Anti-dhimmitude: Judge kills CAIR's suit against ex-Rep. Ballenger

CAIR finally loses one. Good thing Ballenger didn't retain Rich Lowry as his lawyer. "Judge kills suit against ex-Rep. Ballenger," from the Charlotte Observer, with thanks to Daniel Pipes:

WASHINGTON - A federal judge has dismissed a $2 million lawsuit filed against former Rep. Cass Ballenger by an American Muslim civil rights group for linking it to terrorists during an October 2003 interview with The Charlotte Observer.

In a seven-page decision released Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon agreed with the Hickory Republican's argument that he made the comments "in the scope of his employment as a federal employee" and that the suit should be converted into one against the U.S. government.

And because a doctrine called sovereign immunity bars most suits against the federal government, Leon threw out the case.

In the newspaper interview, Ballenger blamed the breakup of his 50-year marriage partly on the stress of living near the group's Capitol Hill headquarters, which was so close to the Capitol that he and his wife worried "they could blow the place up."

He also called the Council on American-Islamic Relations "the fundraising arm for Hezbollah."

In its lawsuit, CAIR said that these and other comments by Ballenger damaged its reputation and good name.

But it ain't over:

Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR's national legal director, said Wednesday that the group plans to appeal the ruling, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Young Muslim immigrant killers deported from Denmark, leftists mourn

From the Norwegian Kafir's superb Fjordman blog:

One of the men, Hizir Kilic, was born in Denmark, while his cousin Ferhat Kilic came to the country when he was three. The two men were minors at the time of the crime, and had therefore not yet become Danish citizens, since anyone born to immigrant parents in Denmark must be at least 18 before requesting to become a national. Two young criminals have been sentenced to deportation to Turkey, after killing an Italian tourist in Copenhagen in 2003. Two teenagers were sentenced to deportation by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, for murdering an Italian tourist in Copenhagen's Nørrebro quarter in 2003. The cousins Hizir and Ferhat Kilic were 16 and 17 years old when they assaulted and stabbed a young Italian traveller, Antonio Currà, and left him to die on the street.

The court sentenced them to 10 and 8 years in prison for the murder, and to be deported to the country of their
birth, Turkey, even though they had lived almost all their lives in Denmark.

'The deportation is ten times worse than the prison sentence,' Hizir Kilic told the court last week. 'I won't be able to go to Turkey and survive.' The cousins' defense attorneys tried in vain to convince the court's seven judges, that the boys' young age and strong roots in Denmark should exempt them from new laws, which allow courts to have criminal immigrants deported.

And here is a translation of some Danish leftist reactions, courtesy Faith Freedom:

By Christina Rosendahl, film director:

"Dear Hizir and Ferhat,

You guys did a dirty trick. You stabbed a young Italian man, someone almost like yourselves. He was a living human being. Now he is dead. You have to go to jail and you guys have deserved that, of course. But I want to apologize to the both of you on behalf of Denmark. Sorry about the arrogant and narrow-minded vindictiveness that you meet in the Danish streets. Sorry about all those Danes who think it is all right to send you guys out of the country although you have been given a gigantic prison sentence.

Although you have lived here all your life and even are born here, went to school, made friends and have been petty criminals and even smoked pot (as they claim on the radio), there seems to be different rules for you than for other criminals.

Sorry about all those Danes who gladly are being interviewed on TV or on the radio who want to 'honor' us all with their home-spun philosophy: »We really cannot accept people killing each other in the streets « or »it is their own fault, we want them out of the country «. Thank god I'm not the only one who feel sick about the Danish rhetorics of fear. You guys are going to prison and you have deserved that. How I had hoped that the Danish community would take responsibility and give you lots of help: Psychiatric help, psychological help, help at school, more financial help and helping you guys knowing how to kill time in stead of killing people; help getting an education, getting work and a family eventually. And more hope for the future as well as self-esteem. Sorry about those Danes who live in a different century. I hope the best for you. Even though you did do a dirty trick!"

The Death of France's "Multiculturalism"

The great Nidra Poller, writing in Frontpage (thanks to EPG):

October 2000, Place de la République in Paris: the first of what would become an endless series of ambiguous pro-Palestinian demonstrations welcomed the snake of anti-Semitism into its heart. "Death to the Jews" rang out loud and clear that day as policemen stood by, journalists watched with apparent indifference, and the mass of demonstrators thronged and thrust as demonstrators do.

8 March 2005, Place de la République: a thousand young toughs pierced the heart of a student demonstration and unleashed their rage, not against the police but against the "privileged classes" in their own age group--the protesting lycée students. Operating in gangs of ten and twenty, the casseurs (smashers) in brand-name sweat suits swept through the march like pirate ships, zeroed in on their prey, attacked from behind. They threw kids to the ground, gratuitously beating and kicking them, snatching handbags, ipods, wallets, and cell phones. Riot police looking like robots with their thick leather padding stood by as the predators cut through the crowd wielding knives, clubs, and tear gas bombs....

Read it all.

Muslims plan to disrupt Temple Mount visit

From World Net Daily, with thanks to EPG:

JERUSALEM -- A plan by a grassroots Jewish organization to bring 10,000 Jews to the Temple Mount has prompted an Islamic group allegedly connected to Hamas to instruct followers to disrupt the visit, a high-ranking Jerusalem police official told WND.

Revava, a group with the stated mission of ''restoring self-esteem to the state of Israel by restoring national pride and values,'' has planned the April 10 event at the heavily restricted Temple Mount to spark Israeli dialogue about reclaiming the holy site from its Islamic custodians.

The Jerusalem police last week told WND they would not allow thousands of Jews on the Temple Mount at once.

Shmulik Ben Ruby, a police spokesman, said the current government restrictions of allowing only small groups of about 30 to 50 non-Muslims to ascend the Temple Mount, the holiest site for Jews, will apply on the day of the scheduled gathering.

''We will not let so many Jews up at once. This is not the usual habits on the Temple Mount," Ben Ruby said. "We have to ensure that every Jewish group is going up in safety and will go up quietly."...

The Islamic Movement [which plans to disrupt the event] has been accused by Israel of urging its members to join Hamas, and was blamed for participation in several terror attacks, including a car bombing in September 1999. Many Movement members allegedly recruited by Hamas in the West Bank have been arrested in recent years....

Ben Ruby told WND although Jews are barred from the Mount in large groups, the Israeli police would allow thousands of Muslims to ascend.

Latinas Embrace Islam

Another article about Latinas converting to Islam, in Florida this time. From the TBO News, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

TAMPA - As a child, Amy Perez attended different Christian churches, praying at Catholic Masses and singing at Baptist revivals. But she never felt satisfied with the answers those faiths provided to her questions.

At 12, Perez left Webb Middle School for the Universal Academy of Florida, a Muslim school in Tampa, because she did not like the cliques and social scene at Webb. And she wanted to learn more about Islam.

Perez read about the Muslim faith and asked her classmates questions.
After much research and contemplation, Perez took the Shahada, the declaration of faith to become Muslim.

She was 14.

``I finally found peace,'' said Perez, 22, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. ``A peace that I had never known. Everything made sense to me. Every question I had, there was an answer for. It was truly remarkable.''

Perez's sentiments seem to resonate with U.S. Latinas, who are embracing Islam in increasing numbers. They join a faith dominated in the United States by blacks, who make up about half the estimated 6 million followers, according to a 1990 study by the American Muslim Council, the most recent available. Followers of South Asian and Arab descent constitute about 35 percent.

Numbers of Muslims are difficult to determine since faith is not included in the U.S. census, but there is abundant anecdotal evidence that more Hispanic women are adopting Islam....

Once again, still searching for a reporter with the guts to ask one of these converts what she thinks of Qur'an 4:34.

Dhimmitude at the Treasury Department

"Outside View: Terrorist Financing and Crime" is an egregious piece of ignorance and dhimmitude by Juan Carlos Zarate, U.S. assistant secretary of the Treasury Department for terrorist financing. Among other duties, Zarate is responsible for formulating and coordinating the department's counter-terrorist financing and anti-money laundering efforts. From UPI, with thanks to EPG:

Washington, DC, Over the last several years, the U.S. Treasury has established an important relationship and dialogue with the Muslim and Arab-American communities as we work together to deal with the corrosive effects and threat of terrorist financing to the United States and the Muslim and Arab worlds. This relationship is acutely necessary as we work to protect and preserve the sanctity of charitable giving and Zakat from terrorist groups like al-Qaida, which have purposely usurped the goodwill and donations of Muslims around the world to fuel their terrorist agenda.

This relationship is also critical to advancing our collective mission of promoting charitable relief and development around the world to those most in need of our assistance. The American Muslim and Arab communities are uniquely situated because they have the powers of the purse and persuasion to affect global practices and perceptions that are essential to advancing both of these goals and winning the long-term battle against terrorism.

Charitable giving is a proud and vibrant component of virtually every community in America, regardless of religion, culture or background. This is especially true in the case of Islam, where Zakat -- charity -- is a pillar of the faith. The unfortunate reality of the post-9/11 world is that terrorist groups like al-Qaida and Hamas have abused charitable organizations to finance their lethal schemes. Terrorists have created charitable fronts and have sought out corrupt or vulnerable non-profits to raise and move money, to transport operatives and materiel, to recruit and indoctrinate new members, and to support family members of operatives or deceased suicide bombers.

Yes, and nobody -- but nobody -- who gave money to these groups had any idea of where their money was going. Every last one of them was shocked, shocked!

This is the sad reality of a violent minority that has corrupted the goodwill of the donor community, and in particular, the good faith of Muslims....

If you plan on reading it all, it might be wise to keep a bottle of Pepto-Bismol handy.

Conyers helps Muslims keep official out of U.S.

From the Detroit Free Press, with thanks to EPG:

Michigan Muslims of Indian descent are hailing the U.S. government's decision to deny a prominent Indian minister entry into the country because of his intolerance toward religious minorities.

The State Department's move came after U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, sponsored a congressional resolution last week to condemn Narendra Modi, chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. In 2002, anti-Muslim riots broke out in his state after a train carrying Hindu activists was attacked. Some Muslim and human-rights groups said Modi failed to stop the violence and has allowed a culture of intolerance to take hold in the state where Mohandas Gandhi was born....

Hmmm. Modi didn't start any violence...he just "failed to stop" the violence actually started by Muslims -- and he's the "intolerant" one.

Conyers said Thursday that he was urged to action by the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C....

Well well, these are heady days for CAIR. We might as well elect Ibrahim Hooper President and get it over with.

The decision brought protests from some Indian Americans and the Indian government, which asked the United States to reconsider, noting that Modi was a democratically elected official and should have been given the respect afforded elected officials....

"I personally call him the Hitler of Gujarat," Quayid Saifee, a computer consultant from Rochester Hills born in India, said Thursday....

Conyers' resolution, introduced March 15, was supported by U.S. Reps. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania and Trent Franks of Arizona, both Republicans. They also expressed concern about Modi's treatment of Christians.

In the resolution, Conyers noted that the Indian Supreme Court had admonished Modi for his inaction in the 2002 riots.

Conyers said he hopes the move won't adversely affect America's relations with India. "We consider ourselves allies of India," Conyers said Thursday. "We just have this one problem."

We sure do.

Arabs, Muslims being wooed by NJ governor candidates

From AP, with thanks to EPG:

NEWARK -- From a living room festooned with dozens of elephants in all shapes and sizes, Sherine El-Abd is busily raising money for gubernatorial candidate Bret Schundler, whose call for lower property taxes she loves.

It's only March, but the Edison woman, an Egyptian immigrant and Republican organizer, is already planning candidate forums for October.

In Denville, Aref Assaf is supporting U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, warming to his willingness to include more Arabs and Muslims in his administration and to fight what the Democrat considers the excesses of the USA Patriot Act.

Great. Any word from Assaf on what he plans to do to eradicate elements of the jihad ideology from the American Muslim community?

Three and a half years after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Arab-American and Muslim communities are important to candidates for the New Jersey governor's office. The growing political organization -- and prodigious fund-raising potential -- of Arabs and Muslims in New Jersey make them an appealing source of votes and campaign cash.

Candidates are already speaking at Arab-American dinners, taking out congratulatory ads in souvenir journals and asking for money from a group almost giddy with its newfound political influence.

"We are becoming players," said Assaf, a Palestinian activist and president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee's New Jersey chapter. "It's a recognition of the fact that the Arab-American community is coming center stage on the American political stage. We are no longer a liability; we are an asset."

With an estimated 250,000 Arab-Americans and an additional non-Arab Muslim population of about 450,000 in New Jersey, these communities could prove decisive in a close election, said Magdy Mahmoud, president of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations....

A ridiculous and ominous decision in Britain

Could this be National Review's last article critical of the creeping Islamization of Europe? "Wrong from Head to Toe: A ridiculous and ominous decision in Britain," by Theodore Dalrymple in the March 28 issue of NR, via The Manhattan Institute, with thanks to EPG:

In the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgment than that recently given by Lord Justice Brooke of the British Court of Appeal. It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization.

A young Muslim girl, Shabina Begum, who attended a state school in Luton, England, four-fifths of whose pupils were Muslim, started a legal battle when she was 13 to be allowed the jilbab, a form of dress that leaves only her face and hands exposed. She was almost certainly put up to this by her older brother, a supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Muslim party that seeks to establish a Muslim world state, that believes democracy is blasphemy, and that denies that the Western citizenship of Muslims is real or meaningful, or confers any privileges or imposes any duties.

The school in question had, in fact, worked out a dress code for Muslim girls that satisfied almost everyone. It was extremely accommodating: Various forms of modest dress were allowed, including certain types of scarf. But, after two years of accepting the dress code, Shabina Begum suddenly started to appear in her jilbab. The school demanded that she go home and change into a costume that accorded with the dress code, but she refused. Eventually she brought a case, supported and possibly funded by the Hizb ut-Tahrir, under the U.K.'s Human Rights Act. She claimed that the school was denying her right to an education.

She lost the case, and also an appeal, but won at the last hurdle. The Guardian reported that after her victory, she said she "could scream with happiness."

When they heard of her victory, many Muslim women around the country must have wanted to scream with quite different emotions, despair and rage prominent among them. For Lord Justice Brooke's ruling, that Shabina Begum's human rights had been denied, and that she had been discriminated against illegally on religious grounds, displayed a complete and invincible ignorance of the social context of the case. Lord Justice Brooke saw no evil, heard no evil, and felt no evil. In effect, therefore, he was giving succor to those Muslim men who still abuse women in a medieval fashion.

Regardless of whether Shabina Begum acted in this case without duress and of her own free will, which seems to me highly unlikely given that the traditional place of Muslim women is not the public spotlight, the fact is that substantial numbers of young Muslim women are virtually enslaved in Britain; they grow up in what can only be called a totalitarian environment. I know this from what my patients have told me. They are not allowed out of the house except under escort, and sometimes not even then; they are allowed no mail or use of the telephone; they are not allowed to contradict a male member of the household, and are automatically subject to his wishes; it is regarded as quite legitimate to beat them if they disobey in the slightest. Their brothers are often quite willing to attack anyone who speaks to the women in any informal context. They are forced to wear modes of dress that they do not wish to wear. Their schooling is quite often deliberately interrupted, so that they are not infected by Western ideas of personal liberty; ambitious for a career, they are kept at home as prisoners and domestic slaves.

Worst of all are the forced marriages to which they are subjected. They are taken by their parents, often at a young age, "back" to Pakistan, where they are told that they are getting married, often to a first cousin. Their fathers regard their British passports with all the respect Hitler accorded to treaties. The young women have possession of their passports only fleetingly, as they pass through immigration. Thereafter, they are confiscated by the father and held as ransom against their good behavior, which in this, as in every other, instance means doing as they are told.

If by any chance they should object to their marriage, they are mercilessly beaten and in some cases killed. All the young women who are taken to Pakistan are aware of such cases: Like the shooting of Admiral Byng, such cases are committed pour encourager les autres. Very occasionally, the parents do not even transport the recalcitrant girls to Pakistan to kill them: They do it in England. Recently in the prison in which I work, I met a young man of Pakistani origin who was afraid of the other young men of Pakistani origin in the prison. Why? Because he had previously given important evidence in court in a case in which a girl who had refused to marry the husband selected for her by her parents was murdered by her father and brothers. The other young men of Pakistani origin thought the man who had testified was a traitor to their religion and culture; for in fact it is a religion and culture very convenient to the young men, whom it supplies with a domestic slave and mother of children while they can entertain themselves elsewhere. The whole evil system would break down if any of the young women were allowed their freedom, which is why the men must stick together. Like any form of totalitarianism, it is strong but brittle.

I have spoken to Muslims about this, and they tell me that what I am
describing is customary or cultural practice, not a religious requirement. I am not scholar enough to know whether they are right, but it is certainly customary practice over a large area of the earth's surface. And so long as this practice, be it religious or customary, is widespread, the word of no Muslim girl who claims to want to wear increasingly "modest" dress can be taken at her word, any more than a public figure in the USSR could have been taken as expressing his own personal opinion. If the judge was aware of this, he took no notice of it....

Read it all.

"Islamic law has been there since it was passed on from Allah to the Prophet Mohammed, it cannot be re-written now"

Sharia alert. As I have pointed out many times, this is what makes reform in Islam virtually impossible: when reformers seek to set aside practices such as polygamy, hardliners see it as a transgression of Allah's will. "Ugandan Muslims March in Defense of Polygamy," from Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:

KAMPALA - Hundreds of Ugandan Muslims demonstrated in the capital on Tuesday to protest a proposed restriction on polygamy they see as an affront to their religion.

Under Islamic law, a Muslim man is allowed to take up to four wives, as long as he can provide for all of them equally.

But a domestic relations bill being debated by Uganda's parliament says Ugandan Muslims should have to seek approval from their first wife before marrying again.

"Islamic law has been there since it was passed on from Allah to the Prophet Mohammed, it cannot be re-written now," one of the protesters, Bukulu Haruna, told Reuters....

"Other cultures want to overcome Islam, but we will not allow it. People are willing to die so that no one will trample over them," one demonstrator said.

Human rights campaigners in Uganda have called for polygamy to be banned....

"God gave us guidelines on how marriage should be handled. Telling us how many women we should marry makes the bill ridiculous and infringes on our freedom of worship," Kampala district Khadi Sheikh Silman Ndilangwa told reporters.

The domestic relations bill, first seen by parliament last year, also
includes proposals on the scrapping of bride-price, one of the requirements of a Muslim marriage....

Fitzgerald: In Turkey, Islam is permanent, Kemalism transient

The nonpareil Hugh Fitzgerald on false dhimmi assumptions made about Islam vis-a-vis Turkey, and much more:

The refusal to allow the American government to use an American airbase for which a large rent is paid, the attacks by important members of the Turkish government or Parliament decrying the Americans in Iraq as "worse than the Nazis," the acceptance of Arab propaganda about the "Palestinian people" which the Turks, who controlled the relevant territory, know perfectly well is a convenient political fiction designed to disguise the relentless Arab Jihad against Israel as merely a matter of "two tiny peoples," and "compromise," and "adjustment of borders" (all nonsense, all misunderstood by those who wish to misunderstand),the inability of the Turkish secularists to properly defend aginst the ruthlessness and guile employed by the Islamic forces in Turkey that are busy throwing off the constraints on Islam that Ataturk had so carefully constructed and deployed -- all of this should cause a few grim conclusions to be drawn in Washington.

To wit:

1) Islam is permanent, Kemalism transient. Islam will always be a threat, as long as it has not been so discredited, so weakened, so tied down, that it cannot again escape from its box.

The lesson of Turkey is that eternal vigilance on behalf of secularism is necessary, and those who have been the beneficiaries of such secularism are foolish not to recognize that it occasionally requires military force (that of the Turkish Army) and constant reinforcement of legal measures taken against the outward expression of Islam as a political and social force, to keep Islam in its place, since it cannot otherwise be dealt with or transmogrified into something less menacing.

2) The Cold War led to some assumptions about Islam which were false. The Americans did not know anything about Islam (and still that government knows very little). But they knew that Islam was incompatible with Communism, and that was good enough for them. They knew that the Turks they were likely to meet, the members of the Defense Ministry in Ankara, were stout fellows, secular, just the kind you could trust. In the same way, they "knew" that Iraq under "strongman" (that was his heroic epithet, until his mutilated corpse was dragged through the streets of Baghdad following the 1958 coup) Nuri al-Said, or Nuri Pasha, would stoutly be on "our" side and was therefore a linchpin in that ill-conceived CENTO (which died a natural death after that 1958 coup). They "knew" that the Shah was Our Man in Teheran, a "pillar of stability" (as Jimmy Carter called him, in making a toast to his regime). They "knew" that those Sandhurst-educated, ramrod-straight, delightly, almost Terry-Thomasly mustachioed Pakistani generals were, like those Turkish generals, "our sort," and could be trusted to help us in the world-wide Campaign Against Communism, and so much more trustworthy than those slithery Indian leftists, with that Krishna Menon, and that pious Fabian-tainted Jawaharlal Nehru, still smelling of bouquets of flowers that bedecked him at Bandung.

And every single time the Americans have made an investment in a Muslim country, a Muslim regime, the good faith of Muslim people, the permanence and the unhindered use of a military base put up at great expense, by the Americans, they have been disappointed. The Moroccan base, the Wheelus Air Base outside Tripoli, the bases in Saudi Arabia -- all gone, or going. The hopes for permanent bases in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Qatar are the fantasies of people who would save themselves a lot of time, and the taxpayers a lot of money, and the Infidel world a lot of heartache, if they only realized this.

It is too late to do what should and could have been done back in 1978 -- demanding that Sadat allow America to stay in the Sinai, both to guarantee the peace and to take over those Israeli-built airbases in a region smack dab in the center of the Middle East, yet largely unpopulated by hostile locals (and with friendly Israelis nearby for R and R, and medical care, and supplies). It is not too late to figure out that wherever there is Islam, sooner or later there will always be hostility to Infidels, and the more powerful those Infidels, the more unwilling those Infidels are to bend to the dictates of Islam, the more hostility there will be.

3) The lesson of Turkey should be applied to Iran. Within a year, or two, or three, it is possible that the hideous Islamic Republic of Iran will fall. And it will be followed by a government reflecting the widespread disgust, in Iran, with Islam as a political force, and even with Islam, period. There may be those who will publicly embrace Zoroastrianism, not out of deep belief but out of a desire to be something, anything, other than Muslim -- and why not the original, pre-Islamic belief that has the sheen of Persian history about it, in the same way that Firdowsi is treated as a nationalist hero for helping, linguistically, to prevent the arabization of Iran and the disappearance of Farsi.

But again, no one should assume that Iran is permanently de-Islamized. Islam will come back, inevitably. And that is why Iran must, whether or not it seems to favor Islam, has to have its nuclear project removed -- because Islam is a permanent threat to Infidels, and no country, with a history of Islamic rule, can be trusted to have permanently put paid to Islam. In Turkey, after 80 years of a systematic attempt to constrain and weaken Islam, Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims have come back, in a big way. That is the assumption that Infidels must make about Iran as well.

In other words, there can not be any let up in wariness, no let up in what should be a relentless and imaginative campaign to exploit all fissures, all internecine warfare, all resentments, within dar al-Islam. Jihadists have carefully exploited such pre-existing mental conditions as antisemitism and anti-Americanism, not least to split asunder the two parts of the West -- Europe and America.

Two can play that game. But the Infidel side has not even begun. If it had, it would be using Iraq as a point to exploit the Sunni-Shi'a fissure, instead of attempting, crazily, to patch things up and make sure the Shi'a do not respond. And Iraq is the perfect place as well, by promoting an independent Kurdistan, to begin to let other non-Arab Muslims (such as Berbers in North Africa) begin to have hope that the Arab supremacist ideology within Islam can, in fact, be overcome.

These are both worth pursuing. But the spirit of geopolitics, grand strategy, the kind of thing that would have been obvious to any schoolboy in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan or Sir Halford Mackinder, is now regarded as unseemly, not the kind of thing nice graduate students taking solemn seminars in "International Relations" at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, or the Georgetown Foreign Service Institute, or the Johns Hopkins Center for International Whateveritis, are likely to do -- it smacks of Olden Days, and wallmaps with pins on them, and mad generals and crazed strategists, when we all know that the world has changed utterly, and we all need to find ways of Getting to Yes, in the time-honored manner of -- oh, I don't know, Roger Fisher or Tariq Ramadan or Rodney King or Kofi Annan or the "International Community" or the Easter Bunny, it hardly matters.

Why not?

Dhimmitude at the Wall Street Journal: the Journal touts MPAC

The Wall Street Journal has shown some disturbing dhimmi tendencies in the past, but it really takes the cake today with a puff piece by George Melloan on the Muslim Public Affairs Council. (WSJ is a paid subscription site, so no link.) In it, Melloan says:

Muhammad was a different kind of prophet also in the sense that he was temporal ruler as well, building his political base in Medina and then conquering the Arab city that had once rejected him, Mecca. After his death, in June 632 by traditional account, Arabs rapidly built an empire stretching from the gates of the Mediterranean to the far side of India, spreading Islam as they went. On the whole, they were tolerant of Christians and Jews in the lands they conquered, acknowledging that all three religions claimed the same origins....

Here's an antidote to that old chestnut. But the WSJ has not come precisely to praise Islamic tolerance, but to sing the glories of the Muslim Public Affairs Council:

A group called the Muslim Public Affairs Council is trying to promote better relations between Muslims and law-enforcement agencies. To that end it has launched its own counterterrorism and civil-rights campaign, working with imams at mosques, Muslim community leaders, law-enforcement agencies and the media. Their credo: "It is our duty as American Muslims to protect our country and to contribute to its betterment."

The executive director of MPAC is Salam al-Marayati, a Baghdad-born former chemical engineer long engaged in Democratic politics in Los Angeles. He and two colleagues, Ahmed Younis and Edina Lekovic, dropped by the Journal's New York office last week to talk about their project. Ms. Lekovic, a Montenegrin by ancestry, is the group's spokeswoman. Mr. Younis, national director, has studied in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Cuba. He wrote a book titled "Voir Dire (Speak the Truth)," discussing the blending of American culture and Islamic values, while studying law at Washington and Lee University.

Mr. al-Marayati is relatively upbeat about the status of Muslims in the U.S., particularly in comparison to Europe. "In Europe, they tend to become 'ghettoized' because they are never really accepted," he said. In the U.S., Muslims are more easily assimilated and find it easier to work within the system....

Mr. al-Marayati apparently has had his moments of alienation as well, judging from a 1999 article by Daniel Pipes, a frequent critic of Islamists, that called him an extremist. But in a speech at the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism last fall, the MPAC director asserted: "We reject using Islam as an instrument of political change."

Six years of the kind of history the world has logged since 1999 can change a man. The MPAC group clearly sees it as the wisest choice for American Muslims not only to come to terms with the society of which they are a part, but to actively participate in the struggle against religious extremism. They are well aware of their vulnerability to anti-Muslim sentiments and of the opportunities the liberal U.S. political system offers them for combating that danger....

I once had a memorable exchange with Salam Al-Maryati on the Michael Medved Show, and I wrote this about MPAC in an article refuting their all-out attack on Steve Emerson:

For months now, MPAC has been touting its new “National Anti-Terrorism Campaign” (NATC), garnering uncritical publicity in the media and even praise from government officials. The Campaign’s glossy brochure proclaims that “It is our duty as American Muslims to protect our country and to contribute to its betterment.” But like the old Whip Inflation Now campaign of the Ford Administration, the NATC is long on style and short on substance. It recommends, for example, that “All activities within the mosque and Islamic centers should be authorized by legitimate, acknowledged leadership…” That sounds great until one realizes that if a mosque is involved in terrorist activity, it is most likely with the complicity of mosque leadership — as per the Naqshbandi Sufi leader Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani’s 1999 testimony before a State Department Open Forum that eighty percent of American mosques were controlled by extremists.[1] The rest of MPAC’s recommendations are in the same vein, appearing to be more concerned about misbehavior by non-Muslim law enforcement officials in mosques than about the possibility of terrorist activity in those mosques. WIN buttons are one thing, but the consequences of false advertising by MPAC are much more deadly. Now with the publication of this new report, MPAC’s counterterrorism agenda seems to boil down to one substantive point: Steve Emerson, not Islamic terrorism, is the enemy....

