Honor crime: Taxi boss jailed for threats against daughter over arranged marriage deal

It sounds like the Canadians are starting to take these cases more seriously. Which is a great thing. There are too many cases where Muslim women and girls are threatened with all manner of violence and no one is arrested. Again this man wanted to kill his daughter, because she pulled out of an arranged - likely passport marriage. We have got to keep a closer eye on those arranged marriage deals.

This man was not only a taxi driver, he was a Muslim leader and founder of a mosque, as well as said to be a religious 'modernist' and not violent. He apparently shifted gears when his daughter showed a drop of independence.


The city’s taxi union boss was handed a year in jail Tuesday for what a judge deemed an “honour crime.”

Yusef Salam Al Mezel, 44, had pleaded guilty to criminally harassing his 23-year-old daughter, Eman, over three weeks in July 2007.

“Mr. Al Mezel has threatened his daughter with serious violence and has caused her to fear for her safety in the name of honour,” Judge Lynn Ratushny wrote. “He has committed the crime of harassment against her in the name of honour.”

Al Mezel admitted to pushing his daughter, threatening to break her legs and kill her and smashing her computer. When she fled marriage to a Syrian man for a $9,000 dowry, he stalked her to a shelter and a friend’s home.

He sent her e-mails threatening her uncles and cousins would go “crazy” over the family’s honour and to come home before someone got hurt.

Police spirited the young woman — and the family sheltering her — out of Ottawa.

There’s no evidence Al Mezel would have killed her but his threats “invoke a seriously dangerous belief system that can and has led to violence against women,” Ratushny wrote.

The judge noted that Al Mezel, who came from Kuwait 20 years ago, is a community leader — a founder of his mosque, city council candidate and representative of 1,500 taxi drivers.

But she wrote that a year is the minimum to denounce what he’s done and deter others.

The Crown had asked for up to two years.

Eman Al Mezel testified she’d stained the family “sharaf” by running away and shedding the hijab and killing her was the only way to clean it.

Al Mezel’s other daughters testified that their father was never violent and is a religious “modernist.” His brothers testified the family are “lefties” and believe men and women are equals.

Al Mezel himself said that listening to expert evidence on honour crimes was like hearing about a “different world” — he’d never, he said, lived in that world or held those beliefs.

Al Mezel’s lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, argued at sentencing that Al Mezel was a desperate father who wanted to bring his daughter home and the victim of anti-Muslim stereotypes. She’d sought probation.

“My heart breaks for him and his family,” she said Tuesday. “He’s a really, really decent person who made a very bad mistake.”

Ottawa Sun


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Australians pause for Remembrance Day [Video]

The Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, has laid a wreath at The Australian War Memorial as part of Remembrance Day commemorations.


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Saudi Arabia: Riyadh grants $380 mln loan to Pakistan

Everyone needs help sometimes - but wouldn't it be cheaper to stop funding the madrassas? Then their religiously crazed students can stop blowing up the place.


Riyadh, 11 Nov. (AKI) - Saudi Arabia has granted Pakistan a 380 million dollar loan in the biggest single donation since donors pledged 5.7 billion dollars worth of aid to the country in April. A senior Saudi official said the loan was part of the 700 million dollars the country had pledged to give Pakistan.

Several countries that met in Tokyo in April pledged a total of 5.7 billion dollars in aid to Pakistan but some donors have sought more details on how the money will be spent and have raised doubts about the stability of the government.

The Pakistani central bank will get 200 million dollars from Saudi Arabia to cover the country's budget deficit, a 100 million dollar credit line to cover Pakistani fertilizer imports and 80 million dollars to support the Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project, the official said.

"This (380 million dollar) loan was granted by the Saudi Development Fund which supports development in foreign countries by giving grants or soft loans," the official said.

"Saudi Arabia is so far Pakistan's biggest donor under the Tokyo agreement ... We will deliver the remaining 320 million dollars soon. We are working with Pakistani authorities to define areas of need," he added.

Saudi Arabia is Pakistan's top Arab ally. Some 1.7 million Pakistani expatriates who live and work in Saudi Arabia sent home 1.8 billion dollars in remittances in 2008.

The International Monetary Fund has urged Pakistan to work harder on reform and demanded that donors follow through on the aid promised for the Asian country.


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Iran: Tehran attacks Oxford scholarship in honour of Neda Agha-Soltan

"We believe that your college decision to abuse Neda's case to establish a graduate scholarship will highly politicise your academic institution, undermining your scientific credibility," embassy.

'Undermining your scientific credibility' what does this mean? They imagine their religion gives them so much power! It is a megalomaniac led country.

Tehran, 11 Nov. (AKI) - Iran has attacked Oxford University after one of its colleges established a scholarship in honour of a woman killed during street protests in Tehran in June. The Iranian embassy in London denounced the 6,600 dollar Neda Agha-Soltan graduate scholarship offered by the university's Queen's College.

But in a letter to the university's chancellor, the Iranian embassy dismissed the decision as "a politically motivated move".

Queen's said the scholarship would help impoverished Iranians study at Oxford.

Soltan became a symbol of the wave of opposition that swept the country after president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected in a widely disputed election in June.

She was shot dead during an anti-government protest in Tehran.

"We believe that your college decision to abuse Neda's case to establish a graduate scholarship will highly politicise your academic institution, undermining your scientific credibility," the letter said.

The embassy also reasserted its claim that Soltan was killed "in an isolated street far from protesters on that day, where her murderers had filmed her and her companions 20 minutes before the incident".

Opposition supporters have claimed that the 12 June poll was rigged to ensure the Ahmadinejad's re-election was rigged.

At least 30 protesters have been killed in clashes since the election and thousands of others have been imprisoned across the country.


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Fields of Paper Poppies Flourish in Britain in Rememberance of Armistice Day [Video]

Every year about this time, millions of people in Britain wear red paper poppies in recognition of Armistice Day, and in support of their country's armed forces. This year, the annual November 11th observation, marking the end of World War One, holds special significance. British troops are again in harms way, this time in Afghanistan. Jennifer Glasse reports for VOA from London


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Australia's self-styled 'Sheik' Haron protests outside court in chains [Video]

Message on his placard:

[Prime Minister Kevin Rudd] if you kill Afghan civilians they will kill our civilians Don't cause danger for Australia.

A SELF-STYLED Muslim Sheik has chained himself to the steps of a Sydney courthouse in a bid to convey his message of peace.

