2008 MAS-Minnesota conventions.

But who is MAS?

Fortunately, federal prosecutors cleared up the matter back in December 2007 when they said in a court filing in the federal appeal of convicted terror operative Sabri Benkahla (page 58, footnote 13):

MAS was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

As support for that statement the federal prosecutors cited a September 2004 investigative report by the Chicago Tribune, which chronicles the efforts by the international Muslim Brotherhood to create Islamic states worldwide including the U.S.

The group identified by the Chicago Tribune as the main organization operating today on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood was MAS:

In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.

So in 2004 – four years before Ellison’s MAS-financed trip to Saudi Arabia – MAS had been identified in the establishment media as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.

And in case there was any confusion on Ellison’s part, federal prosecutors addressed the issue again in December 2007 – one year before Ellison’s MAS hajj trip – saying that MAS was “the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”

That alone should prompt an apology by Ellison to Bachmann.

As the late Billy Mays would say, but wait, there’s more.

Indeed, there is much more. Be sure to read it all.

I was on the Mark Levin Show last night discussing the uproar over Michele Bachmann's call for an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the U.S. Government.

Audio courtesy Ramparts 360 (and thanks for your kind words).

Somehow these Misunderstanders of Islam didn't get the memo that Ramadan is a time to "reconcile differences and seek peace." And oddly enough, they misunderstand Islam and Ramadan in exactly the same way as the Muslims in Bulgaria who somehow got the crazy idea that "Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators." What an odd coincidence!

"Muslims begin Ramadan fast; bombs hit Thai south," by Niniek Karmini for the Associated Press, July 21 (thanks to JCB):

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Muslims have begun fasting for the start of the Ramadan holy month in Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere around Asia, but the somber occasion was marred in Buddhist-dominated Thailand by two bomb blasts that killed one person and injured seven....

Muslims in Thailand also began Ramadan on Friday, while Malaysians began Saturday. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were to start Saturday or Sunday.

The Muslim holy month devoted to dawn-to-dusk fasting, prayers and good deeds culminates with the three-day holiday of Eid al-Fitr.

Muslims believe God revealed the first verses of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad during Ramadan, which starts with the sighting of the new moon. The Muslim lunar calendar moves back through the seasons, so Ramadan starts 11 days earlier each year under the Western calendar.

The holy month started ominously in southern Thailand, the region where most Thai Muslims live and where an insurgency has claimed thousands of lives. The car bombing started fires at shops and residences and sent black smoke wafting from a row of four-story buildings in a commercial area of Sungai Kolok in Narathiwat province.

Seven people were injured, including four who were briefly trapped on the roof of a burning building, said police Col. Maitree Chimcherd. He said Muslim insurgents hid the homemade bomb in a pickup truck parked in front of a computer store.

On Thursday night, a roadside bomb killed a villager and wounded his companion while they were hunting for squirrels in the woods in Yala province, said police Col. Wichai Jaengsakul....

Here's a different angle on Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood president: it's not so much what Muhammad Morsi has said, but what he hasn't said. Considering all the anti-infidel talk emanating from those around him -- whether calls to destroy Egypt's pagan pyramids, calls to wage an all-out jihad against Israel, or calls to reimpose jizya on Egypt's Christian Copts -- not only has Morsi not condemned such talk, he hasn't even tried to distance himself from it. Such silence speaks for itself.

"In Egypt, Morsi's silence speaks volumes," by Joel Brinkley for the Chicago Tribune, July 17:

Mohammed Morsi has been Egypt's president for less than a month, and already senior clerics in his country and around the Islamic world are loudly calling for the demolition of the pyramids, Egypt's most important tourist attraction and among the Seven Wonders of the World.

Saudi Sheik Ali bin Said al-Rabi'i called them heinous "symbols of paganism." In recent days, similar calls have been echoing through Egypt and the region, including one from a Bahraini sheik who urged Morsi to "destroy the pyramids and accomplish what the Amr bin al-As could not." He was referring to the Prophet Muhammad's companion who conquered Egypt in the seventh century but didn't have the technological wherewithal to accomplish the task.

None of this should be too surprising. Islamic extremists are now destroying 15th century tombs in Timbuktu, world heritage sites, because they are considered "idolatrous." And remember in 2001, when the Taliban fired heavy artillery at two huge Buddha statutes carved into a rock face about 1,700 years ago. Taliban leader Mullah Omar had issued an edict against un-Islamic graven images. Numerous other examples exist, contemporary and ancient.

What's surprising is that Morsi has had nothing to say about this, not a word. Neither has he said anything about numerous "freelance" efforts to enforce other elements of Shariah law across Egypt, even though his new government hasn't said that's his plan.

Well, his extremist allies are already trying to enforce an ancient Koranic commandment that directs Islamists to collect a tax called the jizya from Coptic Christians and other "non-believers." Ahmed Imran, who was a Salafist-party candidate for office, recently declared that "Copts are obligated to pay the jizya." And as Raymond Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American author and columnist of Coptic ancestry, recently wrote: "Increasing numbers of attacks on Christians in Egypt revolve around extorting jizya."

The Koran (9/29) declares: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah" until "they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled." Once again, Morsi has said nothing about this.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Morsi on Saturday but didn't talk about these problems. The State Department sees the unresolved power struggle between Morsi and the Egyptian military as the most important issue right now.

Not surprisingly, Clinton did manage to mention the importance of Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. But I wonder if she knew that a few days earlier Mohammed Badi, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi's own political party, loudly proclaimed during his weekly sermon that it's the duty of "every Muslim to strive to save Jerusalem from the hands of the rapists and to cleanse Palestine from the clutches of the occupation."

Once again, Morsi had nothing to say.

In Afghanistan this month, a woman accused of adultery crouched in the dirt as a friend handed her husband an AK-47 assault rifle. He shot her multiple times, continuing to fire even after she collapsed, dead, as about 150 men stood on a nearby hillside, applauding. He then posted a video of the repulsive event for the world to see. The Afghan government did nothing.

What does this have to do with Egypt? In Afghanistan, Pakistan and some other states, extremists like the man who shot his wife are free to carry out "justice" as they see fit because the government looks aside. That seems to be the way Egypt is heading, too.

Already, the Washington Post reported, Islamic extremists who have fought in Afghanistan and Pakistan are setting up militant training camps in the Sinai, obviously up to no good, while the government does nothing.

As Ibrahim told me, "People are beginning to connect the dots. Morsi just became president, and we're already seeing changes."

Speaking at Muslim Brotherhood headquarters, Morsi said: "The second Muslim conqueror of Egypt will be Mohammed Morsi," the online newspaper El Bashayer reported. "And history will record it." Morsi has not refuted that report.

So, will extremists actually blow up the pyramids? After the Bahraini sheik's remarks went viral, he improbably denied making them. But Egyptian media reports say Salafist party officials want Egypt's new constitution to demand "the demolition of the Pyramids of Giza as they represent a symbol of unbelief." Already, Abdel Moneim al-Shahat, the Salafist-party spokesman, is advocating at least covering them with wax so all anyone will see "is a big blob," as Ibrahim put it.

But under the hot desert sun, the wax would melt in no time, possibly bringing calls for more extreme measures. If and when that happens, will Morsi, once again, simply look away?

As Pamela Geller explains in detail here, nothing else but Islam motivated Nidal Hasan to commit mass murder. The official unwillingness to face this honestly is nothing short of criminal, for it will only make future such attacks more likely, since nothing will be done to prevent them. "Report downplays Islamic role in Fort Hood jihadi attack," by Neil Munro in The Daily Caller, July 20 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

No government officials should be penalized for their inaction while they watched an online al-Qaida organizer persuade U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to murder twelve of his fellow soldiers at Foot Hood in 2009, says the final report of an independent panel.

“Although we are critical of certain actions and omissions, we do not regard any of those actions to be misconduct that would warrant administrative or disciplinary action,” said the third-last paragraph on the 150-page report, titled “Final Report of the William H. Webster Commission.”

“Some missteps occurred because there was no stated policy or binding directive in place that would have required different actions … [but] absent formal policy guidance on the assignment and resolution of Routine leads, the delay cannot be said to involve misconduct,” said the paragraph.

The report was overseen by William Webster, who headed the FBI from 1978 to 1987.

The report was distributed July 20 with the announcement that Republican Rep. Frank Wolfe will hold a August 1 committee hearing on the report. The witness will include an FBI official, Mark Giuliano, who is the executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch.

The report says Hasan yelled the Islamic war-cry — “Allahu akbar!” which means “Allah is supreme” — as he shot his fellow Americans in Fort Hood.

On his business card, Hasan described himself as a “soldier of Allah,” who is the Muslim god.

In place of Islamic texts, the report blames Hasan’s self-described religious motivation on a non-religious psychological process of “violent radicalization.”

On page seven, the report declares that “most terrorists are psychologically normal as individuals, and do not fit a medical diagnostic category.” However, the report argues that “radicalization occurs when followers submit to the collective identity and leaders identify a shared enemy as a target for violent behavior.”

The report did not treat Islamic radicalization as a subset of radicalization amid the many jihadi attacks on U.S. civilians and soldiers, but instead lumped it under a very broad category of “radicalization.”

“Radicalization — whether based on religious, political, social, or other causes — challenges the capability and capacity of the FBI and other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community to identify, collect, analyze, and act on accurate intelligence in time to detect and deter those who would commit violence,” says the report.

To combat “radicalization,” the report urges the FBI to increase information sharing, buy better computers and better protect suspects’ privacy.

After dismissing Islamic religious motivations, the report quotes Hasan’s letters about Islamic edicts to the American-born al-Qaida organizer, Anwar al-Awlaki.

In January, 2009, Hasan cited one verse in a letter to al-Awlaki, as saying, “The blame is only against those who oppress men with wrongdoing and insolently transgress beyond bounds through the land defying right and justice: for such there will be a Penalty grievous.”...

In contrast, the Webster report recommends FBI officials further tighten FBI agents’ consideration of Islamic texts when conducting investigations.

“We recommend [officials] conduct compliance reviews and audits on a regular basis as experience indicates is necessary to ensure FBI compliance with all policies applicable to … race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion as a basis for investigative activity.”

Idiots. Highly useful ones.

SERDANG, July 19 ― The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community along with liberalism and pluralism were today branded as enemies of Islam by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak in front of a crowd of over 11,000 imams and mosque committee members from across the nation.

“LGBTs, pluralism, liberalism ― all these ‘isms’ are against Islam and it is compulsory for us to fight these,” he said.

Najib also said the government supports human rights, but within the boundaries of Islam.

“We do support human rights, but we must do so within the boundaries set by Islam,” he said.

Everyone knows how many human rights there are within Islam. Nothing to fear here, yes? Yes, there's nothing to fear...unless you're a woman, Jew, homosexual, former Muslim, or non Muslim, among other things.

The prime minister also told Muslims to avoid discord which could threaten those who safeguard Islamic principles.

“If the nation falls into a state of chaos, who will safeguard these people?” he asked.

A 'state of chaos' in Najib's mind probably means an insufficient amount of devotion to Islamic supremacism on the government agenda. It is an Orwellian turn of phrase that we should expect from this or any other Prime Minister of a Muslim-controlled government.

The event, organised by the Prime Minister’s Office, started off with the Minister in Prime Minister’s Office Maj-Gen (R) Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom saying that imams must defend the government against these threats.

“There are so many attacks on our religion. LGBTs, pluralism, liberalism, Seksualiti Merdeka. We must stand strong and defend the government,” he said.

Attendees were also given a book which was written by Najib himself, entitled “Agenda Islam Dalam Transformasi Negara”.

Yesterday, Opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim also said that he did not support the rights of LGBTs and advocates the sanctity of marriage being that between a man and a woman.

Liberalism is the belief in total liberty and equality of an individual, while many conservative Muslims are opposed to religious pluralism because of fears it could lead to other religions being put on the same standing as Islam.

Don't these Misunderstanders of Islam know that Ramadan is a time to "reconcile differences and seek peace"? "Qaedat al-Jihad claims responsibility for Burgas attack," by Roi Kais for Ynet News, July 21:

A group going by the name "Qaedat al-Jihad" has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack against Israeli tourists in Burgas which claimed the lives of six people, including five Israelis, and wounded dozens.

In a statement released in Western media outlets, the group threatened to carry out more attacks. "The month of Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and God's messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators."

The organization is apparently affiliated with the Global Jihad movement.

Its statement said, "One of our groups aided by Allah managed to bomb a bus full of Jewish tourists, plunderers of holy lands, after careful tracking.

"The holy war is not confined to a particular arena and we shall fight the Jews and the Americans until they leave the land of Islam."

Israel and the US pointed a finger at Iran and Hezbollah following the attack.

It is by now abundantly clear that the "Arab Spring" uprisings were not flowerings of Western-style democracy and pluralism, but pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist takeovers. However, that has not dimmed Obama's enthusiasm for them.

"Obama marks Ramadan," by Byron Tau in Politico, July 20 (thanks to Wimpy):

In a statement, President Obama commemorated the Muslim holiday of Ramadan — calling it a time to "cherish family, friends, and neighbors, and to help those in need."

"On behalf of the American people, Michelle and I extend our warmest wishes to Muslim Americans and Muslims around the world at the start of Ramadan," Obama said.

Obama also took the opportunity to tie in the struggles of people across the Muslim world engaged in ongoing fighting related to the Arab spring uprisings that began in 2011.

"This year, Ramadan holds special meaning for those citizens in the Middle East and North Africa who are courageously achieving democracy and self-determination and for those who are still struggling to achieve their universal rights. The United States continues to stand with those who seek the chance to decide their own destiny, to live free from fear and violence, and to practice their faith freely. Here in the United States, Ramadan reminds us that Islam is part of the fabric of our Nation, and that — from public service to business, from healthcare and science to the arts — Muslim Americans help strengthen our country and enrich our lives," Obama said.