Of course, when the MPAC report charges that “Emerson’s lack of precision leads him to conflate legitimate organizations that can help America and secure the homeland with others that are neither genuinely American nor transparent,” it becomes clear why MPAC is in such a froth about Emerson: because of what he knows about MPAC itself. In American Jihad, Emerson notes that when Abdurrahman Alamoudi of the American Muslim Council, who is now serving a 23-year prison sentence for a terrorism financing conviction, encouraged the Muslim crowd at an October 2000 rally cosponsored by MPAC to declare their support of the jihad terror groups Hamas and Hizballah, “MPAC’s Political Advisor, Mahdi Bray, stood directly behind Alamoudi and was seen jubilantly exclaiming his support for these two deadly terrorist organizations.” This was just three weeks after Bray “coordinated and led a rally where approximately 2,000 people congregated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.” Emerson reports that “at one point during the rally, Mahdi Bray played the tambourine as one of the speakers sang, while the crowd repeated: ‘Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is calling us, let’s all go into jihad, and throw stones at the face of the Jews [sic].’”[18]

There is much more. Emerson’s Investigative Project has documented MPAC’s indefatigable and consistent opposition to the war on terror; its magazine The Minaret has dismissed key anti-terror operations as part of “[t]he American crusade against Islam and Muslims.”[19] Emerson has called attention to the fact that in a book called In Fraternity: A Message to Muslims in America, coauthor Hassan Hathout, who has served as MPAC’s President, is identified as “a close disciple of the late Hassan al-Banna of Egypt.”[20] MPAC’s magazine The Minaret spoke of Hassan Hathout’s closeness to al-Banna in a 1997 article: “My father would tell me that Hassan Hathout was a companion of Hassan al-Banna…Hassan Hathout would speak of al-Banna with such love and adoration; he would speak of a relationship not guided by politics or law but by a basic sense of human decency.”[21]

This is noteworthy because Hassan al-Banna founded the prototypical Muslim radical group of the modern age, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood is the direct ancestor of both Hamas and Al-Qaeda. Al-Banna wrote in 1934 that “it is a duty incumbent on every Muslim to struggle towards the aim of making every people Muslim and the whole world Islamic, so that the banner of Islam can flutter over the earth and the call of the Muezzin can resound in all the corners of the world: God is greatest [Allahu akbar]! This is not parochialism, nor is it racial arrogance or usurpation of land.”[22] He told his followers: “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.”[23]

Do Hassan Hathout and MPAC also believe in “a Qur’an and a sword”? What Emerson and the Investigative Project have uncovered about them suggests at very least that the group should receive serious scrutiny. The fact that MPAC has singled out Emerson for such a focused and singular attack only lends credence to these suspicions. For how better to obscure the message than to discredit the messenger?

It is disheartening to see the Wall Street Journal putting on the blinkers and falling for MPAC.

Dubai: Teachers object to book showing Jewish children

Why? Because the book was called "Friends Forever," and thus seemed to suggest that Muslims should become friends to Jews. From the Khaleej Times, with thanks to Teri:

DUBAI — Education authorities here have promised to review a book taught in an international private school that features a photograph of two Jewish children sporting plaited hair and yarmulke.

Dr Obaid Butti Al Mohiri, the Director of Curriculums Centre at the Ministry of Education, said he would order the withdrawal of the book for primary Class I of the Dubai International School if the complaints raised were found genuine.

Several teachers of the school telephoned Khaleej Times, complaining against the picture, captioned ‘We play together; we stick together’, featured in the book Friends Forever. The teachers said that of all the pictures in the book, the students reacted sharply to only this picture.

"O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. He among you who taketh them for friends is (one) of them. Lo! Allah guideth not wrongdoing folk." — Qur'an 5:51

West has little clue about Islam, says don

Muhammad Abu Layla plays us for dummies, or dhimmis. It would be refreshing if he would bother to explain to his fellow Muslims, the jihad terrorists around the world, how they have misunderstood Islam. From the Star Online, with thanks to Nicolei:

KOTA KINABALU: Islam continues to be one of the most misunderstood religions due to its misrepresentation in the Western media, a prominent Islamic scholar said.

Al-Azhar University professor Muhammad Abu Layla said the religion followed by 1.3 billion people had constantly been wrongly portrayed by the western media.

“It is unfortunate when we hear that Islam encourages terrorism,” he said in his talk titled “The Misunderstood Religion” during a special session at the International CEO conference here.

Prof Muhammad said even the term jihad had been misunderstood, as the common perception of it was that of an armed struggle.

“Jihad has never meant to hold the sword. It is instead to initiate efforts to be peaceful, to protect the weak,” he added.

Prof Muhammad said those who propagate violence in the name of Islam were only twisting it to suit their needs.

Let's see. Jihad was never meant to hold the sword, eh? Yet there are over a hundred verses in the Qur’an that exhort believers to wage jihad against unbelievers. “O Prophet! Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell, an evil refuge indeed” (Sura 9:73). “Strive hard” in Arabic is jahidi, a verbal form of the noun jihad. This striving was to be on the battlefield: “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Qur’an 47:4). This is emphasized repeatedly: “O ye who believe! Fight the unbelievers who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you: and know that Allah is with those who fear Him” (Qur’an 9:123).

“Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful” (Qur’an 9:5). The “poor-due” in this verse is zakat, which is a central obligation for Muslims. Thus the verse is saying that if the “idolaters” become Muslims, leave them alone.

Jews and Christians were to be fought along with “idolaters”: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).

Paradise is guaranteed to those who “slay and are slain” for Allah: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth” (Qur’an 9:111).

One may attempt to spiritualize such verses, but there is no doubt from the historical record that Muhammad meant them literally.

Google deletes Hamas ad

An update of this story from Ynet News, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Google has removed the Hamas-funded advertisement that linked to the website of the terror organization's military wing Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, following Ynet’s inquiry into the matter.

Internet surfers who entered the word “Hamas” in Arabic in the Google search engine, viewed, in addition to the search results, an AdWord message that linked directly to the website of the organization’s military faction Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades....

Google Spokeswoman Debbie Frost said the advertisement was a breach of the search engine’s policy and was therefore removed.

"Since 9/11 we have to bend over backwards for them"

Al-Muhajiroun in New York. "Defending Terrorism: Interview with Kristine Withers," from the Global Politician, with thanks to Nicolei:

Kristine Withers claims to have been assaulted by the Islamic Thinkers' Society, a group she says is likely tied to Al-Muhajiroun, which is a radical Islamic group that is believed to have worked with Al-Qaeda. The following is our conversation about ongoing threats to her from the group, and charges that have been brought against her by the group.

Ryan Mauro: First of all, Kristine, what got you involved in looking at the activities of these Islamic protesters you are warning about?

Kristine Withers: I noticed a group of Muslim men, demonstrating against the War on Terror and advocating the pro-fundamentalist Islam view, about 6 months after 9/11/01. I could not help notice them because they were demonstrating a block from me, which is also a busy commercial area for the Islamic-Hindu merchants, in an area I frequent because of the stores and transportation (to get to the subway). They had signs showing the 9/11 tragedy and were handing out brochures advocating fundamentalist Islamic. Upon research, based upon their literature, I found out they were connected with the Al-Muhajiroun group. At that time their brochure contained web links to that fundamentalist websites. I notified the NYPD anti terrorist taskforce, and this group disappeared.

Then around late May of 2003 I noticed the same people were out demonstrating again in the same area. They also knew who I was. I again notified the NYPD, and was told they had a permit. I went to my councilmen, and was ignored. Little by little their space grew with more and more signs, Television and stereo equipment. The crowds around them started to grow. I observed them to gain more information, but that let to verbal sparring with them. I admit it was a bad tactic, but I was genuinely offended that the people that were declaring war against my country, and western civilization, were there to recruit potential terrorist.

RM: Can you describe how you've been threatened and in your view, treated unfairly?

KW: My friend and I were walking our dogs, when we heard some loud voices. As we walked the voices became clearer, then we saw the a group of Islamic men demonstration. They had a loud amplifiers, they were about 3 feet tall, that was blaring out something in Arabic. The reason this caught my attention was because the week before, when I spoke to my State Senator, he informed me that they were not permitted to have sound equipment. I gave my dogs to my friend so she could take them home. I crossed the street to call the police, then I went over to the group, to inform them that I believed they were overstepping their permit, because of the sound system and because they were on both sides of the street. As I crossed to them, I observed their placards on the street (typical al-Muhajiroun stuff : US the real terrorist, oppose the war on terror, God hates the US because they have Homosexuals, restoration of the Caliphate, pictures of Abu Gharab, 9/11 pictures saying it was justified, etc..) Anyway I knocked down one of the signs, (the unaltered abu Gharab pictures, which showed naked people), next thing I know I was engaged in a verbal yelling match with them, they started threatening me and knocked me down. During this period (approx.. 20 mins before the police arrived) I turned down the rest of the signs, and held off a growing angry crowd of mad Muslims. They were telling me how wicked America and I was. A member of the group was also telling me, "we will kill you", and "next time we will get all of NYC". A man punched me in the face, knocking of my glasses. These were not just a group of individuals. These people (that started the demonstration) were men in their 20's who were radicalized, mostly from the Mid-East, who were controlled by one elder man. They had great discipline that you would not see in just a mob. They were also videotaping this whole incident, with the elder man shouting "film this, it will get us more recruits." Any way the police came finally. After a few minutes finding out about the incident, they took me away alone. This even after I informed them that I was assaulted, a fact which was verified by a few witnesses. When I asked the officer why they did not bring the people who assaulted me in, I was told that "since 9/11 we have to bend over backwards for them."

Since that incident I have had other run-ins with them, been assaulted and threatened, but each time the police take me away.

RM: What group was behind the protests and what leads you to suspect them of being tied to radical Islamists?

KW: The group calls itself the The Islamic Thinkers Society. They fly the Al-Muhajiroun, and use Al-Muhajiroun tracts.

RM: And what is so significant about their ties to Al-Muhajiroun?

KW: Al-Muhajiroun is a group which advocates the control of society based on the rule of a Universal Caliphate, and ruled by Islamic law, the shiara. As a member said "we do not seek to coexist with other religions in America, we seek to dominate them". They want to see Islamic rule imposed worldwide. In their propaganda they portray Islam as an ideology, and an alternative to Democracy. They advocate the advancement of their goal by violence and terrorism. One of their members were a part of the team that conducted the 9/11 attacks. They also advocate the self imposition of Sharia in neighborhoods where they are the majority....Another reason that I find Al-Muhajiroun
dangerous is their ability to recruit new adherents, especially among the youth whom they aim their recruitment at. They accomplish this by knowing how to manipulate the system, and take advantage of political correctness. This allows them to recruit openly, while they form a core of true believers in their closed meetings to be used for their Jihad.

RM: Can you explain the reaction of law enforcement to your information?

KW: I cannot explain the reaction of the police, which is what I would describe as apathy and fear. I cannot explain why they would allow a group, which has links to groups which killed fellow officers, to recruit and propagandize our enemies cause. The only logical reasons, in my opinion, would be one of three. First: fear of lawsuits. This precinct (the 115th) was almost sued by a group of Muslims, because they treated the Koran with disrespect when they arrested illegal vendors. Second: political correctness....Three: Political and Police graft. The local politician, Helen Sears, is beholding to the large indo/Muslim merchants, who are represented by the Jackson Heights Merchants Association. Either way it must be seen as corruption or incompetence. This group has such a clear connection with terrorist groups that to allow them to recruit and operate is clearly collusion. This is especially surprising from the NYPD which experienced an attack by these people....They are trying to spread their Islamic Fundamentalist propaganda, as well as recruit members. They use the cover of religious tolerance to spread their political message....

Read it all.

Turkey Shrugs Off Success of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'

Turkey's Hitler Fan Club update, from Reuters, with thanks to all who sent this in:

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's government Monday played down soaring sales of Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") and said there were no racists in the large Muslim country.

Booksellers say "Mein Kampf," or "Kavgam" in Turkish, has featured among the top 10 bestsellers in the past two months, to the dismay of the country's small Jewish community and of the German embassy in Ankara.

Asked to comment on the phenomenon, government spokesman Cemil Cicek said: "We cannot allow prejudice against people for belonging to a certain race."

"We have never had such an attitude in our culture, nor in our history, and we do not have it now ... It's not possible for people to choose their races ... Turkish society's idea about this issue is clear. There is no racism in this country."...

Gee, Cemil, that's great. Have you ever thought about applying for the job of Iraqi Information Minister? Oh, and by the way, I suppose there are no trees in Turkey, either, eh?

Anti-Semitism has traditionally been weak in Turkey, a Muslim but secular country that has forged close security ties with Israel in recent years.

The Turkish Ottoman Empire offered refuge to Jews and other minorities fleeing persecution in Europe from the time of the Spanish Inquisition onwards.

That last paragraph is a textbook example of a beast that is slain in a volume called The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.

Political analysts say "Mein Kampf" probably reflects rising nationalism and anti-American sentiment rather than anti-Semitism or specific support for Hitler and his ideas.

Why, of course. These sweet, tolerant Turks couldn't possibly be indulging anti-Semitic, Hitlerian thoughts. After all, the Ottoman Empire was tolerant.

Many Turks are worried their country is having to make too many concessions to the European Union as it prepares for the start of long-delayed entry talks later this year.

There is also widespread anger about the U.S. occupation of neighboring Iraq.

Yeah, I can see how those things would drive people to read Mein Kampf. Why, just yesterday I was in a bookstore and I heard someone say: "I am so upset about the new earthquakes in Southeast Asia that I am going to buy a copy of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'"

The current No. 1 bestseller in Turkey, ahead of "Mein Kampf," is "Metal Storm," which depicts a U.S. invasion of the country. The Turkish hero avenges his homeland by destroying Washington with a nuclear device.

I am going to get one of my Turkish-speaking contacts to translate that one into English: it will be a sure bestseller among certain segments of the American voting public.

ADDENDUM: Andrew Bostom has just kindly sent in this illuminating background information:

• In Adolf Boehm's history of the Zionist movement, he depicts in detail the way the Young Turkish leader and Army Commander, Ahmet Cemal (Djemal), reduced the Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine by deportation and massacres, wiping out entire families of Jewish nationalist leaders. Boehm concludes: "If Palestine had not been freed by the English at the end of 1917, the Jewish Yishuv (settlement) would have been exterminated by Djemal. By the war's end, it was reduced to 55,000 souls, that is, half of the pre-war population." [Boehm, Adolf: The Zionist Movement (Die zionististsche Bewegung). Vol. 1: The Zionist Movement until the end of the World War. 2nd, enlarged ed. Tel Aviv: Hozaah Ivrith Co. Ltd., 1935, page 643 ff. Published in German.]

• The Turkish publisher Cevat Rifat Atilhan (1892-1968), who introduced the slogan "Turkey for the Turks!" was an ardent Nazi and Jew hater, and an admirer of Julius Streicher.

• The myth of the universal omnipotence of Jews is still popular in Turkey today and was publicly reiterated on August 17, 2004, in an article in the Turkish newspaper "Vakit." The author, a writer named Karakoc, praised both Hitler and Osama bin Laden for their fight against the alleged Jewish/Israeli threat.

Afghanistan: Campaign against "anti-Islamic" TV stations

Sharia alert from the Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss Department in Afghanistan: "Conservatives wage new campaign against 'anti-Islamic' TV stations," from Reporters Without Borders, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

Reporters Without Borders today called on President Hamid Karzai to take a clear and definitive public stance in support of cable television and diversity in the broadcast media in response to a new wave of pressure from conservatives, especially the Ulema Council led by supreme court president Fazl Hadi Shinwari, for a ban on "anti-Islamic" TV stations. The Ulema Council asked the government on 13 March to make the country's state and privately-owned TV stations stop broadcasting "immoral and anti-Islamic" programmes. Around 100 of the council's members meeting in Kabul singled out the only privately-owned broadcast station, Tolo TV, for criticism.

One representative of the Council told Pajhwok Afghan News agency : "We have decided this in accordance with the constitution and we have also called for a ban on telecasts which have dances as this is absolutely contrary to the Sharia." Article 3 of the constitution says no law can be contrary to the Sharia, while article 34 protects freedom of expression.

Germany: College Launches Disputed Islamic Program

From Deutsche Welle, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

Frankfurt University is the most recent German college to launch an Islamic studies program. But it's already under fire for working closely with Turkey's state religion authority....

Mehmet Emin Köktas and two professors of Protestant theology have been working on the curriculum for two years. Köktas, a Turk, is able to teach in Frankfurt thanks to an agreement signed between the university and the Turkish Presidium for Religious Affairs (Diyanet).

Criticism followed public announcement of the cooperation, alleging Turkey meant to use the new degree program to influence the training of Islamic scholars in Germany. But its supporters vehemently deny the Turkish state plays any role in the project.

Diyanet, however, is a state agency, and it represents Sunni Islam as taught in secular Turkey, a modern, non-fundamentalist form of Islam -- but that is strictly controlled by the government.

But the dean of the university's Protestant theology department, Stefan Alkier, can't understand the criticism of the cooperation with Diyanet. On the contrary, he's pleased that the deal to fund the position brought a renowned Islamic scholar to his faculty.

"We could have carried out the course of studies with our own resources, but it's much more interesting for students that we have Muslim professors," Alkier said. He stressed that Diyanet has no direct influence on who is appointed to the position.

Hmmm. It seems that American universities aren't the only ones susceptible to the lure of Islamic money.

Islamic teachers suspended for praising essay on killing Jews

But would they have been suspended, or even reprimanded, and would the principal have been shocked, shocked!, if reporters hadn't discovered this essay to begin with? From The Telegraph, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Two teachers at an Islamic school in Canada who praised a pupil's essay about killing Jews with hand grenades and machine guns have been suspended for allegedly inciting racial hatred. The pupil, who has not been identified, illustrated his creative writing assignment, which was written in Arabic, by drawing a picture of a Star of David in flames next to a machine gun. He also drew a Palestinian flag on top of the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam's holiest sites. Claims that the essay was put on display in a glass case at the entrance of the school, in Ottawa, are being investigated.

The boy's story told of a fictitious "hero", Ahmed Yassin, born in Gaza two weeks after Israel assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a co-founder of the terrorist organisation, Hamas. One passage describes how, watched by a friend called Salah, Ahmed attacks Jewish soldiers with a gun and bombs.

"Without thinking, Ahmed took his M16 machine gun and threw the bombs, and he showered the Jews; this resulted in the killing of the soldiers," the story reads. "Salah said: 'You killed them all.' Ahmed answered: 'Praise be to God'."

At the end of the story, the boy's fictitious heroes say: "We promise God and the heroes of Al-Aqsa that we will continue the path, we will continue in spite of the difficulties and the hardships until the victory of the martyrdom, we will not surrender; we will fight for the sake of God until the end."

The essay drew praise from one of the teachers of Arabic at the Abraar Islamic School, who wrote on the story: "God bless you, your efforts are good. The story of the hero Ahmed and the hero Salah is still alive. The end will be soon when God unites us all in Jerusalem to pray there." The teacher's name has not been released.

It is unclear how long the story was on display before it was brought to the attention of The Ottawa Citizen newspaper, which obtained two translations of the story before confronting the school. The headmistress, Aisha Sherazi, who is originally from Wimbledon, in south-west London, said that the school was "extremely shocked, disturbed and concerned" about the boy's story.

Google advertises Hamas

From Ynet News, with thanks to Alain:

Terror organizations are advancing their recruitment and public relations methods: Internet surfers who enter the word “Hamas” in Arabic in the Google search engine, will view, in addition to the search results, an AdWord message that links directly to the website of the organization’s military faction Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

The link also appears in a search of several other words, such as the “Gaza,” “Palestine,” “Jihad.”

This indicates that a Hamas source has paid Google, the most popular search engine on the web, for the advertisement.

Instructions for a dhimmi

"How to Influence Muslim Minds and Capture the Arab Hearts" is the title of this piece by Ibtissam Al-Bassam in Arab News (thanks to Skeetstreet), but a better title might be "How to Flatter Muslim Minds and Cater to Arab Hearts." Dina Powell is going to the Middle East, and when she's there, she better not criticize anything:

Since Arabs have little tolerance for people who criticize their faith or disparage their culture, Mrs. Powell should refrain from any criticism of the way Arab and Muslim men women and children eat, live, think or dress. She should avoid stating, or insinuating that Western values are superior to Muslim and Arab values. She should never recommend that they exchange their cherished identity for a Western one.

Smile and play the dhimmi, Ms. Powell, and you will be beloved all over the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia: Makeshift Hindu temple razed, three worshippers deported

From the Malaysian Manorama, with thanks to Twostellas:

Riyadh: Saudi religious police have destroyed a clandestine makeshift Hindu temple in an old district of Riyadh and deported three worshippers found there, a newspaper reported.

Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police, Thursday stumbled across a room converted into a temple while raiding a number of flats suspected of being used to manufacture alcohol and distribute pornographic videos, pan-Arab Al-Hayat said.

"They were surprised to find that one room had been converted into a Hindu temple," it said.

A caretaker who was found in the worshipping area ignored the religious police orders to stop performing his religious rituals, the paper added. He was deported along with two other men who arrived on the scene to worship. All forms of non-Muslim worship are banned in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, which is home to Islam's holiest shrines.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an advisory panel, last month urged the US government to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia, as well as Vietnam and Eritrea, for violating religious rights....

And has the US government complied? Yet?

Iran: six demonstrators killed; arrested female soccer protesters to be lashed

And the worldwide media maintains a respectful dhimmi silence. "Official death toll rises from Iranian soccer protests; Arrested female soccer protesters to be lashed," from the Student Movement for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI)

At least six demonstrators were killed in the Greater Tehran and several other in some of the riots which rocked cities, such as, Khoram-Abad, Esfahan, Shiraz, Kermanshah, Sari, Ardabil, Babol, Rasht, Mashad, Hamedan, Mahabad and Oroomiah (former Rezai-e) due to popular demonstrations which happened following Iran's win over Japan in the frame of the qualification games for the 2006 Soccer World cup. Tens of other have been severely injured and some are in critical conditions.

Brutal militiamen were seen using clubs, chains and knives against demonstrators with the firm intention to kill anyone standing against the regime. Several female protesters were seen beaten to death in Guisha and Fatemi as they took off their veils.

Islamic regime's propaganda tools, such as, the official so-called "Iran Students News Agency" (ISNA) have qualified some of these deaths as due to "having been trampled under the spectators' feet" or "Dying of heart attack due to excitement". Foreign news agencies, such as, Reuters, AP, Xinhua or AFP have ignored the existence of street riots while echoeing the official version due most likely of fear of seeing their correspondents expelled or due to their financement by major lobby groups interested in continuing business with the Islamic republic....

Arrested female demonstrators are to be lashed for their "un-Islamic behavior" before getting released. Such decision has been announced to some of the families who have searched for their missing members arrested following yesterday's Soccer riots....

Family members are afraid about the consequences of the methodic barbarian lashing punishment on the health of the arrested demonstrators who are mostly slim due to their often young age. The Islamic regime is applying the backwarded Islamic Sharia Law by which stoning, mutilation, amputation, lashing or eye for eye punishments are promoted....

A Muslim Umma, But No Christian Community: Grim Observations at Eastertide

In The Spectator, Anthony Browne, European correspondent for The Times of London and a man with whom I once had the great pleasure of appearing on BBC Radio along with the illustrious jihadist leader Omar Bakri, reports on the world-wide persecution of Christians, beginning with post-Saddam Iraq (thanks to Mark Durie for the link):

For most citizens of Iraq, the invasion meant the end of tyranny. For one group, however, it meant a new start: the country’s historic Christian community. When the war stopped, persecution by Islamists, held in check by Saddam, started.

At a church in Basra I visited a month after the war ended, the women complained of attacks against them for not wearing the Islamic veil. I saw many Christian-owned shops that had been firebombed, with many of the owners killed for exercising their legal right to sell alcohol. Two years and many church attacks later, Iraq may still be occupied by Christian foreign powers, but the Islamist plan to ethnically cleanse Iraq of its nearly 2,000-year-old Assyrian and Armenian Christian communities is reaching fruition.

There is nothing unusual about the persecution of Iraqi Christians, or the unwillingness of other Christians to help them. Rising nationalism and fundamentalism around the world have meant that Christianity is going back to its roots as the religion of the persecuted. There are now more than 300 million Christians who are either threatened with violence or legally discriminated against simply because of their faith — more than any other religion. Christians are no longer, as far as I am aware, thrown to the lions. But from China, North Korea and Malaysia, through India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, they are subjected to legalised discrimination, violence, imprisonment, relocation and forced conversion. Even in supposedly Christian Europe, Christianity has become the most mocked religion, its followers treated with public suspicion and derision and sometimes — such as the would-be EU commissioner Rocco Buttiglione — hounded out of political office....

Browne finds that, despite their power, Christian states or peoples seem remarkably unwilling to use any of that power or strength in defense of oppressed fellow Christians:

While Muslims openly help other Muslims, Christians helping Christians has become as taboo as jingoistic nationalism....

But just as Christian-majority armies control Iraq as it ethnically cleanses itself of its Christian community, so the power of Christian countries is of little help to the Christian persecuted where most Christians now live: the Third World.

Across the Islamic world, Christians are systematically discriminated against and persecuted. Saudi Arabia — the global fountain of religious bigotry — bans churches, public Christian worship, the Bible and the sale of Christmas cards, and stops non-Muslims from entering Mecca. Christians are regularly imprisoned and tortured on trumped-up charges of drinking, blaspheming or Bible-bashing, as some British citizens have found. Just last month, furthermore, Saudi Arabia announced that only Muslims can become citizens.

The Copts of Egypt make up half the Christians in the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity. They inhabited the land before the Islamic conquest, and still make up a fifth of the population. By law they are banned from being president of the Islamic Republic of Egypt or attending Al Azhar University, and severely restricted from joining the police and army. By practice they are banned from holding any high political or commercial position. Under the 19th-century Hamayouni decrees, Copts must get permission from the president to build or repair churches — but he usually refuses. Mosques face no such controls.

This is in full accord with Sharia provisions forbidding Christians to build or repair churches -- and yet learned commentators still maintain that Sharia is only found today in Saudi Arabia and Iran. And that's true in terms of full implementation -- but Christians still suffer in various ways as dhimmis all over the Islamic world. Read on:

Government-controlled TV broadcasts anti-Copt propaganda, while giving no airtime to Copts. It is illegal for Muslims to convert to Christianity, but legal for Christians to convert to Islam. Christian girls — and even the wives of Christian priests — are abducted and forcibly converted to Islam, recently prompting mass demonstrations. A report by Freedom House in Washington concludes: ‘The cumulative effect of these threats creates an atmosphere of persecution and raises fears that during the 21st century the Copts may have a vastly diminished presence in their homelands.’

Fr Drew Christiansen, an adviser to the US Conference of Bishops, recently conducted a study which stated that ‘all over the Middle East, Christians are under pressure. “The cradle of Christianity” is under enormous pressure from demographic decline, the growth of Islamic militancy, official and unofficial discrimination, the Iraq war, the Palestinian Intifada, failed peace policies and political manipulation.’

In the world’s most economically successful Muslim nation, Malaysia, the world’s only deliberate affirmative action programme for a majority population ensures that Muslims are given better access to jobs, housing and education. In the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, some 10,000 Christians have been killed in the last few years by Muslims trying to Islamify the Moluccas.

In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, most of the five million Christians live as an underclass, doing work such as toilet-cleaning. Under the Hudood ordinances, a Muslim can testify against a non-Muslim in court, but a non-Muslim cannot testify against a Muslim. Blasphemy laws are abused to persecute Christians. In the last few years, dozens of Christians have been killed in bomb and gun attacks on churches and Christian schools.

In Nigeria, 12 states have introduced Sharia law, which affects Christians as much as Muslims. Christian girls are forced to wear the Islamic veil at school, and Christians are banned from drinking alcohol. Thousands of Christians have been killed in the last few years in the ensuing violence....

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Barnabas Trust, which helps persecuted Christians, blames rising global religious tension. ‘More and more Christians are seen as the odd ones out — they are seen as transplants from the West, and not really trusted. It is getting very much worse.’...

You get the gist. Dr Paul Marshall, senior fellow at the Centre for Religious Freedom in Washington, estimates that there are 200 million Christians who face violence because of their faith, and 350 million who face legally sanctioned discrimination in terms of access to jobs and housing. The World Evangelical Alliance wrote in a report to the UN Human Rights Commission last year that Christians are ‘the largest single group in the world which is being denied human rights on the basis of their faith’....

But the BBC, despite being mainly funded by Christians, is an organisation that promotes ridicule of the Bible, while banning criticism of the Koran. Dr Marshall said: ‘Christians are seen as Europeans and Americans, which means you get a lack of sympathy which you would not get if they were Tibetan Buddhists.’...

To this day, while Muslims stick up for their co-religionists, Christians — beyond a few charities — have given up such forms of discrimination. Dr Sookhdeo said: ‘The Muslims have an Ummah [the worldwide Muslim community] whereas Christians do not have Christendom. There is no Christian country that says, “We are Christian and we will help Christians.”’...

Today is a good day to read the entire article. And to give it to others to read.

Safety of Muslim VCU professor discussed

From the Times-Dispatch (thanks to Twostellas), more on the continuing saga of Amina Wadud, a Muslim woman had the temerity to lead a prayer service in New York City, thereby angering male Muslims the world over, and raising murderous ire in some.