Sheik Haron appeared at the Downing Centre Local Court today charged with sending harassing letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers.

As the Daily Telegraph revealed last month, Sheik Haron - whose real name is Man Monis - allegedly sent the letters over two years, devastating the families of seven Diggers who died in Afghanistan.

One letter was addressed to a widow, care of a funeral home and he apparently accused some of the dead Australian soldiers of being "criminals", "killers" and "murderers" fighting a war of invasion.

Outside court today, Sheik Haron refused to apologise to the recipients, urging the letters be taken in their entirety.

He attacked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and former PM John Howard who have "made Australia unsafe".

"I don't want Australia to be unsafe," he said.

"Which country has attacked us? If a country attacks us unjustly, I'm happy to go to war."

In a lengthy sermon to the waiting cameras, he also waved an Australian flag, as a number of people watched on.

Represented by Chris Murphy and Adam Houda, Sheik Haron did not enter a plea, had his reporting conditions reduced and will face court again in January.

Daily Telegraph.au


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Italy: Mohammed called a 'paedophile' in TV spat

When the truth offends...

We cannot expect that Islamic law i.e. that only selected things are said about Islam or its prophet in the modern world.

Many Muslims not only want others to accept that Muhammad married a child - they want to continue the same practice - without criticism. Muhammad also expressed interest in marrying at least one other infant - but died before he could marry her. A few months ago a 12 year old Yemeni girl died while in child labor.


Milan, 9 Nov. (AKI) - Italian feminist and former far right-wing MP Daniela Santanche has sparked a controversy after calling the Prophet Mohammed a "a polygamist and paedophile" during a TV debate. Santanche appeared on a television programme aired on the commercial channel, Canale 5 with the president of Milan's Islamic centre, Ali Abu Schwaima, on Sunday.

"Mohammed was a polygamist and a paedophile because he had nine wives, one of whom was only nine years old, that is a historical fact," said Santanche.

A former MP for the post-fascist National Alliance party, Santanche now leads the far-right La Destra party.

Her remark incensed Schwaima and Muslims in the audience, who had been invited to take part in a debate on the contentious issue of placing crucifixes in Italian classrooms after last week's ban by the European Court of Human Rights.

"Why don't we talk about serious things, not about your disgusting comments," he shouted at Santanche.

Santanche continued to shout back: "For us, Mohammed was a paedophile."

"You're just showing the ignorance of people like you who have no other arguments to use," bellowed Schwaima, jabbing his finger at her.

He claimed the crucifix should not be removed from classrooms in Italy.

"For us, Christ was one of the five main prophets and we respect him, like the crucifix."

But Santanche was not appeased by Schwaima's remark.

"We will never listen to Mohammed, who was a polygamist and a paedophile," screeched Santanche.

Studio ushers were seen physically restraining an irate, bearded member of the audience from lunging at her.

"I and my staff dissociate ourselves from these comments, which are offensive to Islam," Domenica Cinque's presenter, Barbara D'Urso, said in a statement issued after the programme.

A former MP for the post-fascist National Alliance party, Santanche ran for the lower house of parliament on the far-right La Destra list in last year's general election.

But the party failed to reach the 4 percent threshold required for election to the parliament.

Santanche was last year among rightwing protesters who opposed the conversion of a former velodrome into a mosque in Milan.

She opposes Muslim women wearing the veil in Italy and has called for a referendum to reopen the country's brothels.

Aisha was believed to be nine-years-old at the time of her marriage to Mohammed.

Child marriages such as Aisha's were relatively common in Bedouin societies at the time of the prophet and remain so in countries such as Yemen and Saudi Arabia among others.



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Australia's wacko Sheikh - chains himself to the court after being charged with writing threating letters to deceased soldiers' families

You want to laugh at this guy - but what he is saying appears kind of threatening.

An Australian man accused of sending harassing letters to the families of dead soldiers has been described by his lawyer as a man who is "preaching peace". Man Monis, who also uses the name Sheikh Haron, appeared in a Sydney court on Tuesday with his lawyer Chris Murphy. AKI

Outside court he spoke at length in Arabic before switching to English, telling journalists that the Australian Government had jeopardised the safety of the community due to its military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sounds a little like a threat!! Maj. Hasan - the Fort Hood shooter said the same thing:

He warned senior Army physicians in 2007 that the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars to avoid "adverse events."

We might be missing the language here.


HE TOLD them [soldier's families] their sons were killers and murderers. But outside court yesterday the self-styled Muslim cleric, Man Haron Monis, claimed letters he sent to the grieving families of Australia's fallen diggers were his own version of a ''flower basket'' or ''condolence card''.

Mr Monis, also known as Sheikh Haron, has been charged with seven counts of using a postal service to menace, harass or cause offence when he sent a series of letters to the families of Private Luke Worsley and Lance Corporal Jason Marks, who were killed in Afghanistan in 2007 and last year.

Mr Monis, of Campsie, is also charged over a letter he sent in July to the family of the Australian Trade official, Craig Senger, who was killed in the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2007.

It is understood Mr Monis sent letters to other families of dead soldiers, for which he has not been charged.

A deportation order might put the fear of God in him.. loyalty?

During his appearance at the Downing Centre Local Court yesterday, his lawyer, Chris Murphy, said his client was a ''peace activist'' whose letters had contained no threats.

''He is 45, without any blur on any of his character,'' Mr Murphy said. ''He's an open book. His life has been mostly on the internet; he preaches peace.''

Mr Monis's bail conditions were relaxed before the matter was adjourned until January 19. Outside court he spoke at length in Arabic before switching to English, telling journalists that the Australian Government had jeopardised the safety of the community due to its military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr Monis did not respond when journalists asked if he would say ''sorry'' for offending the families of the fallen soldiers.

Mr Monis had said the letters he sent were condolence letters with a message asking the families to pressure the Government to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

''This pen is my gun and these words are my bullets. Despite my poor English, I fight with these weapons, against oppression, to promote peace,'' Mr Monis said.

''I love Australia. I want safety for Australia; I don't want to be used our soldiers [sic]. I don't want Australians to be unsafe.''

Later, as the media crowd began to disperse, Mr Monis pulled out a long chain and padlocked himself to a railing on the court steps, two small Australian flags held high above his head.