How? Certainly they've been responsible for great innovations in airport security, but what else?

After murdering Israeli civilians in Bulgaria, Iran wants still more blood. "‘We will strike Tel Aviv if Israel attacks,’ senior Iranian cleric vows," by Ilan Ben Zion in the Times of Israel, July 21 (thanks to David):

Tehran will attack Tel Aviv if Israel makes the slightest aggression against the Islamic Republic, senior Iranian cleric Hojjatoleslam Seyed Reza Taqavi said at Friday prayers, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

“If Israel makes a mistake, we will attack the heart of Tel Aviv from Tehran,” Taqavi, Head of the Policy-Making Council of Iran, said.

“They do not dare to damage our nuclear centers and know very well that any move against the Islamic Republic will make them regret it,” he emphasized.

The direct threat towards Israel came after a tense week in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran on Thursday of perpetrating a bombing in Bulgaria the day before that killed five Israelis and wounded dozens more. Iran vehemently denied the charge, although Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared to intimate that it had been revenge for ostensible Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear scientists....

A remarkably and unusually fair and even-handed piece in the New York Times about our free speech victory. "M.T.A. Violated Rights of Group, Judge Says," by Benjamin Weiser for the New York Times, July 20 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Friday that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority violated the First Amendment rights of a pro-Israel group when it rejected an advertisement the group wanted to place on city buses on grounds that they contained demeaning language.

The group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, had proposed an ad that said, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.”

Then, between two Stars of David, the ad said: “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

The transportation authority said the ad violated its prohibition on ads that demeaned individuals or groups on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and five other specific categories. The group was given the opportunity to revise the ad, but it refused, and claimed in a lawsuit that the agency’s “no demeaning” language restriction was unconstitutional.

The judge, Paul A. Engelmayer of Federal District Court, ruled that the rejected ad was “not only protected speech — it is core political speech,” expressing a “pro-Israel perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict” and implicitly calling “for a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy with regard to that conflict.”

As such, the judge held, the ad “is afforded the highest level of protection under the First Amendment.”

Pamela Geller, executive director of the group that sought to place the ad, called the decision “a victory for freedom-loving people.”

Ms. Geller is an outspoken blogger and critic of Islam whose group ran ads on city buses in 2010 that opposed construction of an Islamic center near ground zero.

Judge Engelmayer said he would delay the effect of his order for 30 days, to allow the transportation authority to consider its appellate options and alternatives to the current rule.

Aaron Donovan, a transportation spokesman, said on Friday that the authority was reviewing the decision, and that it was also “evaluating its existing advertising standards in light of the court’s ruling.”...

"Mr. Wetsch describes two tenets that must also be adhered to during Ramadan: The faith calls for not engaging in conflict and argument; and to work to reconcile differences and seek peace."

You gotta be kidding. But the judge fell for it.

"'Man in Black' bank robbery defendant gets monthlong Ramadan delay in hearing," by Elizabeth Mohr for the Pioneer Press, July 20 (thanks to Kenneth):

Citing religious views, an accused bank robber known as "The Man in Black" asked a federal judge this week to postpone hearings until the end of Ramadan, a monthlong Muslim observance.

Mark Edward Wetsch was charged with holding up 13 Minnesota banks between March 2011 and January 2012. The robber earned his moniker by wearing all black during the heists, in which he made off with about $69,000.

Wetsch was scheduled to have a motion hearing Friday, July 20, in U.S. District Court in St. Paul but asked the judge to continue the hearing so he could observe the holy month of Ramadan, a period of daylight fasting, prayer and reflection. Ramadan began Friday and lasts 30 days.

After Magistrate Judge Jeanne Graham denied his initial request for a continuance, Wetsch argued that his meal and prayer requirements can be accommodated, but there are other elements of Ramadan to be observed as well.

"Mr. Wetsch describes two tenets that must also be adhered to during Ramadan: The faith calls for not engaging in conflict and argument; and to work to reconcile differences and seek peace," said Wetsch's motion, filed Thursday. "Clearly, a contested hearing in which the government is making allegations against Mr. Wetsch and he is fighting against causes him to engage in conflict and argument."

Graham approved his renewed request. His next hearing has not yet been scheduled.

Gratitude. "'Asylum-seeker' guilty of terror payments," from UPI, July 21 (thanks to Block Ness):

GLASGOW, Scotland, July 21 (UPI) -- A man who lived for more than a year in Scotland as an asylum-seeker was convicted Friday of using illegally obtained benefits to finance terrorism.

A jury in Glasgow found Nasserdine Menni guilty of sending money to Taimour Abdulwahab, who died in a bungled suicide bombing in Stockholm Dec. 11, 2010, The Herald of Glasgow reported. The verdict after an 11-week trial was "not proven" -- a verdict unique to Scotland that is legally the same as not guilty -- on a charge that Menni conspired to kill Swedish citizens.

Menni, who was also convicted of benefit fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced in August.

"Thank you very much, my Lord, for the justice in Scotland," he said as he was led out of the courtroom, addressing the judge.

Menni, an Algerian, and Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen born in Iraq, got to know each other while working in an auto parts plant in Bedfordshire. Menni was living under an assumed name with false papers that identified him as French, investigators say....

Watch for the outcry, the riots, the deaths of innocents, over the desecration of these Qur'ans...what's that? This "desecration" was done by Muslims, and so no protests will ensue? You mean Qur'an Rage is manipulative and selective? Say it ain't so!

"10 Kilos of Heroin Hidden Inside 30 Korans," by Cheradenine Zakalwe for Islam Versus Europe, July 20 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Some 200,000 capsules of drugs hidden inside toasties and more than ten kilos of heroin hidden inside 30 Korans were seized on Sunday by Moroccan authorities on board a vehicle preparing to leave the port of Nador for Spain.

The drugs were discovered inside the vehicle of a Moroccan mother travelling with her four children. The family was supposed to deliver the drugs to Spain on behalf of a member of their family who also lives in the Iberian peninsula.

The latter is said to have convinced them to import the drugs and to sell them in Spain, in order to resolve their financial problems. During questioning, the family said it had been strongly affected by the crisis raging in Spain since 2008, reports the info site Nador City.

The fear and hesitation of the 25-year-old son who was driving the car triggered the suspicions of the customs agents, who ordered a search of the vehicle.

Source: Bladi.net

Or break the Ramadan fast. Sharia Alert for asthma sufferers: "Ask the scholar: Using asthma sprays during fasting in Ramadan," by Mohammed Al Sadafy from Emirates 24/7, July 21 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

An asthma patient has asked whether the Shariah permits use of medical sprays during fasting in Ramadan.

According to the fatwa section of the Department of Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities, if the asthma patient uses a medical spray during fasting, it may go from the nasal cavity to the throat which will make fasting invalid and make re-fasting for this day necessary.

If this happens, he has to continue to refrain from eating, drinking and smoking for the rest of the day to show respect for the holy month and people who are fasting.

If an asthma patient is cured of the ailment, he should re-fast the missed days. If he has not been completely cured, he should re-fast on days when he is not suffering from asthma.

If he is a life-long asthma patient, it is no sin if he could not re-fast the missing days because his mistake was not deliberate. But it will be a sin if he did not re-fast despite being able to later.

Increasing Attacks on Christianity in Europe
by Enza Ferreri

I'm afraid that Raymond Ibrahim might in the not-so-distant future have more work to do when compiling his monthly statistics of persecution of Christians.

European countries may have to be added to his list.

Persecution of Christians in Europe takes mainly two forms. The first is the age-old type that we already know from what happens in Asia and Africa as Muslim (mostly illegal) immigrants spread across the globe.

The second is the brand-new, "liberal" kind, deriving from European elites' efforts to
marginalize Christianity in its own historical home.

I'll focus in this post on a few examples of the increasing number of physical attacks on churches, Christian festivals, other symbols of Christianity and even Christian people throughout Europe. It must be noted that destroying crosses is a well-documented Islamic tradition

In a cemetery in Pausa, Saxony, Germany, a 2-meter-tall statue of Jesus Christ was beheaded and the head smashed to pieces. Pastor Frank Pierel reported that such attacks
take place rather frequently in his area.

In Strunjan, Slovenia, the "artist" Dean Verzel and others set fire to a votive cross erected by local seamen in the year 1600, replicating the gesture he had performed 10 years before in 2002 and for which he had been acquitted. Repeating an often-heard justification for all sorts of anti-Christian garbage, "it's nothing against Christianity", he said, "it's a 'work of art'".

In the cemetery of Canohès, France, four Christian graves were vandalized and covered with anti-Christian slogans.

In Bologna, Italy, a Moroccan student approached the faithful attending the procession of Corpus Domini and shouted "You're all a flock of sheep, you'll go to hell!" He was charged with offending people and a religious faith.

In Clouzeaux, France, the Church of the Bon Pasteur was set fire to in broad daylight. The fire was lit in three different places and caused immense damage. The altar was totally destroyed, electrical wires pulled out of the wall, crucifixes, pews, chairs, panels, chandeliers toppled and broken, holy water fonts, extremely precious vestments, and many other religious objects completely ruined. Apparently it was three local children, aged 14, 13 and 12, who caused damage of 50,000-70,000 euros.

Still in France, three men entered the Church of Cruseilles on Holy Saturday and set fire to leaflets, prayer and hymn books. The cloth covering an altar was also burned and the main altar damaged.

More cemetery vandalism in France, in Sussargues, where graves were covered with anti-Christian writings and crucifixes were turned upside down, and church vandalism in Paris.

In Duisburg, Germany, churches were attacked over the New Year with stones, firecrackers, rockets, causing tens of thousands of euros' worth of damage. The congregants said that this was not the first time.

The main server of the Catholic Church in France was hijacked by a Muslim Algerian hacker who took control of a total of 475 French websites, many Catholic, the content of which he replaced with the message "No God But Allah and Mohammed is Messenger Of Allah".

This tops it all. In Nimes, France, people who had attended a Catholic festival were leaving in cars and buses when young Arab-Muslims from the neighboring estate started to throw stones at their vehicles coming from the sanctuary. The event organisers were forced to arrange a diversion to a different route to protect the occupants of the vehicles from the savage attacks, which continued.

In Nice, France, the traditional, annual Catholic procession for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrated throughout the Catholic world on August 15 but by the parish of Our Lady of the Assumption in Nice on August 14 evening, is now under police protection. During the last procession the entire route, 400 meters long, was lined by police. Who the faithful need protection from can be guessed when we know that Nice has a large Muslim population, who has been holding its prayers every Friday for years, illegally occupying public streets with impunity.

To remain in Nice, one of its churches received the dubious honor of being adorned with a huge Algerian flag on the front, covering the words "Saint Peter".

Watch this video translated by Islam versus Europe (IVE) about the many attacks committed against churches and cemeteries all over France in the first half of 2011, but prepare to be upset.

In Milbertshofen, Munich, Germany, a Catholic church has been the object of a continuous aggressive campaign for more than a year, with services disrupted, walls smeared, holy water receptacles filled with urine. Things have been set on fire, and tiles torn down from the roof; consequently it rained inside, with risk of damage to the almost 500-year-old tableau. The culprits are the neighborhood's youths and even children, almost entirely from a migrant background. A local social worker says that the youths are becoming more radical and the attacks are increasingly religiously motivated. (This video was also translated by IVE.)

Another video shows St Calogero Church in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy, after Ales Halid, a drunken immigrant from Ghana already known to the police for other crimes, entered the church shouting in Arabic and smashed a small black statue of the saint against a wall. The man was so agitated that it took four police officers to restrain him before arrest. Two officers got injured and Halid also damaged the police car.

"Now we have to understand what drove this man to act in such an ugly manner" the video says, but it inadvertently hints at an answer when it adds that the attack took place "during the festivities dedicated to the Monaco Turco [Turkish Monk, a reference to St Calogero] worshipped by the people of Agrigento, saint who has been acclaimed by Bishop Montenegro as a model of integration among peoples." Maybe Halid did not want "integration", and particularly objected to a Turkish Christian monk called "the black saint".

Notice that none of the Italian media reporting this called the man "Muslim". This is the usual media line, which the president of France's National Council of Muslim Faith for some reason thought in need of being reinforced when last week he asked journalists that, in case of aggressions, the religion of neither victim nor aggressor should be mentioned.

In the cemetery of Belleville-sur-Meuse, France, the bronze statue of Christ carrying the cross was broken and fifteen graves were desecrated.

In Burgos, Spain, the two statues of St Peter and St Lawrence of the 13th-century Gothic church of San Esteban were beheaded. Police were puzzled by this attack against a place of worship, which is also an architecture jewel and an important cultural and historical heritage. The main hypothesis was that it was an act of vandalism because, if it had been a robbery, the thieves would not have damaged the statues. The church's parish priest said this was "the first time" an attack on San Esteban had ever occurred in its 8 centuries of existence.

A few years ago, 57-year-old Canon Michael Ainsworth was beaten up in his own east London churchyard by three Muslim youths who caused him serious injuries. The attacks on vicars or churches were so frequent in that parish with a large Bangladeshi Muslim population that they prompted Melanie Phillips to write: "Indeed, there appear to have been many attacks by Muslims who are clearly intent on turning east London into a no-go area for Christians".

The Telegraph wrote: "A survey of London clergy by National Churchwatch, which provides personal safety advice, found that nearly half said they had been attacked in the previous 12 months. The organisation suggested that vicars should consider taking off their dog collars when they are on their own."

