Monday, December 31, 2012

Saudi Cleric Promises “Paradise” to 14-Year-Old Girls Who Have Sex with Terrorists




According to Sheikh Mohammed al-Arifi, these “temporary marriages for intercourse” (an Islamic legalistic way of permitting prostitution or concubinage) will satisfy the militants’ sexual desires and boost their determination in killing Syrians.

I’m not sure I completely follow the logic of that last part, but I imagine that the Al-Nusra Front, despite its boasts that it is forcing its fighters to live a clean lifestyle without any smoking or drugs, may be having trouble keeping homicidal maniacs in the fight without sex and Islam is a practical enough religion that there’s always a wake to take the forbidden and make it permitted in the name of Jihad.
The Jihadis get to molest an underage girl and the girl is told by her family that if she goes through this, she’ll earn paradise and unlike most women, who are hellbound according to Mohammed, will not have to worry about the afterlife.
Islam. It’s really feminist.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Egypt's President Moves Toward Dictatorship

James Phillips and Amy Payne
November 26, 2012

Egypt remains in turmoil after its president decreed last Thursday that he was no longer subject to the laws of his country—giving himself power over the judiciary and other branches of government.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made his lunge for power shortly after helping to broker a fragile ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the extremist offshoot of his own Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda includes imposing Sharia (Islamic law), curbing the rights of women and religious minorities, abandoning Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and advancing Islamist causes around the world.
Reuters reports that about 370 people have been injured in clashes between protesters and police since Morsi issued his decree last Thursday. The president is meeting with judges today, supposedly on an agreement to amend his decree, but protesters say they want to see it reversed completely.
Morsi has set Egypt on a troubling new foreign policy course since coming to power in June. His government has distanced itself from Washington while cozying up to China, improving relations with Iran, and violating its peace treaty with Israel.
He has escalated Egypt’s cooperation with Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls Gaza and remains adamantly committed to Israel’s destruction. Morsi’s Islamist-dominated government has cracked down on Egypt’s media and has announced that Egyptian journalists will be put on trial for “insults” to the president. Morsi’s government is systematically clamping down on Egyptians’ political, social, and cultural freedoms. Yet the Obama Administration naively continues to court it as a partner.
Morsi may calculate that his help in administering Band-Aids to the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict will make the United States and others who give aid to Egypt think twice before trying to reverse his power grab.
The Obama Administration was working on an aid package to Egypt that includes forgiving approximately $1 billion of Egypt’s debt to the United States. This is in addition to about $1.5 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid.
When protesters tore down the American flag at the U.S. embassy in Cairo on September 11, Morsi’s public reaction was nonchalant. Instead of immediately denouncing the attack and taking action to upgrade security around the embassy—as Libyan and Yemeni leaders have done after similar events—Morsi waited a day before casually issuing a mild rebuke to the rioters via Facebook.
The Obama Administration should leverage U.S. aid to pressure the Egyptian leader to respect the rule of law, abide by the decisions of Egypt’s courts, and abandon his drive for absolute power. Morsi has exploited external crises in the past to advance his own ambitions. In August, he used a Sinai terrorist attack that killed Egyptian soldiers as a pretext to purge the Egyptian army of its top Mubarak-era holdovers. Now he has done the same with the judiciary.
Egypt’s judiciary also has pushed back against Morsi’s power grab. The Supreme Council of the Judiciary denounced Morsi’s unilateral assertion of power over the judiciary as “an unprecedented attack on judicial independence.” The Judges Club, an association of judges made up of many appointees by the Mubarak regime, called for a strike by courts across Egypt.
But the judges alone will not be enough to reverse Morsi’s power grab. The key vote will be wielded by the armed forces. Morsi appears confident that he can count on support from key military leaders, whom he hand-picked after purging the top ranks of Mubarak loyalists in August.
While the army’s ultimate verdict on Morsi’s power grab is not yet apparent, Egypt’s investors voted with their wallets and withdrew their money from Egypt’s stock market, which plunged almost 10 percent on Sunday.
The big losers here are the Egyptian people. Their aspirations for freedom and democracy will likely get lost in the shuffle as Egypt’s “Arab Spring” descends into an Islamist winter. But the United States and its allies—particularly Israel—will also find their national interests undermined by the anti-Western drive of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Quick Hits:
  • Nearly 200 countries start more talks on global warming today in Qatar.
  • This week, the Supreme Court will decide whether to rule on same-sex marriage.
  • The U.S. government spends “an average of $1.5 billion in tax dollars per year devoted to getting out the message for various departments and policies,” reports the Washington Guardian.
  • Led by Breaking Dawn Part 2, Skyfall, and Lincoln, the box office had its best Thanksgiving ever, reports Deadline Hollywood.
  • Did you shop on Black Friday? What about today’s Cyber Monday deals? Unfortunately, a lot of these items are still overpriced thanks to tariffs.