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Fort Hood Memorial (VIDEO): WATCH LIVE

US President Barack Obama (C) and First Lady Michelle Obama (Top) arrive at Andrews Air Force Base, MD, November 10, 2009. Obama joins this shaken military community Tuesday in mourning victims of a bloody rampage amid growing questions about the chief suspect's links to militant Islam.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Pakistan: Car bomb blast kills at least 34 in busy street

A Pakistani father mourns death of his son after a car bombing in Charsadda, Pakistan, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009.

Hell on earth!

It seems the Taliban have given them a choice - accept an Islamic takeover with the installation of strict Sharia law or face daily bombings and attacks.

Death toll has reached 34

Charsadda, 10 Nov. (AKI) - At least 24 people were killed and more than 40 others were injured in the latest bomb attack to strike the volatile northwestern region of Pakistan. According to  Pakistan's GeoNews, a car bomb exploded in a busy shopping street in the town of Charsadda, 20 kilometres from the city of Peshawar, in the North West Frontier Province.

As Pakistani authorities continued to search for survivors in the rubble, there were fears that the death toll could rise. Hospital sources quoted by Pakistan's Geo News said many of the victims were women and children.

Pakistani prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and president Asif Ali Zardari condemned the suicide blast on Tuesday, reiterating their resolve to fight terrorism.

The attack is the third to target the region around the city of Peshawar in the past week.

More than 300 people have been killed in a wave of attacks since Pakistani troops launched an assault against the Taliban in South Waziristan.

The powerful blast, which exploded at an intersection just outside the market destroyed windowpanes of nearby buildings and knocked down electrical wires.

The bomb attack occurred as the Pakistani military was continuing its ground and air offensive against militants in South Waziristan bordering Afghanistan.

The army claims nearly 500 militants have been killed in the military action that began in mid-October.

On Monday, a suicide bomber killed himself and at least four people near a police checkpoint in Peshawar. A day earlier at least 12 were killed in a suicide bomb attack near the city.


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Fort Hood Suspect's Seditious Comments Ignored By Politically Correct Military

The last bullet point on that page reads simply: "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"

The last point of a medical presentation /class - as we know from earlier reports - was on household mold and dry cleaning chemicals - and to everyone's surprise Hasan starts talking about Islamic jihad. He was stressed alright - over what he was about to do.

The US military's mistakes should be a lesson to us all. The things that were clearly red flags in the Hasan case - are being heard all over Europe. And here the same politically correct response is forthcoming. In Holland Muslims are saying openly we are going to take over your country - one Dutch Muslim [female] politician told a right-wing activist doing a poll - that one day he will be in the minority. People are saying all over Europe with these types of comments coming from Muslims - isn't it time to pull up the drawbridge. 40% of British Muslims believe that the UK should become an Islamic State. And it is only down to EU countries' surveillance that it doesn't look like Pakistan. The Hasan case is more than a guy going postal - it is clear - he had a religious agenda.


The Army psychiatrist suspected of killing 13 people at Fort Hood reportedly warned senior Army physicians in 2007 that the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars to avoid "adverse events."

According to The Washington Post, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic during his senior year as a psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Medical Center.

Instead, Hasan lectured his supervisors and two dozen mental health staff members on Islam, homicide bombings and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting against other Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A source who attended the presentation told the paper, "It was really strange. The senior doctors looked really upset."

The Powerpoint, entitled, "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military," consisted of 50 slides, according to a copy obtained by the Post.

"It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims," Hasan said in the presentation.

Under a slide titled "Comments," he wrote: "If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the 'infidels'; ie: enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ie: suicide bombing, etc." [sic]

The last bullet point on that page reads simply: "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"

On the final slide, labeled "Recommendation," Hasan wrote: "Department of Defense should allow Muslims [sic] Soldiers the option of being released as 'Conscientious objectors' to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events."

An Army spokesman told the Post Monday night he was unaware of the presentation, and a Walter Reed spokesman declined comment.

A classmate of Hasan, meanwhile, told FoxNews.com that the warning signs were all there — the justification of homicide bombings; spewing anti-American hatred; efforts to reach out to Al Qaeda — but that the military treated Hasan with kid gloves, even after giving him a poor performance review.

And though he was on the radar screen of at least one U.S. intelligence agency, no action was taken that might have prevented the Army psychiatrist from allegedly gunning down 13 people and wounding 29 others in the Fort Hood massacre last week.

"There were definitely clear indications that Hasan's loyalties were not with America," Lt. Col. Val Finnell, Hasan's classmate at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He and Hasan were students in the school's public health master's degree program from 2007-2008.

"The issue here is that there's a political correctness climate in the military. They don't want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody's religious belief, or they're afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.

"I want to be clear that this wasn't about anyone questioning his religious views. It is different when you are a civilian than when you are a military officer," said Finnell, who is a physician at the Los Angeles Air Force Base.

"When you are in the military and you start making comments that are seditious, when you say you believe something other than your oath of office — someone needed to say why is this guy saying this stuff.

"He was a lightning rod. He made his views known and he was very vocal, he had extremely radical jihadist views," Finnell said. "When you're a military officer you take an oath to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic.

"They should've confronted him — our professors, officers — but they were too concerned about being politically correct."

Finnell said the warning signs were clear to many, not just classmates. Faculty members, including many high-ranking military officers, witnessed firsthand his anti-Americanism, he said.

Finnell recalled Hasan telling his classmates and professors, "I'm a Muslim first and I hold the Shariah, the Islamic Law, before the United States Constitution."

He recalled one time when his classmates were giving presentations in an environmental health class on topics like soil and water contamination and the effects of mold. When it was Hasan's turn, he said, he got up in front of the class and began to speak about his chosen topic, "Is the War on Terror a war on Islam?"

Finnell says he raised his hand. "I asked the professor, "What does this topic have to do with environmental health?"

"When he was challenged on his views, Hasan became visibly upset. He became sweaty, he was emotional."

But despite questioning from the other students, Finnell said, the professor allowed Hasan to continue. He said Hasan's anti-American vitriol continued for two years as he worked toward his degree in public health.

There were even more warning signs that might have alerted the Army in recent months:

— In the days and weeks before the shooting, Hasan voiced his objections to Muslims fighting the war on terror to members of his mosque, the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen. Congregants at the mosque said he voiced his objections to Muslims serving in the U.S. military and to his impending deployment to Afghanistan.

— Over the summer, Hasan's comments led Osman Danquah, co-founder of the mosque, to recommend that it deny Hasan's request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood, the Associated Press reported.