The two facts that France has the lion's share of these less than edifying episodes and that, with 7.5 per cent of its population being Muslim, has the highest percentage of Muslims among Western European countries seem to go hand in hand rather well.

I could go on but you've got the idea of the current trend. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based author and journalist. She has been a London correspondent for several Italian magazines and newspapers, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La Repubblica.

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 26
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23 / Part 24 / Part 25

“Setting aside these natural licences of the romancer, the portrait of Saladin is drawn with remarkable insight and accuracy. His gentleness, courtesy, and nobility of character, his justice, truthfulness, and generosity, which "The Talisman" has made familiar to so many readers who know nothing else in Mohammedan history, are set forth in every contemporary record. His rare bursts of passion, which Scott has finely rendered, were also historically part of his disposition. Unfortunately he seems to have never heard of Saladin's knighthood, and thereby we have probably lost a magnificent chapter. The general manner, dress, and so on are sufficiently Eastern, but show no minute study of the subject. The hatred of the Templars is another true touch. The two Military Orders were the only Christians to whom, as a class, Saladin showed no mercy: and he had his reasons. On the other hand, Scott is altogether wrong when he says that the Sultan "has been ever found" in "the front of battle," "nor is it his wont to turn his horse's head from any brave encounter." Saladin revelled in the sight of battle; "there was nothing he loved so much as a good knight," says Ernoul—witness his hearty admiration of the Green Knight of Spain—but he did not fight in person. He would fearlessly expose himself between the lines of battle, attended only by a groom with a spare horse, whilst the bolts and arrows whistled about his head; he would even make his chaplains read prayers under fire; and he would be seen in all parts of the field. But his duty as general, he conceived, was to lead, encourage, restrain, and order the disposition of the troops, not to engage in personal encounters; and so far as fighting went, a marshal's bâton, or Gordon's cane, would be his proper weapon. Conversing with the Bishop of Salisbury, after peace was made, he censured the rashness of the " Inkitar" Richard in mixing personally in the fray. That Scott played tricks with history is really nothing to the point; but that he was able, through the confused and imperfect records he used, to see and depict the true character of Saladin with remarkable accuracy, is but another proof of his genius.”

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

In a sane world, Iran would be an international pariah, with organizations and schools organizing boycott and divestment campaigns against Iran. Instead, Israel is targeted not only by the Jew-hating jihadis in Iran and around the world, but by their Useful Idiots in Western government, business and academia. "U.S. links Iran to nine 2012 plots against Israeli targets around the world: report," by Mark Hosenball for Reuters, July 20 (thanks to Kenneth):

New York police believe Iranian Revolutionary Guards or their proxies have been involved so far this year in nine plots against Israeli or Jewish targets around the world, according to restricted police documents obtained by Reuters.

Reports prepared this week by intelligence analysts for the New York Police Department (NYPD) say three plots were foiled in January, three in February and another three since late June. Iran has repeatedly denied supporting militant attacks abroad.

The documents, labeled “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” said that this week’s suicide bomb attack in Bulgaria was the second plot to be unmasked there this year.

The reports detail two plots in Bangkok and one each in New Delhi, Tbilisi, Baku, Mombasa and Cyprus. Each plot was attributed to Iran or its Lebanese Hezbollah militant allies, said the reports, which were produced following the bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria of a bus carrying Israeli tourists.

Iran on Thursday dismissed “unfounded statements” by Israel linking Tehran to the Burgas blast, saying they were politically motivated accusations which underscored the weakness of the accusers.

Wednesday’s bombing in the Black Sea city is listed in a document headed “Suspected Iranian and/or Hezbollah-linked Plots Against Israeli or Jewish Targets: 2012 Chronology”, the latest of the nine 2012 plots linked to the Islamic Republic or its proxies.

U.S. officials say they increasingly concur with Israeli assessments that Iran and its proxies organized the killing of seven Israeli tourists in Burgas by a suicide bomber after they boarded an airport bus.....

Ferdaus with an instrument of his piety

Once again we see the high cost involved when Muslims get the crazy idea that their peaceful religion commands them to wage war against Infidels. Yet no Muslim organization in the U.S. has any kind of program to keep Muslims from misunderstanding Islam in this way. Now, why is that? "Mass. man admits guilt in plot to blow up Pentagon," from The Associated Press, July 20 (thanks to Kenneth):

A Muslim-American man admitted Friday that he plotted to use remote-controlled model planes packed with explosives to blow up the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

Rezwan Ferdaus, 26, pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to terrorists and attempting to damage and destroy federal buildings by means of an explosive.

Ferdaus, of Ashland, was arrested last year after federal employees posing as members of al-Qaida delivered materials he requested, including grenades, machine guns and plastic explosives.

Under a plea agreement, federal prosecutors agreed to drop four other charges. Prosecutors and Ferdaus' lawyers also agreed to jointly recommend a 17-year prison term. Sentencing is set for Nov. 1.

Ferdaus, who grew up in Massachusetts and has a physics degree from Boston's Northeastern University, smiled and greeted a large group of family and friends as he entered the courtroom.

After entering his guilty plea, Ferdaus tried to lean over to comfort his crying mother but was quickly pulled away by U.S. Marshals. She sobbed uncontrollably and had to be supported by family members as her son was led out of the courtroom.

Prosecutors said Ferdaus began planning jihad, or holy war, against the United States in 2010 after becoming convinced through jihadi websites and videos that America was evil. He later contacted a federal informant and began meeting to discuss the plot with undercover agents.

Authorities said the explosives were always under the control of federal agents and the public was never in danger. Counterterrorism experts and model-aircraft enthusiasts say it would be nearly impossible to inflict large-scale damage using model planes.

Of course. The public is never in danger from these plots. One wonders why the feds bother to arrest these guys.

But both inside and outside court Friday, prosecutors described an elaborate plan they said Ferdaus was committed to carrying out.

Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Siegmann said that if the case had gone to trial, prosecutors would have used recordings on which Ferdaus is heard detailing the plot.

Siegmann said there were two main parts of his plan: to blow up the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol using remote-controlled planes and to kill American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan using improvised explosive devices detonated by modified cellphones.

The planes, measuring 60 to 80 inches in length and capable of speeds greater than 100 mph, would be guided by GPS and packed with 5 pounds each of plastic explosives....

Imagine a non-Muslim head of state speaking this way about a Muslim country. Imagine the hue and cry that would ensue. But no one will get particularly concerned over this. "Gloating Ahmadinejad hints at Iranian responsibility for Burgas terror attack," from the Times of Israel, July 20 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gloated publicly on Thursday over the deaths of Israelis in a terror bombing in Bulgaria, and hinted that Iran was responsible for the attack.

Speaking hours after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly blamed the bombing Wednesday at Bulgaria’s Burgas airport on “Hezbollah, directed by Iran,” Ahmadinejad described the attack as “a response” to Israeli “blows against Iran.”

“The bitter enemies of the Iranian people and the Islamic Revolution have recruited most of their forces in order to harm us,” he said in a speech reported by Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “They have indeed succeeded in inflicting blows upon us more than once, but have been rewarded with a far stronger response.”

He added: “The enemy believes it can achieve its aims in a long, persistent struggle against the Iranian people, but in the end it will not. We are working to ensure that.”

Ahmadinejad’s speech was interpreted in Israel as asserting that the Burgas bombing was a revenge attack for the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has repeatedly blamed Israel....

Michael Coren, one of the very few journalists willing to discuss jihad honestly, interviews Pamela Geller on death threats they have both recently received and other jihad matters.

With Erick Stakelbeck filling in for Glenn Beck, and David Brog. "Radical Islam and America," from GBTV, July 19, 2012.

AFDI statement:

On Friday, July 20, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) won a major victory for the freedom of speech: Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority’s refusal to run our pro-Israel ad was “inconsistent with the First Amendment.”

The AFDI ad read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Defeat jihad. Support Israel.” The MTA refused to run it on the grounds that it was “demeaning” to term the jihadists who glory in the murder of Israeli civilians “savages,” and violated their policy against “images or information that demean an individual or group of individuals on account of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation.”

This was the only ad that had been rejected as “demeaning” by the MTA since its standards for accepting and rejecting ads were adopted.

Engelmayer, however, determined that the MTA’s standards were inconsistent both in their formulation and their application, because it allowed ads that demeaned others on political and other grounds, but rejected this one that supposedly demeaned Muslims or Islamic jihad terrorists. He wrote in his opinion that “there is no good reason for protecting some individuals and groups, but not others, from such abuse.”

Illustrating the MTA’s inconsistency, Engelmayer noted that “under MTA’s no-demeaning standard, an advertiser willing to pay for the privilege is today at liberty to place a demeaning ad on the side or back of a city bus that states any of the following: ‘Southerners are bigots’; ‘Upper West Siders are elitist snobs’; ‘Fat people are slobs’; ‘Blondes are bimbos’; ‘Lawyers are sleazebags’; or ‘The store clerks at Gristedes are rude and lazy.’”

Engelmayer’s ruling stated: “The AFDI Ad is not only protected speech—it is core political speech. The Ad expresses AFDI’s pro-Israel perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the Middle East, and implicitly calls for a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy with regard to that conflict. The AFDI Ad is, further, a form of response to political ads on the same subject that have appeared in the same space. As such, the AFDI Ad is afforded the highest level of protection under the First Amendment.”

“This is an enormous victory for freedom-loving people,” said Pamela Geller, Executive Director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative. “Judge Engelmayer’s decision is crucial not just for AFDI and the MTA, but for the freedom of speech in general. The AFDI case has set a key legal precedent for the freedom of speech and won a great victory for the First Amendment.”

Geller added: “The freedom of speech is increasingly threatened in the U.S. in recent years -- the Left and Islamic supremacists are doing all they can to rule honest discussion of Islamic jihad violence and Jew-hatred out of the realm of acceptable public discourse. Judge Engelmayer has struck a huge blow against this sinister authoritarian effort and for the freedom of speech that is the cornerstone of all our freedoms. Truth will not be suppressed or embargoed.”

AFDI Associate Director Robert Spencer said: “This is an extraordinarily encouraging ruling in these times when the freedom of speech is increasingly threatened. It strikes a severe blow against the effort by Islamic supremacist groups in the U.S., such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to establish Muslims and even Islamic jihad terrorists as a protected class, of whom criticism is forbidden by law.”

The American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed the lawsuit on behalf of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), Geller, and Spencer. AFLC lawyers David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise argued the case before Judge Engelmayer.

Calm down. He just wanted to light his cigarette, you greasy Islamophobe. Islamic supremacist intimidation at the Olympic opening ceremony: "Teenager shouts 'Allahu Akbar' as he tries to grab Olympic flame from torch bearer's hands as police bundle runner to safety," from the Daily Mail, July 20 (thanks to David):

A 17-year-old shouted 'Allahu Akbar' - Arabic for 'God is Great' - as he unsuccessfully tried to grab the Olympic torch during a stretch of the flame's route through Maidstone towards Redhill.

Broadcast live on the BBC, the youth lunged from the crowd to try to take the torch from the hands of its bearer Anna Skora, but was swiftly bundled away by officers.

In one video posted to YouTube he can be seen waiting behind a car and as Ms Skora gets closer he lunges towards the torch.

Ms Skora was about to hand over the torch to Graham White, a Surrey charity worker, when the teenager burst out of the crowd and tried to grab it.

He managed to get through the line of police officers escorting the torch as it headed through the town.

One of the officers at the back of the group swiftly grabbed hold of Ms Skora and the torch, guiding them to the opposite side of the road....

Remember: in Muslim countries, you must respect Islamic practices and sensitivities. And in non-Muslim countries, you must respect Islamic practices and sensitivities. Islamic Tolerance Alert from the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places: "Saudi warns non-Muslims: respect Ramadan or else," from The Associated Press, July 20 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Saudi authorities are warning non-Muslim expatriates against eating, drinking or smoking in public during Ramadan, the monthlong sunrise-to-sunset fast - or face expulsion.

The Interior Ministry of the oil-rich kingdom is calling on non-Muslims to "show consideration for feelings of Muslims" and "preserve the sacred Islamic rituals."

Otherwise, a statement says, Saudi authorities will cancel violators' work contracts and expel them....

Saudi Arabia, the ultraconservative Sunni kingdom, is the home of Islam's holiest sites. It enforces a strict interpretation of the religion.

Here yet again, for AP you're "ultraconservative" if you want to impose Sharia and "ultraconservative" if you oppose Sharia.

Sources are now saying that the jihadist's identity is not clear. His Hizballah membership appears clearer. "Hezbollah Is Blamed in Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria," by Nicholas Kulish and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times, July 19:

BURGAS, Bulgaria — A senior American official confirmed Israel’s assertions on Thursday that the suicide bomber who killed five Israelis in an attack here on Wednesday was a member of a Hezbollah cell operating in Bulgaria.

The official said the current American intelligence assessment is that the bomber was “acting under broad guidance” to hit Israeli targets when the opportunity presented itself. That guidance was given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by its primary sponsor, Iran, he said.

The attacks, the official said, were in retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists by Israeli agents, something that Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. “This was tit for tat,” said the American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the investigation was still underway....

The nuclear scientists were not innocent civilians. They were part of a war effort.

A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the Burgas attack was part of an intensive wave of terrorist attacks around the world carried out by two different organizations, the Iranian Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as well as Hezbollah.

“They work together when necessary, and separately when not necessary,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss national security issues.

While the the Burgas attack fit the modus operandi of Hezbollah, the Israeli official said, it was not clear whether the bomber intended to blow himself up or had suffered what the official called a “work accident,” adding: “We will never know.”