Monday, November 05, 2012

Medal of Honor Winner Blasts “Ditherer-in-Chief” Obama over Benghazigate

Daniel Greenfield 

Major General Patrick Henry Brady is one of only 81 living Medal of Honor winners. During the Vietnam War, Brady served with the 57th Medical Detachment, rescuing over 5,000 wounded, and knows a few things about dangerous rescues under fire.
His Medal of Honor citation reads, “Maj. Brady distinguished himself while serving in the Republic of Vietnam commanding a UH-1H ambulance helicopter, volunteered to rescue wounded men from a site in enemy held territory which was reported to be heavily defended and to be blanketed by fog.
“To reach the site he descended through heavy fog and smoke and hovered slowly along a valley trail, turning his ship sideward to blow away the fog with the backwash from his rotor blades. Despite the unchallenged, close-range enemy fire, he found the dangerously small site, where he successfully landed and evacuated 2 badly wounded South Vietnamese soldiers.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Geert Wilders: “It is our duty to expose Muhammad”

by creeping
Religion of Peace?
Excerpt from Geert Wilders, Speech to Swedish Free Press Society, Malmö, October 27, 2012.
Because Sweden has the same problem as the Netherlands, Denmark and the rest of the Western world. We are all in the same boat. Our freedoms are in danger. Our political and often leftist media establishment turns a blind eye to the largest threat to liberty in our present age. This threat is called Islam.
Islam commands its followers to establish a worldwide Islamic state, where everyone has to live according to the Sharia, the barbaric law of Islam. And where Islam’s opponents are being marked for death.

Friday, October 26, 2012

There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.

Michael A. Haberman, M.D. 
Israeli Psychologist, Dr. Sam Vaknin, has an interesting view on President Obama
Dr. Vaknin has written extensively about narcissism.

Dr. Vaknin states: "I must confess I was impressed by Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident -- a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling.. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words. Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such quasi "religious" impact on so many people.

The fact that Obama is a total incognito with Zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming. Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects."

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

What’s the Harm With a Little Sharia?

creeping
via Atlas Shrugs.
Brooke Storrs has traveled to Malaysia several times since 2001, communicated with minority citizens and expats living there, and kept a close eye on online news once she returned home. She wrote an essay about how their dual courts (civil and Sharia) impact non-Muslims who are given religious freedom in their constitution. The purpose of the essay below was to show how entangling Sharia and civil courts in society works itself out in the lives of non-Muslims and to make the case that allowing Sharia into our court system most assuredly has a deleterious effect.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Arab-American network behind Obama

creeping
Most of this, particularly the Rezko deals, were public before the last election. The media ignored it just as they are now.

via Chapter IX: The Arab-American network behind Obama

Obama’s controversial relationships with radical figures like Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi have been well-publicized in recent years.
Prior to his academic career in the United States, Khalidi worked for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization when it was classified by the State Department as a terrorist group.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Pushback against growing anti-Muslim sentiment in America results in more anti-Muslim sentiment

http://www.barenakedislam.com/2012/10/12/pushback-against-growing-anti-muslim-sentiment-in-america-results-in-more-anti-muslim-sentiment/

Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to educate people about ‘jihad’ and its savage proponents around the world, a coalition of Left Wing and Muslim faith groups say they will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States. 