— In the months before Thursday's shooting Hasan tried reaching out to people associated with Al Qaeda — and did so under the watchful eye of at least one U.S. intelligence agency. An intelligence official told FOXNews.com that "Hasan was on our radar for months."

On Sunday Sen. Joe Lieberman announced his intention to lead a congressional investigation into the Fort Hood murders, saying there were "strong warning signs" that Hasan was an "Islamic extremist."

"The U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance. He should have been gone," said Lieberman, who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In interviews Sunday, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey stressed that it was too early in the investigation to know whether these warnings signs could have spared the lives of the 13 killed, dismissing earlier reports about such signs as "speculation" based on anecdotes. "I don't want to say that we missed it," he said.

Finnell said that once Hasan was identified as the suspect in Thursday's massacre, he reached out to the Army to tell them about his experiences with Hasan.

This time, he said, "They listened."

FOX NEWS


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Yemen: Muslimn Brotherhood leader calls for end to Saudi military action

Saudi Army vehicle burns during clashes with Houthi rebels in the border area between Saudi Arabia and Yemen in this video grab from recent footage released by the rebels November 9, 2009.


Sanaa, 9 Nov. (AKI)- The supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, has asked Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to stop the military offensive against Shia rebels in Yemen.

In a statement published on the Internet, 81-year-old Akef asked the Saudi monarch to end military action against the militants aligned with the imam Abdel Malik al-Houthi.

"We are upset and saddened by the recent bombings by the Saudi army to harm the much loved Yemeni people," the statement said.

"Saudi Arabia's intervention does nothing but feed the useless bloodshed on its border with Yemen."

Saudi Arabia said it had regained control of territory seized by the rebels in an incursion last week and there were reports that Saudi military had resumed air raids on Monday.

Saudi forces captured 250 militiamen loyal to al-Houthi in fighting in the south of the country in recent days, al-Arabiya Arabic satellite TV network reported on Monday.

Saudi officials also insisted that the air and ground offensive, launched last week after a soldier was killed in a raid in the Jizan region, had not strayed into Yemen.

Meanwhile, rebels in northern Yemen claimed to have shot down a Yemeni fighter jet attacking their strongholds on Sunday.

Sanaa denied the claim, saying the Sukhoi crashed because of a "technical error".

It was the third Yemeni military plane to crash since the latest fighting between the army and the rebels, known as the Houthis, began some four months ago.

"The Saudi air raids resumed this morning," rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam reportedly said on Monday.

"Saudi combat fighter jets launched intense raids against border areas inside Yemeni territory on Sunday night. The Saudi military used phosphorus bombs during those night raids, burning mountainous regions."

But he rejected suggestions that rebel fighters had crossed the Saudi border, saying those who had been detained were illegal migrants, and accused the Saudi government of allowing the Yemeni military to use its territory to launch attacks.

But Saudi assistant defence minister Khaled Bin Sultan insisted on Sunday that Saudi troops were trying to force the rebels from its territory and seal the border to prevent incursions.

Saudi television aired footage on Sunday of Saudi soldiers capturing and blindfolding men who were identified as Houthi fighters.


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China Executes Nine Uighurs

Members of the police force walk into the local courthouse before the beginning of a trial for four Uighurs suspected of being involved in the recent syringe attacks in Urumqi, in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region, September 17, 2009. Four Uighur men were sentenced to between eight and 15 years in prison for stabbing a Han Chinese woman in the neck with a syringe in the capital of the ethnically divided Xinjiang region in China's northwest.


BEIJING -(AP)- An initial group of nine Uighurs have been executed for taking part in July's deadly ethnic rioting in the country's far west, Chinese state media reported.

The China News Service reported Monday that the nine were put to death recently but gave no specific date or other details.

The executions followed a review of the verdicts by the Supreme People's Court as required by law, it said.

The nine were convicted of committing murder and other crimes during the riots that left nearly 200 people dead in China's worst ethnic violence in decades.

Hundreds were rounded up in the wake of the unrest in Xinjiang province. The news service said a further 20 people were indicted Monday on charges related to the deaths of 18 people and other crimes.

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Iran: Clinton demands release of US trio held on 'spy' charges

Supporters of three hikers held in Iran, protest in front of Sproul Hall at University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif. , Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009.


Tehran, 9 Nov. (AKI) - American secretary of state Hillary Clinton said on Monday the United States believed Iran had no reason to detain three young Americans now facing espionage charges.

"We believe strongly that there is no evidence to support any charge whatsoever," Clinton said on a visit to Berlin.

"And we would renew our request on behalf of these three young people and their families that the Iranian government exercise compassion and release them so they can return home, and we will continue to make that case.".

The three Americans have been detained on alleged illegal entry and are to be charged with espionage, according to the Iranian state news agency Irna.

Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal have been held by Iranian authorities since the end of July.

According to media reports, the three are believed to have crossed a poorly marked border by mistake while hiking in Iraq's Kurdish region.

According to the state news agency, the move was announced by general prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi.

"The three are charged with espionage. Investigations continue into the three detained Americans in Iran," Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, the Tehran general prosecutor, said on Monday.

Under Iranian law, espionage is punishable by death.

Iran is also holding another American citizen, Kian Tajbakhsh, an academic who was arrested during the mass protests that took place after the re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last month he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his alleged role in the violence that followed the election.


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Man charged with statutory rape in ‘marriage’ to 14-year-old girl

It appears that Black Muslims are starting to take up the practises of Muslims in the wider Islamic world. The marriage of young girls - which is a worrying sign. They have not yet starting the cousin marriages - which is so prevalent in the Islamic world - 65% plus - to do that they would need more control over the women - be they daughters, sisters or wives. But as it stands the law protects the women in a western democracy.

If you want to live like Muhammad did - then you will have to go to Arabia.


Vincent Mosby signed a marriage contract and paid a dowry in a religious ceremony in August, police said.

Mosby, 23, of Kansas City didn’t legally wed his 14-year-old bride, however, because Missouri law won’t allow it without a judge’s order. Police said she was pressured into the union because her mother and stepfather thought she was going to be sexually active with a boy her age.

Although the bride’s stepfather arranged the “marriage,” according to court records, other relatives frowned upon the union and told police in late August. The relatives also took the girl to protect her from further sexual abuse, according to court records.

A relative told police that Mosby called and threatened violence if family members didn’t “give me back my wife in 72 hours,” according to court records. Two days later, on Sept. 9, someone fired three shots into the Kansas City home of the girl’s aunt. No one was hit.