The bomber was carrying a fake Michigan driver’s license, but there are no indications that he had any connections to the United States, the American official said, adding that there were no details yet about the bomber — his name, age or nationality. He also declined to describe what specific intelligence — intercepted communications, analysis of the bomber’s body parts and other details — that led analysts to conclude that the suicide bomber belonged to Hezbollah.

“This looks like he was hanging out for a local target, and when this popped up he jumped on it,” the official said, referring to a tour bus carrying Israeli vacationers outside the airport in Burgas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a news conference Thursday in Jerusalem that the attack in Burgas was carried out by “Hezbollah, the long arm of Iran.”

For their part, Iranian officials condemned the attack and all acts of terrorism. “Terrorism endangers the lives of innocents,” said a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Ramin Mehmanparast, according to Iran’s state Arabic-language television channel, Al Alam.

The Bulgarian authorities released a security video Thursday showing the suspect wandering into the arrivals hall at the airport here, for all appearances just another tourist in his plaid shorts, Adidas T-shirt and baseball hat.

But it is his oddly bulky, oversized backpack that, in terrible hindsight, stands out the most. This bag, investigators believe, contained the bomb that the man is suspected of detonating next to a bus outside the airport, killing the five Israeli tourists, a Bulgarian bus driver and himself in a fireball that upended this city on the Black Sea.

The suicide attack, the country’s first, sent police and intelligence officers from Bulgaria, Israel and the United States scrambling to identify the bomber and to look for possible accomplices and convincing evidence that would connect him to Hezbollah or Iran.

Officials here have said they have the man’s fingerprints and his DNA, and are trying to identify a man who was roughly 36 years old, whom they suspect was in the country between four and seven days before the blast....

UPDATE: Officials deny that the jihad murderer was a Gitmo detainee.

Not only is Ghezali a demonstration of how Islamic antisemitism all too often is manifested in blood and murder; he is also a vivid illustration of how the Left's vociferous opposition to anything and everything that the U.S. does to defend itself kills people. I wonder if Leftist lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, who assured authorities that other Gitmo detainees deemed dangerous were actually harmless, will have any comment on this. (I knew Clive slightly when we were both students at the University of North Carolina; Clive, if you're reading this, send me an email at director[at]jihadwatch.org: I'd love to interview you about Mehdi Ghezali and Guantanamo.)

Note also the role that mainstream media whitewashing of Islamic jihad played in this: instead of alerting Swedish citizens to the danger Ghezali posed, The Local downplayed his jihad activity -- and no doubt smeared anyone who tried to sound the alarm as a greasy Islamophobe.

"Anti-Israel Bomber in Bulgaria Was Released From Gitmo Thanks To Left," from Breitbart, July 19 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Leftists who hate Israel can rejoice; their efforts at securing the release of a Gitmo detainee and their subsequent lionizing of him allowed him to murder five Israelis in the bombing Wednesday in Burgas, Bulgarian. The bomber has been identified as Mehdi Ghezali, who was detained at Gitmo Bay in Cuba from 2002 to 2004.

According to Wikileaks documents, Ghazali was “uncooperative, unforthcoming and deceptive during interrogations.” His father had met with Abdolrahman Barzanjee, an Al Qaeda associate and possible Ansar Al-Islam coordinator for Europe (Ansar Al-Islam is a group of Sunni Muslims trying to turn Iraq into an Islamist state), and Ghazali was friends with a Swedish operative who was a close associate of Abu Zubadayah, a high-ranking official with Al Qaeda.

Ghazali, who was a Swedish citizen, was visited by members of the Swedish government frequently while he was in custody at Gitmo, and the Swedish media played up his incarceration. While Ghezali was detained at Gitmo, he was featured in the documentary Gitmo – The New Rules of War, a film that savaged Guantanamo Bay detention camp by film directors Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh.

In February of 2004, Ghazali was reassessed and regarded as an enemy combatant who had gone to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, but although Gitmo concluded that he was a “medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US its interests and allies,” the decision to release him to Sweden followed: “Recommendation: JTF Gitmo recommends that this detainee be transferred to the control of another country for continued detention.”

He was released to Sweden on July 8, 2004. And guess how much he meant to the Swedish? He was flown home to Sweden by the Swedish Air Force on a Gulfstream IV jet, at the expense of the Swedish government.

Ghazali joined a July 4, 2006 demonstration held outside the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay facility.

But the liberal Swedes weren’t done with nurturing Ghazali yet. He was arrested in September of 2009 in Punjab, Pakistan, on suspicions of having ties to al-Qaeda; Pakistani police chief Mohammad Rizwan described Ghezali as "a very dangerous man". But the Swedish newspaper The Local described his actions as "a harmless meeting with a Muslim revivalist movement, Tablighi Jamaat."

One month later, Ghezali was released to Sweden. The Swedish Ambassador even accompanied him on the flight home.

With all the help Ghezali received from the liberal media and liberal governments, it’s obvious they have blood on their hands. But the blood is Israeli, so don’t expect the Left to shed a single tear.

UPDATE: U. S. officials deny that Ghezali was the Bulgaria jihad murderer.

Yet again Islamic antisemitism erupts into mass murder, while the world continues to turn a blind eye to it as a phenomenon. "Bulgarian press names bomber: Mehdi Ghezali," from the Times of Israel, July 19 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Bulgarian media on Thursday named the suicide bomber who blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists, killing five Israelis and a local bus driver, in the Black Sea resort of Burgas on Wednesday as 36-year-old Mehdi Ghezali.

Ghezali reportedly arrived in Bulgaria five weeks before the bombing and arrived at the airport via taxi, Channel 2 reported. He was also reportedly given the bomb by someone else, but no further details were provided.

There was no independent confirmation of the veracity of the information. The reports surfaced soon after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly accused Hezbollah, directed by Iran, of responsibility for the bombing. The Prime Minister’s Office made no comment on the reports.

The Bulgarian reports, rapidly picked up by Hebrew media, posited various versions of how the bomber had detonated the bomb, including the suggestion that the bomber had not intended to die in the blast, but may have wanted to place the bomb on the bus and flee.

Ghezali has a Wikipedia page, which describes him as a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it says. He was taken into custody on suspicion of being an al-Qaeda agent, having been arrested along with a number of other al-Qaeda operatives.

Following a lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, Guantanamo authorities recommended Ghezali be transferred to another country for continued detainment, and he was handed over to Swedish authorities in 2004. The Swedish government did not press charges.

A 2005 Swedish documentary about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp starred Ghezali, who detailed his experience in American custody.

He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.

Earlier on Thursday the Bulgarian police released a brief video clip that claimed to show the suicide bomber, responsible for Wednesday’s terror attack on a tour bus full of Israeli citizens, walking around shortly before the blast at Burgas International Airport.

The Bulgarian news agency Sofia reported that the bomber was carrying an American passport and Michigan driver’s license, both believed to be forgeries.

Sofia also reported that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry managed to recover the fingerprints of the bomber, which they submitted to the FBI in the United States and the international police organization Interpol. The FBI and CIA joined Israeli and Bulgarian officials in investigating the attack.

Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told Sofia that DNA tests were being run to determine the identity of the Caucasian man, who the minister described as casually dressed with nothing suspicious about his appearance to set him apart from the crowd of people at the airport....

Not just in Bulgaria: jihadis are targeting Jews, the worst enemies of the Muslims according to the Qur'an (5:82), all over the world. But remember: the real problem is "Islamophobia."

"Muslim couple guilty of anti-Jewish bomb plot," from the Yorkshire Post, July 19 (thanks to David):

A MUSLIM hairdresser and her Bradford-born husband have been convicted of planning a terror attack in the Jewish neighbourhood of Manchester.

Shasta Khan, 38, and her husband, Mohammed Sajid Khan, 33, bought substances and equipment from supermarkets to assemble an improvised explosive device.

Police found a cache of terror-related material after being called to a domestic dispute at the couple’s home in Oldham, last July.

Beheading videos, propaganda glorifying Osama bin Laden and bomb-making guides were seized along with peroxide and bleach, used by Shasta Khan in her hairdressing work, which together with electrical equipment were being readied to make a bomb.

A satnav from her Peugeot 305 vehicle showed they had been on multiple trips to Jewish populated areas around Manchester, looking for targets to attack.

A jury at Manchester Crown Court found Shasta Khan guilty of engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism and two counts of possessing information useful for committing or preparing for an act of terrorism. She was cleared of a third count of the latter charge.

Her husband pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism Both will be sentenced at 2pm tomorrow.

British-born Muslim Shasta Khan was convicted by a majority ruling of 11-1 on the main charge of preparing for acts of terrorism.

She cried in the dock as the verdicts were delivered and then wailed as she was led to the cells.

Opening the case four weeks ago, prosecutor Bobbie Cheema said behind their “apparent normality of daily life”, Sajid Khan, an unemployed car valeter, and his wife planned to carry out “jihad at home”.

They both became radicalised by material found on the internet such as an al Qaida magazine called Inspire, the aim of which is to encourage Muslims in the West and this country to carry out holy war or jihad by mounting attacks in their own countries independent of any outside direction or association with any other person.

In response, the pair prepared to carry out a terrorist attack on British soil, with the most likely target being an orthodox Jewish area of Prestwich....

Supporting the idea that this was a jihad attack is the fact that it was a suicide bombing. Pace CAIR-linked Robert Pape, only jihadists have thus far been known to commit mass murder in this way on an international scale. "Bulgaria says suicide attacker in baseball cap, sneakers, shorts attacked Israeli tourist bus," by Veselin Toshkov for The Associated Press, July 19:

SOFIA, Bulgaria - A lanky, long-haired man wearing a baseball cap and plaid shorts with a fake Michigan driver's license carried out a deadly suicide attack on a bus full of Israeli vacationers, Bulgarian officials said Thursday.

Israel stuck by its claim that the attack was carried out by Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla group, and threatened retaliation. Seven people — five Israelis, the Bulgarian driver and the bomber — died in the blast Wednesday.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack. But Israel has attributed a series of attacks on its citizens around the world in recent months to Iran, threatening to escalate a shadow war between the two arch-enemies.

The attack occurred shortly after the Israelis boarded a bus outside the airport in the Black Sea resort town of Burgas, a popular destination for Israeli tourists — particularly for high school graduates before they are drafted into military service — about 400 kilometres (250 miles) east of the capital, Sofia.

Bulgarian television aired security camera footage Thursday showing the suspected bomber wandering in and out of the terminal shortly before the blast. He was dressed as a tourist himself, wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt, plaid shorts and sneakers with short white socks. He carried a large backpack with wheels, as well as a smaller bag.

Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said the bomber was believed to have been about 36 years old and had been in the country between four and seven days.

"We cannot exclude the possibility that he had logistical support on Bulgarian territory," the minister said.

Officials were using DNA samples to try to establish his identity. Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov told reporters that a Michigan driver's license was retrieved, but he said U.S. officials reported that "there was no such person in their database." Michigan is home to one of the largest Arab communities in the United States.

Could this be the "white jihadist" that we have heard about efforts to recruit for so many years? "Bulgarian police release video of suicide bombing suspect," by Asher Zeiger for the Times of Israel, July 19:

Bulgarian police have released a short video they say is of the suicide bomber responsible for Wednesday’s terror attack on a tour bus full of Israeli citizens at the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria.

The Bulgarian news agency Sofia reported that the bomber was carrying an American passport and Michigan driver’s license. Both documents are believed to be forgeries.

Sofia also reported that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry has managed to recover the fingerprints of the bomber, which they have submitted to the FBI in the United States and the international police organization Interpol. The FBI and CIA have joined Israeli and Bulgarian officials in investigating the attack.

Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told Sofia that DNA tests would be run to determine the identity of the Caucasian man, who the minister described as casually dressed with nothing suspicious about his appearance to set him apart from the crowd of people at the airport.

The ministry did not indicate how the police came to the conclusion that the man was the suicide bomber.

The video released by the police on Thursday shows a young man with long hair wearing a hat and backpack, dressed in a blue T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. He was filmed by the video camera approximately one hour before the attack took place.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said Thursday the attack was likely carried out by a suicide bomber who detonated as he boarded the bus. Initially, investigators believed the bomb had been set off from within a suitcase on the bus....

Nothing, nothing whatsoever in this story about how Hamas-linked CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. Nothing in this story about how CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Not a word about how several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. No hint here that CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. No indication whatsoever that its California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.

Instead, we hear that a civil rights organization is charging "McCarthyism." What is really happening is that a recognized Hamas front is trying to block the asking of legitimate questions. For if there really is Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the government, and Hamas-linked CAIR succeeds in blocking an investigation of it, who will emerge as the winner? The Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators. Funny thing how everything CAIR does seems to redound to the benefit of jihadis and Islamic supremacists.

"Muslim Rights Group: Bachmann Playing 'Six Degrees of Separation Drinking Game' with National Security," by Dana Hughes for ABC News, July 18 (thanks to EH):

A Muslim human rights group has issued a strong response to the allegations from House Republican members that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin's family, as well as other prominent Muslim-Americans working within the U.S. government, have ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

Corey Saylor, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR, calls questioning the loyalty of "patriotic American Muslims" based on what he says are old anti-Muslim conspiracy theories "beyond the pale."

Five GOP members of Congress, including former presidential candidate Michelle Bachman, sent letters to the Inspector General offices for the State Department, as well as the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, questioning whether Abedin and other prominent Muslims are part of a plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the U.S. government.

"America wants a serious national security conversation," says Saylor. "Michelle Bachmann is giving us a six degrees of separation drinking game ."

CAIR, a Washington-based Islamic advocacy group founded in 1994, is not alone in its condemnation. Today veteran Republican Senator John McCain gave a spirited defense of Abedin, calling the allegations against her "ugly" and "sinister." He chastised his GOP colleagues in the House saying that no one, "not least a member of Congress," should launch such a "degrading attack against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of that they stand for."