Virginia Commonwealth University officials met yesterday to discuss concerns about the safety and security of a female professor of Islamic studies who defied Islamic tradition by leading a prayer service that included men and women.

The professor, Amina Wadud, has been threatened and sharply criticized in many parts of the Islamic world since the March 18 prayer service in New York that was attended by an estimated 80 to 100 people, about half of whom were men. Traditionally, Muslim women do not lead prayers in a mosque, and they pray separately from men.

Wadud called in sick yesterday, according to Pamela D. Lepley, director of university news services. Wadud's home telephone has a security system that permits only calls from approved numbers to go through, and she could not be reached for comment last night.

Lepley said the discussions at yesterday's "debriefing" focused on Wadud's security "and the security and safety of the whole institution." She added that such sessions are routine during high-profile matters.

VCU officials have been in touch with state and federal agencies to be certain "we're all doing what we need to do," Lepley said. She did not elaborate....

The events surrounding Wadud's prayer service come at an unsettling time for VCU.

Last Saturday, a day after Wadud's prayer service, a suicide car bomber struck a theater in Doha, Qatar, about 7 miles from where VCU's Qatar-based College of Design Arts is located.

About 10 faculty members and students from the college were at the Doha Players Theater watching a production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" when the bomber struck.

None of the faculty or students was injured "beyond a scrape on an ankle and a bruised shoulder," said Richard E. Toscan, dean of VCU's School of the Arts in Richmond, in a news conference this week.

Lepley said all information so far indicates no link between the car bombing and Wadud's prayer service.

However, VCU has stepped up security on its Qatar campus, as has the Qatar government.

The design college in Qatar, one of the richest nations on earth thanks to oil and natural-gas reserves, has been a godsend to VCU since it was opened in 1998.

Fees paid to VCU by the Qatar Foundation, which provides funding for the school, have provided the resources for a meteoric rise of the Richmond-based School of the Arts to the top tier of arts schools in the United States....

Sudan: Company takes over church property

"Sudan: Company Takes Over Episcopal Church Property: Khartoum judge refuses to enforce court injunction," from Compass Direct, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

March 24 (Compass) -- The Sudanese Arab company claiming ownership of a disputed church property in Khartoum moved into the building last week, ignoring a court injunction barring any alterations or use of the property before a judicial ruling on the case.

Stunned representatives of the Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS) discovered during a March 15 trial hearing before the Khartoum Public Court that the United Al Azra Company had arbitrarily taken possession of their church headquarters and guesthouse, first confiscated at police gunpoint 10 months ago....

Before last week’s hearing began, ECS lawyer Aziza Ismail asked Judge Wahhabi Ibrahim what action had been taken to enforce the court injunction, in response to last month’s court-ordered engineer’s report. The report had confirmed that “extensive repairs” amounting to “a complete renovation” were being made on the property in blatant violation of the court injunction ordered last June.

“What is the problem? Why is the church complaining?” the judge reportedly asked.

“Your honor,” the lawyer replied, “you are letting them trample on the court order. It has been ordered that nothing should be done on this building until you have made your ruling on the case.”

Shrugging off the complaint, the judge commented, “Yes, that is the order of the court. But it is up to me to decide what to do with the fact that the law has been broken.”

Judge Ibrahim brushed aside the church’s request to post a guard at the property, declaring that they should not be worried, “Because in the end, you will get the building back in better shape than it was before!”

Britain's Muslims praised by British Chancellor

Brown needs to revisit the source material. "Britain's Muslims praised by Brown," from the Telegraph, with thanks to Effractor:

Gordon Brown last night paid tribute to British Muslims as "modern heroes" who brought hope and idealism to the country.

The Chancellor said they had contributed to Britain spiritually and economically because Islam was a religion that encouraged fair play, social justice and equality.

Please, Mr. Chancellor, show me where I can find in the Qur'an and Sunnah the idea of equality for non-Muslims.

"Islam teaches us that we are all part of one moral universe, that humanity is intertwined and interlinked like different parts of a human body, reflecting each other's condition. This is a universal moral principle we can all learn from," he said.

Many of Britain's 1.5 million Muslims supported Labour until the Iraq war and the party is now working hard to try to win them back.

"As Chancellor, I want in particular to thank you for the enormous contribution the Muslim community makes to our economy. I have learnt much from your entrepreneurial flair and talent," Mr Brown said in a speech at the Muslim News awards for excellence.

"But the contribution of British Muslims to British life goes far beyond the economic realm."

Mr Brown, whose father was a Church of Scotland minister, praised the teachings of Islam and defined a hero as "someone who has given their life to something bigger than themselves"....

"What we share in common is the belief in fair play, in social justice and in the equality and potential not just of some but of all," he said.

If that is so, why do non-Muslims not enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims in any majority-Muslim state on the planet today?

And they lived happily ever after - maybe

Remember this story?

Here's an update from Israel National News, with thanks to Romy: "Sweden: Gazan Guilty of Kidnapping Children."

An Arab was found guilty today in a Swedish court of kidnapping his children from the country and bringing them to the Gaza Strip.

Ismail Nawaja, of the Gaza Strip kept his children with him from June 2004 until December, when they were taken back to their mother. Nawaja has been detained in Sweden since January.

"In 1492, we lost everything"

Traditional Islamic theology holds that any land that has once belonged to the House of Islam belongs to it forever. That is the ultimate impulse behind the efforts to eradicate Israel, and a growing parallel movement in Spain. "Andalusia's connection," from the Toronto Star:

At the Jamal Islamiya mosque in this seaside town, a Muslim lament of historic proportions is proclaimed in large letters on a framed poster: "In 1492, we lost everything."

For the mosque's leader, and much of the Muslim world, the year marks the traumatic conclusion of Islam's golden age, a time remembered like a collective wound.

It's a period when the last piece of Muslim-held territory in Spain fell to Catholic monarchs, ending almost 800 years of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula.

Centuries when poetry, science and architecture flourished under Islamic caliphs expired with bonfires of Arabic manuscripts, mass expulsion and extermination in the Inquisition.

To the east, the Muslim empire of the Ottomans would reign for another four centuries. But many would trace its long decline to the fall of Al Andalus, the Moorish name for Andalusia.

The result is a yearning that today makes Spain, more than any other
European country, a battleground in the name of Islam.

"They stole 500 years of history from us," says Omar Checa Garcia, who heads the Jamal Islamiya mosque and cultural centre. "We want it back, but we don't want revenge."

What does it mean to want it back without wanting revenge? Just restore the Islamic state and there will be no reprisals?

Others are not so accommodating. Osama bin Laden uses what he calls the "tragedy of Al Andalus" as a rallying cry for his deadly brand of Islamic jihad against "the crusaders and Jews."

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, drew a parallel between the loss of the Iberian peninsula and the struggle of Palestinians.

"We will not accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus be repeated in
Palestine," he said....

On March 11, 2004, a cell of mainly Moroccan extremists, calling themselves "the brigade situated in Al Andalus," detonated 10 bombs that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains....

Read it all.

Athens opposes 'Arabisation' of Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem

Why are the Palestinian MP's doing this? Because the Greeks are thought to have sold land to (gasp) the Jews! From AFP, with thanks to Charles Martel:

ATHENS (AFP) - The Greek government said it will defend the historical character of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, following Palestinian calls for its "Arabisation."

In Ramallah, on the West Bank, Palestinian MPs -- furious at the alleged sale of Jerusalem land to Jewish investors by the Greek patriarchy -- voted Tuesday for Arab Orthodox Christians to secede from the Greek patriarchy.

They passed a resolution urging the Palestinian Authority to no longer recognise the authority of the Greek Orthodox patriarchy over the Orthodox Arab community.

Denials of the alleged land sale, issued by Greek Patriarch Irineos I in Jerusalem, fell on deaf ears.

A Greek government spokesman, Evangelos Antonaros, said here that the Greek Orthodox patriarchy in Jerusalem had a history spanning centuries, and he believed most of the flock would not want to abandon it.

An investigation into the matter is under way, assisted by Greek foreign ministry experts who arrived in the Old City on Monday.

"Taking the results of the investigation into consideration, we will decide on steps that will defend the patriarchy's historical characteristics," Antonaros said. ...

UK: "porking yard" sign offends Muslims, owner hauled into court

Galloping UK dhimmitude alert. You just can't make up this sort of thing. (But what's an "Asbo"?) "Car Park Sign Asbo 'A Joke' Says Pub Landlord," from the Scotsman, with thanks to plishman:

A man who was made subject to an Anti-Social Behaviour Order for putting up a sign saying "porking yard" in his pub car park, because it was offensive to Muslims, today described the court action as "a joke".

Leroy Trought, 42, was given a two-year Asbo at a hearing at Bristol Magistrates' Court on Monday.

Magistrates ordered him to change the wording of the "porking yard" sign at The Swan With Two Necks in St Judes, Bristol, to "parking yard".

He was ordered not to display any signs that may be threatening, abusive or insulting at the pub, which is next to a Somali mosque....

But Mr Trought today said that imposing the Asbo was a joke.

He said the sign was intended to commemorate the large number of butchers' shops that used to be located in the area and he had never intended to cause any offence.

He said: "We ran a competition in the pub to think of a funny name for the car park and one of the customers came up with the name 'the porking yard'.

"I grew up in Bristol so I know that this area has traditionally had a lot of butchers. It was always known as 'pork alley' so 'the porking yard' just seemed to fit.

"There's a butcher across the street that has been here for more than 100 years. It's political correctness gone mad....

That it is, my good man.

Beat manager Adrian Williams, of Avon and Somerset Police, welcomed the Asbo.

He said he had received complaints about the sign from school teachers, community leaders and members of the Somali community.

He said: "We are very pleased that the order has been made following
complaints from the community.

"It shows that this kind of behaviour, which is provocative, will not be tolerated."

Will anything non-Islamic be long tolerated in Britain?

Berlin-Based Hate Preacher Expelled

Anti-dhimmitude in Germany. From Deutsche Welle, with thanks to Cathy J. Palmer:

Invoking new anti-hate legislation, a Berlin court ruled Wednesday that a well-known Turkish religious leader accused of preaching hatred should be extradited to Turkey.

The administrative court in Berlin accused 59-year-old Yacub Tadshi of asking for God's protection for suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq during a rally in the city center in 2004.

That same year, the Muslim preacher of Turkish origin who has lived in Berlin since 1971 used the occasion of an early Ramadan prayer to lash out against native Germans in his Mevlana mosque in Kreuzberg. Tadshi said Germans could only expect the flames of hell for their weird beliefs.

German public TV correspondent Reinhard Laska filmed the Imam's address.

"We were able to show how the Imam insulted all Germans in his Berlin mosque," he said. "He repeatedly said that all Germans were stinking people and doomed to go to hell because they were useless creatures and infidels. His words were all the more shocking as shortly before, the press spokesman of this mosque had told us about the Turks' strong interest in fostering good relations with native Germans. He said it was so important for people of different faiths to share views and live together peacefully - what a lie that turned out to be!"...

A lie? From the press spokesman of a mosque? We're shocked, shocked to hear of such a thing!

Pakistan: Religion Column Restored in Passport

This is what makes for pandemic discrimination against and harassment of Christians in Pakistan. From Arab News, with thanks to Twostellas:

ISLAMABAD, The government of Pakistan has restored the column of religion in passport, said Federal Minister of Defense Rao Sikanader Iqbal here yesterday.

The column identifying the bearer's religious affiliation will be restored to the Pakistani passport, in a bid to avoid a clash with Islamic parties threatening a countrywide strike over the issue....

The move came ahead of a strike called by six-party Islamic alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal to protest the government's policies including the deletion of religion column from the machine readable passports, which were launched late last year.

The Islamists have said the deletion of the column was a deliberate attempt by President Pervez Musharraf to damage the Islamic identity of the 150-million strong overwhelmingly Muslim nation....

Bat Ye'or on radio tonight

The pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or, will be on the John Batchelor show tonight at 10:00PM EST (thanks to Jerry Gordon for the notice).

Listen in to hear continuing discussions of Eurabia, which is the title of Bat Ye'or's new book about the encroaching Islamization of Europe.

Go to www.wabcradio.com and listen live tonight.

UPDATE: Bat Ye'or's appearance has been postponed until March 31.

Islamic school suspends teachers over student's hate-filled tale

Caught in the act. From the Ottawa Citizen, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Two teachers at the Abraar Islamic school in Ottawa were suspended yesterday pending an investigation into the encouragement or incitement of hatred against Jews expressed in a young student's violence-laden writing project.

Principal Aisha Sherazi said the seven-member school board and
administration were "shocked" by teacher involvement in the project that was brought to her attention by the Citizen yesterday morning, and decided at an emergency meeting to suspend the instructors.

I'm sure they were shocked, shocked!

One teacher was apparently involved in the artistic production of the eight-page story of killing and martyrdom. Handwritten in Arabic and titled The Long Road, the cover page was illustrated by a drawing of a burning Star of David beside a machine-gun and Palestinian flag atop the Dome of the Rock, an ancient Muslim shrine in Jerusalem.

The other teacher had written comments on the student's paper, praising the boy's story of revenge for the assassination by Israeli forces a year ago of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a co-founder of Hamas, in retaliation for suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

"God bless you, your efforts are good," the teacher wrote on the title page.

"The story of the hero Ahmed and the hero Salah is still alive. The end will be soon when God unites us all in Jerusalem to pray there."

On the margins inside the story, the teacher had written a note endorsing the boy's fantasy of a young Ahmed Yassin and his friend, Salah El-Dine, ambushing Israeli soldiers.

"Without thinking, Ahmed took his M16 machine-gun and threw the bombs, and he showered the Jews; this resulted in the killing of the soldiers," the boy's text reads. "Salah said: 'You killed them all.' Ahmed answered: 'Praise be to God.'"

The fantasy heroes are quoted at the end of the story saying: "We promise God and the heroes of Al-Aksa that we will continue the path, we will continue in spite of the difficulties and the hardships until the victory or the martyrdom, we will not surrender; we will fight for the sake of God until the end."

Mrs. Sherazi declined to name the student, for privacy reasons, or the teachers until the investigation is complete. "Then we'll see what action we decide we want to take," she said.

Mrs. Sherazi, a 32-year-old teacher who took over as principal in recent months, does not speak or read Arabic. She expressed surprise about the drawing and the story, even though it had reportedly been displayed in a glass case at the school.

The Citizen obtained two translations of the story before asking the principal about it. She said such a subject was not on the curriculum, but it may have been a submission in a creative writing contest for the Arabic studies class, where students could choose their own topics....

Saudi slavery: Guest Worker May Lose Digits, Toes After Being Tied Up in Bathroom for a Month

From Arab News, with thanks to Twostellas:

JEDDAH, A 25-year-old Indonesian woman who came to Saudi Arabia as a guest worker will have several of her fingers, toes and part of her right foot amputated because of gangrene after being tied up for a month in a bathroom by her Saudi sponsor, who also apparently beat her severely, injuring her eye and knocking several of her teeth out.

The reason given was that the woman, who worked as a maid, had not finished cleaning the house. The Indonesian government is demanding justice as Riyadh police continue to investigate this disgusting crime....

Nour Miyati told Fathallah that her sponsor punished her because she had not finished her housecleaning completely. She also told the official that her hands and feet had been tied up and that she had been imprisoned in a bathroom for a month. She said her sponsor warned her not to talk to police or embassy officials.

The medical report showed that there had been no sexual
assault....

Gee, I guess by comparison to other Saudi slaves, she got off lucky.

All-Arabic Preschool Classes in Swedish City

Fjordman reports on the galloping Islamization of Sweden:

Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, which should be known to those following Muslim immigration to Scandinavia, has now taken another step towards its Islamization: Starting from the fall of 2005, the district of Hyllie will begin education in Arabic only for groups of immigrant preschool children. This seems logical, given that Muslims already make up close to one third of its population, and may well be the majority within a few years as native Swedes are leaving the city in record numbers. The idea is that once the children learn the language of their parents, it will become easier for them to learn Swedish as well. So the Swedish state paying for educating Swedish citizens on Swedish ground in Arabic is somehow supposed to increase integration. The idea is so ridiculous that even the regional newspaper Sydsvenskan is skeptical.

Fitzgerald: The Post's Arab media dhimmitude

Hugh Fitzgerald, the Vice President of the Jihad Watch advisory board, discusses a choice bit of dhimmitude from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief:

“The US needs to find a way to engage the Arab media, rather than shut down, marginalize, and ostracize news mediums such as Al-Jazeera,” said Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief.

No, we don't have to "engage the Arab media." We should be doing everything we can to "shut down, marginalize, and ostracize news mediums [sic] such as al-Jazeera."

Hundreds of thousands of households in the United States receiving propaganda for the Jihad, for that is what the worldview of Al-Jazeera is all about, is a security threat. Does Rajiv Chandrasekaran speak as one who has studied what Islam teaches, in all of its main canonical texts, or is he one more Tom Friedman, skimming on the surface and, as a mere reporter (not all reporters are mere reporters -- think of Peroncel-Hugoz, or Arnold Hottinger -- but a good many are), who may believe that because he was the Washington Post's "Baghdad bureau chief" (what a satisfying phrase that must be for reporters -- "bureau chief"), he understands things in the Middle East. But without an understanding of what is essentially kept from the superficial Western reporters, with their breathless reports on what happened that day, that hour, an understanding of the deepest wellsprings and promptings of Muslim behavior, of the role of Islam in the life of any Muslim society (simply incomparably more present and vital and overpowering than any that of any other faith, so that Westerners have a hard time understanding just how omnipresent Islam is, especially when they are likely to have their closest contact with people who know exactly how to minimize this, to present themselves as quasi-Western men).

Al-Jazeera is a cross between TASS and Der Stuermer. During World War II the Americans would not have stood for one minute to have Nazi propaganda broadcast into this country. During the Cold War, the Russians were ultimately allowed only to produce one glossy magazine, full of smiling kholkhozniks fulfilling the glorious five-year-plan on a collective farm, and of course articles about "50 Years of Soviet Rule in Azerbaijan" and "Pushkin and the Great October Revolution." But we already have a small army -- no, a large army -- of apologists for Islam abroad in the land. We have a hundred different Muslim groups, spreading a view of Islam far more deceptive than the best the clumsy Soviet propagandists could ever come up with.

Al-Jazeera is a spreader of lies and nonsense. It has the blood of Americans -- beginning with Americna soldiers in Iraq -- on its hands. Allowing it to broadcast in this country is madness.

We are run, in large part, by people who are ignorant, and utterly obstinate in that ignorance, of Islam. Part innocence, part stupidity, part denial because to recognize the truth means to recognize how much of what has been done, over the past few decades, implicates so many of our ruling class in past and present follies, this phenomenon is akin to what one observed in the 1930s. But the folly of the 1930s came to an end with Hitler's invasion of Poland. Reality broke in.

There will be no cross-border attack of large, mechanized forces of Islam. The attack is different; it involves not so much qital, or battlefield combat, as the use of "wealth" and "pen, tongue" (propaganda) and demography, the latest weapon of the Jihad to create conditions everywhere so that Islam may triumph. This is not a fiction, a dystopia. Right now, in tolerant Holland, the leader of a major political group, Geert Wilders, lives in hiding, moving from army base to army base. The same is true for one of the most outstanding members of the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In England, one Will Cummins lost his job even for writing some very mild home truths about Islam; so did a popular BBC host. At the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, when evidence was produced that high-school textbooks in Egypt contained Qur'anic passages urging the killing of Infidels, the Pakistani ambassador, speaking for all 56 or 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Countries, called such a charge an act of defamation and incitement to hatred, and prevented the textbooks to be shown. In other words, Muslims can inculcate hatred of Infidels (and it is all over the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira), but those who point this out are guilty of "whipping up hatred" themselves.

One wonders of Rajiv Chandresekar has any idea of what is really in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Now that he has returned from being "Baghdad Bureau Chief" with all of its excitement, he can actually begin to study what Islam teaches, and what has been the treatment meted out to non-Muslims -- Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists -- under Muslim rule. It would be instructive.

If the Administration will not ban Al-Jazeera, then Congress should do so. And the Democrats, who by being even worse in their misunderstanding of Islam, make this Administration look good even when it is far from being what it should be, need to come up with a few more Henry Jacksons, and many fewer William Fulbrights.

Who's funding the terrorists?

Why, we are. Annie Jacobsen explains how in Women's Wall Street (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):

The Center for Security Policy, a non-partisan, non-profit project in Washington DC., recently released an analysis of the investment patterns of America's public pension funds. The 100+ page report, The Terrorism Investments of The 50 States, points out that America's top 100 pension systems invest between 15 to 23 percent of their portfolios in companies doing business in terrorist-sponsoring states. The State Department identifies terrorist-sponsoring states as Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Cuba and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Read it all.

Violence Against Chinese Christian Women in Indonesia Warrants Asylum

"Violence Against Chinese Christian Women in Indonesia Warrants Asylum, Ninth Circuit Panel Rules," from the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, with thanks to Twostellas:

Violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, particularly against women and Christians, is sufficiently pervasive to require that a Chinese Christian woman be found eligible for asylum, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.

Overturning a ruling by a divided panel of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the court ruled that Marjorie Kinda Lolong's petition for review be granted. The attorney general will now have the final decision as to whether Lolong, who applied for asylum while here as a student in 1998, may remain permanently in the United States.

Senior Judge Betty B. Fletcher, writing for the Ninth Circuit, noted that elements within the Indonesian military have been linked to the violence, even though the country's president and other leaders have called for tolerance.

"Evidence of the government's willingness to control the perpetrators of ethnic and religious violence in Indonesia fails to rebut the
overwhelming evidence of the government's inability to control those forces," Fletcher wrote.

The jurist cited a "voluminous record that documents ongoing discrimination and violence against the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia," which the court addressed in another asylum case last year.

Lolong, the judge noted, filed her application just months after
riots in which dozens of ethnic Chinese women were raped; the State Department has estimated the number at 300. Lolong testified that one of the victims was a friend of hers, and that another friend had escaped a rape attempt; both women became afraid to leave their homes, she said.

Fletcher also cited evidence that anti-Chinese violence has spread to areas of the country where it had been rare. "Indeed, the Indonesian government's decision to permit Chinese language press and cultural displays has caused heightened resentment and acts of retaliation," the judge said....

Let me get this straight: it was the government's own fault that violence broke out and 300 women were raped? Because they allowed "Chinese language press and cultural displays?" Oh, come now. Even the good judge Fletcher must blush at the absurdity of this kind of moral equivalence.

Australia: Catholics back Muslim claims against evangelical Christians

This bit of dhimmi idiocy comes to us from Catholic News, with thanks to Twostellas:

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart's Vicar for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations has explained its support for the Islamic Council of Victoria's anti-vilification case against Catch the Fire Ministries, before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

A statement from the Archdiocese's Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission says that Episcopal Vicar Fr Peter Kenny sought to make an intervention on behalf of the Islamic Council. The Uniting Church also sought to make such an intervention. Dr Gary Bouma, an Anglican priest, appeared as an expert witness on behalf of the Islamic Council....

The Commission said that the intention of the Catholic intervention was to show the respect the Catholic Church has towards Islam.

"We wished to show our respect in the face of possible vilification, in accordance with 'with the official policy of the universal Catholic Church' which urges [Catholics] to 'acknowledge, preserve, and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among [Muslims], also their social life and culture'"....

But was there actual vilification? Or just truth-telling? Must this "official policy of the universal Catholic Church" be implemented at the expense of accepting incomplete and deliberately distorted versions of what Islam actually teaches?

The plight of Iraqi Christians

Here is an excellent summary report that brings together many stories we have posted here. Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli in MEMRI (with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist), discusses the plight of Iraqi Christians:

The high level of violence in Iraq has affected every sector of the Iraqi population, and Christians are no exception. Christians, however, have been specifically targeted by Islamists, who either accuse them of collaborating with the "invading crusading army" or label them infidels. As Islamist pressures mounted in Iraq, following its occupation, Christian businesses were destroyed, Christian university students were harassed and Christian women were forced to wear the veil. [5]...

Recently, the unidentified "Brigades for the Liquidation of Christian Agents and Spies" has threatened to liquidate those working with the multinational forces and to "pursue them in their homes and churches." In placards posted in Christian areas, the Brigades wrote:

"The Christian minority enjoys peace and security in the land of the Muslim and in our country in particular. Its members have held senior positions in the State. But their malevolence toward Muslims became evident when the occupier entered our country. He found great support among them in the form of translators and agents who acted as informers against Muslims. Their churches receive evangelist groups. They spread moral corruption and pornography in our streets. Muslims have been arrested, women raped and houses destroyed as a result of Christians being agents of the occupiers." [7]

Violence Against Churches

In August 2004, five churches, one in Baghdad and four in Mosul, were hit in one day, in a coordinated attack that killed 12 people. In October, five churches in Baghdad were hit on the first day of the Muslim month of Ramadan. In November, eight people were killed in two church bombings. [8] The August attack on churches was followed on September 10 by mortar attacks against the Assyrian town in Bakhdeda (also referred to as Qarqosh ) in the Ninevah Governorate in northern Iraq. [9]

The Destruction of Businesses

With the public sector and the military all but closed to them, Christians have focused on the services sector of the economy and retail business. Because of Islamic restrictions on alcohol consumption, Iraqi governments have limited the liquor retail business to Christians, who, in turn, have been meeting an obviously high demand for alcoholic beverages among a large segment of the Iraqi Muslim population....

Shortly after the fall of Saddam, Islamists, who took control of the streets of many Iraqi cities, began to target Christian owners of liquor stores. They first ordered the owners to close their businesses; if the owners failed to comply, the Islamists gutted the stores and often killed the owners. An example is liquor merchant Bashir Toma Alias, who was shot in the head in the center of a bazaar in Basra while on his way home to celebrate Christmas. [10]...

Often the police stand idly by in the face of crimes committed in their presence because they are afraid of the armed Islamists or because they sympathize with their aims.

The Christians complain that after they were driven out of the liquor business by Islamist groups, Muslims have taken over the business and continue to sell liquor publicly. [14]

The Islamists have also targeted barber shops run by Christians because the Islamists object to haircuts and to shaving. [15]

Harassment of Students

Christian students at Iraqi universities are also subjected to harassment and often to violence. At the University of Mosul, the second largest university in Iraq, 1,500 Christian students recently decided to suspend their studies because of threats to their lives by Islamists who have taken control of the university. [16] Because many of these students traveled to campus in buses from outside the city, they were afraid that their transportation would be bombed if they persisted in attending the university. [17]...

Christmas Celebrations

Christians celebrated Christmas in their homes, for fear of attacks. Most churches avoided the traditional midnight Mass or large gatherings of churchgoers. [20] Indeed, the churches called upon their parishioners to avoid coming to churches on Christmas out of concern for their safety. [21]...

Conversion to Islam

Chaldeans also complain about pressures to convert to Islam. When a parent converts to Islam all minors in the family are forcefully converted regardless of the wishes of the other parent. [24]

Even though this is a long excerpt, there is much, much more. Read it all.

Illegal alcohol kills 21 in Sudan

First there was that little matter of jihad genocide, and now there's the really big problem: alcohol sales. From the BBC, with thanks to Adam:

At least 21 people have died in Sudan and another six have been blinded after drinking illegally-produced alcohol, the country's interior ministry says.

In a newspaper statement, the ministry warned people of the dangers of consuming contaminated alcohol.

It said a campaign was being launched to close down illegal breweries.

Alcohol sales are banned in northern Sudan under Islamic law, but displaced non-Muslim southerners living around Khartoum frequently brew their own.

Imposing Islamic Sharia law on a population with a sizeable non-Muslim minority has long proved difficult for Sudan's Islamist government, says the BBC's Jonah Fisher in Khartoum.

The unpopularity of Sharia in the mainly Christian south contributed to the 21-year-long civil war - and now the question of alcohol in Khartoum is proving a real headache,, our correspondent says....

Yeah, that 21-year genocidal jihad was tough -- and now comes the real headache: moonshine.

As part of the recent peace deal between the north and south, a commission is being set up to protect the rights of non-Muslims in Khartoum.

However, the government has made it clear that Sharia law and the selling of alcohol is not up for negotiation.

So what rights exactly will be protected for non-Muslims? Only, evidently, those of the dhimma: toe the line, bow and scrape, keep your mouth shut, and you might not get brutalized.

'Honor Killings' Show Culture Clash in Berlin

More on Hatun Surucu, from the LA Times, with thanks to Nicolei:

BERLIN - Frost covers the roses, and the scrawled eulogies are tattered near the sidewalk where Hatun Surucu was gunned down. The attackers appeared on a cold night more than a month ago. Three shots were fired and the young Turkish woman crumpled in the blurred glare of a streetlight.

The accused assailants fled to a place that Surucu knew well: the home where she was raised. Her killers, police say, were her brothers.