(WOW! A pamphlet! Oh, that’ll erase the images of Muslims burning American flags, killing ambassadors, and blowing people up around the world)

Friday, October 12, 2012

The Islamic Republic of Catalonia

Soeren Kern
October 12, 2012


"We will all vote for the Islamic parties because we do not believe in left and right. This will make us win local councils, and as we begin to accumulate power in the Catalan autonomous region, Islam will begin to be implemented." — Abdelwahab Houzi, Salafist preacher, Lleida.
A successful push for independence in the Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia would lead to the establishment of a country with the third-largest percentage of Muslims in Western Europe, just behind France and Belgium, and far ahead of Britain and Germany.
An independent Catalonia, with its capital in Barcelona, would also be home to the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe; it would emerge as ground-zero for Salafi-Jihadism on the continent and become one of the top incubators for Islamist terrorism in the West.
Catalonia, historically one of the wealthiest and most industrialized regions of Spain, has harbored a strong streak toward independence since medieval times, when Barcelona was a Mediterranean trade center with its own parliament. But the ongoing economic crisis in Spain has redoubled calls for Catalonian secession from Spain and the establishment of an independent state.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Disgrace in Benghazi

 Mark Steyn www.nationalreview.com



So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Dems Claim They Led Fight for Civil Rights By Supporting Slavery




  by

I’m starting to wonder if the Democratic Party isn’t a party of liars, but a party of people so abysmally ignorant of basic history that they don’t even know that they’re lying anymore.
For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.
That’s the claim on the Democrats site under “Our History”
I’m interested to hear about Andrew Jackson’s support for health care reform and his civil rights achievements on the Trail of Tears. And I doubt that Andrew Jackson’s Petticoat Affair (not what you think) really qualifies as feminism.
The Democrats seem to think that they were fighting for civil rights while supporting slavery. Perhaps they mean this notable support for civil rights from the Democratic Party Platform of 1868.
After the most solemn and unanimous pledge of both Houses of Congress to prosecute the war exclusively for the maintenance of the government and the preservation of the Union under the Constitution, it has repeatedly violated that most sacred pledge, under which alone was rallied that noble volunteer army which carried our flag to victory. Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten States, in time of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.
That was only 144 years ago.