State Department deputy spokesperson Patrick Ventrell also shot down the accusations, calling them "preposterous."

Saylor says that Abedin and the other Muslim officials listed in the House letter are American citizens who are "asking what they can do for their nation," and now Bachmann "seems to be punishing them for the sin of offering that service during a Democratic administration," he says.

In addition to Abedin, the letters also cite Mohamed Elibiary, an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security named in the letter, as also having possible ties to extremists. Last year Elibiary was given an award by the Society of Former Special Agents for his counter-terrorism work with the FBI.

"Now his contributions have been rewarded by Bachmann questioning his patriotism," says Saylor.

Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress, has sent letters to Bachmann demanding she and her GOP colleagues produce evidence backing up their claims. Ellison told CNN's Anderson Cooper that the allegations are "the worst of guilt by association," said Ellison. "It is a stark affront to American values."...

Is the possibility that he spent time in Michigan going to be investigated? Given the official indifference to the presence of the jihad ideology there, probably not. "Suicide bomber blew up Bulgaria airport bus," by Angel Krasimirov for Reuters, July 19:

BURGAS, Bulgaria (Reuters) - A suicide bomber carried out the attack that killed eight people in a bus transporting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, the country's interior minister said on Thursday, and Israel accused Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants of responsibility.

Video surveillance in front of the airport and the investigation showed the bomber could not be distinguished among arriving Israeli tourists, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said at the airport of Burgas, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast.

"We have established there was a person who was a suicide bomber in this attack (on Wednesday). This person had a fake driving license from the United States, from the state of Michigan," Tsvetanov told reporters.

"He looked like anyone else - a normal person with Bermuda shorts and a backpack," he said.

Special forces had managed to obtain DNA samples from the fingers of the bomber and were now checking databases in an attempt to identify him, Tsvetanov said. Bulgarian security services had received no indications of a pending attack.

Tsvetanov said eight people were killed in the attack including the Bulgarian driver of the bus and the bomber. The Israeli foreign ministry said it could confirm that five Israelis were killed.

The tourists had arrived in Bulgaria on a charter flight from Israel and were on the bus in the airport car park when the blast tore through the double-decker. Body parts were strewn across the ground, mangled metal hung from the bus's ripped roof and black smoke billowed over the airport....

The nearly completed mega-mosque of Murfreesboro

Again: Why is a huge Muslim compound going up where there are very few Muslims? And who is paying for it?

Also, when will the Obama Administration show the same eagerness to fight for the rights of embattled non-Muslims in Muslim countries?

"Federal judge paves way for Tennessee mosque to open for Ramadan," from CNN, July 18 (thanks to Menis):

(CNN) -- A federal judge's ruling Wednesday cleared the way for a controversial mosque in Tennessee to open in time for the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

County officials must conduct a final building inspection at the mosque in Murfreesboro, near Nashville, U.S. District Judge Todd J. Campbell said in a temporary restraining order.

The order will allow the mosque to complete the inspection process so it can use its building in time for the religious holiday of Ramadan, which starts at sunset Thursday, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said in a statement.

"This is a great victory not just for the Muslims of Murfreesboro, but for people of all faiths. No house of worship should be kept from meeting just because the neighbors don't like their religious beliefs," said Luke Goodrich, deputy general counsel at the Washington-based fund, which represented the mosque in a federal lawsuit.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro filed separate lawsuits this week, arguing that Rutherford County officials violated federal laws when they denied requests for a final inspection and certificate of occupancy for the mosque.

The center argued that it was being unconstitutionally blocked "merely because local anti-Islamic protests have made the mosque controversial."

Justice Department officials coordinated the timing of their lawsuit with the local case because they thought there would be "irreparable harm" if the mosque were not allowed to open for Ramadan, spokesman Mitchell Rivard said.

Plans for the mosque have resulted in threats to the center and a lawsuit that led to a county judge's order shutting down the project in June. County officials had cited that order when they denied requests for the final inspection.

The construction site had been vandalized multiple times, including by an arson attack in 2010, and federal authorities have charged a Texas man with calling in a bomb threat to the center before last year's anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Tennessee mosque's fate up in the air after court ruling

The center's lawsuit argued that it was ordered to meet "a heightened standard of notice in the zoning process" because of objections by some Murfreesboro residents, a standard no other religious institution has been asked to meet.

"This double standard for the mosque has deprived ICM of its legal rights under federal law and the Constitution, serves no public purpose and threatens to cripple ICM's ability to observe Ramadan," the lawsuit states.

The project had been approved by a planning commission and was under construction when Corlew reversed that approval because of what he said was the insufficient notice. The county followed its normal practice of publishing notice of the hearing in the local newspaper, but Corlew said more should have been done because the mosque was "an issue of major importance to citizens."

Four county residents filed suit to block the mosque in September 2010, arguing it posed a "risk of terrorism generated by proselytizing for Islam and inciting the practices of Sharia law" and that planning commissioners violated their due process rights. They also demanded the judge bar any approval until the Islamic center showed that it was not interested in "the overthrow of the American system of government, laws and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution."

Were these concerns ever addressed? Or just ignored?

On Wednesday, Campbell ruled that the Justice Department had "demonstrated that the mosque is necessary to accommodate the number of worshipers, especially during the holy season of Ramadan, which begins July 20. The new building, which is ready to serve the community, eliminates the facilities problems, providing ample space for prayer, holiday celebrations, religious meetings and children's play."...

This kind of lawsuit is a consequence of pretending that we are not at war. In a war, enemy combatants are targeted without due process. Awlaki and Samir Khan were at war with the United States. But since the Administration does not acknowledge the existence of that conflict, and tends to treat actions against jihadis as matters of law enforcement rather than war, it has only itself to blame for this lawsuit. That is not to say, however, that the ACLU doesn't bear responsibility for yet again acting against the interests of Americans.

"Families of Americans killed by drones file suit," by Greg Miller for the Washington Post, July 18 (thanks to Wimpy):

The families of three U.S. citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year, including militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, filed a lawsuit Wednesday that accuses top CIA and U.S. military officials of violating the constitutional rights of those killed.

The lawsuit, which was prepared in part by the American Civil Liberties Union, represents the most direct legal challenge yet to the Obama administration’s decision to kill U.S. citizens in counter-terrorism operations without open due process measures or scrutiny from courts.

“These killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts,” the suit alleges.

The suit stems from two drone strikes that took place over a six-week stretch last fall. The first, in September, killed Awlaki as well as alleged al-Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan. The second strike, in October, killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son. All three were born in the United States.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the ACLU, said the suit seeks compensation for the families, but is primarily aimed at forcing the Obama administration to disclose details about decisions that were made in secret.

“It’s an effort to get accountability,” Jaffer said. The administration has argued that requiring a court order in advance of strikes would cause delays and make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attack. Jaffer said the ACLU is “asking the government now, after the fact, to explain to a court why it did what it did.”

The defendants named in the suit include Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and CIA Director David H. Petraeus, as well as two of the top officers in the U.S. military special operations ranks: U.S. Navy Adm. William H. McRaven and U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Votel.

Spokesmen for the CIA and Pentagon declined to comment on the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs listed include Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of the cleric, and Sarah Khan, mother of Samir.

Obama administration officials have recently defended the drone campaign in a series of speeches, but have generally refused to discuss legal positions or criteria for operations in substantial detail.

In March, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that “it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack. In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.”

The suit, which was also prepared in part by the Center for Constitutional Rights, argues that none of the three U.S. citizens killed met that standard and that the government failed to exhaust opportunities to apprehend the men without resorting to lethal force.

“Some officials have suggested that the U.S. government targets its citizens only if they present ‘imminent’ threats,” the suit says, “but they have defined the term ‘imminent’ so broadly as to negate its meaning.”

U.S. officials have said that Awlaki, a native of New Mexico, was directly tied to several terrorist plots against the United States, including the failed attempt by a Ni­ger­ian man to detonate a bomb aboard a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009....

That doesn't seem too "broadly" defined to me. Awlaki was waging jihad warfare against Americans. He got what was coming to him.

Two more illustrations of why we don't see more genuine Muslim reformers. "Top Muslim cleric shot dead in Russian province of Tatarstan; another wounded in car bomb," from the Associated Press, July 19 (thanks to David):

MOSCOW — A top Muslim cleric in Russia’s Tatarstan province was shot dead and another wounded by a car bomb in two separate attacks apparently related to the priests’ criticism of radical Islamists, investigators said Thursday.

They were not "priests." They were imams. But of course this is AP, which calls both pro-Sharia hardliners and pro-freedom anti-Sharia activists "conservatives."

Russia’s Investigative Committee said that Valiulla Yakupov, the deputy to the Muslim province’s chief mufti, was gunned down Thursday on the way out of his house in Tatarstan’s regional capital, Kazan.

Chief mufti Ildus Faizov was wounded in the leg after an explosive device ripped through his vehicle in central Kazan, Tatarstan investigator Eduard Abdullin told The Associated Press.

Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin told Russian news agencies that his agency is looking into the clerics’ professional activity as a possible cause of the attacks.

Both clerics were known as critics of radical Islamist groups that advocate a strict version of Islam known as Salafism. Faizov was also criticized by media in Tatarstan for allegedly profiting on tours he organized for Muslim pilgrims.

The rise of Salafism in this Volga River province has been fueled by the influx of Muslim clerics from Chechnya and other predominantly Muslim provinces of Russia’s Caucasus region where radical Islamists have for years been involved in a violent confrontation with secular authorities....

This raises more questions than it answers. Was the jihad mass murderer carrying a fake Michigan driver's license in order to throw investigators off the scent as to his actual origins and movements? Or did he have occasion to travel in Michigan, and if so, with whom did he meet there, and what did he do? Fraud regarding driver's licenses has been abundantly documented. Questions about this jihadist's possible contacts in Michigan are legitimate, and should be asked, and answered. An update on this story. "Bulgaria: Bombing Most Likely Suicide Attack," from the Associated Press, July 19:

(SOFIA, Bulgaria) — A brazen daytime bombing that killed seven people and injured dozens on a bus full of Israeli tourists was most likely a suicide attack, Bulgarian officials said Thursday. Israel stood by its claim that Iranian-backed Hezbollah was responsible and vowed to hit back.

The identity of the suspected bomber was still unknown but a Michigan driving license that he carried was a fake, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said.

“We worked on this with colleagues from the FBI and the CIA,” Borisov said. “They said that there is no such person in their database.”

The suspected bomber appeared on security camera tape for nearly an hour before the Wednesday attack, which gutted the bus at the airport in the quiet Black Sea resort of Burgas, 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of the capital, Sofia.

Borisov said he wants a photo of the suspect taken from the tape released and that a DNA expert is checking the suspect’s fingerprints....

No group has immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicion fell upon Iran and its Lebanese proxy, the Hezbollah guerrilla group. Iran’s state TV rejected accusations of Tehran’s involvement, saying in a commentary Thursday that claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others were “ridiculous” and “sensational.”...

UPDATE: Bulgarian PM says the license was fake.

--------------------

An Iran-backed Hizballah jihadist from Michigan? Naaah. Couldn't be. Everyone knows that every last Muslim in Michigan is peaceful, law-abiding, and loyal to Constitutional values and Western understandings of human rights. Only greasy Islamophobes think otherwise, right?

"Bulgaria: Bombing most likely carried out by suicide attacker, was carrying Michigan license," from the Associated Press, July 18 (thanks to David):

SOFIA, Bulgaria — A brazen daytime bombing that killed eight people and injured dozens on a bus full of Israeli tourists was most likely a suicide attack, Bulgaria’s interior minister said Thursday. He said the suspected attacker was carrying a Michigan driver’s license that was being sent to the FBI for authentication.

Tsvetan Tsvetanov said the suspected bomber appeared on security camera tape for nearly an hour before the Wednesday attack, which gutted the bus at the airport in the quiet Black Sea resort city of Burgas, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of the capital, Sofia.

The death toll had risen to eight, including the suspected bomber, as the Bulgarian driver of the bus died in the hospital, Tsvetanov said. Six of the victims are Israeli citizens, while the nationality of the suspected bomber remains unknown.

The Israelis had just arrived on a charter flight from Tel Aviv carrying 154 people, including eight children.

No group had immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicion fell upon Iran and its Lebanese proxy, the Hezbollah guerrilla group. Iran’s state TV rejected accusations of Tehran’s involvement.

A commentary Thursday on the TV website calls claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others “ridiculous” and “sensational.”...

“All signs point to Iran,” Netanyahu said Wednesday. “Just in the past few months, we have seen attempts by Iran to harm Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and more. This is an Iranian terror attack that is spreading across the world. Israel will react forcefully to Iran’s terror.”...

In FrontPage this morning I discuss the legitimacy of investigating Huma Abedin's familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood:

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is at the center of a firestorm over her request that the State, Homeland Security, Defense and Justice Departments, investigate potential “policies and activities that appear to be the result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.” This is an entirely legitimate call, as Bachmann abundantly illustrated in a 16-page letter to Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), laying out the reasons for her concerns. Yet even Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who should know better, has upbraided Bachmann, criticizing her for including Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, among those she noted for having Brotherhood ties.

McCain declared in a statement on the Senate floor that “recently, it has been alleged that Huma, a Muslim American, is part of a nefarious conspiracy to harm the United States by unduly influencing U.S. foreign policy at the Department of State in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes.”

McCain, brimming with righteous indignation, thundered: “These sinister accusations rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family, none of which have been shown to harm or threaten the United States in any way. These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis, and no merit. And they need to stop now.”