A 23-year-old single mother seeking to escape tradition and religious constraints, Surucu was the sixth Muslim woman to have died in the German capital since October in suspected "honor killings," slayings arranged by families who believe that their reputations have been stained.

I just cannot believe these sweet folks would do such a thing.

Such crimes are rarely mentioned in Germany's newspapers.

Why not?

But Surucu's public slaying has instigated fresh debates on politics, immigration, human rights and a rigorous Islam adopted by a minority of Muslims confronted with poverty, discrimination and liberal European attitudes.

Ah, that's it, you see. They were driven to it by poverty, discrimination, and liberal attitudes. It certainly isn't anything for which they themselves have any responsibility.

The case is a portrait of contradictions - much like Surucu, whose memorial pictures show her either wearing the hijab, the head scarf of her Eastern heritage, or with the uncovered hair of her Western aspirations.

"Hatun couldn't bring her two worlds together," said Marko Katovcic, a classmate in an electrical apprentice program. "There is too much contradiction between these worlds. We knew she had problems, but she didn't talk about private things."

Surucu's violent fate is a verse in the larger epic of European immigration. The continent's Muslim population has nearly doubled to about 14 million over the last decade. Many Muslim immigrants seek immediate assimilation. Others practice their religion and traditions while embracing their adopted countries. A small but growing proportion turns to more radical religious precepts that have unsettled the continent since Sept. 11, 2001, and last year's Madrid train bombings....

Hatun married and left a husband and returned home to live alone.

"What's worse, she didn't want anything to do with her biological family. They couldn't figure this out. She just didn't want to be controlled anymore."...

Gee, I just can't figure that out.

Teachers get lessons on Islam and Arab world

A new entry for the Here We Go Again Department, from the Journal News of Westchester, NY, with thanks to Nicolei.

PURCHASE - The teachers were gathered at round tables, answering a quiz about the Jewish scripture, the New Testament and the Quran. They were asked to match the holy book with the quotations, which included references to Adam in the garden, Moses parting the sea and the immaculate conception of Mary. To the surprise of some, the correct match for all of the above was the Quran, the Islamic holy book.

See, it's just like the Bible! See, Muslims hate terrorism as much as anyone else! See, terrorists are just a tiny minority of extremists, like the KKK! I can write the rest of the script without even having been there. And of course, the chances they studied the jihad verses are as great as those of the proverbial snowball.

"For most people, this quiz serves as a wake-up call," said Audrey Shabbas, who led the workshop, "Teaching about the Arab World and Islam," at Manhattanville College in Purchase yesterday. "When talking about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we're talking about connections, not just similarities."

Shabbas' organization, the Arab World and Islamic Resources, conducts workshops nationwide to help educators understand Arab culture and history, as well as Islamic faith, and to bring that knowledge into the classroom.

The workshop included discussions about geography, the different populations of Muslims, and the connections between Arabs and Muslims and the United States.

Many of the 21 teachers who participated were history teachers, but others taught elementary school or art and came to the workshop to learn more about the traditions of the Muslim and Arab students in their schools.

Theresa Kubasak, who teaches second grade at a Manhattan school, said she wanted to learn more about her students' backgrounds.

"It validates the kids' cultures who are sitting in my classroom," she said. "I have all kinds of kids who have experienced war and racism. They deserve to have a teacher who understands their culture."

Louise Kuklis, an economics and global studies teacher at Edgemont High School, wanted to tackle her own assumptions and misconceptions.

"Ever since Sept. 11," she said, "kids have had so many questions.
They're always wondering what is this religion that terrorism comes from. I'm trying to give them awareness of Muslim
society."...

Yes, of course, we're all just one big, happy family - that's the ticket, just one big, happy family...let's not worry about who gets to play the Daddy.

Jihadist Organizations use Public Television to Market Sharia Law to American Youth

"Islamist Organizations Use Public Television to Market Sharia Law to American Youth," from Andre Rublev in Sixth Column Against Jihad, with thanks to LGF:

For Most Americans who regularly watch the news, the term “Sharia law” evokes gruesome images of beheadings, punitive amputations, and women being stoned to death. Muslims who do not approve of the cruelty and misogyny that is often associated with Sharia have two legitimate options for dissociating these practices from Islam. They can either reject Sharia law altogether (much like modern day Judaism no longer believes in the application of Mosaic law), or they can at least demand that the egregious human rights violations that are currently associated with Sharia be declared forever obsolete.

A high school teaching module prepared by the Council on Islamic Education titled “What is Sharia?” rejects the first option by describing Sharia as the "centerpiece and backbone” of Islam 1. It ignores the second option by failing to make any reference whatsoever to the barbarism and misogyny that is currently associated with Sharia law. Despite this appalling oversight, students are expected to explain significance of the five major schools of Islamic law, list the fields of knowledge required for a qualified Muslim jurist, and learn a total of no less than 21 legal terms. In an era when college professors are lamenting the lack of basic knowledge of modern-day high school graduates, it is amazing that anyone should remotely consider supplementing their social studies curricula with so much arcane minutia.

Read it all.

In the Arab World, a Blog Can Mean Prison

Is blogging forbidden by Sharia? Un-Islamic? If not, then why the restrictions in a culture that supposedly so highly values the free exchange of ideas? From William Fisher in the Lebanese Daily Star, via AINA, with thanks to Nicolei:

In democratic countries, personal Web sites known as Weblogs have grown exponentially over the past few years. In the United States, for example, there are literally millions of "blogs."

Not yet in the Middle East, even though there are many parallels in the region with what has made the phenomenon explode in the United States. For example, blogging technology is available to anyone with access to the Internet, it is cheap, indeed free, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home-computer ownership is still embryonic, the deep suspicion of government-owned mainstream media has almost certainly helped spur the growth in the region's Weblogs.

But there is at least one critical difference. In most of the countries of the Middle East, using a personal Weblog to express political dissent can land someone in jail as easily as taking part in an unauthorized political protest in a public square. For example, recently in Iran - one of the worst anti-blogger offenders - a blogger was jailed for 14 years for "spying and aiding foreign counterrevolutionaries," after using his site to criticize the arrest of other online journalists. Despite the risks, an estimated 75,000 Iranians among the country's five million Internet users maintain online blogs. Especially among middle class youth, they have become an important way of expressing dissatisfaction.

Mona al-Tahawy, a columnist at the London-based Saudi daily Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, writes that bloggers in Iran and Iraq "have inspired others in the Arab world." She also adds: "Despite working in an elite medium, requiring a computer and literacy, bloggers are the voice of the true Arab Street, especially the young."

Like Iran, most countries of the region impose varying degrees of
restriction on Weblogs. Saudi Arabia, where authorities block some 400,000 Web sites, is among the most restrictive. It is unclear how many blogsites there are in the kingdom, but those that are accessible focus largely on political dissent.

Typical is a site called "The Religious Policeman." One recent posting
asked:

"What reforms? There aren't any reforms! The government promised to set up a higher commission on women's affairs, guaranteed women participation in the recent National Dialogue Forum and in the National Human Rights Commission."

It adds: "The National Dialogue Forum agreed to change nothing, the 'team photo' had no women in it, anyone with any sense left in
tears."...

We know the feeling.

Environments of Hate

From the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (thanks to RB) comes "Environments of Hate: Indoctrination in the Arab World and Propaganda Advocacy in Americas University Classrooms," a wonderful article from the courageous Lebanese speaker and writer Brigitte Gabriel:

I'm honored to bring Columbia a unique perspective concerning the academic freedom issue. I see similarities between the issue and my personal experiences growing up. I was raised in an Arab society in Lebanon that took impressionable young minds and filled them with propaganda – minds that were young and didn't know any better. I am an eyewitness and a victim of the indoctrination of hate education, racism, intolerance, intimidation and fabricated lies by my government and religious influences.

This indoctrination was for one purpose: to eradicate the newborn state of Israel – to foment hatred and wipe out Jewish presence in an Arab-dominated world. For Arabs, the simple existence of Israel was viewed as a catastrophe: “al nakbah!” This pan-Arab hate indoctrination was a reaction to Jews returning to their homeland, after Arabic and Islamic belief for 1400 years that the “Yahud” were vanquished and subjugated as Dhimmi.

I believe hate-motivated indoctrination fosters irrational thinking and faulty reasoning, whether it influenced my education as a child in Lebanon or the advocacy education that roils the classrooms here at Columbia. This is the root cause of the controversy swirling around several members of the Middle East Asia Languages Arts and Culture (MEALAC) faculty and their alleged intimidation of students and other faculty!

What is at stake is our future, the students of today who will become tomorrow's leaders. If their minds are poisoned with irrational hatred, and this hatred is not combated and eliminated, then academic freedom and free speech in an open marketplace of competitive ideas is dead.

But let me begin by talking about my experience growing up in Lebanon where doctrinal hatred of Jews and Israel was ever present.

From television programs, to national songs, hourly radio newscasts and newspapers, our citizens were fed a steady diet of lies poisoning our attitudes towards the Jews. Israel (“Aaesrael”) is the devil. Al-Yahud shayateen, The Jews are evil. Sarakou Al-Ard Al Arabiyah. They stole Arab land. Al Wakt al wahid allazi yassir endana salam huwa lamma naqtul kul al yahud wa narmihum bil bahr, The only time we'll have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea. Every time Israel was mentioned, “Al adew al Israeli” was attached to the phrase: the Israeli enemy.

My country and others saw nothing wrong with practicing this form of mind abuse, of taking a generation hostage and molding them into misguided weapons – some willing to be martyred in the name of Islam or Palestinian nationalism. It's a form of mental child abuse taking place in every Arab country....

Read it all.

Pakistani commission says government biased against religious minorities

"Pak commission says govt. biased against minorities," from Expressnewsline, with thanks to Fanabba:

The Pakistan National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) has, in its 'Human Rights Monitor - 2005' report condemned the preferential treatment given to Muslims by allowing them only to become head of state and suggested that the policy of exclusivism should be abandoned by the government as it makes non-Muslims feel marginalized despite their contribution to the country.

Such laws, of course, are a hangover of the dhimma.

The Dawn quoted the report, which gives a detailed account of the situation of religious minorities in Pakistan in 2004, as saying that the government seldom invokes the articles of equality and distrust in government institutions have become inevitable due to biasness [sic].

There are other hangovers, too:

The NCJP has said that the attack on minorities' places of worship, instances of forced conversions, discriminatory laws are being used as weapons for political leverage and evictions of minorities indicate the state's failure to ensure not only human rights but implement legislation for effective governance....

Switzerland: tourist brochure dhimmitude

In a story about the still-unsolved synagogue arson in Switzerland, a curious paragraph. From Israel National News, with thanks to Alain:

Switzerland has a large Moslem population of some 500,000 - and the city of Lugano has a strong representation thereof. On the day before the double arson, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung reported that Lugano tourism officials had published a brochure in Arabic catering specifically to Moslem tastes. A comparison of the Italian, French and German versions of the Lugano tourist brochure with the Arabic-language text reveals that in the latter, pictures of churches are conspicuously missing. In addition, references to the local variety of pork-based salami were replaced with inoffensive local cheeses.

Ah, yes, let's continue bending over backwards not to offend the sensibilities of the our extremely sensitive Muslim friends. Never mind those burning synagogues.

ADDENDUM: Gabrielle Goldwater takes issue with the 500,000 figure above:

According to the Government's Statistics Office, membership in religious denominations is as follows: 41.8 percent Roman Catholic; 33.0 percent Protestant; 1.8 percent Orthodox; 0.2 percent Old Catholic; 0.2 percent other Christian groups; 4.3 percent Muslim; 0.2 percent Jewish; 0.8 percent other religions (Buddhist, Hindi, and other); 11.1 percent no formal creed.

According to official statistics, the Muslim population has doubled to more than 310,000 over the past several years, .....but independent sources believe an additional 150,000 Muslims may be residing illegally in the country. But this is not confirmed, also we have a very close police system and tight borders.

More anger over NY woman 'imam'

More reverberations over the Muslim woman who led prayers in New York last Friday. "Anger over NY woman 'imam,'" from the Calcutta Telegraph, with thanks to Nicolei:

She is being called the "shock Imam", having stunned Muslim clergy across continents. In India, the shade of opinion over a Muslim woman leading namaz ranges from anger to flippancy to allegations of an American conspiracy.

On March 18, Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led Friday prayers in New York, where about half of the estimated 100 people were men. Clad in a hijab (veil), she also read out the Khutba (the holy sermon).

This has triggered a controversy as traditionally, women are not even allowed to offer namaz inside mosques. In exceptional cases, women pray in a separate room or behind a partition.

Muslim religious leaders in India have been dismissive about Amina, claiming that the event was aimed at hogging media attention.

"It's a matter of modesty that prevents a Muslim woman from leading prayers," said Lucknow-based Shia leader Maulana Kalbe-Jawwad. He pointed out that when Muslims pray, they form ruler-straight lines. Resting on their knees, they lean forward until their foreheads touch the floor. Both the worshippers and the prayer leader face west towards Mecca.

What's that go to do with anything? I've got a newsflash for you, buddy, women have seen men's rear ends before. So what?

Peer Sayeed Mian, the rector of Bhopal-based Taj-ul-Masajid, said the event was "un-Islamic" as women are not supposed to lead prayers. "It is not a question of gender equality," he said, questioning the need for it.

What is it a question of, then?

"In Islam, the role of duties of men and women are clearly defined. There is no such thing as aping men," he said, terming it another "conspiracy" to create differences on gender lines.

Well, well, if it isn't another conspiracy. I suppose the Zionists are whispering in Amina Wadud's ear, eh?

Maulana Mohammad Saleem, a preacher in Bhopal, said offering namaz was an act between a person and God. "It is not that one who leads would go to heaven and those following would get a lesser reward."

Meaning, women don't have to worry their pretty little heads about big, weighty matters like leading prayers. They get to go to heaven anyway...maybe.

Kamal Farooqui, a member of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board, said Islam has consciously-defined gender roles. "Women have been bestowed the greatest honour of giving birth to children. Does that mean that men start complaining about it?" he asked.

So since you don't see many men complaining about not being able to have children, (except maybe "Stan" in Life of Brian) well, that means women shouldn't complain about things like your everyday, average and very Islamic "sexual slavery" marriages. These things are ordained by Allah, you silly girls!

Amina countered that Prophet Mohammed had granted permission to a woman called Umm Warraq to lead her family in prayers.

That's it? That's the entire argument you're putting up against Centuries of Islamic Law and Tradition? Good Luck, Amina, good luck. You'll need it:

Scholars at Darul-Uloom, Deoband, and Nadwa-tul-ulema, Lucknow, said what Amina had failed to mention is that Umm Warraq led the people of her house in a prayer at one occasion only.

Imam Malik and Imam Abu Hanifa, famed commentators of Islam, considered it an exception....

Wouldn't you know it.

Saudi prof sentenced to 275 lashes for insulting Sharia

If calling the method for determining the beginning of Ramadan and Eid "primitive" gets 275 lashes, how many would you get for questioning Sharia provisions on jihad and dhimmitude? "Ministry Intervenes as Writer Sentenced to 275 Lashes," from the Arab News, with thanks to JJP Mackie:

RIYADH, 21 March 2005 - The case of a Saudi writer who was sentenced by a Shariah court in Riyadh to 275 lashes and four months imprisonment after being accused of being "corrupt" by members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, has returned to the Ministry of Culture and Information yesterday after the intervention of the ministry, Arab News has learned.

The case is the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Ali Al-Mizeini, an Arabic language professor at King Saud University, was charged by the commission with allegedly questioning the religious institution's abilities and knowledge in an article written by him in Al-Watan newspaper. The commission was represented in court by another professor at the university, Abdullah Al-Barak from the Islamic Culture Department.

The accusers demanded that Dr. Al-Mizeini be tried according to Shariah for his writings. Dr. Al-Mizeini was later summoned to a court hearing....

The regulation issued by the minister of justice states that "whatever offends Shariah or Islamic ethics or contradicts anything in the Qur'an or Sunnah (the Prophet's sayings) or is an accusation of a person toward another which demands a religious punishment of lashes or imprisonment according to the nature of the crime is a matter that concerns public courts."

The regulation continues: "Public courts or primary courts which are given cases that deal with offenses concerning moral issues or attacks on Shariah that demand religious punishment should not transfer it to other concerned lawful bodies to look into it."

Judge Suleiman Al-Fantooh of the Shariah court sentenced him to a four-month jail term and 275 lashes....

Al-Mizeini's article angered many Islamists when he said that the method used by the Supreme Judiciary Council in determining the beginning of Ramadan and Eid was "primitive" that still relied on the naked eye's vision of the moon at a time where the crescent can be determined by telescopes as well by Saudi astronomers who are experts in the field.

Meanwhile, another Saudi writer is being tried by a religious court in the Kingdom for criticizing the commission in another Saudi daily, Al-Jazirah.

Abdullah Al-Bikheit, the writer, published many articles in the daily criticizing the approach of the people who work for the commission. Arab News contacted the writer who revealed his story. "In the beginning, I got a call from the police department to appear in the station to deal with a case filed by a person I did not know," he said....

"I later found out that 80 percent of those who filed the case were members of the commission who were angered by my writings in the daily," he said....

Al-Bikheit said that he criticized the commission in the Saudi daily as "any other government body that has its shortcomings." He said that he replied to the negative feedback to his articles in the letters to the editor column of the paper which did not "please the commission's members". He intends to publish a book with all the 17 articles he has published in Al-Jazirah.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that book to come out.

UK: Police urge forced marriage law

From BBC News, with thanks to Shiva:

Forced marriage should be made a specific criminal offence, police say.

Currently families who compel their children to marry can be charged only with offences like assault or kidnap.

Officers are due to tell a London conference that in the past two years nearly 500 people have asked for help to avoid being forced into marriages.

Metropolitan Police research suggests a link between forced marriage and honour killings and officers say a specific offence would make prosecutions easier.

Honour killings are when people are murdered because they are deemed to have shamed their families and can occur when someone refuses to marry a partner chosen for them.

Police say making forced marriages illegal would send a clear message that this is not acceptable in the UK....

Last year, government officials said a special unit within the Foreign Office had dealt with almost 1,000 cases of forced marriage since it was set up in 2000.

It had also rescued and repatriated to the UK 70 young people a year from overseas....

Jihadists kill Iraqi women as 'betrayers' of Islam

"Rebels kill Iraqi women as 'betrayers' of Islam," from the TimesOnline, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist.

THE terrible screams will haunt Najat al-Alloussi every time she remembers her last telephone conversation with her kidnapped daughter. "Mama, mama," cried Hadeel, 24. "They have just executed my husband in front of my eyes. Please help me. They just shot him in the head. Please help me, mama."

A male voice then told Alloussi, a prominent Iraqi gynaecologist: "We have killed him and now we shall kill your daughter as well."

She begged for the young woman's life, promising to hand over gold, cash and a valuable building if her captors would set her free. But the line went dead.

Two bags containing the bodies of her daughter and son-in-law, graduates in medicine who had taken internships at al-Qaem hospital close to Iraq's border with Syria, were dumped near their Baghdad home 48 hours later.

Alloussi's daughter had been shot in the heart.

The couple were apparently suspected of having tipped off US forces that insurgents were being treated in their hospital.

Whatever the reason she was targeted, Hadeel was one of a growing number of Iraqi women to have fallen prey to insurgents killing those in prominent positions. Some die because their work brings them into contact with American or Iraqi officials, others because their advocacy of more rights for women offends certain religious fundamentalists.

A few seem to have been singled out for failing to conform to an extreme Islamic code of dress and for abandoning traditional lives at home.

Zeena al-Qushtaini, a divorced mother who owned one of Baghdad's best known pharmacies and had contracts with coalition forces, dressed in western clothes and mingled with women activists.

"Lady Zeena", as she was known, was wearing a diamond necklace and ring when she was shot twice in the head after being abducted. Her body was found dressed in a full-length black abaya that she would never have chosen to wear, the headscarf covered in blood.

Tawheed wal-Jihad, the group run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, released a film of her murder and that of her business partner, Ziad Baho, who was beheaded.

Islamic militants have killed 20 women in the northern city of Mosul and a dozen more in Baghdad. The victims shared a common desire to live freely and a vision of a better role for women in Iraqi society....

Fitzgerald: Sistani for Nobel? No thanks

Jihad Watch Advisory Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald takes on this outstanding display of dhimmitude from the eminently cloudy-minded Thomas Friedman at the New Duranty Times:

Everyone will have his own startling encounter with Islam -- the real thing, not what Muslim apologists, hoping to give everyone a carefully-circumscribed "peek into the Koran" (and let's make sure that none of these unwary Infidels manages to read anything beyond the Michael Sells "Approaching the Qur'an" and by all means, keep them from looking into the Hadith or the Sira), have on offer. It is almost always limited to highly selective quotation from the Qur'an. The Hadith, and the Sira -- sorry, off limits for now.

One keeps being surprised at how little people think they need to know before making grand pronouncements. Yesterday, amused by the latest display of vacuity and portentousness by Tom Friedman, nominating -- modestly -- Ali al-Sistani for the Nobel Prize -- I went to www.sistani.org to look around. There, between Sistani's complete banning of chess (and to think that checkmate is merely the Persian "shakh mat"), and his discussions of all the usual subjects that inquiring Muslims wish to know about, from whether it is okay to marry the sister of a man you have sodomized, or who has sodomized you (I forget which) to whether your canonical prayers count if you haven't performed the wudu (ablutions) correctly -- you know, all the stuff that you want to know, was something else, and that something was all about what is considered by Sistani and those who seek his guidance to be "Najis" or "unclean."

If you click on "Muslim Laws" on the left, and then, once a list comes up, click on "najis things," you will get a list -- #84 -- and if you then go a little further, and click on the menu where, among those unclean things, the "kafir" (which is to say, the Unbeliever, that is to say -- You and I, Dear Reader) you will get a further discussion of how, in the wonderful, "moderate" Islam of the al-Sistani variety, the Unbeliever, the Infidel, the Kafir (guilty of "kufr" or "ingratitude" for failing to receive the Revelation of the Last of the Prophets in the right, accepting, submissive way) is viewed.

So here, for everyone out in Ames, Iowa, is just a little sample of what you are missing, and what one suspects that Mohammed Fahmy, and Tariq Ramadan, and Hamid Dabashi, and Zeinab Bahrani, and a cast of hundreds of millions, would prefer that you not inquire into too deeply. And please, whatever you do, in order to accommodate them, at least promise that you will NOT read the websites www.dhimmitude.org and www.faithfreedom.org and www.co-jet.org and www.jihadwatch.org, and certainly do NOT read anything by Bat Ye'or, but especially do not read Islam and Dhimmitude or The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam. And do not read Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim. And let's not even talk about Robert Spencer. These books will only confuse you. And never pay attention to a man named Ali Sina or any of those ex-Muslims who appear at his website. Never google the name "Habib Malik" to read what he has to say about the historic relationship of Islam to Christianity; never read a similar article by James V. Schall, a professor at Georgetown; never take a peak at the Western scholars whose work may be sampled in the anthology The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom.

Well, here is what you can find at www.sistani.org:

"84. The following ten things are essentially najis: 1. Urine 2. Faeces 3. Semen 4. Dead body 5. Blood 6. Dog 7. Pig 8. Kafir 9. Alcoholic liquors 10. The sweat of an animal who persistently eats najasat [i.e., unclean things].

108. The entire body of a Kafir, including his hair and nails, and all liquid substances of his body, are najis.
109. If the parents, paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of a minor child are all kafir, that child is najis, except when he is intelligent enough, and professes Islam. When, even one person from his parents or grandparents is a Muslim, the child is Pak (The details will be explained in rule 217).
110. A person about whom it is not known whether he is a Muslim or not, and if no signs exist to establish him as a Muslim, he will be considered Pak. But he will not have the privileges of a Muslim, like, he cannot marry a Muslim woman, nor can he be buried in a Muslim cemetery."

So who wants to second the nomination of Al-Sistani for the Nobel Prize? Anyone out there in Ames, Iowa?

Arafat Killed By High Tech Laser Attack - Envoy

From our new Monsters in the Closet Department comes this contribution from Attallah Quiba, the PA's ambassador to Sri Lanka. Arafat, you see, couldn't have done something as prosaic as die; had he not been murdered, he would clearly have lived to be 562. From Bernama, the Malaysian National News Agency, with thanks to Teri:

COLOMBO, March 19 (Bernama) -- Attallah Quiba, the Palestinian ambassador in Sri Lanka, believes that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was killed by unnamed Israelis using advanced technology, the Island newspaper said.

Responding to questions at a media conference in Colombo on Friday, Quiba claimed that two Israelis who met Arafat on the day he was taken sick "used a laser device to attack Arafat."

"They tried to flee after using the device but were wrestled down by the Palestinian Authority security personnel. Both men were carrying Canadian passports."

Quiba was quoted as saying the Palestinian Authority immediately informed the Israeli government of the "attempt on Arafat's life." Samples of Arafat's blood were tested in 16 countries and it was revealed that he had been poisoned by high technology, he said.

Iowa: Seminar tries to dispel stereotypes of Muslims

The illustrious Samuel Berbano gives us another one for the Here We Go Again Department, in the Iowa State Daily, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

Although dispelling stereotypes among a large population is not child's play, some Islamic students on campus say the solution could be as simple as ridding a common childhood fear.

Just as one takes a peek in their closet to find that there are no monsters lurking in the shadows waiting to jump out, if one takes a peek at the Quran, they'll find Islam does not promote violence, said Omar Manci, sophomore in agricultural engineering and president of the ISU Muslim Student Association.

Not to criticise your clearly immense journalistic credentials, Sammy, but did you happen to "take a peek inside the Qu'ran" yourself before reporting so uncritically on Manci's assertion? Child's play, eh? Why aren't you questioning these people who are treating you (and your readers) like children?

"Fear and ignorance are behind the negative stereotypes of Muslims in the media. If you fear something and don't know anything about it, it's a negative combination -- like seeing monsters in your closet," Manci said....

Yes. Remember those burning towers on 9/11? It was all ignorance, you see. Could they do it again? Monsters in the closet!

"Islam never refers to Christians as infidels," said Mohammed Fahmy, professor of industrial technology at the University of Northern Iowa, who presented sessions on Islam and marriage during the conference.

Right, Fahmy, but of course, there is that little matter of the fact that it does say they are under the curse of Allah: "The Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" (9:30). Behold the grandeur of Islam! How open-minded this is! How respectful of diversity!

Holland: Muslim loses welfare benefits for rudeness to female workers

From the Dutch Blog Zacht Ei, with thanks to Ali Dashti:

All hail Mrs. Verdonk

A few months ago, our immigration secretary Rita Verdonk was lambasted in the press for daring to comment on an imam who refused to shake her hand.

Now, it seems more people are willing to stand up for their right to be treated as human beings.

An Islamic man in The Hague will not be receiving his Social Security
allowance this month for being unwilling to greet female employers of the Sociale Dienst (Social Services). In some Dutch media, the story is being spun as if the man is being punished for not wanting to shake hands. That's not the whole story. The statute of this particular office of the Sociale Dienst allows for religious people who are forbidden to touch women to express themselves in another way, for example by nodding or bowing. But this particular guy didn't want to greet women in any way....

Australia asylum row on converts

From BBC News, with thanks to Shiva:

Australia is to review the cases of a group of 30 asylum seekers after some of them converted to Christianity.

The migrants, from Iran and Iraq, are being held in detention centres after their original applications for refugee status were rejected.

Immigration officials said their conversion to Christianity, and changed conditions in their home countries, meant their cases would be reassessed.

It was unclear how many of the 30 have renounced Islam for Christianity.

Immigration officials have said that in some cases, new information had been obtained about the dangers they could face if they were deported.

'Face saving'

Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, said there were concerns that if detainees were sent back to their homelands they could suffer persecution because they had embraced a different religion.

They could even be killed, as Islamic law dictates.

Mr Howard has stressed that this policy of review was not biased in favour of Christians.

The main opposition Labor party, however, has warned that reviewing asylum claims based on religion would damage the country's reputation.

It said other detainees could be encouraged to adopt Christianity simply to stay in Australia....

Exactly why is that such a bad idea?

DC Watson: 2005: While it's still America

Jihad Watch reader DC Watson has some politically incorrect observations and recommendations at the Counter-Jihad Education Taskforce site. A small sampling:

Why are organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations still operating inside American borders after three of their former officers have been convicted for various terror and fraud related crimes?

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2004/April/04_crm_225.htm
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/usroyer603ind.pdf (p.15-20)
http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/infocom/uselashi121702sind.pdf (P. 6-9)
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=9981
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3875507.stm

Why, with these facts on record, does our government permit this group to hold training classes for law enforcement officers on how to better understand the Islamic culture? This is the United States, so shouldn't CAIR be hosting training classes for Muslims who are having difficulties integrating into American society instead?

Read it all.