Monday, August 27, 2012

The Muslim Brhood, Part II – Haj Amin al-Husseini

PETER FARMER August 27, 2012
Part I - A Brief History of the Muslim Brotherhood (Can be found by clicking here)
The identity of today's Muslim Brotherhood, in many ways, parallels the lives of just three influential men, who founded and shaped the Brotherhood as it grew into the largest and most-influential Pan-Islamic movement in the world today. The three men were Hasan al-Banna, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, and Sayyid Qutb. In the previous installment of this series, we examined the life of the founder of the movement, Hasan al-Banna. In this, the second installment, we turn our attention to a second key figure - Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini.
Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was born in 1895 in Jerusalem in what was then British Mandatory Palestine into an influential, politically-powerful clan. Young al-Husseini was indoctrinated by his father and other clan members, who hated the British and the Jews. He attended a Koranic primary school and then a Turkish-funded secondary school, where he learned the language of that nation. He matriculated briefly in 1912 at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, where he learned Islamic (sharia) law. In 1913, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca required of all Muslims, and thereafter appended the prefix "Haj" to his name.
With the start of World War One in 1914, al-Husseini joined the Turkish army and became an artillery officer. He was on disability leave in Jerusalem in 1916 when British forces captured the city. During the period 1916-1918, al-Husseini participated in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Immediately after the war, al-Husseini's views remained those of an Arab nationalist, but his political and ideological views shifted towards overt anti-Semitism and a greater Muslim consciousness. Other Palestinian Muslims began to look to him for leadership. Al-Husseini then participated in efforts to destabilize the British mandatory government; he also became a hardline opponent of Jewish immigration into Palestine. In 1920, during the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, violent rioting between Jerusalem's Jews and Arabs broke out; al-Husseini was charged with incitement for his role in the uprising and received a ten-year prison sentence from a military court. He fled to Trans-Jordan before being apprehended.
In 1921, his brother Kamel, the mufti of Jerusalem, died - and fate intervened on Amin's behalf; in a move designed to placate Palestinian Arabs, British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel pardoned al-Husseini, and appointed him the new Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Supreme Islamic Council. Hoping to neutralize growing discontent among the Arab population, Samuel appointed  members of the rival Nashashibi clan to the council, in addition to those selected from the Husseini clan. For a time, this gambit worked, as infighting among the two clans prevented a united front. Al-Husseini, however, led an international Muslim effort to restore the site of the al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques (Haram ash-Sharif), upon the Temple Mount - a site claimed as a holy place by both Jews and Muslims. Husseini's efforts rallied other Arab Muslims to his cause, and strengthened resistance to the influx of Jews into Palestine and Jerusalem.
Tensions between Jews and Muslims mounted over the next few years, and inevitably, finally burst into the open in August 1929. On August 17, a Jewish boy was stabbed to death while retrieving a football and a young Palestinian Arab was subsequently badly beaten by a group of Jews. From 23-29 August, civil unrest and violence broke out in the Old City of Jerusalem in a dispute over access to the "Wailing Wall" at the foot of the Temple Mount, as Muslims attacked Jewish families and businesses, and British police and Jewish defenders retaliated. Casualties and property damage were extensive; 133 Jews were killed and 339 injured, while 110 Arabs were killed and another 232 injured, mostly by British police. Some accused al-Husseini with inciting the riots, but he emerged from the episode unscathed and with his credibility as a leader much-enhanced among his own people.
During the 1930s, al-Husseini consolidated his leadership position and expanded the Pan-Islamic movement. He founded the World Islamic Congress and supervised the creation of a number of clandestine organizations, including the "Holy Struggle" youth movement (al-jihad al-muqaddas) and the paramilitary al-Futuwwah, and helped funnel arms and equipment to them. He traveled widely in the Middle East and interacted with his counterparts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Among his associates was the Syrian-born leader of the militant anti-Zionist "Black Hand" group (al-Kaff al-Aswad‎), Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.
In November, 1935, after killing a police officer, al-Qassam and three of his men were surrounded by British security forces and all were killed in a gun battle. On April 15, 1936, Arab gunmen attacked a truck convey, killing two Jews. The next day, in retaliation, Irgun (Jewish paramilitary) gunmen killed two Arab workers. Thus began the second Arab revolt of 1936-1939. Al-Husseini quickly formed and headed a coalition of Muslim leaders called the Arab High Command (AHC), which demanded a series of strikes, boycotts of British and Jewish businesses, and similar measures. Thousands of Jewish farms and orchards were burned or otherwise destroyed, and many rural Jews had to flee to safer areas. Under the threat of more-substantial British military intervention, and the arrival of a British Royal Commission of Inquiry, the AHC called an end to the general strikes in October 1936.
In the summer of 1937, British security forces attempted to arrest al-Husseini for his part in the revolt, but - tipped off by an informer - the mufti fled into the protection of a haram (religious sanctuary or mosque). After the assassination of a British official in September, al-Husseini was deposed from his post on the Supreme Islamic Council, and warrants issued for the arrest of a number of its members. Husseini fled to French-controlled Lebanon. Husseini became increasingly paranoid over the prospect of betrayal by friends and associates, and on his orders, a number of them were executed.
In 1941, by then living in Iraq, al-Husseini participated in the coup d'état against Prime Minister Nouri al-Said and pro-British regent Crown Prince Abdullah, and the abortive Anglo-Iranian War of 1941. After escaping to Persia, al-Husseini made his way to Italy and arrived in exile in Berlin in November, 1941 - where he spent the remainder of the Second World War as a guest of the Nazi Party.
----
In part III of this series, we will examine Haj Amin al-Husseini's wartime life in Nazi Germany and his post-war role in the Pan-Islamic movement.

Copyright 2012 Peter Farmer
Peter Farmer is a historian and commentator on national security, geopolitics and public policy issues. He has done original research on wartime resistance movements in WWII Europe, and has delivered seminars on such subjects as political violence and terrorism, the evolution of conflict, combat medicine, and related subjects. Mr. Farmer is also a scientist and a medic. 

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Obama supporters in birtherism-banner blunder

http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/obama-supporters-in-birtherism-banner-blunder/print/

2nd 'potatoe' moment this week for campaign in Ohio

If Barack Obama carries the key swing state of Ohio in November, it won’t be because he and his supporters know how to spell.

Today, at a Republican rally in Powell, Ohio, an airplane pulling a banner attempted to capitalize on Mitt Romney’s “joke” yesterday in Michigan about not needing to show his birth certificate. The Democrats have responded by accusing Romney of having joined the “birthers,” and the airplane banner continued that theme.

Unfortunately, the supporters who sponsored the banner – MoveOn.org, as reported by a Los Angeles Times reporter onsite – failed to do a spell-check before take-off.
“AMERICA IS BETTER THEN BIRTHERISM,” it read, incorrectly substituting “then” for “than”.