He explained that the letter Bachmann and several other Representatives sent asking for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood influence in the government “alleges that three members of Huma’s family are ‘connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.’  Never mind that one of those individuals, Huma’s father, passed away two decades ago.”

However, in her letter to Ellison, Bachmann explained that much more was behind her concern about Abedin than guilt-by-association based on family members: “The concerns about the foreign influence of immediate family members is such a concern to the U.S. Government that it includes these factors as potentially disqualifying conditions for obtaining a security clearance, which undoubtedly Ms. Abedin has had to obtain to function in her position. For us to raise issues about a highly-based U.S. Government official with known immediate family connections to foreign extremist organizations is not a question of singling out Ms. Abedin.  In fact, these questions are raised by the U.S. Government of anyone seeking a security clearance.”

And in Abedin’s case, there are ample reasons for raising these questions. Her father, Syed Z. Abedin, was a professor in Saudi Arabia who founded the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, an organization supported by the Muslim World League, a Brotherhood organization. Her mother, Saleha Mahmoud Abedin, is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, the Brotherhood’s adjunct organization for women. The Brotherhood itself is in its own words, according to a captured internal document, dedicated to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house.”

All that leaves McCain unmoved, for he goes on to assert that “the letter and the report offer not one instance of an action, a decision, or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State Department that would lend credence to the charge that she is promoting anti-American activities within our government. Nor does either document offer any evidence of a direct impact that Huma may have had on one of the U.S. policies with which the authors of the letter and the producers of the report find fault.”

However, it is odd that McCain would expect Bachmann to produce the outcome of an investigation before any investigation has even taken place. As Bachmann noted, “these questions are raised by the U.S. Government of anyone seeking a security clearance.” So why should Huma Abedin be exempt? Would an official who had family connections with the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nations be similarly exempt from scrutiny? If not, why should someone with familial connections to a group dedicated to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”?

There is more.

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 25
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23 / Part 24

“Scott's treatment of the Oriental side of the picture is marked by fewer liberties, because there was less occasion. He has exercised a judicious caution in bringing practically only one Eastern figure, that of Saladin himself, upon his canvas, and avoiding the temptation to dwell upon anything but his personality. He says nothing definite of the Sultan's history, and by substituting him for his brother "Saphadin" in the story of the proposed marriage, he gets rid of the necessity for individualising a second important Moslem character; but Scott knew very well that it was to be an alliance between "Saphadin," not Saladin, and Joan of Sicily, not Edith. To avoid crowding the canvas with "inferior characters," to say nothing of lowering the dignity of the alliance, a stroke of the pen abolished both Joan and her proposed bridegroom. No one can deny that the story is all the better for it; and a footnote easily propitiates complaisant history.

“But if Saladin was to marry Edith there must be a meeting; and so the ordeal by battle and the unhistorical slaughter of Conrad and the Master of the Temple (whose name was not "Sir Giles Amaury") serve also most conveniently to make the chief actors acquainted. It is possible that Scott was really unaware of the fact—somewhat singular, considering their close relations, both hostile and diplomatic—that Richard and Saladin never actually met face to face. The King twice proposed an interview, but in each case Saladin declined. It was "Saphadin" who really met Richard and exchanged much cordial hospitality, and who conducted all negotiations. Equally fictitious are Saladin's visit in the disguise of a hakim, and his solitary rides about the plains. The Sultan never travelled unattended; he generally had his guard of mamluks when he was anywhere near the enemy; and the chance encounter with Kenneth, the disguise and the talisman belong to the category of the "Thousand and One Nights." Nor can Scott honestly be justified in his description of Saladin's appearance. He says he was "in the very flower of his age," but Oriental flowers at fifty-four are apt to be faded; and he ventures to paint his portrait, which, to our loss, no contemporary Eastern attempted. All we know definitely about his face is that at fifty he wore a beard, and we only know this because he happened to tug at it during the battle of Hittin. Sir Walter has got the beard right, "a flowing and curled black beard," to boot, "which seemed trimmed with peculiar care"; but when he goes on to work in the nose, eyes, teeth, and forehead, he trusts to that admirable source, his own invention.

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

Flight schools must not provide "flight training to a foreign student unless the Secretary of Homeland Security first determines that the student does not pose a threat to aviation or national security." But actually to do this checking would be "Islamophobic." And anyway, what could go wrong?

"9/11 Flashback: US Flight Schools Still Unknowingly Training Terrorists?," by Lee Ferran and Jason Ryan for ABC News, July 18 (thanks to Kenneth):

More than a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans, some foreign flight students are still not subject to terror database screening until after they've completed pilot training, according to a new report from the government's watchdog.

"Thus, foreign nationals obtaining flight training with the intent to do harm, such as three of the pilots and leaders of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, could have already obtained the training needed to operate an aircraft before they received any type of vetting," says report, published today by the Government Accountability Office....

After the attacks, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) established the Alien Flight Student Program (AFSP), which is designed to prevent flight schools regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration from "providing flight training to a foreign student unless the Secretary of Homeland Security first determines that the student does not pose a threat to aviation or national security."

But the new GAO report says that the AFSP database is woefully behind and some of the more than 25,000 foreign nationals who were in the FAA airmen registry were not found in the AFSP database, "indicating that these individuals had not applied to the AFSP or been vetted by the TSA before taking flight training and receiving an FAA airman certificate."...

Act of war. "Israeli PM Points to Iran in Deadly Bulgaria Blast," from ABC News, July 18 (thanks to Kenneth):

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he suspects Iran was behind a deadly explosion aboard a bus full of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria today.

“All the indications are that Iran is behind this deadly attack,” the Israeli leader said, just hours after at least three people were killed in a fireball aboard a bus at an airport in the eastern Bulgarian city of Burgas.

Just minutes before Netanyahu’s statement, other Israeli officials said it was unclear if the explosion was the result of a terror attack. But Netanyahu said the new explosion was just the latest in a “consistent pattern” of Iran-backed attacks targeting Israelis around the globe....

MEMRI has just picked up and translated the same video I relied on in my "Sodomy for the Sake of Islam" -- the same video Electronic Intifada is trying to portray as a "hoax."

"Israel has previously warned Bulgaria of the threat posed by Hizbollah."

"Israelis killed in Bulgaria bus suicide bombing," by Marcus Dysch for The JC, July 18 (thanks to David):

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has confirmed a number of Israelis have been killed in an explosion on a bus carrying tourists in Bulgaria.

It is believed a suicide bomber boarded the bus outside the Sarafovo airport and immediately detonated his bomb. The Bulgarian Interior Ministy confirmed the explosion had been a terrorist attack.

Local media in the resort of Burgas claim the bus was packed with Israelis, possibly members of a young basketball team on their way to a training camp.

Reports suggest as many as seven people have been killed. At least 18 people have arrived at a local hospital to be treated for their injuries, while the airport has been closed in the wake of the attack. It is feared a pregnant woman was among those injured.

The explosion is thought to have occurred at around 6pm local time (4pm BST). A flight from Tel Aviv had arrived around one hour earlier. All flights from Israel to Bulgaria have now been suspended.

The bus is believed to have been an airport shuttle carrying the holidaymakers. Around 40 people were thoguht to be on the bus.

Cypriot authorites last week arrested a Swedish national believed to be a Hizbollah member suspected of planning an attack on Israelis.

Burgas is the second largest resort on the country's Black Sea coast. It is popular with Israeli tourists and is home to a Chabad centre. Israeli teens are known to flock to the resort for their summer holidays.

Israel has previously warned Bulgaria of the threat posed by Hizbollah. Bulgaria has a Jewish community of around 7,000.

In January a suspicious package was found on a bus carrying Israeli tourists from Turkey to Bulgaria, leading Israel to request additional security for its tourists travelling in the country, according to reports at the time in the Bulgarian press.

The Bulgaria attack coincides with the 18th anniversary of the fatal bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 85 people and wounded hundreds....

Register now, space is limited. September 11, 2012, UN Plaza Millennium Hotel, 3:00 pm - 7:00 pm. Email PamelaGeller@gmail.com.

SION to Hold International Congress and Media Workshop to Address Islamic Supremacist War Against Free Speech

NEW YORK: The first session of the International Freedom Defense Congress, the operating body of the human rights organization Stop Islamization of Nations (SION), will be held in New York on September 11, 2012. The principal focus of the Congress will be a media workshop pertaining to Islamic supremacist attempts to restrict the freedom of speech in the free world, and the smear campaigns against freedom fighters in newspapers and media institutions in the West.

"The objective of this first-of-its-kind workshop is to develop media-related mechanisms to address the smear campaigns," SION said in a statement. It will also address the media's double standard regarding Islam and other religions, as epitomized in March 2012 by the New York Times' running of an anti-Catholic smear ad and rejection of a SION ad telling the truth about Islamic jihad.

It said the workshop will discuss at length the reasons behind and the results of the Western media's offensive campaigns against freedom of speech and the truth about Islam, jihad, Islamic supremacism and Muslims, which it added still occur from time to time.

"The workshop will represent a quantum leap in media action, as it discusses, beyond rhetoric, the practical steps to address the phenomenon of the Islamic war against free speech," SION President Pamela Geller said.

Freedom fighters from all over the globe, journalists, intellectuals and academicians will be among the participants in the workshop, which will consist of brainstorming sessions to develop mechanisms for cooperation with external partners, and to develop an action plan to address the phenomenon of the Islamic war against free speech.

The organisation noted that the workshop is of particular importance as it is the first ever to address the implications of Resolution 16/18 of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the stated goal of which is to "combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of, discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief," but which is actually designed to restrict truthful speech about Islamic supremacism and jihad, so as to render the West mute and defenseless before the advancing threat of jihad and Sharia.

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2011, was backed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the most recent Istanbul Process Conference in Washington in December.

This is widely viewed as a significant step toward furthering OIC efforts to destroy the freedom of speech and impose Sharia blasphemy laws on the free world.

"We are holding this Congress on the eleventh anniversary of the day jihad came to America in order to strike a blow for freedom," Geller said.

SION President Geller is the author of Stop Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books) and The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America (Simon & Schuster). SION Vice President is the acclaimed author and Islam expert, Robert Spencer, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad (both Regnery).

The SION Board of Advisers also includes Oskar Freysinger, a Swiss Parliamentarian and member of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), who won international renown for his leadership of the successful campaign against the construction of minarets in Switzerland; Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media (AIM) and a leader of the struggle to keep the jihadist propaganda network Al-Jazeera off American airwaves; Dr. Ashraf Rameleh, President of Voice of the Copts, an international organization standing up for the human rights of Coptic Christians and all religious minorities against religious bigotry and intolerance; Dr. Ali Sina, the renowned ex-Muslim author and founder of FaithFreedom.org; Dr. Wafa Sultan, the ex-Muslim human rights activist and author; the German pro-freedom activist Stefan Herre of Politically Incorrect; the Israeli author Dr. Mordechai Kedar; the Hindu human rights activist Babu Suseelan; Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE); and Canadian publisher and free speech defender Ezra Levant.

Speakers at SION's International Freedom Defense Congress will include Kedar, Rameleh, Sina, Kincaid, and Gravers, as well as Danish free speech advocate Lars Hedegaard; Italian human rights activists Magdi Christiano Allam and Valentina Colombo; English politician and freedom fighter Paul Weston; and renowned Muhammad cartoonist Lars Vilks. More speakers will be announced shortly.

SION stands for:
-- The freedom of speech - as opposed to Islamic prohibitions of "blasphemy" and "slander," which are used effectively to quash honest discussion of jihad and Islamic supremacism;
-- The freedom of conscience - as opposed to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy;
-- The equality of rights of all people before the law - as opposed to Sharia's institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims.

Join the SION Facebook group here.

Syrian Defence Minister General Daoud Rajha "was the most senior Christian government official in Syria....His death will resonate with Syria's minority Christian population, who make up about 10 percent of Syria's population and have generally stood by the regime."

"Islamist group, Free Syrian Army claim Damascus attack," from Reuters, July 18 (thanks to Twostellas):

Two groups claimed responsibility for the explosion in Damascus on Wednesday that killed several top Syrian officials, including the defence minister and the president's brother-in-law. Liwa al-Islam, an Islamist rebel group whose name means "The Brigade of Islam", said in a statement on its Facebook page that it "targeted the cell called the crisis control room in the capital of Damascus." (Reuters)

In "Obama's epic failure in Afghanistan" in WND today, Pamela Geller excoriates Obama's ludicrous and self-defeating policies in Afghanistan:

Fresh on the heels of the horrible news of last weekend’s slaughter of American troops comes this new and even more horrible news. Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai last week invited his great rival, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, to lay down his arms and … run for president of Afghanistan.

“Mullah Mohammad Omar can come inside Afghanistan anywhere he wants to,” said Karzai.

Where does he think Omar is? Sheltered in Pakistan the way bin Laden was?

“He can open political office for himself but he should leave the gun,” Karzai also said. “He along with his friends can come and create his political party, do politics, become a candidate himself for the elections. If people voted for him, good for him, he can take the leadership in his hand.”

This is yet more of the poisonous fruit from Obama’s anti-freedom foreign policy (something I have exposed all the way through his presidency, and detailed in my book, “The Post-American Presidency,” back in 2009). We have come to a terrible end in Afghanistan. Allowing Mullah Omar to run for president in Afghanistan would be like allowing Hitler (had he been alive) to run for fuehrer after the war.

Mullah Omar has been wanted by the U.S. State Department since October 2001. There’s a $10 million reward on his head. He sheltered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida killers in the years prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. He had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, and is still directing the Taliban’s ongoing war against the U.S.-led NATO forces and the government of Afghanistan.