Palestinian kills sister (she was raped by her father)

Honor killing of a 17-year-old girl in the "Northern West Bank." At least the perpetrator was arrested. What kind of punishment he gets remains to be seen; honor killers have all too often gotten off very lightly. "Palestinian kills sister," from AFP, with thanks to Twostellas:

Al Ayyam daily said the teenager was strangled by her 27-year-old brother on Wednesday in Bala'a town near the northern city of Tulkarem. Arrested by Palestinian security forces, the brother admitted he had killed her to "erase the shame" after her pregnancy began showing.

He also admitted knowing that his sister had become pregnant because their father raped her. Police are now hunting the 52-year-old father, who witnessed the murder, and has since disappeared....

"The police did not arrest or even question the father," the group charged in an open letter published in another paper. Signed by the Palestinian Working Women's Society for Development, the letter called on the Palestinian parliament to adopt laws to protect women from all forms of violence.

Journalist defends report on jihadists in Brussels

Note the hostile reaction of the mayor and State Security to Fraihi's report. Why is that? What is it about this that makes them feel threatened? It is that it shakes their stifling orthodoxy that Islam is a religion of peace and Europeans need not be concerned about the growing Muslim populations. "Journalist defends report on Islamic extremists in Brussels," from Belgium's RVI, with thanks to Twostellas:

In the Brussels municipality of Molenbeek, youngsters are being recruited to commit fundamentalist terrorist attacks. This is suggested in an undercover research by the daily Het Nieuwsblad. The mayor of Molenbeek and the State Security both put this into perspective.

A young journalist for the Flemish paper Het Nieuwsblad spent 2 months
undercover in the Moslem community in the district of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek in Brussels. Under the guise of a student, working on a sociology thesis, Hind Fraihi investigated extreme Moslem practices including the recruitment of young Moslems for the Jihad.

Youngsters would be encouraged to go to Afghanistan to take a military
training, says the freelance research journalist Hind Fraihi. She talked with dozens of people who claim to have been addressed about this.

Recruitment takes place in the streets, in subways and in mosques that are well hidden behind the facades of terraced houses, she says.

Head of the editorial staff of the newspaper has confirmed her story:
"Research journalist Hind Fraihi, a religious moslem woman herself, has been living in the heart of Molenbeek for 2 months under the guise of being a sociology student. Her aim was to investigate whether the rumours are true that the municipality is a centre of moslem extremism in our country."

Fraihi's report came under fire from the local police commissioner Johan De Becker who referred to the journalist as a tourist who had brought the work of the police into jeopardy. The relativistic reaction of both the State Security and the local mayor Philippe Moureaux surprised the young journalist. According to Fraihi, the mayor had said that he knows youngsters that are willing to blow themselves up. She asks if Moureaux finds that quite normal. As a Moslem herself, Fraihi explains that she was able to enter mosques where the mayor had never been. She claims to have heard imams calling for a holy war against Jews and Westerners during the holy period of Ramadan....

Female-led U.S. service irks Muslims in Mideast

Woman leads Muslim prayer service update. It seems that Muslims in the Middle East are up in arms, so to speak, about a prayer service held in New York -- because a woman led it. From AP, with thanks to Scaramouche:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Muslims in the Middle East yesterday angrily denounced a mixed-gender Islamic prayer service led by a woman in New York as a violation of their religion.

Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led the service on Friday before a congregation of 80 to 100 men and women at Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, an Episcopal church.

Three mosques had refused to hold the service, and an art gallery backed out after receiving a bomb threat. Organizers said the service was intended to draw attention to the inequality faced by Muslim women.

The Egyptian newspaper, Al-Messa, reported the service on its front page, with the emphatic headline: "They are tarnishing Islam in America!"

It referred to Wadud as "the deranged woman."

A female Islamic law professor condemned the act as apostasy, explaining that a woman’s body "stirs desire" in men.

Well, stop the presses.

Some suggested the event was a U.S. conspiracy to mold traditional Islam into a secular U.S. religion....

Remember that sentence the next time CAIR or MPAC tries to strong-arm and intimidate you into assuming that Islam is nothing more or less than just another "secular U.S. religion," and accuses you of "Islamophobia" if you disagree.

"Women were not allowed to have input in the basic paradigms of what it means to be a Muslim," Wadud said after the service. She added that while the Islamic holy book, the Quran, puts men and women on equal footing, men have distorted its teachings to leave women with no role other than "as sexual partners."

Come now, Ms. Wadud. I respect what you are doing, but really, do you expect us not to notice that the Qur'an says that "men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other" (Qur'an 4:34)? Are you hoping that Americans aren't aware of this verse, or are you yourself in a state of denial and wishful thinking about the Qur'an?

US missionaries released in Dubai

From Reuters, with thanks to Twostellas:

DUBAI: Two US missionaries detained in Dubai on suspicion of distributing Christian compact discs and Bibles in the Muslim Gulf emirate have returned to the United States, a local newspaper said.

A US embassy official confirmed the report but declined to give details, citing the US privacy act.

The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, forbids proselytising by non-Muslims.

Double standard watch: imagine for a moment the international outcry that would ensue if Britain, or France, or the United States for that matter, forbade proselytising by non-Christians. Yet the chattering classes persist in retailing moral equivalence and all-religions-are-equally-capable-of-inspiring-violence arguments, despite the fact that anyone who looks at the world with an objective eye for five minutes can see that they aren't true.

The daily quoted a Dubai Justice Department official as saying the case against the two women had been dismissed but that the public prosecution department kept the 26 CDs and 19 Bibles confiscated when the women were arrested last month....

In 1993 a UAE court sentenced a British man to six months in prison for handing out Christian literature to Iranians. Dubai, unlike other places in the Gulf which follow Islamic law to the letter, tries to cater to differing cultures and religions and has both churches and mosques.

That last sentence is odd. Are they "catering" to different cultures by releasing these women instead of executing them? Gee, thanks.

Norway: Muslim Gang Rapes Continue

"Norway: The Rapes Continue," from the Fjordman Blogspot:

7 Kurdish Muslim immigrants are suspects in a gang rape case against a 16 year old Norwegian girl in Oslo in December. One of the men charged with the gang rape is suspected of being involved in another gang rape of a girl in Oslo ten days later.

Now, everybody is innocent until proven otherwise, and none of these men have yet been convicted of anything. But it does sound a lot like a recent such case in Sweden, where a group of Kurdish males had raped a Swedish teenage girl for hours and taken photos of the event. There are reports of more such incidents coming in with disturbing frequency. Kurdish Muslims in Norway have even openly threatened Norwegian girls with rape before.

I am by now almost convinced that the theory presented in my first post about Muslim rapes in Sweden and Norway is true. The staggering numbers revealed in 2001 in Oslo have been suppressed for political reasons, as they would destroy too many multicultural pipe dreams and be inconvenient for the elites. So in the end, the safety of young Scandinavian women is sacrificed in order to keep the glossy image of a multicultural society intact. I find this absolutely appalling. I don't know who made the decision to quiet down these statistics. It has to be somebody high up in the police hierarchy, or probably in the Ministry of Justice. Regardless, it is in the end the responsibility of the Norwegian Minister of Justice, Odd Einar Dّrum, who should announce his immediate resignation.

It is a national, if not international, scandal that the authorities in a nation that prides itself on being a champion of women's rights can put fear of offending Muslim immigrants higher than the security of its own young women. Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik should also consider resigning. At a time when racist attacks from Muslim immigrant youngsters make it increasingly unsafe for Norwegian women in their own capital city, their Prime Minister is mainly concerned with who puts together book shelves at IKEA. Such a politician either does not understand what's going on in his own country or no longer cares about protecting his own people. In both cases, he is unfit for public office, let alone that of Prime Minister.

Mein Kampf becomes bestseller in Turkey

"Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' sells 50,000 copies in Turkey in three months," from AFP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

ANKARA: Cheap cover prices and a rise in nationalist sentiment have made an unlikely best-seller in Turkey of Adolf Hitler's infamous autobiography, "Mein Kampf."...

But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the D&R bookstore chain.

"'Mein Kampf' has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller," said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925. "We took it out of the closet for purely commercial reasons." His company's sole aim, he stressed, was "to make money," which they did by slashing the cover price.

"Mein Kampf," published by about a dozen companies over the years, always sold at a fairly steady annual rate of about 20,000 copies at some 20 New Turkish Lira ($15) a copy.

The Mefisto edition retails at YTL5.90 and sold 23,000 copies in two months....

"The times we live in have a definite impact on sales," Kilic said. "It is an astonishing phenomenon."

TigerHawk again has some dead-on observations (with links in the original):

Not surprisingly, The Jerusalem Post is more willing to see a trend than the Daily Star:

Filiba said the sales were part of a "worrying trend" with anti-Semitic publications - such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a 19th-century anti-Semitic tract - on sale even in bustling department stores.

Fifty thousand copies sold in less than three months is a huge sales figure for Turkey, equivalent to 250,000 copies in the United States. I could not find U.S. sales figures, but I found one source that said that American sales averaged 15,000 copies per year.

History does not progress in a straight line. Racist fascism has tremendous appeal to the world's dark hearts, and it will emerge in some quarters whenever there is social distress and conflict, as there is today in Turkey. No such platitude should let us forget, though, that Islam and Nazism have close historical ties that could re-emerge at any time.

Muslims condemn woman's plan to lead prayers

"Woman leads Muslim prayer service in New York City despite criticism in the Middle East," from AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

NEW YORK (AP) A female professor led an Islamic prayer service Friday with men in the congregation despite sharp criticism from Muslim religious leaders in the Middle East who complained that it violated centuries of tradition.

Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the service she was leading helped emphasize ``the belief in the reality that women are equal'' under Islam.

Oh really? "Women are equal" under Islam? Since when? "Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other" (Qur'an 4:34).

She addressed a congregation of between 80 to 100 men and women attending the service at Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an Anglican church in Manhattan.

Many of the women in attendance were modestly dressed and, in accordance with Islamic tradition, covered their hair with the hijab, or head scarf.

Wadud conducted the service primarily in English with verses of the Quaran [sic] read in Arabic.

``Women were not allowed to (have) input in the basic paradigms of what it means to be a Muslim,'' she said, adding that while the Quran puts men and women on equal footing, men have distorted its teachings to leave women with no role other than ``as sexual partners.''

Of course, the Qur'an itself gives rise to this ambiguity. It says that men are superior to women, as I quoted above, and also says this: "O mankind! reverence your Guardian-Lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, His mate, and from them twain scattered (like seeds) countless men and women" (4:1). Many use that verse and other similar ones to argue that men and women are equal in dignity in Islam. They do not, of course, mention 4:34.

Then there's this from CNN, with thanks to Mediawatch:

There was a brief outburst from some protesters outside the building at the start of the service, but they were kept from entering by a heavy police presence. One young U.S.-born, bearded activist, who only gave his name as Nussrah, said Wadud was not representative of Muslims.

"She is tarnishing the whole Islamic faith," he said.

CNN for whatever reason doesn't tell us everything this man said. From Knight-Ridder, with thanks to LGF:

Only a handful of protesters showed up outside the event and they conducted a counter prayer service on the sidewalk, led by a young American man who would only give his name as Nussruh. "These people do not represent Islam," said the clearly furious Nussruh. "If this was an Islamic state, this woman would be hanged, she would be killed, she would be diced into pieces."

That's true.

Austrian Minister Backtracks on Anti-Hijab Comment

From IslamOnline, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

VIENNA, March 16, 2205 - Austrian Interior Minister Liese Prokop has backtracked on anti-hijab statements, thanks to immediate and astute action from the Muslim minority in the south-central European country.

"I respect Muslim women and their right to choose their attire," Prokop said in press statements carried by IslamOnline.net Tuesday, March 15.

She shifted her ground following a visit by a delegation led by Amina
Baghajati, the media spokeswoman for the Islamic Religious Authority (IGG), the main representative body of the Muslim minority in Austria.

Prokop told the state-run Falter magazine on March 8 that she strongly supported banning hijab-clad women from teaching in schools.

"I consider now the legality of banning hijab in schools," Prokop told the state-run Falter Magazine Tuesday, March 8. "But, anyhow, I will throw my weight about the ban."

Expectedly, the minister's statements raised the ire of the Muslim minority and government officials with Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel saying Prokop was in no position to address such an issue.

Reinforcing the eminent status they enjoy under Islam, Austrian Muslim women established last month the Muslim Women Forum in Austria (FMFO) as an affiliate to the IGG to get the message across.

"The eminent status they enjoy under Islam"? The eminence of getting beaten for disobedience (cf. Qur'an 4:34)?

Muslims reach settlement with Dell on prayer at work

Dude! You're gettin' a prayer room! From AP, with thanks to RB:

Muslim contract employees at the Dell Inc. plant in Nashville reached a settlement with the company on issues related to a dispute over prayer in the workplace, a national Islamic civil rights advocacy group announced yesterday in Washington.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the 31 Muslim employees, who left work last month in a disagreement over Islamic prayers, will be reinstated, receive back pay, and be granted religious accommodation. Managers also will also receive additional training on existing religious accommodation policies and practices....

The settlement came following a meeting yesterday between representatives of the council, Dell, the Muslim workers, the Metro Human Relations Commission and Spherion Corp., the company that provided the workers to Dell.

''We are pleased with both the terms of the settlement and with the cooperative attitude of all parties in the negotiations,'' CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said. ''We thank everyone from around the world who contacted Dell to express their support for reasonable religious accommodation in the workplace.''...

Letter To the Hellenic Parliament: Do Not Deny Genocide

Note the lengths to which the Turks have gone to cover up this genocide. The slightest mention of it anywhere will irk the Turk. Well, come and get me, Recep. The whitewashing of what was done to the Armenians and Greeks is just one element of the larger and time-honored Islamic project of whitewashing history in general, which has been so successful that innumerable canards are now accepted as fact by people who have no particular axe to grind or interest in the subject, but are just repeating what they were taught: the Egyptians welcomed the Muslim Arab invaders, so odious was Byzantium's yoke! The Crusades were acts of unprovoked aggression and slaughter of non-Christians! The Islamic empires were paragons of religious tolerance! There was no genocide of Armenians and Greeks!

From the Assyrian News Agency, with thanks to Nicolei:

The Turkish state's elimination of its Armenian, Greek and Assyrian populations was part and parcel of the same effort to obliterate Turkey's Christian minorities. All were perpetrated during the same time frame, by the same governments, and using the same methods - namely, massacres, labor camps and death marches under the guise of deportations.

New York State's governor George Pataki and the Armenian National Committee have recently added their voices to a growing community of individuals and organizations of conscience that have recognized the genocide of Asia Minor's Greeks by the modern Turkish state.

Now Greece, which has wrestled with its own turbulent history to evolve into a champion of democratic ideals, human rights and the rule of law, is poised to betray these very principles by denying the historical reality of a genocide that was perpetrated against its own people....

As noted by Professor Peter Balakian, prominent U.S. scholar and author of "Black Dog of Fate", the driving force behind the renewed awareness of Turkey's Greek holocaust transcends nationality and ideology: "this is not about ethnic conflict, Greek vs. Turk or Armenian vs. Turk, this is about universal moral issues and universal human rights issues . . . Clearly, denying genocide paves the way for future genocide, for it suggests to the world that governments can commit mass murder with impunity."

This chilling postulate was already put into practice just twenty years after Turkey's eradication of its Christian minorities. Eight days before unleashing his exterminationist campaign in Europe, on August 22, 1939 Hitler defended his orders "to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children" by declaring "who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"...

Hebrew University professor Stanley Cohen's statement regarding the Turkish government's aggressive campaign of denial vis-a-vis the Armenian Genocide applies equally to its denial of the genocide of Asia Minor's Greeks:

"The nearest successful example [of 'collective denial'] in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17 genocide against the Armenians in which some 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and coverups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars. The West, especially the United States, has colluded by not referring to the massacres in the United Nations, ignoring memorial ceremonies, and surrendering to Turkish pressure in NATO and other strategic arenas of cooperation" (Law and Social Inquiry, Winter 1995).

According to a groundbreaking expose by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia "Encarta" pressured contributing scholars Helen Fein, Executive Director of The Institute for The Study of Genocide, and Ronald Suny, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, to incorporate strategies of denial when referring to the Armenian Genocide because "the Turkish government had threatened to arrest local Microsoft officials and ban Microsoft products". Any familiarity with Turkey's record on free speech would demonstrate that these were not idle threats.

A Turkish writer for Encyclopedia Britannica was imprisoned for using the word "Armenia" in a map of ancient Anatolia.

Last year, Turkey imprisoned Assyrian priest Yusuf Akbulut for "telling reporters that his Christian minority had been the victim of genocide" (The New York Times, 12/12/00).

Ankara's Public Prosecutor's Office is now seeking a six-year prison term for Turkish human rights activist Akin Birdal for saying "everybody knows what was done to the Armenians" during a panel discussion in Germany. In 1998, Birdal survived multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and legs by two extremists linked to the Turkish military.

In October, Turkey successfully blackmailed the U.S. House of Representatives to withdraw a majority-supported resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide by threatening economic, military and diplomatic sanctions.

Incredibly, in a not-so-veiled threat Ankara warned that Americans in Turkey would be in danger should the resolution pass, prompting Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to remark "what kind of ally threatens American lives if it doesn't get its way? With friends like that, who needs enemies."...

Quite.

Jordan: Muslim guardian discounts Christian mother's testimony

Siham Qandah update, from Compass Direct, with thanks to Nicolei:

March 16 (Compass) -- The Muslim guardian trying to wrest custody of two Christian children away from their widowed mother demanded yesterday that an Islamic court in Jordan discount the mother's testimony because she is a Christian.

But Abdullah al-Muhtadi's attempt to play the "religion card" against his own sister may represent the last card in his hand, one of the widow's friends told Compass today.

Under Islamic law statutes, the testimony of a Christian or any other non-Muslim carries only half the legal weight of a Muslim witness in a sharia court. So al-Muhtadi insisted that the judge must count his testimony as a Muslim to be stronger evidence than anything testified by his Christian sister....

The defendant was ordered on February 6 and again on February 20 to produce before the court documented evidence to disprove accusations that he had embezzled large sums of money from his wards' trust funds....

As Qandah's estranged brother who converted to Islam as a teenager, al-Muhtadi launched legal proceedings in 1998 to gain personal custody of her daughter Rawan and son Fadi, ostensibly to raise them as Muslims. The children are now 16 and 15, respectively....

Qandah was forced to find a Muslim guardian for her children after her husband died in 1994, while he was serving as a soldier in the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces in Kosovo. Local courts had produced an unsigned "conversion" certificate, claiming her husband had secretly converted to Islam three years before his death. Although her children were baptized Christians, Islamic law decreed that the document automatically made the "convert" father's children Muslims as well....

Non-Muslims are not allowed under Islamic law to control the financial affairs of Muslims, so Qandah had asked her brother to take on this court-appointed responsibility to receive and pass on their orphan benefits, never dreaming that he would turn against her and try to take custody of the children himself....

Despite assurances from King Abdullah II and other members of the Jordanian royal family who have pledged the children will not be taken away from their mother, the custody wrangle has yet to be resolved.

CAIR 'Optimistic' On Jobs Settlement With Dell

Dude, you're cavin' to CAIR! Dell dhimmitude update. From the Dow Jones Newswires, with thanks to Twostellas:

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- A national Islamic civil rights group was retained as legal counsel by 21 of 30 Muslim employees who were allegedly forced from a Dell Inc. (DELL) plant in Nashville, Tenn., for seeking to pray in their workplace.

In a press release Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, said the workers signed retainer agreements with the council in Nashville on Saturday.

The council's Legal Affairs Director Arsalan Iftikhar said in an interview that the group is optimistic about a settlement over the Feb. 4 incident, which involved workers of Somali origin hired through a contract with the staffing company Spherion Corp. (SFN).

"I do feel that Dell as been responsive so far," Iftikhir said, adding that any settlement acceptable to the group would include reinstatement for the workers as well as back pay.

The council helped settle a similar dispute involving contract workers for Solectron Corp. (SLR) in 1999.

The Dell case is expected to be mediated through the City of Nashville's Human Relations Commission.

Last week, CAIR asked that the Muslim workers who were forced from their jobs be rehired pending resolution of the issues involved. The group also offered to mediate a mutually agreeable settlement to the dispute....

Dell Corp., through a spokesman, said the company is "confident a resolution is going to be reached" between the company and the displaced Muslim contract employees in Nashville...

We don't recognize your kind

"'Israel' erased from Canadian passports," from World Net Daily, with thanks to Teri:

Under a new passport policy in Canada, ''Israel" cannot be specified as the country of birth for Canadian citizens born in Jerusalem.

Canadian Jews are being told by their government to surrender their passports so the word "Israel" can be removed if it appears next to the name of the Jewish state's declared capital, according to a report by Israel National News....

A 2004 ruling by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. mirrors the Canadian policy. The court ruled American consular offices in Israel need not register the birthplace of an American citizen born in Jerusalem as ''Jerusalem, Israel,'' but merely as ''Jerusalem.''

Judge Gladys Kessler rejected two lawsuits filed over the status of Jerusalem on passports, saying the U.S. ''does not recognize any sovereign over the city.''

Turkish parliament passes controversial headscarf amnesty

From AFP, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

ANKARA - The Turkish parliament Tuesday passed for a second time a controversial law pardoning tens of thousands of women who were expelled from universities for reasons including the wearing of the Islamic headscarf, banned under Turkey's secular education system.

The law, which amnesties students expelled since 2000, was already vetoed once by Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer in late February....

The bill was drawn up by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has roots in a now banned Islamic movement.

Critics have blasted the law as a "populist" political tactic aimed at women who were expelled for wearing headscarves, which are banned in the civil service, schools and universities....

Headscarves are regarded by the establishment, including the Turkish army, as a statement of opposition to the overwhelmingly Muslim nation's strictly secular order.

Thus even in Turkey they understand what Westerners have so much trouble grasping: that sometimes a scarf is not just a scarf. It can be a symbol for an entire political and social system.

Dutch Muslims plan to form political party

From the Islamic Republic News, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

A group of Muslims in the Dutch city of Amsterdam plans to set up the Muslim Democratic Party (MDP) at the end of May.

The party wants to compete in the upcoming local government elections in five cities and later also in the parliamentary elections, Dutch news agency ANP has reported.

The MDP will promote the interests of Muslims in the Netherlands, the agency quoted spokesman M. Jabri saying....

Contacts are also being sought with non-Muslims, 'so that we have a balance within the executive', said Jabri.

"It is a matter of people who think the same way politically." The MDP has drawn up a provisional manifesto with the outline of the movement. Islam forms the basic point here.

The Palestinian question is also raised in the manifesto.

"The MDP declares solidarity with the peoples of the south in their fight against the neo-colonialism that is steered by the US and neo-liberal Europe, but also against the occupation and aggression of the US, its lackeys and internal dictators," according to the manifesto, quoted by ANP.

With language like that, they are sure to pick up quite a few non-Muslim allies in Europe.

U.S. seeks pacts on religious freedom

Will we finally see some anti-dhimmitude regarding the Saudis? I wouldn't bet on it. Nicholas Kralev in the Washington Times discusses the issue of religious freedom in countries "of concern":

The Bush administration said yesterday it is close to reaching agreements with Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Eritrea that would improve the state of religious freedom in the three countries of "particular concern" for Washington.

The administration asked Congress, which can impose sanctions on the violators under the International Religious Freedom Act, to extend yesterday's deadline for the three governments to demonstrate commitment to becoming more tolerant toward various religions.

"We've been actively engaged with all three in working for improvements in respect for religious freedom in those countries. We've made some important progress," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters....

Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Eritrea were included on the list of "countries of particular concern" for the first time, joining Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Burma and China. They had six months, which expired yesterday, to at least begin reversing the negative trend....

What? No Pakistan? And what about Egypt? Sudan? Jordan?

Al Azhar demands dhimmitude from Vatican: apologize for the Crusades

"Al-Azhar – The Vatican: Official apologies demanded," from the Morocco Times, with thanks to LGF:

Egyptian highest religious authority Al-Azhar has requested the Vatican to present official apologies on Christian crusades carried out against Muslims seven centuries ago. Sheikh Fawzi Zafzaf, President of the Interfaith Dialogue Committee of Al-Azhar, said during a press conference that his committee has sent a request to the Pope last February, demanding an official apology on Christian crusades against the Muslim world, following the example of the Jews.

The principle of demanding apology from the Vatican germinated following Pope Jean Paul II's visit to Syria and Egypt a few years ago, and the apologies the Catholic Church presented to the Jewish and some other Christian doctrines, explained Sheikh Zafzaf. “Al-Azhar is only asking for a similar treatment,” he added.

The Vatican's ambassador to Egypt has abstained from commenting, saying that Al-Azhar's request is now being considered by the Holy See.

Charles at LGF notes that Al-Azhar, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, has praised suicide bombing and stated that Islamic states have a religious obligation to acquire nuclear weapons.

And yes, like TigerHawk, I want to see an apology from Al-Azhar for the 450 years of unanswered Islamic aggression and expansion that obliterated the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East and North Africa, and to which the Crusades were a late and paltry defensive reaction.

But the Crusades have grown into a myth that little resembles reality. One hostile emailer, who represented himself as a professor of divinity in Scotland (and may well be, the level of politicized ignorance in the universities being what it is these days) just today asserted to me that the "whole pretence behind [the Crusades] was to slaughter the un-Christian savages in the East." He also claimed that "2.5 million (approx) Muslim people were slaughtered during the Holy Crusades of the 11th century."

This is absurd, and not just because the Crusades had just barely begun by the end of the eleventh century (the first one was called in 1095 and didn't get going until 1099). But the Crusades were not waged to "slaughter un-Christian savages," and it would not have been possible for the Crusaders to kill 2.5 million people (all in 1099, I guess). I suppose this "professor" would have us think that the Connecticut Yankee showed up in the County of Edessa with a few state-of-the-art 20th century Nazi crematoria. (Estimates of deaths in the Crusades more realistically peg them at about 650,000 on each side -- for the entire period between 1095 and 1291).

Anyway, by bothering the Pope, Al-Azhar is just trying to perpetuate this nonsense. It is, after all, politically useful -- as my addled Scots friend indicates. As it happens, I am these days working on a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, which should be out from Regnery in a few months. In it, I'll do my best to clear away this propaganda and tell what really happened.

Federal Money Goes to Controversial Muslim Group

From Sherrie Gossett in Accuracy in Media, with thanks to Daniel Pipes:

While the major media have portrayed the president's faith based initiative as a pay-off to conservative Christians, a controversial Muslim group accused of having an association with an extreme form of Islam has also been getting federal funds. The group, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), considers itself moderate and mainstream but has sponsored conferences in the past that included speakers known for violent anti-Jewish rhetoric.

At the beginning of this month President Bush made headlines across the country when he addressed religious leaders who gathered at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington for the White House-sponsored Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Leadership Conference. Bush announced that his administration had awarded a whopping $2 billion in grants last year to social programs operated by churches, synagogues and mosques. A White House official said this was probably the most money the federal government had given in one year to religious charities.

The major media failed to report, however, that ISNA, which was represented at the conference, is under Senate scrutiny. Members of the Senate Finance Committee called on the Internal Revenue Service to turn over private tax and fund-raising records for major Muslim charities, including ISNA, as part of an investigation into possible links between the charities and terrorist groups.

The Senators cited no evidence of such ties in their December 22, 2003 letter to the IRS. But the committee's Republican chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, and its ranking Democrat, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, said in part: "Many of these groups not only enjoy tax-exempt status, but their reputations as charities and foundations often allows them to escape scrutiny, making it easier to hide and move their funds to other groups and individuals who threaten our national society. This support for the machinery of terrorism not only violates the law and tax regulations, but it violates the trust that citizens have in the large majority of charities."...

Mary Jacoby and Graham Brink, writing in the St. Petersburg Times, describe ISNA as "subsidized by the Saudi government" and the "main clearinghouse for Wahhabism in the U.S." The New York Times has described ISNA as the umbrella organization for 300 Muslim groups and about one-third of the mosques in the United States....

Read it all.

Sfeir to meet Bush to talk Hizballah and bilateral relations

But how committed can Sfeir really be to Lebanese "sovereignty and independence" if he was in Washington to shill for Hizballah? "Sfeir to meet Bush to talk Hizbullah and bilateral relations," from the Lebanese DailyStar:

BEIRUT: Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir said Tuesday he was in Washington as a "friend of democracy" and to promote friendship between Lebanon and the U.S.

Speaking upon his arrival in the American capital, where he is due to meet U.S. President George W. Bush Wednesday, Sfeir said: "We want for Lebanon to live in peace, to be a free, sovereign and independent country, a country for all people. Let's give it an opportunity to regain its special status within the international community."

It has been understood that Sfeir's visit is aimed at convincing the Bush administration to soften its stance toward the Lebanese resistance group Hizbullah, which the U.S. deems a terrorist organization.