The rally was the first time Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have appeared together and the last public event before the pair head to Tampa for the GOP convention.
The blundered banner comes in the same week Obama and three supporters, acting as human letters, YMCA-style, misspelled “Ohio” as “Oiho”.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Terrorist said to have been a Swedish citizen with a history of Muslim extremist activities

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=4133
The Times of Israel
July 22, 2012
The one-stop news site covering Israel, the region and the Jewish people worldwide
Mehdi Ghezali (screen capture, Channel 10)
Mehdi Ghezali (screen capture, Channel 10)
Bulgarian media on Thursday named the suicide bomber who blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists, killing five Israelis and a local bus driver, in the Black Sea resort of Burgas on Wednesday as 36-year-old Mehdi Ghezali.
Ghezali reportedly arrived in Bulgaria five weeks before the bombing and arrived at the airport via taxi, Channel 2 reported.
He was also reportedly given the bomb by someone else, but no further details were provided. There was no independent confirmation of the veracity of the information. The reports surfaced soon after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly accused Hezbollah, directed by Iran, of responsibility for the bombing. The Prime Minister’s Office made no comment on the reports.
The Bulgarian reports, rapidly picked up by Hebrew media, posited various versions of how the bomber had detonated the bomb, including the suggestion that the bomber had not intended to die in the blast, but may have wanted to place the bomb on the bus and flee.
Ghezali has a Wikipedia page, which describes him as a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it says. He was taken into custody on suspicion of being an al-Qaeda agent, having been arrested along with a number of other al-Qaeda operatives.
Following a lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, Guantanamo authorities recommended Ghezali be transferred to another country for continued detainment, and he was handed over to Swedish authorities in 2004. The Swedish government did not press charges.
A 2005 Swedish documentary about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp starred Ghezali, who detailed his experience in American custody. He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.
Earlier on Thursday the Bulgarian police released a brief video clip that claimed to show the suicide bomber, responsible for Wednesday’s terror attack on a tour bus full of Israeli citizens, walking around shortly before the blast at Burgas International Airport.
The Bulgarian news agency Sofia reported that the bomber was carrying an American passport and Michigan driver’s license, both believed to be forgeries. Sofia also reported that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry managed to recover the fingerprints of the bomber, which they submitted to the FBI in the United States and the international police organization Interpol. The FBI and CIA joined Israeli and Bulgarian officials in investigating the attack.
Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told Sofia that DNA tests were being run to determine the identity of the Caucasian man, who the minister described as casually dressed with nothing suspicious about his appearance to set him apart from the crowd of people at the airport. (I guess everyone carries huge back packs, nowadays?)
The ministry did not indicate how the police came to the conclusion that the man was the suicide bomber.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Campaign Against FGM in Iraq and Middle East

Irfan Al-Alawi

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

How Obama has been working behind the scenes to overthrow secular leaders and replace them with IslamoFascist ones


Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Mursi did not wait for the ballots of the two-day poll to be counted before proclaiming himself President of Egypt. In Cairo, Egypt’s generals are engaged in an acrobatic exercise to keep their balance while watching the Muslim Brotherhood take power with the blessing and financing of the White House in Washington.

DEBKA  US president Barack Obama’s goal from the outset of the Tahrir Square revolution early last year was to get the Muslim Brotherhood installed in government through the ballot box. He sees this as the grand vindication of the vision he unveiled at Cairo University on June 4, 2009 in a speech reaching out to world Muslims.

Obama accepts Muslim parties who are not al Qaeda or jihadists as forces of moderation who must be allowed to attain power through their embrace of Islamic/sharia ‘democracy,’ and with whom the US, the West and Israel must learn to coexist. This perception, which entails getting even pro-Western autocratic rulers displaced, guided his hand in supporting the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow in Libya seven months later to make way for “moderate” Muslim rule.

It is also being applied in Syria. Aided by the Muslim ruler closest to him, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, Obama is working hard to unify the squabbling factions of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, the backbone of the Sunni rebellion against the Assad regime and his Alawite sect, and bring the MB to power through the democratic process.  

Israel, it must be said, finds itself in a strategic pits deeper than ever before as it faces the Islamist revolution overtaking Egypt. While promising Israel security perks, Obama has relentlessly pursued a policy of accommodation with revolutionary Islam, both Shiite – through a nuclear deal with Iran after it progressed beyond the point of no return for building a bomb – and the Sunnis, by collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood and its branches.


This policy has stripped Israel of its strategic assets barring one – military prowess. In their three years at the helm of Israel’s government, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been coerced into lining up with Obama policy -involuntarily.