Also last weekend, Obama declared that Afghanistan is a “major non-NATO ally.” The non-NATO ally declaration allows for streamlined defense cooperation, more money, expedited purchasing ability of American equipment and easier export control regulations.

And he has just committed to more jizya for the Taliban....

Read it all.

...where, no doubt, they would get jobs and become stable, prosperous, law-abiding members of Italian society. "Italy: Imam and three Syrians arrested for people smuggling," from AKI, July 18 (thanks to Twostellas):

Venice, 18 July (AKI) - Police on Wednesday in northeast Italy arrested a radical imam and three Syrians suspected of belonging to a people trafficking gang that allegedly smuggled illegal immigrants to Italy from the Middle East.

Police believe the unnamed imam from San Dona' di Piave near Venice was funnelling cash from the people smuggling racket to international jihadist groups.

He was already known to to anti-terrorism investigators for his suspected links to such jihadist groups, police said.

The illegal migrants paid "large sums" to the gang to be smuggled into Italy, where some were employed off the books on building sites run by the imam and his brothers, according to police.

If the migrants baulked at paying the sums of money agreed with the gang to obtain working papers, they were threatened and assaulted, said police....

Pamela Geller gives background: "As you know, our pro-Israel ad that was rejected by the NYC MTA is still being litigated in Manhattan court. We will win that case. Here is the new ad that I have submitted to run in the same stations and the same type kiosks as the anti-Israel ads are now running in. The number has jumped to 19,230 since I submitted the ad. I really need a digital ad that can change daily."

"‘Islamorealism’ ad claims ’19,207 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11,′" by Melissa Quinn in the Daily Caller, July 17 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

New York City train commuters may soon see new anti-Islam advertisements on the city’s Metro North line.

The American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) created an ad campaign to raise awareness about Jihadist activities against Israel and the United States, highlighting the number of Islamist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, and a growing number of deaths that have resulted.

“19,207 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01 and counting,” the ad reads. “It’s not Islamophohia, it’s Islamorealism.”

The $15,000 campaign is a response to pro-Palestine ads. It will cover 75 station kiosks throughout the Metro North route for a four-week period.

“We wanted to bring some reality — because truth is a recognition of reality — we wanted to bring some truth to Metro North,” said AFDI executive director Pamela Geller.

“People need to understand the implications of the Islamization of America,” she added.

Geller’s group is already in litigation with the New York City Metro Transit Authority after the rail system rejected a different series of ads on the grounds that they violated its advertising standards — a move Geller is framing in terms of the First Amendment....

Meanwhile, Obama is urging Karzai to come to a settlement with the Taliban, has secretly dropped charges in the case of a Florida man accused of funding the Pakistani Taliban, and is considering sending Taliban detainees back to Afghanistan as a gesture of good will.

"Taliban bomb destroys 22 NATO supply trucks in Afghan north," from Reuters, July 18:

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A bomb planted by the Taliban destroyed 22 NATO trucks carrying supplies to their forces in northern Afghanistan, the Taliban and police said on Wednesday.

Eighteen fuel trucks and four supply vehicles were parked in Aibak, the capital of Samangan province, when a bomb ripped through them, wounding one person, local police said.

"At 2 a.m. the mujahideen attacked the invader NATO trucks," the Taliban said in a statement, referring to the wagons which had been driven from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan's north.

The trucks were attacked in the same province where prominent anti-Taliban lawmaker Ahmad Khan Samangani was killed on Saturday at his daughter's wedding, in a suicide bomb attack that killed 22 other guests.

"We believe the Taliban carried this out. Eighteen trucks have been totally destroyed, the rest were damaged by fire," Samangan police chief Khalil Andarabi told Reuters....

The Palestinian jihad propaganda machine in action: "Switched at birth in Gaza?," from Elder of Ziyon, July 17 (thanks to Inexion):

A reader emailed me about a CBC radio program (originally from Radio Netherlands, link here) he heard recently about Ahmed Masoud, a British writer and playwright who was born in Gaza.

During the program, Masoud told this story that he had written for The Guardian last year:

I had a very happy childhood in a very large family, with five sisters and six brothers. I'm right in the middle, which is a good place to be. But we lived in one of the worst places on Earth – the Gaza Strip in Palestine – and when I was six, in 1987, the first intifada started.

...Despite everything going on outside I had a happy childhood. But all this changed when I was 17.

One day I came home from school and turned on the TV. There was a programme about Palestinian refugees and how their families were fragmented because of the troubles, and it talked about how children and babies were mixed up in hospitals.

I looked at my mother and she was electrified – her mouth was open, her eyes were staring and she looked like a ghost. I knew there was something she wasn't telling me. My dad, too, was staring at the screen. I could see that behind his glasses there was a tear coming down. I hadn't seen my dad cry before, and to see his tears falling down his cheek was terrifying to me.

Then he wiped his eyes and held my hand, and my mum's hand, and he started telling the story about what happened when I was born.

At the time, the hospital was being raided and I was evacuated to a special care unit before my mum had even seen me. My dad heard news that the hospital was being bombed and went straight there. When he arrived he was told the room and cot number where he could find me. He ran as fast as he could, but when he got there, he found not one but two babies in the cot. He didn't know which one was his – the one on the left or the one on the right. There was no time to make a decision. He had to take one. He wondered whether the number they had given him was a mistake, but when he looked around all the other cots were crammed with babies too. And he had to make that decision. So he picked me up. Even now, if you ask him, he can't answer why he picked me and not the other baby.

He went back to my mum and she wrapped me up, and they ran with me through the streets back home. He didn't say anything to her until they got home. My mum just put me to her breast and began to feed me. That bond, that love, that motherly feeling was there. The more she looked at me and fed me, the more she was sure I was her son.

Wow...what a story! It is custom made for reader (and listener) sympathy. You can almost feel the heat from the explosions and smell the gunpowder, as you picture Masoud's father desperately trying to save his baby's life from the heartless Israeli air raid at the maternity ward, and the parents' desperate race through the streets of Gaza - with the still recovering mother forced to flee on foot, no doubt barefooted, dodging the falling bombs and debris while tenderly protecting her newborn baby.

Only one problem: Israel didn't bomb any hospitals in Gaza when Masoud was born. It didn't have air raids until the second intifada.

This story happened six years before the first intifada, when tens of thousands of Gazans were peacefully commuting to and working in Israel. Hamas didn't exist. Thousands of Israelis lived in Gaza. More from Israel would go there weekly to buy goods cheaper than they were within the Green Line. Arabs with the proper means would travel to Israel to be treated in hospitals there.

Masoud's birthday is August 27, and I cannot find any possible actions by Israel in Gaza in 1981 or 1982 around that date. Israel was fighting in Lebanon, not Gaza, and the very few protests there were met with riot control methods, not airplanes. (In 1981, there was one highly unusual mass protest in Gaza where one protester was killed, and that was in December. Most of the protests at the time were from the PLO in the West Bank.)

This story is fiction.

There is more. Read it all.

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 24
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22 / Part 23

“It would be interesting to trace the effect of these medieval tales upon the two great writers [i.e. Scott, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 –1781), the latter to be discussed later] who have introduced Saladin among the dramatis persona of European classics. Scott, of course, had read the chronicles and romances, as far as they were readily accessible, and incidents in 'The Talisman' may be plausibly traced to the legends of the minstrels. Saladin's visit to Richard's camp in the disguise of a hakim may have been suggested by the Minstrel's tale of the equally imaginary visit to the Hospital of St. John at Acre. The quarrel over the banner of Austria is found in the 'Romance of Richard Coeur de Lion,' published at Edinburgh, in Weber's "Metrical Romances," fifteen years before 'The Talisman.' But his main source was clearly not the romances, but the chronicles, which he used as far as they suited him, and very properly threw over whenever they did not fit his scheme. As [Scott] wrote himself in the Preface of 1832:

‘One of the inferior characters introduced was a supposed relation of Richard Coeur de Lion; a violation of the truth of history, which gave offence to Mr. Mills the author of the History of Chivalry and the Crusades, who was not, it may be presumed, aware that romantic fiction naturally includes the power of such invention, which is indeed one of the requisites of the art.

“Scott boldly asserts that he ‘had access to all which antiquity believed, whether of reality or fable,’ about Richard I.; but he can hardly have gone very thoroughly into the Oriental sources, although some were even then easily accessible in Latin. It is obvious, however, that when he sins against ‘the truth of history,’ in regard to his European characters, it is of malice prepense. He admits that he knowingly killed Conrad of Montferrat in the wrong way, and the wrong time, and the wrong place, and his other deviations from history are probably no less intentional. He places the scene of the novel at Jaffa, in the autumn of 1192, as various indications prove; and he must have known that Philip of France and Leopold of Austria had both left the Holy Land after the surrender of Acre more than a year before. He sets "the Diamond of the Desert" [a fresh-water fountain] close to the Dead Sea, on the road to Jerusalem, half way between the camps of the Crusaders and the Saracens; which would place Saladin's camp, "over against Jaffa," somewhere in Moab on the other side of the Mare Mortuum [Dead Sea]. Nor could Ilderim have been deceived for a moment by the notion that the Knight of the Leopard [Sir Kenneth] could possibly find himself beside that inhospitable water if he was riding from Jaffa to Jerusalem, since he must have left the Holy City directly behind him. At that time, moreover, no "pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre" was to be thought of. But a crusading tale without a desert, no sand, no oasis, no Dead Sea, no pilgrimage, would lack the essential local colour, and Scott very properly put it in. And so all the quarrelling between the rival nations, which was true enough of the French and English, is infinitely more interesting when the absent King of France himself leads his knights; no novel-reader would care a rush for the jealousy of a Duke of Burgundy—unless, of course, he were Charles the Bold.

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.

Yet another Islamic supremacist pro-Sharia uprising supported by the Obama White House. "Syria: Now is the decisive battle, Muslim Brotherhood says: 30 yrs after failed 1982 uprising, victory could be ours," from ANSAmed, July 17 (thanks to Block Ness):

(ANSAMed) - ANKARA - The ''decisive battle'' has begun in Damascus, exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leaders meeting in Istanbul in their first plenary congress in 30 years said today.

Three decades after their attempted uprising against Hafez al Assad, father of the current Syrian president, ended in a bloodbath and 20,000 dead, the Sunnite Muslim Brotherhood now sees their chance for a comeback.

In spite of ''long years of repression by the regime,'' the movement has remained strong in Syria, said Brotherhood leader, Mohammad Riad Shakfa. The biggest force on the Syrian National Council, which is the West's main opposition interlocutor, and very influential in the Syrian Free Army, the Muslim Brotherhood is supported by Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is also a Sunnite, and whom Assad accuses of fomenting a religious war in his country. If Syria were to follow the Egyptian model post-Assad, the country's next leader might well be from the Muslim Brotherhood.
...

Global finance completely compromised. "Report Shows How HSBC Maintained Its Ties With One Of Osama Bin Laden's Key Benefactors," by Linette Lopez for Business Insider, July 17 (thanks to Twostellas):

Yesterday, the Senate released a report on HSBC's ties to the darkest actors in global finance. Today, the details of the 335 page investigation are trickling out and shocking everyone.

The laundry list of offenses includes everything money laundering for Mexican drug cartels to ignoring U.S. regulations meant to prevent dollars from reaching our country's known enemies.

Enemies like Al Qaeda.

One of the most damning parts of the report details HSBC's relationship with Saudi based Al Rajhi Bank, a member of Osama bin Ladin's 'Golden Chain' of important Al Qaeda financiers. The relationship has spanned decades, perhaps that is why even when HSBC's own internal compliance offices asked that it be terminated in 2005, even when the US government discovered hard evidence of Al Rajhi's relationship with terrorism, HSBC continued to business with the bank until 2010.

Al Rajhi bank is owned by the billionaire Al Rajhi family and holds $59 billion in assets. It is Saudi Arabia's largest private bank.

Al Rajhi's links to terrorism were confirmed in 2002 when U.S. agents searched the offices of a Saudi non-profit and U.S. designated terrorist organization, Benevolence International Foundation (page 193). In that raid, agents uncovered a CD-ROM listing the names of financiers in Osama bin Ladin's elite 'Golden Chain.' One of those names was Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, a founder of Al Rajhi bank....

Over at FrontPage Magazine (via RaymondIbrahim.com), I discuss the New York Times' latest distortions:

In a recent New York Times article titled, "As Islamists Gain Influence, Washington Reassess Who Its Friends Are," one Scott Shane does what the MSM does best: objectively list and discuss facts, but then offer an interpretation that has little grounding in reality.

The prevailing theme of his article is that there is "great change" in the Middle East, which certainly is true, though he fails to explain the fundamental factors behind this change, including the primary one that should interest Americans—namely, a counterproductive, if not irrational, U.S. Mideast policy. Nor does he explain the philosophical underpinnings of this failed policy—namely, the belief, pounded in every American child's head upon entering school, that all violence is a product of some grievance or material want: hence, all Islamic violence is a product of grievance and legitimate wants, all of which the U.S., under Obama, is going to satisfy by ensuring they gain control of Egypt—even as many Egyptians yesterday protested against Hilary Clinton's visit, insisting that "Egypt will not become Pakistan," a reference to the U.S. administration's obvious meddling in Egypt to empower the Sharia-enforcers.

Shane spends some time contrasting the Bush Administration "stark" Mideast policy, including its unwillingness to meet with the Muslim Brotherhood, with the Obama administration's willingness to meet, not only the Brotherhood, but members from the terrorist organization Al Gama'a al-Islamiyya, which Shane describes as having "renounced violence." Likewise, he argues that during the Bush years, "American officials did not always carefully distinguish between Islamists, who advocate a leading role for Islam in government, and violent jihadists, who espouse the same goal but advocate terrorism to achieve it."