But Sfeir said his visit to the U.S., which he described as a "democratic country par excellence," was aimed at promoting "brotherly relations between Christian and Muslim communities in Lebanon and the people of this great and noble nation."

He added: "The message I am carrying is that of love, respect and appreciation for the United States. We appreciate and thank all those who can help Lebanon regain its sovereignty and independence."...

Iran, EU gear for new rounds of talks in Tehran

From the TehranTimes:

TEHRAN (IRNA) -- Negotiators from Iran and the European Union will hold their new rounds of negotiations focusing on political and trade cooperation, Iran's Foreign Ministry said here Tuesday in a statement.

"In this round of negotiations, delegates from the two sides will separately discuss political cooperation as well as trade and cooperation agreement (TCA)," the ministry's head office for information and press said.

For political talks, the director of Foreign Ministry's West European office, Ebrahim Rahimpur, will represent Iran, while a representative of Luxembourg Foreign Ministry will head the EU delegation.

As for a trade and cooperation agreement, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's director for multilateral economic cooperation, Kia Tabatabaii, will sit down for negotiations with the director general for economic affairs of the European Commission, Christian Lefler.

The political talks are the fifth of their kind, while negotiations on the trade and cooperation agreement are the sixth, with their last round held in the Belgian capital of Brussels earlier this month.

The EU-Iran talks began after President Mohammad Khatami came to power in May 1997, with the EU taking up a policy of 'comprehensive dialogue' with the Islamic Republic in the form of biannual troika meetings on political and economic issues.

The political part of the dialogue covers issues regarding conflicts, including in the Middle East, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, human rights, and terrorism.

On the economic front, the European Union is exploring possibilities for cooperation with Iran in energy, trade and investment as well as refugees and drugs control.

The EU is Iran's biggest trading partner, with oil accounting for over 80 percent of Tehran's exports to the EU. Iran also sells agricultural products -- mainly pistachios -- as well as textiles and carpets to the EU.(...)

Several other Iranian officials have lined up to warn that Tehran might be forced to abandon the diplomatic process if pressed too far.

The key sticking point in the negotiations is uranium enrichment which Tehran has suspended as a confidence-building gesture since last November, but the country insists that it cannot be cajoled to sustain the suspension for good.

The Europeans, represented by Germany, France, and Britain, have been pressing the Islamic Republic on this in return for a package of incentives.

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi stressed Tuesday that economic incentives may help improve foreign relations but won't permanently prevent Tehran from pursuing a peaceful nuclear program.

"Our (nuclear) rights cannot be exchanged for any economic incentives," he told a news conference....

Indonesia ousts Christian groups

From Sharon Behn in the Washington Times:

Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday.

The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency.

"We want each of the relief agencies to be transparent in their programs: Some of them are not clear about their mandates," said Juwono Sudarsono during an interview in a Washington hotel.

"Aceh is mostly Muslim, and some church groups from Australia and the United States are too eager to be there and do their part," he said.

Mr. Sudarsono said his government had set March 26 some weeks ago as a target date for moving from the disaster-relief phase of post-tsunami operations to the reconstruction phase.

With that goal in sight, he said, the overwhelming presence of U.S. and Western relief agencies could make members of the local Islamic community uncomfortable, adding that they would be replaced by Pakistani and Saudi Arabian workers....

87 Percent of Saudis Back Women's Participation in Elections!

Ah, even Saudi Arabia can't escape the glorious rising sun of modernity, eh? Well, maybe. The headline may be misleading. "87 Percent Saudis Back Women's Participation in Elections," from Arab News, with thanks to JJP Mackie and RB:

JEDDAH, 16 March 2005 - A survey conducted by an independent agency in Jeddah showed 87 percent Saudis backing women's participation in elections. It also reflected the greater role of media in educating the public on the polls.

"Eighty-seven percent of 240 Saudis who took part in the survey called for women's participation in the next round of elections," said Dr. Muhammad Fashetan, chairman of the SAS Center for Opinion Survey and Consultancy in Jeddah.

He said the survey's participants included 50 teachers, 20 businessmen, six university students, 40 government employees, 20 retired military officers, 20 media persons and 30 retired civilian officials.

Some women were actually happy to hear the survey report, no matter how small the number polled was. For them it indicated that there is a change in the way people perceive the matter and some saw it as a result of the media's influence. But a considerable number of women also expressed their doubts on the credibility of the poll.

Nawal Hamed, a physician, said that the number mentioned in the survey, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, is not representative of the Saudi population. "I have my doubts on the significance of this number and I think the people polled belong to a certain educated class, that is why they seem supportive of women voting."...

Lessons in Islam at Elementary Schools in Germany

Islamization in Germany: "Lessons in Islam at Elementary Schools in Baden-Wuerttemberg," from GermanNews, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir and RB:

Stuttgart. Starting with the 2006/07 school year, Islamic religious education will be offered at public schools in Baden-Wuerttemberg for the first time. According to Ali Demir, the chairman of the Islamic religious community, the lessons will be offered in German at about a dozen elementary schools. Lessons offered will be tied closely to the local Islamic communities and local politics. The teachers will be educators of Islamic faith already working in the teaching profession, who underwent additional training, according to Demir....

There are about 70.000 elementary school students that are of Islamic faith in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

70,000? 70,000 in one province?

Dutch Muslim Women 'Face Racial Oppression'

What race are Muslims again? Maybe that Nordic giant Ibrahim Hooper can explain to me about "racism" against Muslims. From Islamonline, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir and RB:

THE HAGUE, Along with the media reports which stereotype them as oppressed under Islam, Muslim women in Holland have other more concerns to worry about, a leading Dutch feminist said.

It is a sort of cliché and stereotype to say that women are oppressed under Islam, but it is a fact to say that immigrant women in the country - particularly Muslims - are being discriminated against, lawyer Vamli Van Arslan told IslamOnline.net on Monday, March 14.

Arslan believed that Muslim women in the Netherlands take the brunt of religious discrimination and racial profiling in the labor market because of their attire and names.

"The government remains largely inactive towards such incidents," she said.

Arslan, herself a Muslim, said that women should have the right to put on whatever suits them, a principle she said is enshrined by the secular laws....

That's true, were it not for the fact that the hijab indicates allegiance to a whole different societal model and set of laws. Ah, so much oppression, so little time to manufacture -- er, uh, explain -- it.

Hirsi Ali wins fight over Islam criticism

A victory for the Jihad Watch Woman of the Year (and next year, too), Ayaan Hirsi Ali. From Expatica, with thanks to Filtrat and RB:

AMSTERDAM - The Hague Court refused to censor MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Tuesday, dismissing a court challenge to her criticism of the Islam faith and a planned sequel to her controversial film "Submission".

The ruling comes after several Muslims took legal action against the Liberal VVD MP in a bid to prevent her from making what they believe to be insulting, offensive or blasphemous remarks against the Islamic faith.

They also demanded the court block a sequel to the film Submission, which accused the Islam faith of endorsing domestic violence.

Hirsi Ali made the film in co-operation with Theo van Gogh. The 10-minute documentary is believed to have played a key role in the filmmaker's murder at the hands of a suspected Islamic militant last November.

But the court in The Hague ruled on Tuesday there are insufficient grounds to ban a follow-up film, asserting that Hirsi Ali has not acted illegally with her statements. The court did accuse the MP though of testing the bounds of what is acceptable....

He also said Hirsi Ali is repeatedly asserting that the Islam faith is
dangerous "without making a distinction between fundamentalist Islam and Islam in general". Moszkowicz demanded an end to such sweeping statements....

All right, Moszkowicz. Tell me, please: does Qur'an 4:34, which tells men to beat their disobedient wives, belong to "fundamentalist Islam" or "Islam in general"? A cursory look at the Amnesty International reports for the Islamic world will show that it seems to be taken seriously by men all across those regions.

Hirsi Ali has in the past labelled Islam a backward culture, condemning also its oppression of women under Islam. "For me, it is all about a battle of opinions through peaceful means: words against words. I am not out to hurt or offend people with different beliefs," she was quoted saying earlier this year.

Warm congratulations from Jihad Watch, Ms. Hirsi Ali.

A Sacred, but Not Very Specific, Conversation

He calls it "A Sacred Conversation": Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa, a Chicago physician and writer, recounts this conversation at AltMuslim.com, with thanks to Nicolei and RB.

[An American woman writes]: "I won't deny that I have hostility towards Islam. I think you should know, however, that before I knew anything about Islam I used to regard Muslims as nice, intelligent, good people and I thought Islam wasn't very different from Christianity. However, after the attacks of 9/11 which took America and myself by surprise, I began to research just what Islam is all about. So far, I don't like what I see. Both in theory and in practice it seems bloody and barbaric."

[Hassaballa responds:] I sincerely appreciated her refreshing honesty. The attacks of 9/11 poisoned the view of Islam for many fellow Americans, and it should not be surprising. The level of the Muslim community's insulation from the greater American society, coupled with the widespread ignorance of the basics of Islam on the part of most Americans, should have set up an enormous backlash against American Muslims after September 11. Yes, there were attacks and some were even killed. Yet, September 11 did not spell the end of Islam in America. It speaks to the fundamental goodness of the people of our country.

Still, it is important for me to point out that Islam is neither bloody nor barbaric in theory. Here, however, is the problem: unfortunately, Islam has been used by a tiny minority as an instrument of bloodthirsty barbarism. I am so angry for that.

Angry, eh? All right, Dr. Hassaballa. What are you going to do about it?

[The woman continues]: "I want to know that somewhere out there are Muslims that won't condone the acts perpetrated by Islamic terrorists all over the world and that Islam is not a threat to everything I hold dear. In other words, I'm looking for some sign that the 'clash of cultures' between Islam and the West is not inevitable. I know I'm asking a lot, but all I'm looking for is some middle ground."

[Hassaballa]: This is a very legitimate concern for many, many non-Muslim fellow Americans. So let me say again what I initially told this fellow American: I do not, never have, and never will condone acts of murder and mayhem in the name of Islam. I reject it, I hate it, I despise it, and I condemn it with every cell in my body. The terrorists who act in the name of Islam are as much my enemy as they are yours. What you hold dear, I hold dear. Islam is not a threat to that. My whole purpose in writing is to be a bridge between America and the Muslim world. I am trying with all my keystrokes to avert a "clash of civilizations." Islam and the West live in harmony in me, and it can do so around the world. Again, please don't confuse Islam for the ugliness you see done by Muslims. Please. It is the same as judging Christianity by the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, or judging America by "Baywatch." Both are fallacious.

I am so very grateful to God that I had this conversation, and hence I called it a "sacred" one. I am confident that these very same thoughts and feelings dwell within the minds and hearts of a good number of non-Muslim fellow Americans. I am so grateful to God that this fellow American had the courage to tell me about them.

I would like to invite Dr. Hassaballa to visit us at Jihad Watch, and to explain the specific Islamic grounds on which he condemns terrorism. I hope he will also explain the distinction between jihad and terrorism, and show how the explanations of jihad put forth by Osama bin Laden and his ilk are fallacious on Islamic grounds. Dr. Hassaballa, I'll be right here waiting for you.

BBC weeps over the plight of American Muslims

But note that it can only retail the unsupported claims of a "rock star." No hangings of sharp-tongued teenagers or religiously-motivated murders of hospital patients to report here. "Muslim American: A new identity?," from the BBC, with thanks to JJohnson and RB:

Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the US, yet one in four Americans regard Muslims living among them with suspicion. What does it mean to be both Muslim and American?

Touring the US with his band Junoon, rock star and Muslim American, Salman Ahmed, wanted to find out how the aftermath of 9/11 continues to shape the lives of Muslim Americans in 2005.

"Following the attack," he says, "there were human rights abuses against Muslims, using immigration violations as a weapon. Thousands have been detained and others deported."

Better than being incinerated in your office.

Can Ahmed name any who were deported who didn't have terror ties or immigration violations? No system is perfect, but the overwhelming majority had one or the other, or both.

One month after the attacks on New York and Washington, Congress rushed the Patriot Act into law to help track down terrorists.

The great thing about the American system is that it is, to a greater extent than most governments, self-correcting. Elements of the Patriot Act that may conflict with Constitutional freedoms have been the subject of endless discussions, and the whole thing is subject to modification by future legislation.

"The Act gave the FBI the right to spy on American citizens, to look into our lives, our email, and even our library records," he says.

Better than being incinerated in your office.

But anyway, this is a common canard, and is overblown. The Act didn't really give the FBI anything it didn't already have -- and its excesses are being trimmed in any case.

Even though the hijackers who attacked the Twin Towers in September 2001 represented a militant fringe, some Americans have blamed the entire Muslim world.

And the claims made by terrorists, that they acted in the name of Islam, have outraged many Muslims....

But, still, it's better than being incinerated in your office...

And anyway, about that last part, it would be nice if these Muslims who are "outraged" that the terrorists claim to act in the name of Islam would come up with a convincing version of Islam that refutes the jihadists' use of the Qur'an and Sunnah. They haven't done so yet.

Another kind of Islam?

In "The Region: Another kind of Islam," Barry Rubin addresses the problem of reforming Islam and ending incitement. From the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Designnut and RB:

A Saudi mother, a college professor, recently wrote about a remarkable experience. Shortly after September 11, 2001, her son came home from fifth grade and sang the praises of Osama bin Laden, repeating what his teacher had told the class. Three years later, that same teacher was one of the Islamist terrorists who attacked the Saudi Interior Ministry.

It is quite clear that terrorists in the Arab world are often the direct product of what they were taught in school about Islam. And even if the graduates make good, pro-regime citizens they are also inoculated against supporting political reform, democracy or moderate Islam.

That is why a recent article by Latif Lakhdar in the March issue of MERIA Journal - and in an earlier Arabic version published in Middle East Transparent Web site - is so important. For Lakhdar shows how this vicious circle can be broken, and is in fact already being broken in one Arab country.

Lakhdar, a Tunisian liberal who lives in Paris, contrasts how Islam is taught in his native country with what is done in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In those places, he explains, Islamic education "instills in the younger generation a religious fanaticism which entails a phobia toward dissimilarity and a rejection of the other, even to the extent of killing." Any debate about religious precepts is an unacceptable deviation that must be punished.

In contrast, there is a way of teaching religion rationally, in a manner that does not bar science or logic. Such an approach includes the comparative study of religions, which shows there has been a historical development. It demonstrates not only the lack of a monopoly on piety but also that change is a natural part of religion.

The sociology and psychology of religion can be either a tremendous benefit or manipulated to serve the interests of unscrupulous people. Linguistics encourages the careful study of texts to show that they have always been interpreted....

Read it all. I wish Lakhdar well, but I wonder how he deals with the objection that the idea that "change is a natural part of religion" conflicts with Islamic orthodoxy. In Islam Unveiled I discuss the uphill (and well-nigh impossible) battle Islamic reformers must face, because reforms inevitably (and quickly) clash with cherished tenets of Islam. It is a problem to which I have yet to see a solution.

Two Saudis beheaded for killing Pakistani who witnessed 'shameful' incident

Sharia alert: note how the men were executed, and remember that the next time someone is beheaded in Iraq and the talking heads say it's "un-Islamic." These men committed the murder to avoid the flogging or prison term they would have gotten for homosexual acts. From CBC, with thanks to Skeetstreet and RB:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Two Saudi men were executed Sunday for killing a Pakistani man who saw them in a "shameful situation," the Saudi Interior Ministry said in a statement issued by the official Saudi Press Agency.

The phrase "shameful situation" is used to refer to homosexual acts, seen as a sin against Islam and prohibited in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations. In Saudi Arabia, homosexual acts can be punished by flogging or prison terms....

They feared the scene he'd witnessed could create a scandal for them, so they first ran him over in a car, then crushed his skull with a rock and set him on fire, the statement said.

Thus bringing the term "overkill" to a new low.

Sunday's beheadings brought the number of people beheaded in Saudi Arabia this year to 24....Beheadings are carried out with a sword in public.

Fund for Genocide Research Symposium

This could be a great opportunity for some anti-dhimmitude: a chance to raise awareness of the historical realities of jihad and dhimmitude. It's a Symposium for Remembering Victims of Genocide (thanks to Sparta and RB):

Jewish, Serb, Armenian, Greek, Roma people,

For centuries, generation after generation of our people are subject to genocide. Let us unite in our demand that suffering of our peoples be finally recognized. Join our effort to organize symposium on this subject.

The symposium will be held in Belgrade on April 22-24. Send your experts, participate.

Malaysian Muslim leader: sexy dress a cause of crime

Gee, why didn't we think of this before? Let's impose dress codes on everybody, so Muslims won't take immodest dress as an open invitation to rape. We don't want women raped, now do we? Next, let's impose "hate speech" laws so that non-Muslims won't be killed for offending Muslims by what they say - it's for their own good, you see? Yes, that's how this will work, let's just keep restricting civil liberties, so that Muslims will get along with us and we will get along with them. How easy it all is! From the Malaysian Star, with thanks to Nicolei and RB:

KOTA BARU: Kelantan Mentri Besar Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat has accused women who wear revealing clothes of giving the impression that they are selling their bodies.

"Women who wear such clothes are contributing to the rise in sex crimes and that is why I am in favour of any move to curb such dressing," he told reporters after launching the Kelantan Reading Festival 2005 here yesterday.

Nik Aziz said he was in favour of a dress code for non-Muslims as it would help to reduce sex crimes.

He was asked to comment on the proposal by the council here to introduce a dress code for non-Muslims working in supermarkets. The mentri besar said talk about the dress code started 10 years ago.

His comments drew flak from various quarters...

You don't say!

Blair's anti-terrorism law passed after bitter debate

From AFP, with thanks to Teri and RB:

London: British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government finally pushed a controversial new anti-terror law through parliament on Friday following a two-day, round-the-clock debate, after offering a key concession.

The Prevention of Terrorism Bill was approved by the House of Lords on Friday evening, bringing the curtain down on 31 hours of straight debate in the upper chamber of parliament, one of the longest in its history.

The Lords had repeatedly tried to change the law, which lets terror suspects be subjected to so-called "control orders" including limited house arrest, to make it automatically expire within a year with a so-called "sunset clause."

Blair said that this would seriously undermine the measure, because it "would send a signal of weakness at the very time we should be sending a signal of strength".

However, in the end Home Secretary Charles Clarke partly backed down by promising a major parliamentary review of the law in a year, which satisfied opponents.

The compromise, which saw both sides claiming victory -- ended one of the most dramatic legislative battles Britain has seen in recent years....

Muslim 'honor killings' shock Berlin

Another report on Hatun Surucu; clash of civilizations update. From World Net Daily, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm and RB:

Police in Berlin arrested three Muslim brothers in what appears to be the latest in a series of so-called "honor killings."

The slaying of a 23-year-old Turkish woman, Hatun Surucu, who died of multiple bullet wounds to the head and chest, bears all the marks of an honor killing, a police psychologist said, according to BBC News.

"In Islamic culture, the woman is the bearer of the family decency," explained Karl Mollenhauer. "She must maintain the honor of the family. Men must defend that honour."

It would be the sixth honor killing in as many months among Berlin's 200,000-member Turkish community and the 45th in the past eight years....

The BBC reported, however, that just yards from the site of the killing, children on a school playground were heard praising it, saying the victim had lived like a German.

Meanwhile, multiculturalism blunts the police response:

Ozcan Mutlu, a Turk on the Berlin city council, complained German authorities have turned a blind eye to the practice, pointing out a Turkish man who beats his wife does not get the same punishment as a German.

The authorities try to explain the disparate treatment as a function of cultural and religious differences, the BBC said, but Mutlu insists there is "no cultural or religious excuse for beating women, and there can be no less punishment for honor killings. But in Germany it was the fact in the past years."...

Indeed.

Pipes: Which Privileges for Islam?

Daniel Pipes tackles the issue of Muslim special privilages in the NY Sun, via his site, with thanks to EPG and RB:

Throughout the West, Muslims are making new and assertive demands, and in some cases challenging the very premises of European and North American life. How to respond?

Here is a general rule: Offer full rights - but turn down demands for special privileges.

I would only add a caveat: full rights, yes, but with full understanding of Islam's uniqueness as a political and social program as well as a guide for individual piety. For too long too many have gotten away with too much because of the unquestioned assumption that Islam is a religion like all others, and that Muslims therefore will have no trouble accepting Western pluralism.

By way of example, note two current Canadian controversies. The first concerns the establishment of voluntary Shariah (Islamic law) courts in Ontario. This idea is promoted by the usual Islamist groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Canada and the Canadian Islamic Congress. It is most prominently opposed by Muslim women's groups, led by Homa Arjomand, who fear that the Islamic courts, despite their voluntary nature, will be used to repress women's rights.

I oppose any role for Shariah, a medieval body of law, in public life today, but as long as women are truly not coerced (create an ombudsman to ensure this?) and Islamic rulings remain subordinate to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I see no grounds on which to deny Muslims the right, like other Canadians, to revert to private arbitration....

Here again, it would have to be definitively established that all parties concerned, particularly Muslim women in Canada, were resorting to Sharia arbitration voluntarily. It's a thorny question.

But anyway, read all of Pipes' piece; it's a useful beginning to a discussion that needs to be held. You'll find many useful links in the original.

Keep Islamic law out of Canada, Quebec politicians urge

From the Montreal Gazette, with thanks to Tom and RB:

Islamic law has no place in Quebec or the rest of Canada, a provincial cabinet minister and several MNAs said yesterday.

With the Ontario government expected to decide shortly on whether to allow the Islamic legal code, known as sharia, to be applied to settle family disputes among Muslims, Liberal and Parti Quebecois MNAs warned yesterday that using sharia would lead to blatant violations of women's rights.

"I think all political parties in Quebec must say loud and clear that not only do we not want it in Quebec, we don't want it in Ontario and we don't want it in Canada," International Relations Minister Monique Gagnon-Tremblay said at a conference.

Why, Monique, how un-multicultural of you.

The former immigration minister said Quebec should refuse immigrants who believe the Islamic system should be applied.

"We must rework the social contract (for immigrants) so that the people - Muslims who want to come to Quebec and who do not respect women's rights or who do not respect whatever rights may be in our Civil Code - stay in their country and not come to Quebec, because that's unacceptable."

"On the other hand, if people want to come to Quebec and accept our way of doing things and our rights, in that instance they will be welcome and we will help them integrate."...

Monique Gagnon-Tremblay should be Prime Minister of Canada.

"We've seen sharia at work in Iran. We've seen it at work in Afghanistan, with the odious Taliban regime. We've seen it in Sudan, where the hands of hundreds of innocent people were cut off. We've seen it in Nigeria with attempts at stoning," she said.

Salam Elmenyawi, chairperson of the Muslim Council of Montreal, was outraged when told about the comments made at the conference.

"When you talk like that, you are attacking me and my faith," he said in a phone interview. "This is total ignorance. Bigotry and ignorance have no limits."...

OK, Salam. So please explain how Sharia as you see it is different from what Gagnon-Tremblay pointed out about Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Nigeria.

Liberal MNA Fatima Houda-Pepin [who was born Muslim] argued Islamic law would infringe on women's rights and open the door to polygamy.

"One of the strengths of Islamists is that they know you very well. They know our history, they know our culture, they know our justice system, the Charter of Rights," she said.

She said those lobbyists are trying to impose a political agenda, not necessarily a religious one.

Elmenyawi suggested Houda-Pepin was posing as a representative of the Muslim community when she does not speak for it.

He said the Islamic community in Montreal is looking at creating family tribunals, independent of the courts, to settle religious issues and to protect the rights of both women and men. It is an internal debate that has nothing to do with Quebec's Civil Code, he said....

Nothing to worry about, just little family tribunals settling family matters....no, nothing to worry about...Move along...Nothing to see here...Time to catch up on the Michael Jackson trial...

Applications of Islamic law

A useful summary from the New York Times, with thanks to Nicolei and RB. The sources are Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department.

Islamic law based on the Koran is applied in broadly different ways across the Islamic world. A sampling:

Religious States or Regions Within States

IRAN

Legal Codes

Stoning to death is prescribed for offenses (including adultery and
prostitution). The penal code includes these specifications: "The stones should not be too large so that the person dies on being hit by one or two of them; they should not be so small either that they could not be defined as stones."

Regulations updated in 2003 specify that flogging is to be carried out with leather cords 1.5 cm. thick and 1 meter long.

Enforcement: How It Works

Sentences of death by stoning may include a prison term first, or lashings, or both. A moratorium on stoning was issued in 2002, but sentences continued to be handed out.

Recent Cases

2001: Two women were known to have been stoned to death, including one after serving eight years in prison who was convicted of adultery and "corruption on earth."

This is a Qur'anic term: "And We decreed for the Children of Israel in the Scripture: Ye verily will work corruption in the earth twice, and ye will become great tyrants" (17:4).

Two others were reportedly sentenced to death by stoning; it is not known if the sentences were carried out. At least 285 people were flogged, many in public.

2002: At least three were reported sentenced to death by stoning. Amnesty International recorded 9 amputations as punishments, including one cross amputation (for example, a right hand and left foot)....

That too is based on the Qur'an: "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter" (5:33).

2004: An Iranian newspaper reported the sentencing of a man to 80 lashes and 10 years imprisonment, to be followed by execution by stoning for running a brothel. Another man was flogged with 80 lashes and died 4 days later after conviction on charges including possession of a medicine containing alcohol, consuming alcohol in the early 1980's, possession of a satellite dish and aiding his sister's "corruption" in having boyfriends.

NIGERIA

Legal Codes

The 1959 code allowed for limited Shariah law in northern Muslim areas but prohibited sentences of stoning and amputation. After civilian rule resumed in 1999, 12 states adopted new Shariah codes, resuming those punishments.

How It Works

The new codes added specific punishments: for theft, amputation of the hand; for drinking alcohol, flogging; for adultery, death by stoning.

Recent Cases

2001: Bariya Ibrahima Magazu, a street hawker believed to be 17 or younger, received 100 lashes in January at the Higher Shariah Court in Tsafe in front of dozens of her neighbors. She had been sentenced to 100 lashes for having sexual relations outside marriage and 80 lashes for falsely accusing three men of coercing her into having sex.

The accusation was probably declared false when the men denied it. In Sharia courts in such cases, the woman's testimony is inadmissible, but the man's is taken at face value (cf. 'Umdat al-Salik o24.9).

Read it all. There is a great amount of important information here.

3000 Christians Harassed and Attacked in UK

From the Barnabas Fund via ReligionJournal, with thanks to EPG and RB:

Some 3,000 Christians in the UK are in danger because they have chosen to convert from Islam. Some are being actively harassed and persecuted, but many church leaders seem more interested in defending their attackers than in standing up for the rights of the converts.

Nissar Hussain, a Christian from Bradford, has suffered three years of harassment, amounting effectively to persecution, from the local Muslims in his neighbourhood. His car has been torched and rammed, bricks have been thrown through his window on many occasions, there have been threats to burn his house down, and other threats. Mr Hussain and his wife were originally Muslims, and this is the reason for the treatment they are getting.

Though this may seem shocking, it should not be a surprise. From its inception, Islam has rigorously sought to prevent its adherents from choosing any other faith. Such apostates are regarded as traitors and - according to shari'a (Islamic law) - should be executed....

These converts face not only the possibility of hostility and aggression from individuals within the Muslim community in Britain, but also some are asylum-seekers who have fled much graver dangers in their countries of origin. If such individuals are refused asylum and sent home, they could face imprisonment, torture or death.

A number of senior British Muslims have recently acknowledged the injustice of the Islamic apostasy law and the serious breach of human rights and religious liberty which it entails, both in theory and in practice in the modern world.

Christian Leaders Must Speak Out

It is essential that Christian leaders in the UK should affirm the rights of those who have converted to Christianity from Islam. Sadly such converts can often be marginalized by those to whom they turn for help. Having been rejected by their own community, they find that the Christian community fails to take their situation seriously. Three years ago, when Mr Hussain was first attacked, most church leaders who heard of his situation did nothing. As further attacks occurred, they still seemed barely interested. Now that the plight of the Hussain family has hit the national press, church leaders seem to be chiefly concerned to absolve from blame the perpetrators of these crimes. Even some in Bradford itself have sought to deny the link with Islam and have attributed this sustained and vicious campaign to the pranks of youngsters.

For Christian leadership to downplay the sufferings of converts is a betrayal of those who have risked everything for Christ. But if British Christian leaders were to stand up for converts, it could even bring about change within Islam itself.

Perhaps. But I won't be holding my breath.

Turkey: Guides twist Gallipoli into a "holy jihad"

From our Fabricating History Department comes one from the Australian Advertiser, with thanks to Twostellas and RB:

THE Anzac legend is being corrupted by unlicensed Turkish tour guides who claim the Gallipoli campaign was a "holy jihad" decided by the hand of Allah.

In lectures delivered on the battlefields, the guides tell their audiences that "Muslim saints" repelled Allied artillery attacks and enemy soldiers were swallowed by a "green mist".