However, every Obama success in promoting Muslim power drops Israel further down the strategic scale in the face of its empowered foes. Israel’s only recourse for recovering shrinking strategic ground in the Middle East and deterrent strength against the rising Islamist forces in Egypt is to take matters in its own hands and dismantle Iran’s nuclear program by force.

If Netanyahu waits much longer, Israel will find Shiite and Sunni revolutionary rulers uniting against their perceived common enemy, Israel, before they fight each other over slicies of the Middle East. A military coup in Cairo could set this process back, but the chances of its happening are slight.

The Muslim Brotherhood administration was not even in place yet, and rockets were flying into Israel from the Sinai, by Hamas, allegedly under orders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

officials-hamas-ordered-grad-attack-on-israel-at-request-of-muslim-brotherhood-1.436787

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Islam's OIC: The World's Thought Police

by Mudar Zahran
January 19, 2012

On December 19, 2011, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the negative stereotyping and stigmatization of people based on their religion, and urged member states to take effective measures towards addressing and combating "such incidents." This resolution, based on an initiative from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), was supported by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who hosted a closed-door three-day meeting – apparently one of many in a series called the "Istanbul Process"-- in Washington D.C. with OIC representatives to discuss ways to implement the resolution.

What might sound like a step toward "tolerance," however, is in reality an assault on freedom of speech: a UN-endorsed violation of human rights, co-sponsored by the US, and prompted by the OIC, an organization of 57 Muslim nations, most of which hold the world's worst records on freedom of speech.

The OIC initiative for a UN resolution against "defamation of religion" is not new; the OIC has been promoting it for the last 13 years despite earlier opposition from Western countries. What changed recently was dropping the word "defamation of religion" and stressing "freedom of speech"-- something about which Secretary of State Clinton seems to be enthusiastic.

What resulted, however, from this new "Resolution 16/18," as it is called, is a US-endorsed UN proposal that urges the restriction of freedom of speech by using a vague terms, such as combating "religious profiling" – a term that can be interpreted by anyone any way he likes.

Placing such language into an international legal context forces people to have to think twice before practicing their constitutionally-secured right of free speech – in the US, at least -- when it comes to discussing religion.

What is also alarming, even to me as a practicing Muslim, is the fact that the resolution seems to revolve around just one religion: Islam. But will the OIC countries implement any resolution for themselves, taking measures against their government-sponsored demonization of the Jewish faith and the systematic proliferation of anti-Semitism?

Does Resolution 16/18 mean that Muslims will still be free in their textbooks to call Jews the sons of swine and monkeys -- perhaps on some trumped-up excuse that that a such a remark is not religious but "only" racial?

Will the Palestinians' highest religious authority, the Mufti, Muhammad Hussein, still be able to say, as he did in early January at a Fatah (not Hamas) event to celebrate the 47th anniversary of its founding, that the destiny of Muslims is to kill Jews [sic], and, quoting a Hadith [a saying attributed to the prophet Mohammad] that "The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews… come and kill [them]" – and then have Palestinian TV repeat it?

Will the Egyptian police still run over unarmed Christians with armoured vehicles and burn down churches, as has happened in recent weeks? Or will Resolution 16/18 simply evolve as it has now in Egypt, where the Egyptian courts prosecute only Christians in "contempt of religion" cases, loosely based on Facebook or twitter postings of cartoons deemed to be "insulting to Islam" [AINA: Double Standard in Application of Egyptian Law], but constantly fail to prosecute members of the security services who mow down Christians with armored vehicles or torch churches?

Since the Jews have already been ethnically cleansed from most of these countries, the Christians are next in line. As they say in Arabic, "Saturday's job first, then get to Sunday's job."

Will the Palestinian Authority, an OIC member, remove the signs banning Jews from entering areas under its control that are labeled "Type A-areas" and that read "Israelis [Jews] are not allowed"? Would Jordan stop banning the entry of "visible Jews" with "Jewish prayer items"?

Worse, the resolution, if implemented, would hinder the efforts of those seeking further to understand Islam, or even discuss it in an un-self-censoring way-- including Muslims seeking to bring it out of its often brutal tribal roots. The values of Islam, for example, encourage the military conquest of non-Muslim nations. Although this value is within my religion, as a Muslim, I would like to see it being dropped—Now, is that a defamation of my own religion?