He fails to acknowledge that what both "Islamists" and "violent jihadists" want—"a leading role for Islam in government," i.e., Sharia law—is in many respects the legal codification of terror: "a leading role for Islam in government" means whippings, beheading, amputations, sexual segregation, religious discrimination, death for apostates, and international hostility, even if only concealed, for the rest of the non-Islamic world, including the United States and especially its ally, Israel....

As Creeping Sharia asks, "Is this even legal?" How many post offices operate out of churches and synagogues?

"New Islamic Community Center opens in Plymouth," by Renee Tessman for KARE11.com, July 8 (thanks to Creeping Sharia):

PLYMOUTH, Minn. - Muslim families in the west metro suburbs now have a new place of worship.

They celebrated the grand opening of the NorthWest Islamic Community Center in Plymouth on Saturday.

Nausheena Hussain said, "It's really exciting to see the community come out and support it and it's not just for Muslims. There are a lot of neighbors here, a lot of our interfaith partners, so it's really, really just an exciting time for us."

Hussain felt Saturday's celebration was important because last year, she said, "we were fighting to get this establishment put up."

Despite some neighborhood opposition, the Plymouth City Council gave its approval to the center last August....

So now Plymouth has its own mosque in a former post office building at 3300 Plymouth Boulevard. The center will also have rooms available for rent to the community for those who may want to use the space....

The Northwest Islamic Community Center is also leasing back some space to the post office so the branch can stay open.

Mateen Ali said, "There are a lot of post offices that are shutting down across the country so this worked out to be just a great win, win situation for our Plymouth community, but also our Muslim community."...

Clearly authorities are concerned about Radical Christians crossing the border from Canada into the U.S. "Terrorism: 2nd closing of US-Canada borders in 5 days," from AGI, July 17 (thanks to C. Cantoni):

(AGI) Detroit - Last night, for the 2nd time in 5 days, the border between the US and Canada was temporarily closed.

Arguably the busiest of the long border between the two countries, the crossing between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario was closed after a warning was received, indicating that there was a bomb on the Admiral Bridge. Five hours of searches with canine teams did not produce anything suspicious and the authorities reopened the crossing. Last Thursday a similar situation interested the nearby tunnel Detroit-Windsor.

These are the "moderates" to whom the world is demanding that the Israelis make endless concessions. "Fatah summer camp named after female terrorist Mughrabi, who led killing of 37 in bus hijacking," by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik for Palestinian Media Watch, July 17:

Fatah has named a summer camp for youth "Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi," after female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, Mughrabi led the most lethal terror attack in Israel's history, in which 37 civilians were killed, 12 of them children. The Governor of the Jericho district said to participants in the summer camp that Mughrabi and others who "sacrificed" "should be a beacon for us in our activities."

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is also head of Fatah.

The camp was cosponsored by the Women's Association of Qalqilya and the Farmer's Association.

Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the PA glorifies Mughrabi by naming events and places after her. Summer camps and tournaments have been named after her, as have teams and groups in camps. One such summer camp with a Dalal Mughrabi group was sponsored by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad last year. Music videos honoring her and her terror attack have been broadcast on official PA TV. PA leaders and institutions often present her as a role model for Palestinians and particularly for Palestinian youth....

In "The Fake Child Artists of Gaza" in Algemeiner, July 16 (thanks to David), Elder of Ziyon exposes an example of Leftist/Islamic supremacist deception, or Leftist gullibility in advancing jihadist tropes:

In Toronto there is an art exhibition called “A Child’s View of Gaza.” The description states:

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is delighted to announce the presentation at Alternative Grounds Café of a fascinating exhibition of drawings by children from Gaza. The exhibition — A Child’s View from Gaza — features 26 drawings by Gaza children from 5 to 14 years of age, created during the course of art therapy.

Each drawing reflects different aspects of a child’s life in Gaza and the impact of the ongoing blockade on their daily lives. A Child’s View from Gaza also offers a child’s perspective on the Israeli offensive against Gaza, which took place from December 27th, 2008 to January 17th, 2009. Each drawing is unique in its perspective and details.

When these pictures were shown in Oakland last year, they did not appear to be drawn by children, or at the very least some of them may have been drawn under the heavy influence of adults who created the motifs for children to copy. One obvious example was this one:

Image supposedly drawn by a child in Gaza. Photo: CJPME.

It is a direct copy, with a lot of standard anti-Zionist embellishments, of a poster by anti-semitic cartoonist Carlos Latuff (top left).

However, other pieces seem to be way too sophisticated to have been drawn by children at all....

There is much, much more, all fascinating. Be sure to read it all.

Islamic antisemitism, based on the Qur'an's designation of the Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (5:82), shows its ugly face at the London Olympics -- with a little help from dhimmi officials. "Muslims Barred IOC from Honoring Murdered Israelis," by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu for Israel National News, July 17 (thanks to Simone):

An Olympics official admitted that Muslim countries blocked the "One-Minute of Silence" campaign to honor the 11 murdered Israeli athletes, one of the widows said.

Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre was one of the athletes massacred in the Munich Games n 1972, told the European Jewish Press that Jacques Rogge, president of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, told her that his “hands were tied” by the admission of 46 Arab and Muslim members to the International Olympic Committee.

She replied, “My husband’s hands were tied, not yours.”...

Spitzer called the Olympics “a corrupt organization, led by greed rather than the Olympic spirit. She added, “The IOC’s refusal is pure discrimination – greed and anti-Semitism.”

Indeed.

Here is a remarkable analysis of the phenomenon I discussed here: the increasingly thuggish and anti-free speech alliance between Leftists and Islamic supremacists. "The Leftist-Islamic Alliance against Freedom of Speech," by Edward Cline in Accuracy In Media, July 16:

Robert Spencer, a tireless defender of freedom and the freedom of speech against Islam, was attacked recently in the New York Daily News and charged with having “inspired” Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to go on his killing spree in July 2011. The writer, Nathan Lean, in his July 9th column, “Expose the Islamophobia industry,” connects several other counter-jihadist writers with Breivik’s actions, and lumps them all together as “untouchables” who ought to be ostracized.

The Islamophobia industry insists that it is not just a fringe minority who distort an otherwise peaceful faith. Instead, they point to the Koran and suggest that terrorists derive their world views from its messages. If that is so, these anti-Muslim agitators are guilty based on the logic of their own argument. After all, Breivik read and interpreted the writings of people like Spencer and [Pamela] Geller. He deciphered their diatribes much like Osama Bin Laden interpreted the Koran. Both men were compelled to act on the messages they digested.

It is doubtful that Lean has cracked open a Koran, or has heard of the Hadith, or The Reliance of the Traveler. For if he had any solid knowledge of Islam and its principal texts, he would grasp that these works do indeed sanction the violence of Muslim terrorists. He would understand that Spencer has every right to be an “Islamophobe,” that is, someone who is fearful of Islam and especially of Sharia law. It is interesting to note that while Lean inveighs against Breivik, who murdered dozens of people, he does not mention the thousands of people killed by jihadists in virtually every country on earth. Moreover, he does not suggest that Breivik also was inspired by al-Qaida, in addition to a potpourri of other “Islamophobic” writers. About Spencer and his outspoken co-counter-jihadists, Lean concludes:

Society has a responsibility to counter these individuals with overwhelming overtures of pluralism – and to systematically push the fear-mongers out of public discourse.

Spencer replies:

The claim that I “inspired” the Norway mass murderer Breivik because he cited me in his “manifesto” has become a staple of Leftist and Islamic supremacist polemic against people who are trying to defend freedom against Sharia. But it founders on the facts: never mentioned is the fact that Breivik cited many, many people, including Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson — who are just three of the many who are never blamed for his murders.

Also swept under the rug is the fact that whether he is sane or not, Breivik’s manifesto is actually quite ideologically incoherent — so far was he from being a doctrinaire counter-jihadist that he wanted to aid Hamas and ally with jihad groups.

It probably has not escaped the notice of the more observant readers that the alliance of the Left and Islam reflects the same agitprop strategies, chief among is that when the Left’s or Islam’s policies fail, or produce disasters, or cause deaths, or provoke hostility among the electorate, blame for the failure is shifted elsewhere. When Obama’s policies produce the opposite of his alleged goals, he blames Bush, when in fact Obama’s policies are a continuation of Bush’s soft-pedaled socialism. The difference between Bush’s socialism and Obama’s is that Bush’s policies were founded on an ignorance of economics, or of reality; Obama’s policies are intended to negate economics and remake reality.

When Muslims murder, torture, rape, go on rampages, or otherwise resort to violence anywhere in the world to enforce conformity to their ideology, their spokesmen in the West blame ”extremists.” But they never say that the “extremists” are wrong. The ideology is never at fault, only its finger-pointing “misunderstanders.”

Thus, as Spencer points out in his Jihad Watch column, anyone who criticizes Islam is a “misunderstander” who spreads “lies” and “fabrications” and so on about the perils of Islam and can be quick-marched to the same camp with actual jihadists. Then a leap of logic is performed and Muslim violence can be blamed on criticism of Islam. The Left and Islamists “abhor” violence, express “regret” when violence occurs, and do not blame the perpetrators, but instead the “instigators” of the violence, that is, those who exercise their freedom of speech by pointing out the evils and fraud of Islam and the consistent violence its ideology encourages and promulgates. They cluck their tongues in public over the violence sanctioned by their ideology, but chastise anyone who says the violence is part and parcel of their ideology.

They must be “pushed out of public discourse.” That is, shamed, humiliated, boycotted, mocked, picketed, and ultimately censored. The irony is that there is no “public discourse” about the nature of Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Nor does the Left and Islam wish there to be.

It is six of one, half a dozen of another. The Left and Islam both promote collectivism and universal submission and subjugation to them. Of course they are allies. With the help of its Muslim occupiers, France recently elected a blatant socialist. Has anyone in this country heard a single Muslim speak out against Obamacare? Has any British Muslim spoken out against Britain’s welfare state? No? Why not? Because to oppose collectivism one must advocate individual rights. It is individual rights that the Left and Islam wish to extinguish. They say: Control private property, or expropriate it, and it is extinguished.

In the fantasy universe of collectivists, violence is never the fault of the ideology, it is always the fault of anyone who resists submission to the ideology or criticizes it. For secular collectivists (or the Left), as with Islamists, the fundamental means to the end is force.

Read it all.

Walter Scott, The Talisman, the Crusades, Richard I of England and Saladin: Myths, Legends and History
by Ibn Warraq
Part 23
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13 / Part 14 / Part 15 / Part 16 / Part 17 / Part 18 / Part 19 / Part 20 / Part 21 / Part 22

5. Al-Qadi al-Fadil, [1131-1199] who was Saladin’s most trusted adviser and secretary of state. His despatches and letters are preserved in full or in excerpts in the works of Imad ad-Din, Abu Shama (see below), and other collections of documents. Gibb seems to have trusted al-Fadil completely: “The intimacy of the relation between them can be felt in the loyal and affectionate letters addressed by al-Qadi al-Fadil to Saladin, especially during the Third Crusade, sustaining him in times of adversity and even admonishing him on occasions. While, therefore, the historian will treat with all necessary caution, the more elaborate public despatches addressed by al-Qadi al-Fadil on Saladin’s behalf to the caliphs and other potentates, yet the consistency with which certain themes and ideas are expressed in them must be taken to reflect some at least of Saladin’s real purposes and ideals”. [1]

Abu Shama [1203-1267] was a philologist and anthologist, whose "The Book of the Two Gardens [Kitab ar-Raudatain] concerning the the two dynasties of Saladin and Nur ad-Din, brings together valuable material, for most of which we also have his original sources. He quotes (giving his references) from Ibn Qalanisi, Imad ad-Din, Baha ad-Din, Ibn Al-Athir and others. More important are his quotations from the lost Shi‘ite historian of Aleppo, Ibn Abi Taiy, among other things the author of a biography of Saladin. The Two Gardens also reproduces numerous documents from the Sultan’s chancellery, most of them from the chief secretary [Qadi al-Fadil], individual collections of whose letters also exist.” [2]

C. HISTORIANS OF SALADIN.

C.1 STANLEY LANE-POOLE [1854-1931] worked in the Coin Department of the British Museum for eighteen years, and compiled a fourteen volume catalogue on Oriental coins. He was also employed by the Egyptian government on archaeological research in Cairo. His uncle Edward William Lane [1801-1876] was already famous by 1860s for his An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1860). Lane-Poole helped complete Lane’s monumental Arabic-English Lexicon, which had got as far as the letter qāf (the twenty-first letter) when Lane died. Lane-Poole himself was to write several books on Egypt and Cairo, such as Studies in a Mosque (1883) and History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901). Between 1898 and 1904, Lane-Poole was professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin. He published Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1898 [3] in the Heroes of the Nations Series.

Lane-Poole’s last chapter in his Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is an important survey of “Saladin in Romance” or Saladin in European literature from the Middle Ages onwards. I shall return to Lane-Poole’s account of the Medieval romances later in this essay, but here I should like to look at his assessment of Walter Scott’s The Talisman, a work he clearly admired, despite its historical inaccuracies, which Lane-Poole spells out in detail:

[1] H.A.R.Gibb. The Life of Saladin. Foreword by Robert Irwin. London: Saqi Books, 2006, [Ist Edn. Oxford University Press, 1973], pp.161-62.
[2] Francesco Gabrieli. Arab Historians of the Crusades, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984 [Ist Italian Edn. 1957; Ist English Edn. 1969] pp. xxx-xxxi.
[3] Stanley Lane-Poole. Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. London: G.P. Putnam, 1898.

To be continued.

Ibn Warraq is the author of numerous books, including Why the West Is Best and Why I Am Not A Muslim.