Police arrested Mosby on Saturday for his alleged sexual relationship with the teenager. Jackson County prosecutors on Sunday filed one count of statutory rape. A judge set a $100,000 cash-only bond.

Police said the girl’s stepfather and mother became concerned that she was going to become sexually active, so the stepfather allegedly approached Mosby about marrying the girl. The girl was “strongly encouraged” to wed Mosby, police said.

The stepfather, Mosby and the teen had several “sit downs” before the stepfather arranged for a religious ceremony on Aug. 4 at her home, not far from the stepfather’s mosque.

Two members of the mosque attended, but the bride “was not allowed to be present,” court records said. She waited in her room upstairs. Her stepfather allegedly came upstairs after the ceremony, which consisted of prayers and a contract signing, to announce that she was married.

Police say they have the “marriage contract” with the signatures of Mosby, the girl and the stepfather.

The contract also notes the dowry the girl requested from Mosby — a watch and ring, which he told police he bought at Wal-Mart.

Court records said the couple had sex three times in August in her home, while her mother and stepfather were home. The girl did not move in with Mosby. She stayed with her parents and kept in touch with Mosby through phone calls and text messages.

In Islam, boys and girls are considered adults based on when they hit puberty, and people in some parts of the world do marry young, said Mahnaz Shabbir of Stilwell, a past president of the Heartland Muslim Council.

However, she said, Islam also says followers should live by the laws of the land.

The girl’s mother later told police she was not in favor of the marriage but was aware that it occurred. She told police that she told her daughter that Mosby, who went by the name Salih, could go to jail because of their ages, court records said.

Mosby told police he knew the girl was 14 but thought the relationship was legal because the girl’s guardians approved. He denied shooting at the aunt’s home but said he was angry at her family, according to court records.

The stepfather declined to talk to police. Phone records show 231 calls between the stepfather and Mosby between July 2 and Sept. 8.

Kansas City


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What’s Likely to Happen to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan?

A United States soldier walks past an Army poster advertising "Mental Strength For Life" at the Resiliency Center on Fort Hood Army post in Texas November 9, 2009.

Likely Maj. Hasan's reported awakening will be an awakening into his worst nightmare. He's alive. And there is not a single virgin in sight - maybe one or two - but not the 72 he had hoped for. For all those wondering about his mental condition - he may well be suffering from post traumatic stress entirely brought on by his failed jihadist revolt.


The future indeed looks grim for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the accused Fort Hood gunman, who last week opened fire in a processing center on the base, killing 13. Hasan was injured by gunfire, but remains alive and under heavy guard at Fort Sam Houston. That means, of course, Hasan will presumably be prosecuted for his actions.

But what will the legal proceedings look like for Hasan? The Houston Chronicle attempts to answer the question in a story out Monday.

A key question concerning Hasan’s fate hinges on whether civilian prosecutors conclude he was part of a terrorist plot that might justify moving his case into the federal criminal courts under U.S. anti-terrorism laws. If prosecutors, on the other hand, determine that Hasan acted alone, he could face the death penalty in a military court-martial.

Regardless, it seems, it will take a while to administer Hasan’s case. First, Hasan will be subjected to assessments of his physical and mental health. And if a death sentence is handed down, appeals would likely follow. Numerous appeals that could take years — the military justice’s appeals process, writes the Chron, has effectively thrwarted all executions since 1961.

Perhaps what’s likely to occur, writes the Chron, is a court-martial under Article 2 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to punish offenses allegedly committed by a man wearing a U.S. military uniform against other military personnel on a military base. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is responsible for recommending charges, prompting the military equivalent of a grand jury, known as an Article 32 hearing, where both prosecutors and defense can present evidence.

Those results would be reviewed by the base commander, who would decide whether to convene a court-martial. The 12-person jury would be composed of officers higher in rank than Hasan – lieutenant colonels and above.

Hasan’s family is demanding that he be allowed to consult with a lawyer before speaking to investigators or mental health professionals. In a statement released to the news media on Saturday, Hasan’s brother Eyad declared that his family has “faith in our legal system and that my brother will be treated fairly.”

“We hope that the relevant authorities will provide us with information on my brother’s condition and that he be afforded his right to an attorney the moment he regains consciousness,” Eyad Hasan wrote.

WSJ

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Fort Hood Suspect's Ties to Terrorists

Video: Fort Hood Suspect's Ties to Terrorists

Army Major in Fort Hood Massacre Used 'Electronic Means' to Connect with Terrorists

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan's efforts.

CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress "to preserve" all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker.

Hoekstra said he is "absolutely furious" that the house intel committee has been refused an intelligence briefing by the DNI or CIA on Hasan's attempt to reach out to al Qaeda, as first reported by ABC News.

Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.

In a blog posting early Monday titled "Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing," Awlaki calls Hasan a "hero" and a "man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people."

According to his site, Awlaki served as an imam in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia.

The Associated Press reported Sunday that Major Hasan attended the Falls Church mosque when Awlaki was there.

The Telegraph of London reported that Awlaki had made contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers when he was in San Diego.

He denied any knowledge of the hijacking plot and was never charged with any crime. After an intensive investigation by the FBI, Awlaki moved to Yemen.

People who knew or worked with Hasan say he seemed to have gradually become more radical in his disapproval of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.

"If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance," Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.

Army Chief of Staff

A fellow Army doctor who studied with Hasan, Val Finell, told ABC News, "We would frequently say he was a Muslim first and an American second. And that came out in just about everything he did at the University."

Finell said he and other Army doctors complained to superiors about Hasan's statements.

"And we questioned how somebody could take an oath of office&be an officer in the military and swear allegiance to the constitution and to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic and have that type of conflict," Finell told ABC News.

The Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, raised concerns over the weekend that innocent Muslim soldiers could suffer as a result of the shooting at Fort Hood.

"I think the speculation (on Hasan's Islamic roots) could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers," he said on ABC's "This Week."

ABC


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Sudanese President A No-Show As OIC Meets In Turkey

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had questioned the ICC charges against al-Bashir and said that "no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide."

Serious statement. This is undoubtedly a red flag. Firstly in Erdogan's mind it is not possible for there to be genocidal actions in Sudan ~ because they are Muslims. Secondly there is the genocide committed by Turkey, which the EU and the world would like them to come clean on. Though such a statement could lead us to believe that he has no intention of doing so. And thirdly, shows the supremacist belief that is inherent in Islam - which says that a Muslim is above all other men. In this case, unlike other man ~ "no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide" no matter how many defenseless people they kill.