Is Obama's, Clinton's and the US's current message that some religions are "more sacred" than others?

A brief examination of the OIC's history shows the organization is not new to the international proliferation of thought-policing: The OIC is made up of 57 member states (including Russia), with a permanent delegation to the UN. The OIC considers itself the largest international organization outside of the UN; its scope is global.

The OIC has been trying to get this declaration of defamation of religions adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a quest described by some as an attempt by the OIC states to bypass the human rights that are protected by the international law, such as the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and thus distort and lower the standards.

The OIC has also established its own Declaration of Human Rights, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. Although the Cairo Declaration pays lip service to the UN Declaration -- which, as UN member states, these nations are presumably meant to uphold – it is in fact an alternative to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and in all likelihood intended to supplant it. The OIC members have slipped it a small clause, stating that all human rights acknowledged by OIC are "subjective to the Sharia law."

As always with international law the questions become, Who implements it? Do they act in good faith? And if not, what recourse is there?

Already, both Iran and the Palestinian Authority are in gross violation of both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration Against Genocide, yet no country has even moved to challenge either Iran or the Palestinian Authority for these violations.

At the same time, one other country is continually under attack for what often seems like the slightest perceived infraction; and the words "racist" and "apartheid" refer to one country only, which is neither: Israel -- but does this mean that most Arab countries—which are genuinely both racist and apartheid, in both gender and religion -- are not?

Even without a single prosecution to date for the hundred-billion-dollar oil-for-food-embezzlement, or for the continuing sex-for-food violations of children in Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia and Haiti by "peacekeepers" sent to protect them, it would seem as if the United Nations is sufficiently toxic and unlawful to warrant being closed down, or, at the very least, unfunded.

Unfortunately without ever investigating the United Nations, perhaps the biggest international human rights violator of all, Human Rights Watch, in one of its reports, says that the OIC, at least, has been relentless protecting states that violate human rights from criticism.

Human Rights Watch also states it has concerns over the OIC's definition of terrorism, which includes "imperilling people's honour;" "threatening political unity," which sounds like an enshrinement of "one man, one vote, one time;" and "threatening territorial integrity." Would the OIC label the people of Quebec who want separation from Canada terrorists for threatening Canada's "territorial integrity"? Would the OIC recognize the Tea Party as a terrorist organization for "threatening political unity" in the US?

Funny? Not really. The OIC could easily try to market those definitions of "terrorism" that Human Rights Watch describes as "vague," and label genuinely "peaceful acts of expression" as terrorism.

Revealingly, the OIC excludes all real acts of terrorism – carried out by terrorist organizations, such as Hamas – calling them "legitimate struggle".

Further, the OIC officials enthusiastically keep voicing support for the Palestinian "Intifada" [uprising] against Israel, while at the same time failing to provide any significant support either in kind or in finances to the millions of Palestinians within the OIC member states, or even recognizing the miserable human rights conditions of the people about whom they profess to be so concerned. Is it possible that the OIC is more interested in demonizing and harassing Jews than protecting the welfare of their fellow Muslims, the Palestinians?

The US government and the US Department of State are not ignorant about the true nature of the OIC member states, especially when it comes to religious freedom —a significant aspect of freedom of speech. The US Department of State 2010 International Religious Freedom Report signifies US concern about religious freedom in several OIC countries, including Iraq and Pakistan. Nevertheless, last year, OIC secretary general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu was received by president Obama at the White House where Obama expressed "his appreciation regarding the on-going cooperation and engagement between the US and the OIC, including …"combating intolerance and other issues of political nature".

It is shattering that the Obama Administration has welcomed a UN resolution limiting the freedom of speech about religion, especially as it was initiated by countries known to oppress religious freedoms.

The ostensible big change in Resolution 16/18 was apparently that the words "defamation of religion" were dropped – but with no guarantee that they would not be reintroduced later. More meetings like the closed-door one in Washington -- called the "Istanbul Process" -- are apparently planed to discuss "how to implement Resolution 16/18. Resolution 16/18 does not need implementing; it needs abolishing. Now.

The OIC's triumph at the UN of passing a resolution limiting freedom of speech is alarming in that opens the door for further thought-policing resolutions. Why shouldn't the OIC now have good reason to hope that these will also be endorsed by the UN – and also co-sponsored by the United States?