The lectures have sparked outrage across Turkey and have prompted a court challenge to the guides' right to speak about the Gallipoli campaign.

Turkish academics, historians and official guides have launched a campaign to ban the talks, which are being delivered at hallowed sites such as Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair.

The RSL has reacted angrily and vowed to raise the matter with the Turkish Government.

"There is only one Anzac history, and that's the real one that has been thoroughly and meticulously documented," said New South Wales RSL president Don Rowe.

"If these guides are spreading mistruths about the true deeds of any soldiers in the campaign, we would have grave concerns."

The Turkish Government ordered a crackdown on unofficial guides last year - but The Advertiser has learned senior members of the Turkish Government are now backing them....

Let them into the EU!

And for the truth about what happened at Gallipoli, see here. An excerpt:

"The Australians rose to the occasion. They did not wait for orders, or for the boats to reach the beach, but sprang into the sea, formed a sort of rough line, and rushed at the enemy’s trenches. Their magazines were not charged, so they just went in with the cold steel, and it was over in a minute for the Turks in the first trench had been either bayoneted or had run away, and the Maxim guns were captured."

[Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, from the first report in Australia of the Australian landing at Gallipoli, reprinted from the Hobart Mercury, 8 May 1915]

Muslim charity wants ownership of Taj Mahal - because it is a grave

From the BBC, with thanks to Joerg and RB:

An Indian Muslim charity has laid claim to the ownership of the world's most famous monument to love, the Taj Mahal. The Sunni Waqf Board controls all Muslim graveyards in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the spectacular marble monument is located.

It says the Taj Mahal houses several Muslim graves other than those of the Moghul royalty and thus falls under its jurisdiction.

Millions seeking romance flock to the Taj Mahal every year.

The monument was built by the 17th century Moghul emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved queen Mumtaz Mahal and has since become a Mecca of sorts for amorous couples....

The Sunni Waqf Board (SWB), a Muslim trust, was given ownership of Uttar Pradesh's Muslim graveyards by the Indian government itself.

The board has issued notices to the Archaeological Survey of India as well as the central government, seeking their reply to its demand by the end of March....

Mr Usman said once the ownership issue had been decided, the board would demand that 7% of the total earnings from tickets should be transferred to its coffers....

Let's see now. How long do you think it will take for the Waqf Board to outlaw kissing and hand-holding around the "monument to love"? How much of that 7% will go straight to terrorist groups -- completely unbeknownst, of course, to Waqf Board officials?

Legislator Proposes Teaching Islam in Philippine Colleges

Another for our ever-expanding Taqqiya Department from IslamOnline, with thanks to Ali Dashti and RB:

ILOILO CITY, Philippines, As part of Muslims' unrelenting efforts to wash away misconceptions about their religion, a Filipino Muslim lawmaker has recently tabled a bill on the inclusion of the basic teaching of Islam in the college curriculum.

"I believe that requiring all colleges and universities to integrate in their curriculum a subject on Islam and the Muslim is a feasible and credible answer," Representative Faysah Dumarpa told IslamOnline.net.

She said the course would include a brief study on the basic teachings of Islam and the history of the Filipino Muslims and may be taken as an elective subject.

This "will enlighten and broaden the majority of Filipinos on the subject" and help foster "cultural sensitivity awareness", maintained the lawmaker.

Dumarpa hopes the measure would be supported by her colleagues - both
Muslims and Christians....

Dumarpa recognized that the proposal, at first glance, might seem favorable to the religion of Islam and may constitute a violation of the constitution, which provides for a separation of religion and state.

But, she maintained, awareness and cultural sensitivity are also very important, as these are powerful tools for the achievement of peace and development....

I'm all for such a course -- if it tells the truth.

Indonesia: controversy over new "Islamic village"

Officials are trying to allay fears that the village, which already has many non-Muslim residents, will henceforth be exclusively for Muslims. "Betawi village is open to all religions, ethnic groups," from the Jakarta Post, with thanks to Nancy Block and RB:

The controversy over the newly endorsed bylaw on the designation of Srengseng Sawah subdistrict in South Jakarta as an Islamic Betawi village may come to an end, as several Betawi figures have said it will not be exclusively for Muslim residents.

The Betawi people are not of the view that the inclusion of several Islamic terminologies in the bylaw would not mean that Srengseng Sawah will be closed to non-Muslim residents.

All those negatives make this a bit unclear.

Representing Betawi community figures, noted historian Ridwan Saidi said on Sunday that the village would still be an inclusive area for people of any ethnicity or religion although there would also be an intensive effort to preserve Betawi culture.

"The bylaw has nothing to do with religion. But we should understand that if we are talking about Betawi culture, we cannot go far from the importance of mosques and musholla (prayer houses or rooms), the places where Betawi people get together," he told The Jakarta Post.

According to Ridwan, the wariness of certain parties over the proposed conversion of Srengseng Sawah into an exclusively Islamic village can be assuaged through gubernatorial decrees on the implementation of the bylaw.

"The decree should stipulate the protection of residents of all religions and ethnic groups in Srengseng Sawah," Saidi suggested....

Protection! Seeing as how "dhimmi" means "protected people," pardon me if I am less than impressed.

Spanish Islamic Commission: Thanks for telling apart Islam, terrorists

From Australian AP with thanks to Nobody and RB:

THE Spanish Islamic Commission has thanked the country for the "exemplary" way in which it has made a distinction between Islam and terrorism after the March 11, 2004 attacks in Madrid.

"We feel deep and strong solidarity with the victims and their loved ones who have shown an exemplary attitude by never pointing a finger at the country's Muslim population but, on the contrary, could tell the difference between terrorists and the Muslim people," commission secretary-general Riay Tatary told private Spanish radio Cadena Ser.

Referring to the train bombings that killed 191 people in the Spanish
capital a year ago, he said: "It causes profound pain to all Muslims."...

Well, um, maybe not ALL Muslims...

UK: Armed forces 'want more Muslims'

From the BBC, with thanks to Nobody and RB:

The chief of the UK's armed forces has appealed for more Muslim recruits in a bid to better reflect modern Britain.

Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Michael Walker promised "fulfilling
careers and high-quality training" for recruits in a speech to Muslim
leaders.

He told the Muslim Council of Britain in London that he wanted the armed forces to reflect "religious, cultural and ethnic diversity".

Currently only 300 members of Britain's armed forces are registered
Muslims....

"The Muslim Council of Britain has made a real and lasting contribution to the creation of a just and tolerant society," he said.

The general's appearance at the MCB meeting was part of the Ministry of Defence's attempts to show they were serious about recruiting more Muslims....

Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain sounded a warning note:

"For this to be successful, however, it is imperative that the high reputation of our armed forces is zealously protected and maintained and not allowed to be tainted by any misbehaviour or illegal actions."

Quite so, Iqbal.

Salman Rushdie on New Hate Speech Laws

Rushdie, who is of course the poster child for the totalitarian intransigence and brutality of Sharia law, here predictably identifies "religion" as the problem, and engages in simplistic moral equivalence. However, he is honest enough to state clearly what Britain's new hate speech laws are designed to do, and whose favor they are intended to curry. "In bad faith," from The Guardian, with thanks to Doc Washburn:

The exception to European secularism can be found in Britain, or at least in the government of the devoutly Christian and increasingly authoritarian Tony Blair, which is presently trying to steamroller parliament into passing a law against "incitement to religious hatred", in a cynical vote-getting attempt to placate British Muslim spokesmen, in whose eyes just about any critique of Islam is offensive.

Journalists, lawyers and a long list of public figures have warned that this law will dramatically hinder free speech and fail to meet its objective - that religious disturbances will increase rather than diminish. Blair's government seems to view the whole subject of civil liberties with disdain - what do freedoms matter, hard-won and long-cherished though they may be, when set against the requirements of a government facing re-election?

And yet the Blairite policy of appeasement must be defeated. Perhaps the House of Lords will do what the Commons failed to do, and send this bad law to the scrapheap.

"It seems the Europeans are ready to adopt a logical position"

I.e., dhimmitude over Iran's nuclear aspirations. "U.S. 'Hallucinating' Over Nuclear Talks, Iran Says," from Reuters, with thanks to Ted Robertson:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Washington is "hallucinating" if it thinks Iran will scrap its nuclear fuel production plans in return for economic incentives, a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying Sunday.

The United States offered the encouragements in support of the European Union which is negotiating with Tehran to try to persuade it to give up sensitive nuclear activities.

"U.S. officials are either unaware of the substance of the talks or (they are) hallucinating," Sirus Naseri, a senior member of Iran's nuclear negotiating team, told the official IRNA news agency.

Iran says it needs atomic technology to generate electricity and will never use it to make bombs, as the United States fears.

London's Sunday Times said Israel had drawn up plans for a combined air and ground attack on Iranian nuclear installations if diplomacy fails to halt Tehran's atomic program.

The newspaper said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his inner cabinet had given "initial authorization" for a unilateral attack at a private meeting last month.

Israel, which bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, played down the report. Iran has said it will respond vigorously to any attack on its nuclear plants.

Washington gave practical backing for the EU's diplomatic approach Friday, offering to allow Iran to begin talks on joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) and consider letting it buy civilian airline parts if it ceased all activities that could produce fuel for nuclear power plants or atomic weapons.

Washington and the EU have warned Iran it faces referral to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose economic sanctions, if it fails to allay fears it wants the bomb.

U.S. PROPOSAL "DISRESPECTFUL"

Iran dismissed the U.S. offer as insignificant. Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi told IRNA it was "funny and disrespectful."

"The U.S. should apologize to Iran for making this proposal," he said, going on to describe Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a "queen of war and violence."

Naseri said it was not clear if greater U.S. involvement in the negotiations was "helpful or an obstacle to progress."

He said the EU, which has persuaded Iran to suspend potentially weapons-related activities like uranium enrichment while the two sides try to reach a solution, was close to accepting that Iran would not give up enrichment.

Instead, Tehran has offered to give "objective guarantees" that it will not divert nuclear fuel to military uses.

"It seems the Europeans are ready to adopt a logical position," Naseri said.

EU lawmakers label Hizbollah 'terrorist’ group, but still seem to court negotiations

From the Hesitating On the Moral Precipice Department. From Lebanonwire, with thanks to RB:

European legislators on Thursday branded the radical Lebanese Hizbollah group a “terrorist” organization and urged EU governments to place the group on their terrorist blacklists, as the bloc did with the Palestinian Hamas group in 2003.

“[EU] Parliament considers that clear evidence exists of terrorist activities by Hizbollah. The [EU] Council should take all necessary steps to curtail them," legislators said in a non-binding resolution adopted during a session in Strasburg, France on Thursday. EU lawmakers also called on Syria to withdraw its troops and intelligence services from Lebanon.

EU countries are under pressure from the US administration and Israel to add the Iranian-backed Hizbollah organization to its list of outlawed terrorist organizations, obliging member states to seize its assets and take action against its members.

So far, France, Spain, and Britain have been reluctant to include Hizbollah on the list, fearing that such a move would further damage the prospects for Middle East peace talks....

Meanwhile, more mixed signals on another front:

In related news, Washington has refuted a story in the New York Times earlier this week, according to which the US was softening its stance towards Hizbollah and might be ready to recognize it as a legitimate political party in Lebanon. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that the US stance towards Hizbollah had not changed and that the administration of US President George Bush would accept a political role for Hizbollah only if it disarmed. Rice said that did not reflect a shift in Washington’s stance, but it did reflect recognition of the political clout of the militant Shi’ite Muslim organization in Lebanon.

In remarks to reporters, Rice carefully avoided the stock US phrase that Hizbollah is a terrorist organization. Her statements come two days after Hizbollah showed its political power by drawing hundreds of thousands of people to central Beirut for a pro-Syrian rally to counter the effect of two weeks of anti-Syrian rallies following the 14 February assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri....

Two days ago, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the international community to understand that Hizbollah was a force to be reckoned with in implementing the UN Security Council resolution calling for the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and the disarming of all militia groups. “[W]e need to recognize that they are a force in society that one will have to factor in as we implement the resolution,” Annan said.

Yeah, Hitler was a force in society too. I know Annan is long gone, and now it looks as if Rice is on the verge of losing her mind as well. Don't they see at State how this kind of thing worked out with Arafat? Do we really want to usher in another endless cycle of conflict in Lebanon? If the Bush Administration really understood the jihad ideology, they would never consider negotiating with Hizballah, even if it disarms -- after all, this would still be an organization committed to agreeing to a truce only to gather strength to fight more effectively in the future (as per traditional Islamic law). But nary a soul in Washington, on either side of the aisle, seems to have a clue.

Hirsi Ali: Islam dangerous for women

More heroism from the most heroic woman in Europe (and maybe the world), Ayaan Hirsi Ali. "Dutch women's rights activist says Islam dangerous to women," from AP, with thanks to Nicolei and RB:

STRASBOURG, France - Dutch politician and women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Tuesday said Islam was unfriendly to women and urged Europe not to tolerate religious violence.

"Muslim religion is many things but it's certainly not friendly to women," she said at the European Parliament, warning the West that it "shouldn't indulge in and buy fallacies from Muslims."

Hirsi Ali said violence is the most important obstacle to liberating women and must be eradicated through policies such as positive discrimination and education campaigns.

She also warned domestic violence is on the rise in Europe and proposed setting up a European court and an attorney general to deal with domestic violence cases.

She suggested women should actively fight for their rights and stop being "their own worst enemies."

"Women conceive and give birth to sons, but they don't commit them to the noble cause of defending gender equality," she told a seminar on combating violence against women. "The problem is the inability of women to draw up a plan on how to help women."

Pakistan: Protests, Demands for Justice Continue in Gang Rape Case

Another twist in the Pakistan Gang Rape Case , showing that international attention can work wonders. From VOA, with thanks to Nicolei and RB:

(Islamabad)The Islamic court in Pakistan has restored the convictions of five men sentenced to death for raping a woman on orders from a village council. The decision is yet another twist in the high-profile gang rape case that drew international attention last week when another court ruled the men should be set free.

Note also the influence of Sharia in Pakistan:

Pakistan's Sharia Court, the highest legal body for religious cases, says that the civil court system does not have the right to deal with the matter. It has ordered all the defendants in the case and the rape victim, Mukhtaran Mai, to appear before judges of the Islamic court for a new hearing.

The 30-year old Ms. Mai was raped on the orders of a village council in central Punjab province two years ago to punish her family for her brother's alleged illicit love affair with a woman from a more powerful tribe.

Six men, including two village elders were sentenced to death the same year but last week a higher court overturned the sentences of five of them, ordering their release from custody. The sixth man had his death sentence reduced to life in prison....

The religious Sharia court says it alone has the power to rule on appeals in rape cases because they are tried under Pakistan's Islamic law, known as the Hudood Ordinance.

But Mr. Awan says the Islamic court's ruling should be challenged in the Supreme Court of Pakistan because it has raised questions about the credibility of the country's judiciary.

In countries where Sharia courts share jurisdiction with civil courts, the question of which one will prevail is just beginning to heat up. Which law will win, the "law of Allah" or the people's law? How Pakistan will answer this question will have a great influence on neighboring countries.

Belgium: Anti-Tehran protesters removed from plane

An anti-dhimmitude protest. From World Net Daily, with thanks to EPG and RB:

About 90 police officers removed 56 Iranian activists from an airplane at the Brussels airport after a 15-hour standoff in protest of Western accommodation of Tehran's cleric-led Islamic regime.

The activists, who refused to disembark a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt yesterday, were in cell phone contact with an Iranian scholar and activist in London who runs a TV station out of his home, Frood Fouladvand.

The protesters, according to Fouladvand, were chanting: "We are the
messengers of peace. We are against global terrorism. We will remove the malignant terrorist regime of the Mullahs."...

Muzzled by Muslims

Dhimmitude at DePaul: teacher suspended for "racism" over remarks that "offended" Muslim students. Joel Mowbray in FrontPage (thanks to EPG and RB) discusses freedom of speech on campus:

In academia today, "academic freedom" protects those who compare the 9/11 victims to Nazi higher ups, but it does not cover a professor with the temerity to challenge the beliefs of Muslim students in a single encounter which constituted, in the words of his boss, an "assault on their dignity."

Thomas Klocek, a part-time adjunct professor at DePaul University, knows this first-hand; he was unlucky enough to fall on the wrong side of the political correctness fence....The Muslim students who had the 20-30 minute run-in with him that precipitated his suspension charge [of] racism....

On September 15, 2004, Klocek was strolling through the student activities fair at DePaul's downtown campus when he noticed a flyer showing Israeli tanks destroying Palestinian homes. "It was very one-sided," he explained, "and I wanted them to think about the bigger reality."

He put on his professor hat and tried to do what teachers do: he tried to get them to think. And that's what has led to his downfall.

Approaching the Students for Justice in Palestine booth, Klocek engaged the students. And then he enraged them. Depending on who's telling the story, Klocek either earlier or later in the conversation said something to the effect of that while not all Muslims are terrorists, all the terrorists currently operating in the world today are Muslims.

That's not an entirely true statement-look at the Irish Republican Army for just one example-but then again, he was quoting a fairly prominent Muslim, the head of the al-Arabiya satellite television network. And while you can quibble with the full accuracy of the claim, you can't deny its essence.

Same goes for what the Muslim students consider his other truly offensive remark, that there is no Palestinian ethnicity and that the term really only became prominent in media coverage in the last 20 to 25 years. There has been in various forms a region--though not a country, and certainly not an ethnically homogenous state--known as "Palestine" going back to the Ottoman period, but "Palestinian" is more of a regional identification than an ethnic one. And while older than two decades, its usage only became common in the 20th century.

Eight days later, some of the students involved met with the dean and cried racism. They asked for his head. They got it.

Read it all.

Jihad on the American mind

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, in a speech she gave at the conference on "The Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Campus," held at Columbia University on March 6, 2005 and reprinted in FrontPage (thanks to EPG and RB), elucidates Saudi funding and indoctrination in American Universities:

The religious and philosophical justifications for promoting Jihad -which means holy war - around the world, is found in the Quran, says Dr. Hussein Shehata, a professor at al-Azhar University in Cairo. According to Dr. Shehata, the following terms in the Quran combine to justify the spreading of Jihad: in Arabic- Al-Jihad bi-al-Lisan - which means - Jihad of the Tongue, and al-Jihad bi-al-Qalam - Jihad of the Pen. Both combine for preaching and writing to promote Jihad.

This command is complemented by Al-Jihad bi-al-Mal - the Financial Jihad; namely, raising money for needy Muslims and supporting the Jihad warriors - known as the Mujahideen. These are the commands that form the justification to spread the Jihad.

On his website, on March 3, 2004, the same Dr. Shehata explained the uniqueness and the reason for the financial Jihad commandment as being, quote: "a trial of strength of Muslim faith" and "a means to purify the soul from stinginess". It is through the financial Jihad, he says, that Allah gives the wealthy Muslims the opportunity to allocate some of their money for the Da'awa (literally - the call for Islam), which is the Islamic effort to teach or convert people to Islam.

Funny. When I explain all that, I get called an "Islamophobe." I wonder if Ibrahim Hooper has contacted Dr. Shehata to call him an "Islamophobe."

In view of the fact that these commandments are interpreted as an integral part of Jihad, it is not surprising that Saudi Arabia, according to various Saudi official publications, have spent somewhere between $70-87 billion on the spread of Wahhabism around the world since the oil boom began in the mid- 1970's. This money was not only spent in Muslim/Arab countries. Large amounts were and are still being spent in the West, including in the US.

The Saudis have established endowments for American universities, have set up centers for Islamic and Arab studies, and have distributed generous scholarships, which often include visits to Saudi universities in programs similar to the one attended by Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was indicted last week for joining Al-Qaeda and for plots to assassinate President Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Abu Ali, by the way, graduated from the Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Virginia, in the USA, which is sponsored by the Saudi embassy in Washington, and IN which many other young
Americans are being indoctrinated in Wahhabi Islam....

It is important to note that the many millions of dollars that the Saudis are spending here to establish Islamic centers to increase their influence are indeed subverting our academic institutions through indoctrination. Moreover, once established, these centers receive budgetary assistance from the US government under Title IV of the Education Act. In 2004, Congress allocated $86.2 million of our tax money to support these programs.

By giving our money to Islamic Centers and programs endowed by Islamist, we are helping the Saudis and their likes to acquire the foot soldiers to use the knives with which they intend to slit our throats.

Indeed. I trust that Dr. Ehrenfeld received warm and appreciative applause.

Saudis Funded Columbia Program At Institute That Trained Teachers

How to ensure a favorable academic atmosphere. From the New York Sun, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm and RB:

Saudi Arabia has funneled tens of thousands of dollars into the "outreach" programs of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, which until last week was training some of the city's public-school teachers in how to teach students about Middle East politics.

Since 2002, the government-owned Saudi Aramco has given the institute annual grants of $15,000 for unspecified outreach activities. The institute's outreach activities have included a 15-week teacher-training course on Middle East politics led by Columbia faculty members and graduate students.

In a letter dated April 27, 2004, a scholar of Arab nationalism who took over the Middle East Institute in 2003, Rashid Khalidi, wrote to a senior executive in public affairs at Saudi Aramco, Mustafa Jalali, thanking him for "your generous contribution to the Middle East Institute's outreach activities in 2004." The money, Mr. Khalidi wrote, "will enable us to be more proactive and seek out wider outreach opportunities."...

"The faculty and a group of advanced graduate students are also an important resource for the dissemination of information on the Middle East for non-specialist audiences such as schools, colleges, and community groups," the document stated. It then described the institute's course for public-school teachers.

A Columbia spokeswoman, Susan Brown, denied the money from Saudi Aramco was used to finance the program that the institute coordinated for the city's Department of Education. Rather, she said, the program - for which participating teachers paid tuition of $145 - was supported through federal funds. The institute must demonstrate a certain level of community outreach activity to qualify for federal funds.

Ms. Brown would not disclose how the Middle East Institute, which is part of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, spent the Aramco money. Other outreach activities carried out by the institute include a public lecture series and a one-day educational program in 2002 for New York public-school teachers that provided participants with a special "sensitivity" curriculum for teaching issues related to Islam....

Khalidi has also called the office of President of the United States "the costliest to buy." He seems to be an expert on the ways and means of purchasing influence.

Mr. Khalidi has blamed Israel for carrying out "racist" policies and has argued that Palestinian armed "resistance" against Israeli soldiers serving in the West Bank is legitimate. The day the article appeared, the city schools chancellor, Joel Klein, removed Mr. Khalidi as a lecturer in the course.

Mr. Klein's decision infuriated Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, who wrote the chancellor a letter accusing him of violating First Amendment principles and suggesting negotiations to determine whether Columbia would continue to participate in the professional development program.

The New York Sun reported last year that Columbia had failed for years to disclose to the federal Department of Education the foreign gifts it received.

Yeah, right, never cooperate with Amerikkka. I almost forgot.

Columbia gave Washington an updated list of foreign gifts and later disclosed the donors behind Mr. Khalidi's professorship, named after the Palestinian advocate and literature scholar Edward Said.

On the egregious Said, don't miss "Edward Said and the Saidists, or Third-World Intellectual Terrorism" by Jihad Watch Advisory Board member Ibn Warraq, in The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.

Among the 22 foreign gifts of $250,000 or more that Columbia disclosed having received in 2003 was a contribution of $250,000 from an unnamed Saudi individual for "social science research."

Among the donors of the $2.1 million Edward Said chair, Columbia reported, were the United Arab Emirates, which gave $200,000, and the Olayan Charitable Trust, a charity associated with a Saudi-based multinational corporation, the Olayan Group....

Read it all, if you have the stomach for it.

30 Muslim workers fired for praying on job at Dell

Anti-dhimmitude at Dell. Why? Well, it would be perfectly clear to everyone that a Christian who left his work station during work hours to go to church should be held responsible. This is not a question of the infringement of rights unless these employees had arranged with Dell for a work schedule that included time off for prayers, and then Dell reneged. But I doubt that was the case. Otherwise, they contracted with Dell to be on the job from a certain hour to another, and they should hold up their end of the deal. From the Tennessean, with thanks to TwoStellas:

Work or pray.

Faced with that difficult decision, Abdi H. Nuur removed his employee badge and walked away last month from his forklift driver's job at Dell Computer's Nashville plant. He and 29 other Somali Muslims say they were forced to choose between their faith and their employment.

Now the Metro Human Relations Commission is trying to intervene in a
confrontation that pits American-style production quotas against Islam's requirement that its adherents pray daily when the sun sets.

''They told us that we cannot pray at sunset,'' Nuur said. ''They told us that we would have to wait for our break.'

Nuur apparently never considers conforming to the rules of the job he has taken, but rather expects his employers to accommodate him.

According to leaders of Nashville's Somali community, Dell has been one of several area employers with strong histories of accommodating Muslim workers.

But that arrangement apparently came to an abrupt halt in February, with the firing of 30 workers. They were employed by Spherion, a labor agency that provides workers for Dell's Nashville operations, according to David Perez, the compliance officer for the Metro Human Relations Commission.

A Dell spokesman declined to comment about the cases, saying the company had not received a specific complaint.

''Dell values diversity in all areas, and that includes religious beliefs,'' Dell spokesman Mark Drury said. ''The company's practice is to accommodate religious beliefs, so long as the accommodations are reasonable, don't disrupt business operations and are consistent with our policies on operating a respectful workplace....

The Metro Human Relations Commission hopes that it can help mediate a solution. ''It would be great if they could reach a conciliation agreement,'' said compliance officer Perez. He said a Dell manager had phoned him Tuesday to inquire about the situation. Spherion, he said, had yet to respond.

Meantime, he is drawing up a complaint to be filed with Metro government, based on the report from the Somali workers. If a commission panel finds the claims point out a violation of Metro discrimination codes, the companies could be fined.

The workers also could file discrimination complaints with state and federal agencies.

A similar federal complaint turned into a lawsuit that was resolved last year in favor of a local manufacturer.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Muslim organizations are actively looking for excuses to sue. Sue the factory, sue the government, sue anybody who objects. And local and national authorities don't seem to be getting good advice on how to deal with this.

Malaysia: 'Do not infringe on rights of non-Muslims'

Resistance to pressure to make non-Muslim women conform to dress standards for Muslims. From New Straits Times, with thanks to Twostellas:

The MCA today said the Pas-led Kelantan Government should not infringe on the rights of non-Muslims in the State.

State MCA chairman Datuk Dr Fong Chan Onn said a dress code for non-Muslim working women was not necessary as women know how to conduct themselves with decorum in formal and informal settings.

He said the MCA would continue to ensure policies adopted by the Kelantan Government did not infringe on the rights of non-Muslims. The priority should be to ensure that people, Muslims and non-Muslims, lived together in peace and harmony, he added.

Fong was commenting on a Kelantan Government proposal for a dress code for non-Muslim women.

Women's Aid Organisation (WAO) Programme Officer, Tashia Peterson, said there was a need to stop this obsession with controlling women's attire.

Matthews of 'Hardball' Retreats from Speech After Muslim Protest

Is Matthews playing the dhimmi? If what they're saying about Modi is true (and I don't know whether or not it is), then it appears not (although he gets no points for his mealy-mouthed "scheduling conflict" excuse). But why did the CAIR message go out on the Pentagon message server (as we saw yesterday)? From the New York Sun, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm and RB:

The host of MSNBC's "Hardball," Chris Matthews, announced yesterday that he would not appear as planned on March 24 at the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"Due to a scheduling conflict, Chris Matthews has canceled this appearance," an MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, said. He would not elaborate on the nature of the conflict.

In recent days, Muslim activists and others flooded the network with calls, letters, and e-mail urging Mr. Matthews to distance himself from the group. An Indian official billed as the "chief guest" at the meeting, Narendra Modi, has been accused of tolerating anti-Muslim violence in the state of Gujarat, where he is chief minister.

The president of the Indian Muslim Council-USA, Dr. Ashwini Rao of New York, said he does not credit the official explanation for Mr. Matthews's action. "Most likely, that's not correct, because we've been talking to him for the last week and a half, at least, and they've never said it's a scheduling conflict," Dr. Rao said. "I was hoping he'd take a more moral stance."

Mr. Modi has been condemned by various human rights groups for failing to rein in anti-Muslim riots in 2002 that led to the deaths of more than 1,000 Gujarat residents.

The Indian governor was "directly involved in this pogrom and this hatred," Dr. Rao asserted. He said Mr. Modi espouses a supremacist philosophy known as Hindutva. "This is an ideology that was inspired by Mussolini and Hitler. They want to have the same thing in India, where India is solely for upper-caste Hindus," Dr. Rao said.

Last month, 30 human-rights activists asked Secretary of State Rice to block Mr. Modi's trip to America. They labeled him an "egregious violator" of religious freedom and said he should be barred from the country under a 1998 law, the International Religious Freedom Act. Among the signatories to the letter are the director of the religious freedom program at Freedom House, Nina Shea, and the advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, Thomas Malinowski....