(RFE/RL) -- Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the target of an international arrest warrant over alleged war crimes, has canceled his plans to attend a meeting today of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Islamic grouping.

The one-day meeting in Istanbul has been billed as an economic summit to discuss trade and antipoverty measures among the organization's 57 member states, including Iran and Afghanistan.

Al-Bashir's expected attendance had placed EU-hopeful Turkey in an uncomfortable position after the European Union and human rights groups called for al-Bashir's invitation to be withdrawn, or for him to be arrested upon his arrival in Istanbul.

Sudanese President Omar al-BashirTurkish officials had said they had no intentions of arresting al-Bashir because Turkey is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) that has indicted the Sudanese leader on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan's western Darfur region.

Turkish officials also pointed out that the OIC, not the Turkish government, had invited al-Bashir to attend as the head of a member state.

Sudan announced that Bashir's trip was called off due to key political negotiations in Khartom that required the president's presence.

Earlier, Turkish media reported that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had questioned the ICC charges against al-Bashir and said that "no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide."

The Anatolia news agency quoted Erdogan as saying, "If there was such a thing, we could talk about it face to face with President Bashir."

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary-general of the OIC, earlier said the Istanbul meeting was an economic summit and so had bigger things to discuss than al-Bashir.

Radio Free Europe


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FBI set to probe Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan's 9/11 links

They included him [Nidal Hasan] giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the US Constitution.

I think we somehow fool ourselves or wish to find comfort in the belief that only 'hate preachers' accept the view that Islamic law should trump western democracy. That is simply not true. While others may not pick up a gun they may - if allowed to seek to overturn western democracy in other ways.

The alleged Fort Hood gunman apparently attended the same Virginia mosque as two September 11 hijackers in 2001, a time when a radical imam preached there.
Whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan associated with the hijackers is something the FBI will probably look into.. investigation is ongoing.Daily Mail

Nidal Hasa likely saw Sept. 11 in a completely different light - perhaps as something that he thought he should emulate - rather than be repulsed by.

The FBI is set to investigate possible links between the gunman who killed 13 US soldiers at Fort Hood and a radical preacher in contact with at least one of the September 11 hijackers.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an army psychiatrist, went on the rampage at the military base in Texas last Thursday.

It has emerged that Major Hasan's family attended the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Centre in Falls Church, Virginia, and that the funeral of his mother, Hanan, was held there on May 31 2001.

At that time the imam of the mosque was Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim radical who saw Islam and America as enemies. Interviewed by the FBI after the September 11 terror attacks, Mr Awlaki admitted meeting hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi several times in San Diego before he moved to Virginia in early 2001. Al-Hazmi was at the time living with Khalid al-Mihdhar, another hijacker. The two Saudi Arabians were on the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon.

Al-Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, who piloted the Pentagon crash jet, attended the Dar al Hijrah mosque several times in early April 2001, although Mr Aulaqi has denied meeting them then.

Last night Senator Joe Lieberman called for an investigation into whether the army missed signs that Major Hasan had been turning towards Islamic extremism.

Students on a 2007-2008 master’s programme at a military college revealed yesterday that they had complained to faculty about Major Hasan’s alleged anti-American views.They included him giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the US Constitution.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the US Army has to have zero tolerance,” Senator Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, told Fox News. “He should have been gone.”

Mr Awlaki, who was born in the US to Yemeni parents, left America in 2002, eventually traveling to his parents' homeland.

He was suspected of links with extremism even before 9/11, being investigated by the FBI in 1999 and 2000 for contacts with a possible procurement agent for Osama bin Laden. During this investigation, the FBI learned that Mr Awlaki knew people involved in raising money for Hamas, a Palestinian group on the US State Department’s terrorist list.

A spokesman for the mosque downplayed possible links. Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, outreach director at Dar al Hijrah, said he did not know whether Major Hasan ever attended the mosque but confirmed that the Hasan family participated in services there. Mr Abdul-Malik said the Hasans were not leaders at the mosque and their attendance was utterly normal.

The Falls Church mosque is one of the largest on the East Coast, and thousands of worshippers attend prayers and services there every week. Mr Abdul-Malik said that it was a mistake for people to conflate regular attendance at a mosque with extremism.

Many Muslims prayed at the mosque multiple times a day, he said. “It’s part of family life. It’s like going out for ice cream after dinner.”

Faizul Khan, former imam of the Muslim Community Center in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, where Major Hasan also worshipped, said he was not aware that the gunman had attended services at Dar al Hijrah but said it would not be unusual for him to attend more than one mosque concurrently.

Mr Khan said he did not recall Major Hasan mentioning having been taught or preached to by Mr Awlaki.

General George Casey, the US Army Chief of Staff, warned against jumping too quickly inclusions, saying that it was important for the country not to get caught up in speculation about Major Hasan’s Muslim faith. He revealed that he has instructed his commanders to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction to the killings at the Texas post.

Focusing on the Islamic roots of the suspected gunman could “heighten the backlash" against all Muslims in the military, he said in interviews on TV networks ABC and CNN, adding that diversity in the military “gives us strength”.

General Casey said that evidence to this point shows that Major Hasan acted alone, ruling out theories that he was part of an Islamic sleeper cell.

Major Hasan was shot in the torso by police at the end of his rampage, and remains in critical but stable condition at an Army hospital in San Antonio. He was now able to breathe unaided, doctors said.

Sixteen victims remain in hospital with gunshot wounds, seven of them in intensive care.

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Fort Hood shooting: FBI to investigate reports gunman said non-Muslims should be beheaded

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

This is the politically correct conundrum. Not only were reports not filed against the Maj. but those reports that were filed, were not acted on sufficiently - because of a fear of being seen to be singling out Muslims. The accumulative effect of this inaction resulted in the deaths of 13 US service men and women.

He is also said to have told other doctors at one of America's top military hospitals that non-believers were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire.

The comments are said to have come during an hour-long talk Maj Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.

Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given a presentation focusing on an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Maj Hasan appeared to agree with.

It is the latest in a series of "red flags" about Maj Hasan's state of mind that have emerged since the massacre at Fort Hood, America's largest military installation, on Thursday.

Maj Hasan, armed with two handguns including a semi-automatic pistol, walked into a processing centre for soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he killed 13 and injured more than 30.

Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Maj Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a "Muslim first and American second."

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Another, Dr Val Finnell, who took a course with him in 2007 at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland, did complain about Hasan's "anti-American rants." He said: "The system is not doing what it's supposed to do. He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out. I really questioned his loyalty."

Selena Coppa, an activist for Iraq Veterans Against the War, said: "This man was a psychiatrist and was working with other psychiatrists every day and they failed to notice how deeply disturbed someone right in their midst was."

One of Hasan's neighbours described how on the day of the massacre, about 9am, he gave her a Koran and told her: "I'm going to do good work for God" before leaving for the base.

A civilian police officer who shot him, bringing the rampage to an end, said Maj Hasan appeared "calm" during the massacre, hiding behind a telephone pole and shooting fellow soldiers in the back as they tried to get away.

"He was firing at people as they were trying to run and hide, said Sgt Mark Todd. "Then he turned and fired a couple of rounds at me. I didn't hear him say a word, he just turned and fired."

Hasan flinched after he was shot and slid down against the pole still clutching his gun, which had a laser sight on it. The officer kicked away the weapon and handcuffed him.

He said: "The guy was breathing, his eyes were blinking. I could tell that he was fading out and he didn't say anything. He was just kind of blinking."

Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security, said there had been "strong warning signs" that Maj Hasan was an "Islamist extremist".

The committee would ask "whether the Army missed warning signs that should have led them to essentially discharge him, he said. He added: "The US Army has to have zero tolerance. He should have been gone."

But General George Casey, the Army's Chief of Staff, said it was "speculation" that military authorities failed to pick up on warning signs. "I don't want to say that we missed it," he said.

Asked if military authorities had missed warning signs Gen Casey, the Army's Chief of Staff, added: "We have to go back and look at ourselves ,and ask ourselves the hard questions. Are we doing the right things? We will learn from this.

"It's too early to draw conclusions but we will ask ourselves the hard questions about what we are doing and the changes we should make as a result of this."

Telegraph


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Philippines: Kidnapped teacher beheaded by Islamic militants

Manila, 9 Nov. (AKI) - Police in the southern Philippines have found the severed head of a school teacher who was abducted by Islamist militants nearly a month ago. Gabriel Canizares was abducted by Abu Sayyaf militants three weeks ago and his body is still missing.

Canizares was travelling with colleagues on the southern island of Jolo when he was kidnapped by the Al-Qaeda linked militants and his head was left at a petrol station in Sulu province early Monday, a ranking military official said.

According to GMA TV news, Armed Forces Chief Gen. Victor Ibrado condemned the act as “dastardly and inhuman," while defense secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said the incident illustrated the challenge for the people in Sulu in fighting terrorism.

The militants had demanded a ransom of 42,000 dollars for Canizares, but his family had refused to pay the amount.

Education secretary Jesli Lapus expressed shock at the teacher's killing, saying six other teachers who had been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf earlier this year had all been released.

She said president Gloria Arroyo had ordered "punitive action" to "put an end to the Abu Sayyaf group's heinous and inhumane atrocities".

"The people of Jolo are condemning this dastardly act," Jolo municipal mayor Hussin Amin said in a television interview aired in Manila.

The beheading occurred only three days before a visit to Manila by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Abu Sayyaf has been blamed for many of the country's terrorist attacks, including the firebombing of a ferry in Manila Bay that claimed more than 100 lives in 2005 and the abduction of American tourists in 2001.

A land mine explosion targeted a military convoy carrying American troops on 29 September killed two soldiers - the first US military deaths in the southern Philippines in seven years.


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Jihad at Fort Hood – by Robert Spencer

Can you say Jihadist??

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, murdered twelve people and wounded twenty-one inside Fort Hood in Texas yesterday, while, according to eyewitnesses, “shouting something in Arabic while he was shooting.” Investigators are scratching their heads and expressing puzzlement about why he did it. According to NPR, “the motive behind the shootings was not immediately clear, officials said.” The Washington Post agreed: “The motive remains unclear, although some sources reported the suspect is opposed to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and upset about an imminent deployment.” The Huffington Post spun faster, asserting that “there is no concrete reporting as to whether Nidal Malik Hasan was in fact a Muslim or an Arab.”

Yet there was, and what’s more, Major Hasan’s motive was perfectly clear — but it was one that the forces of political correctness and the Islamic advocacy groups in the United States have been working for years to obscure. So it is that now that another major jihad terror attack has taken place on American soil, authorities and the mainstream media are at a loss to explain why it happened – and the abundant evidence that it was a jihad attack is ignored.

Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Virginia but didn’t think of himself as an American: on a form he filled out at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, he gave his nationality not as “American” but as “Palestinian.” A mosque official found that curious, saying: “I don’t know why he listed Palestinian. He was not born in Palestine.”

Center. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech and has a doctorate in psychiatry from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. While there, NPR reports, Hasan was “put on probation early in his postgraduate work” and was “disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues.”

He was a staff psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six years before transferring to Fort Hood earlier this year. While at Walter Reed, he was a “very devout” member of and daily visitor to the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring. Faizul Khan, a former imam at the Center, expressed puzzlement over Hasan’s murders: “To know something like this happened, I don’t know what got into his mind. There was nothing extremist in his questions. He never showed any frustration….He never showed any remorse or wish for vengeance on anybody.”

So he identified himself as Palestinian and was a devout Muslim – so what? These things, of course, have no significance if one assumes that Islam is a Religion of Peace and that when a devout Muslim reads the Koran’s many injunctions to wage war against unbelievers, he knows that they have no force or applicability for today’s world. Unfortunately, all too many Muslims around the world demonstrate in both their words and their deeds that they take such injunctions quite seriously. And Nidal Hasan gave some indications that he may have been among them.

On May 20, 2009, a man giving his name as “NidalHasan” posted this defense of suicide bombing (all spelling and grammar as it is in the original):

There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

Of course, it may not be the same Nidal Hasan. But there is more. One of his former colleagues, Col. Terry Lee, recalled Hasan saying statements to the effect of “Muslims have the right to rise up against the U.S. military”; “Muslims have a right to stand up against the aggressors”; and even speaking favorably about people who “strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”

Maybe he just snapped, perhaps under the pressure of his imminent deployment to Iraq. But it’s noteworthy that if he did, he snapped in exactly the same way that several other Muslims in the U.S. military have snapped in the past. In April 2005, a Muslim serving in the U.S. Army, Hasan Akbar, was convicted of murder for killing two American soldiers and wounding fourteen in a grenade attack in Kuwait. AP reported:

“Prosecutors say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he coolly carried out the attack to achieve ‘maximum carnage’ on his comrades in the 101st Airborne Division.”