Monday, January 02, 2012

An Old Egyptian Tradition

Raymond Ibrahim
January 2, 2012

The myths of a "patriotic" or "altruistic" Egyptian military carefully protecting the "rights" of its citizenry—the narrative of the mainstream media of the January 25 Revolution—are long gone.

Back in January, it was easy to conclude that the Egyptian military was the "savior" of the people, and that their "anti-democratic" President, Hosni Mubarak, embodied all of Egypt's ills. Today, however, far from allowing protesters to stand atop its tanks in triumph, the military has taken to mowing them down with tanks at Maspero, and other barbarities—culminating in the recent massacre of civilians in Tahrir [ironically, "Liberation"] Square.

The military's behavior is hardly inexplicable; Egypt's own history offers countless precedents demonstrating context and continuity. Consider the slave-soldiers known as the Mamluks—the word mamluk simply means "owned"—who usurped power, establishing a slave-dynasty in Egypt from 1258-1517.

Originally non-Muslims who were abducted and enslaved in their youth, indoctrinated in Islam, and trained to become jihadists [holy warriors], the Mamluks were especially ferocious: it was they who first defeated the otherwise unstoppable Mongol hordes at Ayn Jalut. Accordingly, Egypt's Mamluk rulers were oppressive to both Muslims (which is legitimate under Islamic law) and non-Muslims (which is expected).

As James Jankwoski put it:

Ultimately, Mamluk rule rested on force. The chronicles of the period are replete with examples of Mamluk violence against the indigenous population of Egypt... From horseback, they simply terrorized those lesser breeds who crossed their paths. The sudden and arbitrary use of force by the government and its dominant military elite; frequent resort to cruelty to make a point; ingenious methods of torture employed both for exemplary purpose and to extract wealth from others: all these measures were routine in the Mamluk era.

Consider some parallels: the Mamluks ousted their former Ayyubid master and installed their leader, just as the Egyptian military ousted Mubarak and installed their leader, Mohamed Tantawi; Egyptian citizens are once again being killed and brutalized regularly, whether at Maspero or Tahrir Square.

But while the Mamluks were not indigenous, Egypt's military today is made up natives; and while the Mamluks were slaves, today's soldiers are free. These differences make the brutality of today's military that much more objectionable.

In both cases, Egyptian Christians suffer the most, including under the concept of "collective punishment": during the Mamluk era, when Muslims were fighting and defining themselves against the Crusaders, today because the Muslim world defines itself and is increasingly hostile to all things deemed Western, including Christianity.

Reading Adel Guindy's Hikayat al-Ihtilal ["Stories of Occupation"], an Arabic study of the various occupying forces of Egypt since the Arab invasion ca. 640, one comes across centuries of burned churches and persecuted Christians, forced conversions, and exorbitant jizya—taxes imposed on non-Muslims, who were, and evidently still are, treated as sub-human, second-class citizens [see Quran 9:29]. These abuses of non-Muslim "infidels" were everyday features of Mamluk Egypt, so much so that under Mamluk rule the majority of Egypt's Christians sought relief by converting to Islam.

Currently, under military rule, Egypt's Christians are persecuted, calls for jizya, an exorbitant tax imposed upon non-Muslims, who are considered a second-class group of people, are back, and churches are destroyed with regularity.

Hikayat al-Ihtilal describes how, over 500 years ago, Muslims screaming "Allahu Akbar!" ["Allah is the Greatest!"] would destroy and plunder churches while Mamluk rulers sat by and looked on, as usual blaming the Christians. Today's upsurge in church attacks—with officials either looking the other way or even justifying them—is, in fact, what caused Christians to protest at Maspero in the first place, only to be massacred.

At the close of his study concerning the Mamluk era, Guindy makes an especially pertinent observation: with the Mamluks' rise to power, "Egypt entered into a five-and-a-half-century coma, which it did not revive from until the voice of Napoleon was heard knocking on its doors in 1798."

In fact, it was only during the colonial era and into the 20th century—when Egyptians sought to emulate the ways of a then-confident West—that the Mamluk "approach" went dormant.

Today, as both Western appeal and influence fade in the Middle East—in Egypt, starting with Nasser's Free Officers' coup in 1952 and culminating in Tantawi's pure military dictatorship—the threat of Egypt lapsing back into a "coma" becomes all too real, particularly under Muslim Brotherhood and/or Salafist rule, which early elections indicate.

Raymond Ibrahim is an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.