But here's the rub:

In a bizarre and mysterious twist, some in the press corps learned of Mr. Matthews's decision from a Council on American-Islamic Relations news release that was distributed to reporters yesterday via an e-mail list the Pentagon uses to circulate stories about the military.

The Pentagon later issued a statement calling the distribution unintentional and saying it had "taken steps to guard against a recurrence."

A spokesperson for the Islamic group, Rabiah Ahmed, denied that her organization sent the message out through the Pentagon list. "We had nothing to do with it," she said. "Apparently, somebody hacked into their computer system and sent out our press release on their listserv."

Of course.

Why is the DoD list server being used by CAIR?

Aaron at Internet Haganah (thanks to Romy) notes some dhimmitude at the DoD:

WTF, Over. [Why is the DoD list server being used by CAIR?]

No sooner did I sign up for three US Department of Defence mailing lists (DEFENSE-PRESS-SERVICE, DODNEWS and DODIMAGEGALLERY) than I received an email.

What did I expect? Well, what I did *not* expect was a press release from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

He then reproduces CAIR's message -- it's one of their standard press releases.

So you tell me: why is the DoD list server being used by a group with a background like CAIR's?

US called ready to see Hezbollah in Lebanon role

Jihad terrorists, you say? No truce except to gather strength to fight again? Come now -- don't be so parochial! From the New York Times via Financial Times, with thanks to Gabrielle Goldwater:

WASHINGTON, March 9 - After years of campaigning against Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim party in Lebanon, as a terrorist pariah, the Bush administration is grudgingly going along with efforts by France and the United Nations to steer the party into the Lebanese political mainstream, administration officials say.

The administration’s shift was described by American, European and United Nations officials as a reluctant recognition that Hezbollah, besides having a militia and sponsoring attacks on Israelis, is an enormous political force in Lebanon that could block Western efforts to get Syria to withdraw its troops.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah showed its clout by sponsoring one of the biggest demonstrations of recent Lebanese history, bringing hundreds of thousands of largely Shiite supporters into central Beirut to support the party’s alliance with Syria and, by extension, the presence in Lebanon of 14,000 Syrian troops.

Never mind that it was a hoax. Come now! You must awaken to the realities of realpolitik! Have some champagne! Let us drink to the glorious future!

IKEA manuals accused of sex discrimination -- but they fear to offend Muslims

From Reuters, with thanks to My Sunshine:

OSLO (Reuters) - Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is guilty of sex discrimination by showing only men putting together furniture in its instruction manuals, Norway's prime minister says.

IKEA, which has more than 200 stores in 32 nations, fears it might offend Muslims by depicting women assembling everything from cupboards to beds. Its manuals show only men or cartoon figures whose sex is unclear.

"This isn't good enough," Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik was quoted on Thursday as telling the daily Verdens Gang. "It's important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations."

Good luck, Kjell, old man.

Anti-dhimmitude in Denmark: Preacher reported to police

But of course, he was misunderstood! Isn't it astounding how complex this all is, how difficult it is for these poor men to make their points clear! From the Copenhagen Post, with thanks to Filtrat:

A group of forty women with immigrant backgrounds reported a Muslim preacher and his religious community to the police on Tuesday, for advocating threatening and discriminating treatment of Muslim women.

The preacher, imam Raed Hleihel, infuriated the nation during a Friday prayer session in February, when he insisted that Muslim girls should cover themselves from head to toe, and that women who use perfume and go to the hairdressers would go to hell.

The women used the opportunity on the International Women's Day on Tuesday to report the imam and the religious community where he preached to the police.

The women said Hleihel encouraged Muslim men to look down on women, consider them their property, keep them under constant control, and treat them like slaves.

The spokesman for the congregation involved, the Copenhagen's Islamic Religious Community, Kasem Said Ahmad, said the 40 women had misunderstood Hleihels comments.

'Every imam has the right to define how women should be protected,' Ahmad said. 'We would like to invite the 40 women to a meeting with Raed Hleihel, so that he can explain what he stands for, so that the misunderstanding can be corrected.'

In his sermon, Hleihel told men at the congregation to go home and make sure their wives and daughters draped every inch of their bodies with clothing.

When news broke of the sermon, integration consultants and politicians rallied to denounce it as `medieval' and `bigoted.'

That may be, but it is in full accord with Islamic tradition. Here is a salient hadith:

Narrated Aisha, Ummul Mu'minin [Mother of the Believers]:

Asma, daughter of AbuBakr, entered upon the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) wearing thin clothes. The Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) turned his attention from her. He said: O Asma', when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands. (Sunan Abu Dawud, Book 32, Number 4092)

"Bin Laden is damaging Islam"

A couple of Dutch imams try to stay in the country by making religion-of-peace noises. Of course, Islam is so misunderstood, etc. (What monumental complexity it encompasses! How few have grasped it properly!) But they nonetheless can't manage to hide their desire to see Islamic law come to Holland. A translation of a Dutch article, courtesy Cid Martel:

"We are against violence and we are not against Western society. We think everyone should abide by the Dutch rule of law; Muslims as well." Both imams belong to the Al Fourqaan mosque in Eindhoven. Minister Verdonk wants to take away their permission to stay in the country. During the interview in the boardroom of the mosque, the men don’t seen very impressed.

Abou Tareq, 41, who has the Bosnian nationality but comes from Sudan originally, as well as Mohammed Mahmoud, 34, from Kenya, maintain that they haven’t done anything which is against the Dutch law. Their lawyer has protested against the minister’s decision.

"Yes, we are Salafist," both admit, "if by that you mean that we wish to go back to the original roots of Islam. But that doesn’t mean we’re against Western society." Both imams do admit that it would be ideal for the secular laws of a nation to corresponded with Islamic law. "But that does not mean you can push Islamic law onto society. You can only do that after a democratic choice. Which is what orthodox Christians would also like to do."

Both imams deny they ever called Muslims to jihad. Someone like Osama bin Laden also doesn’t have the right to issue a fatwa and call for jihad against the West, both insist. "He does not have the authority, he’s no scholar. Osama bin Laden has done much damage to Islam."

Whew. I feel so much better. I guess that's why no Muslims around the world are waging jihad today.

"But on the other hand," Mahmoud says, "Muslims are often cornered and accused of being followers of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda."

"The AIVD (secret service) has never been able to register anything illegal over here, even though the mosque is being tapped, including our phone conversations," Tareq says.

Tareq studied at the Islamic University of Khartoum in Sudan and then studied English in Bosnia. His colleague studied at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, and after that at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Both are considered scholars by the Muslim community in Holland, and authorities because of their great knowledge of Islam.

But all their scholarship hasn't won them any points among those who think more highly of Osama than they do:

Both claim to have been threatened by Muslims who think they are henchmen of the AIVD. "So the AIVD is about to deport its own people," the imams say jokingly. Tareq gives an example of him calming Muslims down. Three years ago things got very tense between Israel and Palestine, and a young Muslim in Britain stabbed a Jewish woman. "We made clear that it’s not what Islam is about. You can’t take matters into your own hands."

You can't take matters into your own hands. So the way it was done was wrong, but not the action itself. So presumably if an army of Palestinian Arabs massacred a group of Jews with the permission of a mufti, that would be all right.

In 1998 two men supporting the Takfiri came into the mosque. They think they alone represent true Islam. Everyone else is an infidel. "I tried to get them to debate me. I told them: it’s not up to you to decide who is a true Muslim. But they wouldn’t debate me," Mahmoud says.

I would have liked to have seen this debate too, because there has been little or no success, and hardly any attempt, by Islamic moderates to disabuse their jihadist coreligionists of their supposed errors about Islam. Can it be done at all? It would seem to be prohibitively difficult given the fact that the jihadists have the texts on their side.

Things like Muslims having the right to steal from infidels and do things to harm the Dutch nation are silly fantasies, according to Tareq. "You’re supposed to follow the law of the land. Besides, stealing does not belong inside Islam."

But what about the plunder in which Muhammad's armies engaged after victorious battles? And isn't he al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man?

The fact that young Muslims like those of the Hofstad network think they can use violence is based on a completely false idea about Islam. "Never history has shown us that violence solved anything," Tareq says. "The AIVD and politicians have a totally wrong impression of what Islam is. They should get their education from people that really know about Islam," both imams think. The AIVD is welcome to learn from them as well.

ChaldoAssyrians See Face of Evil on TV

Gordon Lake reports from Iraq (thanks to Nicolei and RB) on the broadcast of police interrogations of terrorists. This one was a Mosul policeman.

His name is First Lieutenant Shuqair al-Farishi of the Badrani tribe. He was a police officer in Mosul. He also raped and murdered Christians while on duty....

The judge asks Hussein “who else did you kill?”, “I killed those Christians” he replied. Judge: who were they? Hussein: Aiman Ishu and Boutros. Judge: Why? Hussein: They were collaborators.

The broadcasts are a response to video releases by the insurgency. The thought was the propaganda advantage could be taken from the insurgency by showing captured terrorists who seem so confident in beheading videos, now appearing weak and scared in captivity.

And it seems to be working. According to some in Mosul who are frequent Paltalk users (audio chat rooms on the internet) “Mosul is a different city since the broadcasts began. People are less scared to turn in insurgents” says naabo_1 (screen name), “and more trusting of the police as legitimate now and not as members of the insurgency.”...

The judge asked Hussein “how many people did you and your filthy terrorist squad kill?” Hussein: 36, including the girls, sir. Judge: with the girls? Hussein: yes sir. Judge: how many girls? Hussein: 10 sir. Judge: you killed 10 girls? You raped and killed them? Hussein: Yes, we raped and killed them. Judge: were they unmarried, or what? Hussein: Unmarried, but there were also some married ones. They were university students.

Civil Liberties vs Security in UK

From AP, with thanks to RB: British House of Lords amends anti-terrorism law:

Prime Minister Tony Blair's plans for a new anti-terrorism law suffered a major setback Monday, as Parliament's upper chamber insisted that only judges should have the power to impose sweeping controls on terrorist suspects....

The vote was a blow to the government's plans to give a minister the power to act swiftly against suspects without the need for a trial. Prime Minister Tony Blair insists the new law is necessary to protect Britain from the threat of terrorist attack. Opponents argue, however, that it would erode civil liberties.

The government may try to overturn the Lords amendment when the legislation returns to the House of Commons later this week.

This is an ongoing dilemma. I continue to believe that we can win the war against the global jihadists without giving up the guaranteed liberties of Western societies; I suspect, however, that to do so will require more realism about the true nature of the threat we face.

Kuwaiti women demonstrate demanding political rights

Sharia alert from Arabic News, with thanks to RB:

Hundreds of Kuwaiti activist women demonstrated outside the Ummah council (parliament) demanding their political rights.

They raised banners demanding the right of woman to vote and nominated in elections, and stressed that this does not contradict with the Islamic Sharia law.

This seems to be a matter of opinion:

Several conservative Islamists joined the women march, but just to express their opposition to giving woman the right to vote. Chairman of the Salafeya Islamic coalition in Kuwait threatened to fill the streets with opposers to these rights.

The Islamic parliamentarian Deif Allah Abu Ramia who leads an anti campaign under the title "women have no political right" expressed his regret for the government's adoption of "offering women the right of voting." The Islamic Ummah party which was established recently announced support for the political rights of women, noting that its decision is based on religious fatwa by moderate scholars....

Worthy [sic] mentioning that the Ummah council foiled in 1999 by a small margin a proposal to offer women the right to vote after it was recommended by the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah.

Syria: Jews use hot pokers to gouge Palestinians' eyes

From WND, with thanks to Kemaste:

JERUSALEM – Syria has published an updated version of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," an anti-Semitic story that claims Jews run the world by proxy, adding to it Islamic extremist ideology and dedicating the work to Palestinian suicide bombers, WorldNetDaily has learned.

The new edition of the Protocols was introduced at February's Egyptian International Book Fair, considered the most important event in the Arab literary world, and was published by a Syrian company, Dar al-Awael, which credits Syria's Ministry of Information with approving the text of the book.

The work contains several sections that claim Jews control the world, the Holocaust was a Zionist creation, and Israelis seek to kill Arab children, according to a translation provided to WND by Israel's Center for Special Studies. Chapters include "Judaism is a closed religion," "The Jews are treacherous," and "The laws of humanity and humanistic behavior among Jews are only valid for themselves."

Foreign preachers face tests to qualify for stay in Britain

Good thing they're going to be spending all that time and tax money testing visiting Methodists. Those guys can be lethal.

Another PC dhimmi alert from the UK, from the Telegraph, with thanks to CC:

Foreign religious leaders working in Britain will have to prove their understanding of civic life under proposals announced yesterday. All overseas religious workers seeking leave to stay in Britain would be tested after a year to show their knowledge of Britain and asked to prove that they had integrated with other faith groups.

They would be questioned about parliamentary democracy, the tax system and anti-discrimination laws. Last August, rules requiring foreign religious leaders to have a good grasp of English were introduced.

The main aim is to prevent fundamentalist imams arriving in Britain to preach anti-Western doctrine, though the requirement will apply to all faiths and not just Islamic preachers.

Non Muslims need not Apply, Saudis Say

If Western countries don't make concessions to their Muslim populations, it's a matter of "bias" and "hate." But the concessions are a one-way street. From the Saudi Institute, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

Washington DC - The Saudi Government said today it won’t allow non Muslims to seek its citizenship, Al-Watan newspaper reported today.

Naser Al-Hanaya, Ministry of Interior Assistant for Civil Affairs, told Al-Watan that the citizenship law amended October 18 of last year won’t allow any non Muslims living in the country to seek Saudi nationality.

Al-Hanaya said “Islam is the religion and non Muslims won’t be allowed citizenship.”

Norway: Mullah Krekar will be expelled

"UDI: Mullah Krekar will be expelled," from the Norway Post, with thanks to the Norwegian Kafir:

The Immigration Directorate (UDI) maintains its decision to expel Mullah Krekar, made in 2003.

This is the conclusion made after UDI has heard an appeal by Krekar over the expulsion order.

In February 2003 the UDI decided that Mullah Krekar would lose his refuge status, his travel documents, as well as his work and residence permits in the interest of national security.

At his excellent Fjordman blog, Norwegian Kafir comments: "Too good to be true? We've heard it before." We certainly have.

"Had it not been for the Arab thought, there would have not been a contemporary European philosophy"

What exactly is "contemporary European philosophy"? Surely these fellows don't mean the soulless solipsistic relativist meanderings that pass for philosophy in most Western countries these days. Maybe they mean the terrific idea of deciding to accept the Arab League's foreign policy and committing cultural suicide by encouraging massive Muslim immigration without assimilation in exchange for cheap oil. Now there's a philosophy (of sorts) that is going to influence Europe for generations to come. "Austria Hosts 'Islam & West' Forum" from IslamOnline, with thanks to Ali Dashti:

VIENNA, March 8, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The Cultural League in Austria (Alte Schmiede) is organizing a forum on March 10, in a bid to cement dialogue between Islam and the West, in addition to countering the ‘clash of civilization’ mantra.

The three-day forum will showcase books of divergent ideologies reinforcing common grounds between Islam and the West through out the centuries and how they both helped enrich one another, the forum’s organizers, Walter Famler and Erich Klein, said in a Web site statement.

“Had it not been for the Arab thought, there would have not been a contemporary European philosophy. The fundamentals of the European poetry is based on Arabic basics,” they said.

The missive deplored terminology like the “clash of civilizations,” “the barbers,” “the crusades,” and the “infidels,’ saying the usage is worsening the already parlous situation.

“The West and Islam equation should not be solved by army generals or strategists, who work tirelessly to extend the domino effect of the clash of civilizations’ theory from the East to the West; from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean,” the organizers added.

Right. In Europe, there is no clash. There is only a capitulation.

Pakistan: Female MPs want Islamic dress for air hostesses

Sharia alert. From the Islamic Republic News Agency, with thanks to Ali Dashti:

Islamabad, March 8, IRNA -- A parliamentary opposition alliance in the National Assembly on Tuesday criticised the new dress code for ir hostesses and lady police, demanding it should be made "Islamic".

Four lady members from the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal, an alliance of
six politico-religious groups, through a calling attention notice
argued that the change in dress code was not in conformity with
Islamic teachings....

State Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Raza Hayat Harraj said that
the government always tried to keep in focus Islamic teachings, local
ulture and traditions as far as air hostess and lady police uniform
was concerned.

Anti-Muslim bias 'spreads' in EU

The headline comes from the BBC article itself (thanks to EPG), unchanged. In light of the fact that the bias noted in the article includes the fact that "in Germany ... more than 80% of those surveyed last year associated the world 'Islam' with 'terrorism' and 'oppression of women,'" I would have put the quotation marks on the word "bias" rather than on "spreads." After all, there are movements around the world today, some of which are recruiting heavily in Europe, that are themselves associating "Islam" with "terrorism." To pretend that this association is the work of anti-Muslim bigots is ridiculous, unless Osama himself, along with Omar Bakri and all the rest, is an anti-Muslim bigot. The same thing goes for the oppression of women.

Muslims in Europe have faced increased discrimination since the 11 September attacks, according to a new report. The study by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) covers 11 EU members states.

It looks at "widespread" negative attitudes towards Muslims, including unbalanced media reporting which depict Muslims as "an enemy within".

The report, "Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims in the EU", is based on second-hand accounts....

In France, the debate over the French law forbidding religious clothing in schools had encouraged discrimination against Muslim women who wear headscarves, the report says.

As a result of the law, which was designed to uphold France's tradition of separating state and religion, some women have been unable to marry, vote or take exams in a headscarf, it stated....

In Germany meanwhile, more than 80% of those surveyed last year associated the world "Islam" with "terrorism" and "oppression of women" - although it was unclear to what extent this resulted in discriminatory behaviour.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe

A must-read from Lorenzo Vidino in the Middle East Quarterly, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood (Hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) has profoundly influenced the political life of the Middle East. Its motto is telling: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."[1]

While the Brotherhood's radical ideas have shaped the beliefs of generations of Islamists, over the past two decades, it has lost some of its power and appeal in the Middle East, crushed by harsh repression from local regimes and snubbed by the younger generations of Islamists who often prefer more radical organizations.

But the Middle East is only one part of the Muslim world. Europe has become an incubator for Islamist thought and political development. Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations. Unlike the larger Islamic community, the Muslim Brotherhood's ultimate goal may not be simply "to help Muslims be the best citizens they can be," but rather to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and the United States.[2]

Read it all.

Head of Islamic Jihad Taught Middle East Studies at US University

Dhimmitude at USF: this is where the dominance of Saidism in American universities leads -- aided and abetted by supine dhimmi university officials who give people like Ramadan Shallah positions and influence in their anxiety to avoid any appearance of "racism." "Head of Islamic Jihad Taught Middle East Studies at US University," from Israel National News, with thanks to Twostellas:

(IsraelNN.com) The terrorist behind the Stage Club in Tel Aviv over a week ago taught Middle East Studies at a University in the US before he moved to Syria.

47-year-old Ramadan Shallah is the head of Islamic Jihad who was caught on tape ordering the attack by telephone from Damascus....

Shallah was a PhD student at Durham University...

Shallah then moved from Durham to the University of South Florida in Tampa, where he taught Middle Eastern studies and headed the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a think tank affiliated with the university.

In 1995 he became the head of Islamic Jihad and is now wanted for murder by Israel.

Equal opportunity

Death to blasphemers update: now it's an equal opportunity job. "Woman will kill Hirsi Ali," from the Dutch Report, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Three woman, Fatima, Naima and Khadisja who say they are part of the Hofstad terror network, which they call a friends club, have given an interview in Dutch newspaper "De Volkskrant". They do not use their real names because, they do not want to be recognized by their parents, who do not accept their ideas, they say. One of the woman, Naima, is the wife of Hofstad terror group member Mohammed el M. who is now in detention.

They say Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be murdered by a woman. They did not decide this for tactical reasons. Also for a woman it will be very difficult to come near the heavily guarded Hirsi Ali.

"If Hirsi Ali is murdered by a woman that will have a much bigger impact" says Naima. She also says that the sisters are patient. "even if it will take ten years". But [to avoid prosecution]Fatima, Naima and Kadisja say that they themselves are not prepared to use violence when they are inside The Netherlands. This does not mean that Hirsi Ali is not in danger. Because even if Hirsi Ali would give up and disappear from the media it's still "to late" for her. "She will not escape her punishment: death", says one of the three.

Read it all. Interesting bit there about a book written by the murderer of Theo van Gogh.

Dutch Government Passes New Terror Bill

Anti-dhimmitude in Holland. From AP, with thanks to LGF:

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - The Dutch government approved a new terrorism bill Friday that grants law-enforcement authorities far-reaching powers of investigation and allowing them to hold suspects for up to two weeks without charges.

The measure, which still must be passed by parliament, would allow intelligence agents to use currently banned techniques such as infiltrating terror cells for undercover operations and telephone taps, a Justice Ministry statement said. They will also be allowed to use entrapment tactics, such as bogus sales transactions.

"There also will be more possibilities to gather information, detain suspects and conduct preventive public searches," it said. "The events in Amsterdam and The Hague have made clear that wider powers to prevent terrorism are desirable."

'Full facts' plea on Muslim village

Time for a new Jihadwatch Department: European nations that fund mosques in attempt to outbid radical Muslims. From The Dudley Chronicle.

A Dudley councillor has called for plans to create a Muslim village in the town centre to be conducted more openly after it was revealed that the contoversial project will receive £150,000 funding from taxpayers.

Pakistan: Men who were told to 'gang rape' acquitted

This is the kind of thing that happens as a consequence of such provisions of Islamic law as the one that disallows a woman's testimony in her own rape trial. Women are so devalued under Sharia that the attitudes displayed in this case are only encouraged. From the Telegraph, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Five men who were sentenced to death for gang raping a woman on the orders of a village council are set to walk out of jail after a Pakistani high court acquitted them yesterday.

The two-member court in the city of Multan also converted the death term of a sixth accomplice to life imprisonment.

The victim, Mukhtaran Mai, broke down when told the news: "That is the last resort for us," she said. She added that she would challenge the decision before the supreme court.

Mukhtaran was raped in June 2002 when she went to the village council after her 12-year-old brother was allegedly sodomised by men from the powerful Mastoi tribe.

She refused to accept the council's ruling on how to settle the dispute, and the council ordered the men to rape her in turn as more than 100 people sat outside.

UK: Terror threat from 'very many' Muslim men, says Met chief

Watch for the hue and cry. But what did he say that was inaccurate? From the Telegraph, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Britain faces a potential terrorist threat from "very many" Muslim men who returned to Britain after spending time in training camps in Afghanistan, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police said yesterday.

Sir Ian Blair, whose force, with MI5, leads anti-terrorism work in Britain, was asked if he supported the assertion of the Prime Minister earlier this week that there were "several hundred people in the UK plotting terror attacks".

The commissioner told LBC radio in London: "Yes, I am aware of the fact that there are very many people who came back from the camps in Afghanistan and who are therefore potentially a threat to the United Kingdom.

"And I agree with the Prime Minister's assessment, on that basis, that there are hundreds of people who came back from the camps and are now in the United Kingdom, and that is a very dangerous issue for us all."

Scotland Yard sources made clear Sir Ian was referring to training camps run by al-Qa'eda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which were destroyed in the military campaign by American and British forces after the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001.

Security chiefs have said privately for some time that the radicalising influence of the "jihadists" who attended the camps and went to Muslim-related conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir is at the heart of the threat to Britain.

Saajit Badat, from Gloucester, who admitted plotting to blow up an airliner with a shoe bomb, spent time in the camps...

Muslims can expect the police to target them, minister says

From the Times Online, anti-dhimmitude in Britain. All bets are off regarding how long the Minister keeps her job.

Britain 's Counter-Terrorism Minister warned the Muslim community last night that it must face the reality of being targeted by the police because of the threat from an extreme form of Islam.
Hazel Blears provoked anger from Muslim leaders and the National Black Police Association (NPBA) for her “intemperate” comments. They said her statements could only exacerbate feelings among law-abiding Muslims that they were being unfairly targeted by police and intelligence services.

Dutch Muslims Counter Govt. Plans to Train Imams

Why it will not be so easy for the Dutch to monitor Islamic teachings. From IslamOnline:

THE HAGUE, March 2, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Dutch Muslims have urged the government to adopt their own version of qualifying and training imams with some help from experts and specialists across Dutch universities.

“The Muslim Council of the Netherlands, which liaise with the government on behalf of the Muslim minority, held talks on February 18, 19 with Dutch officials to direct the qualification programs for imams and preachers,” the Council’s deputy Secretary General, Edris Boujoufi, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, March 1.

“We are now addressing how to translate the recommendations of these talks into action, including the right of the Muslim minority to prepare their imams with the help of Dutch experts and socialists.”...

"Verdonk’s interference into Muslims’ affairs violates the secular nature of the Western countries, particularly the Netherlands,” said Boujoufi.

Boujoufi roundly rejected Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk’s plan on imams and immigrants, regarding it as a ruse to interfere into Muslims’ affairs.

Along with qualifying imams, the plan would make everyone who has not spent eight years in the Netherlands during the period of compulsory education (from six to the age of 16) take integration classes.

Pipes on media dhimmitude

Regarding the Ahmed Omar Abu Ali case. From "Big Media Demagogue an Assassination Plot" in FrontPage, with thanks to EPG:

While still living in the United States, Abu Ali developed ties to the “paintball jihadists” of northern Virginia, nine of whom have served time in jail. In 2000, he went to study Islam at its source, at the Islamic University of Medina. In May 2003, a terrorist attack in Riyadh left 34 dead, 9 of them Americans; a month later, the Saudis arrested Abu Ali for connections to this crime, incarcerating him until his recent transfer to the United States.

Conservatives focus on the hair-raising news that an Al-Qaeda affiliate had plans to kill the president of the United States. Liberals hardly note this development, focusing instead on the question of whether, while in Saudi custody, Abu Ali was tortured (Justice Department officials call this an “utter fabrication”). Note the editorials in four northeastern newspapers:

· The New York Times: This case is “another demonstration of what has gone wrong in the federal war on terror. …In an undisciplined attempt to wring statements out of any conceivable suspect, American officials have worked with countries like Saudi Arabia.”

· The Washington Post: “the courts need to ensure that no evidence obtained by torture—with or without the connivance of the U.S. government—is used to convict people in U.S. courts.”

· The Baltimore Sun writes (dripping with sarcasm) that, “By unsealing a federal indictment against Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the U.S. government garnered headlines about an alleged terrorist plot, instead of the unexplained imprisonment of an American citizen in Saudi Arabia. … it portrayed Mr. Abu Ali has [sic] someone other than a victim of torture. The government may think its secret is safe. But it isn’t.”

· Newsday’s editorial is titled “Shame on Bush for rights violation.”

Many links in the original. Read it all.

Egyptian Christians protest at "kidnapping"

More Islamic tolerance in Egypt. From Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:

CAIRO, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Hundreds of angry Christians demonstrated at a church southwest of Cairo in protest at what they described as the kidnapping and forced conversion of two young women to Islam, police sources said on Monday.

It was the second incident of its kind in three months in Egypt, where there are sporadic outbreaks of violence and tension between the Muslim and Christian communities.

The two women, medical graduates Marianne Makram Ayad and Teresa Ibrahim, went to the home of relatives after spending Sunday evening under police protection in the town of Fayoum, 90 km (55 miles) from Cairo, church sources said on Monday. It was not clear whether they still considered themselves Christian.

In the Mar Girgis church in the town on Sunday, hundreds of Christian men carrying crosses had demanded the women return to their community, on the grounds that they had been compelled to convert.

A security official said in a statement that Christian religious leaders were giving the two young women advice. "(Official) measures proclaiming them Muslim have not been taken," the official said.

Conversion is a sensitive subject in Egypt. Coptic Christians are free to convert to Islam while Muslims cannot convert to Christianity. Muslim men can marry Coptic women but Coptic men cannot marry Muslim women without converting.

Christian sentenced to seven years in jail on blasphemy charges

Another story about Bashir Masih, underscoring how Pakistan's blasphemy law is used as a weapon against the disadvantaged. From Asia News, with thanks to Emergency Room:

Multan (AsiaNews) – Pakistan’s blasphemy laws strike Christians again. Bashir Masih, a 30-year-old Christian, was sentenced to seven years in jail for desecrating the Qu’ran.

“It is a tragic situation. This law strikes at the poor, those who cannot defend themselves, the people who lack the means to be heard,” Mgr Joseph Coutts, Bishop of Faisalabad, told AsiaNews. But according to the judge, Bashir Masih tore a copy of the Qu’ran to use in some occult practices.

Even though the sentence was pronounced on February 23 in the Civil Court in Chishtian, a town located in the diocese of Multan, the case did not receive any publicity. Local NGOs and human rights groups are still unaware of the case.