And Hasan’s murderous rampage resembles one that five Muslim men in New Jersey tried to carry out at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 2007, when they plotted to enter the U.S. Army base and murder as many soldiers as they could.

That was a jihad plot. One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, told an FBI informant late in 2006: “I’m gonna do it….It doesn’t matter to me, whether I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away, it doesn’t matter. Or I die, doesn’t matter, I’m doing it in the name of Allah.” Another plotter, Mohamad Shnewer, was caught on tape saying, “They are the ones, we are going to put bullets in their heads, Allah willing.”

Nidal Hasan’s statements about Muslims rising up against the U.S. military aren’t too far from that, albeit less graphic. The effect of ignoring or downplaying the role that Islamic beliefs and assumptions may have played in his murders only ensures that – once again – nothing will be done to prevent the eventual advent of the next Nidal Hasan.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, is available now from Regnery Publishing.

FrontPage Mag


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Lieberman: Believes Attack at Fort Hood was Act of Terrorism [Video]

Lieberman Chairman of Homeland Security Committee: Congress will investigate Hasan motives


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Jihad, Go To Hell [Video]

Warning Videos Contain Radical Opinions ~ But we have heard enough for radical Islam ~ here are some that are against it. The last video is a Christian guy who makes some good points - on political correctness.


Jihad In Fort Hood


Jihad, GO TO HELL

There actually was at least one other attack by a Muslim solider on fellow American soldiers on George Bushes watch.


Allahu Akbar: Muslim Doctor Kills 13 American Soldiers in Texas




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NYC AMERICAN Muslims JUSTIFY Fort Hood Shooting [Video]

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Hirsi Ali: Risking Her Life to Expose Islam's Oppression of Women [Video]

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Protecting Islam: UN Resolution to tell 'Freedom go to Hell' [Video]

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US military base shooting suspect gave away Koran and furniture, said goodbyes, before bloody rampage

This photograph taken on Friday, Nov. 6, 2009 in Killeen, Texas, shows a copy of the Quran and a briefcase holding this business card that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan gave to his neighbor a day before going on a shooting spree at the Fort Hood Army Base

It seems Hasan's behavior was strange for some time - in a health class where the topic was dry cleaning chemicals and household mould, Maj. Hasan goes off on a tirade about the US being at war with Islam. Though - the thought doesn't escape me - that this seemingly innocuous topic - could have for him triggered ulterior motive thoughts - perhaps on chemical weapons, possibly a chemical attack. Why would a mundane subject cause him to show such emotion?


FORT HOOD, Texas - As if going off to war, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan cleaned out his apartment, gave leftover broccoli to one neighbour and called another to thank him for his friendship - common courtesies and routines of the departing soldier. Instead, authorities say, he went on the killing spree that left 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, dead.

A Federal agent stands in the door of the the apartment of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan in Killeen, Texas, early Friday, Nov. 6, 2009

Investigators examined Hasan's computer, his home and his garbage Friday to learn what motivated the suspect, who lay in a coma, shot four times in the frantic bloodletting. Hospital officials said some of the wounded had extremely serious injuries and might not survive.

The 39-year-old Army psychiatrist emerged as a study in contradictions: a polite man who stewed with discontent, a counsellor who needed to be counselled himself, a professional healer now suspected of cutting down the fellow soldiers he was sworn to help.

Relatives said he felt harassed because of his Muslim faith but did not embrace extremism. Others were not so sure. A recent classmate said Hasan once gave a jarring presentation to students in which he argued the war on terrorism was a war against Islam, and "made himself a lightning rod for things" when he felt his religious beliefs were challenged.

Investigators were trying to piece together how and why Hasan allegedly gunned down his comrades in the worst case of violence on a military base in the U.S. The rampage unfolded at a centre where some 300 unarmed soldiers were lined up for vaccines and eye tests.

Soldiers reported that the gunman shouted "Allahu Akbar!" - an Arabic phrase for "God is great!" - before opening fire Thursday, said Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the post commander. He said officials had not confirmed Hasan made the comment.

Palestinian cousin watching footage on TV

Hasan's family said in a statement Friday that his alleged actions were deplorable and don't reflect how the family was reared.

"Our family is filled with grief for the victims and their families involved in yesterday's tragedy," said Nader Hasan, a cousin who lives in northern Virginia. "We are mortified with what has unfolded and there is no justification, whatsoever, for what happened. We are all asking why this happened, and the answer is that we simply do not know."

The 30 wounded were dispersed among hospitals in central Texas. W. Roy Smythe, chairman of surgery at Scott and White Memorial Hospital, said several patients were still at "significant risk" of losing their lives. Army briefers told lawmakers in Washington eight other people were treated at a hospital for stress and trauma.

At a news conference late Friday, Army Col. John Rossi, deputy commander at Fort Hood, said 23 people remained hospitalized, about half still in intensive care. He praised the soldiers' quick actions during and after the shooting barrage, which he said saved lives.

Rossi said that the assailant fired more than 100 rounds and that his weapons were not military arms, but "privately owned weapons ... purchased locally." Law enforcement sources in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said records indicate Hasan in recent months bought the FN 5.7 pistol at a store called "Guns Galore" in Killeen, Texas.

The dead included a pregnant woman who was preparing to return home, a man who quit a furniture company job to join the military about a year ago, a newlywed who had served in Iraq and a woman who had vowed to take on Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In a vigil Friday night, several hundred people gathered at a stadium on the sprawling Army post, the country's largest. It was the first gathering of the community since the killings.

Patricia Villa, next-door neighbor to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, goes through a bin full of bags he gave to her a day before going on a shooting spree at the Fort Hood Army Base In her Killeen, Texas apartment Friday, Nov. 6, 2009. Hasan also gave Villa the pictured clothing, along with furniture and a copy of the Quran

Earlier, 13 flag-draped coffins departed for Dover Air Force Base and the military's mortuary based in Delaware, Rossi said. Officials said the result of autopsies on the victims will be made available to the appropriate federal and military agencies that are probing Thursday's shooting. They will determine if any of the victims might have been hit by friendly fire, something Rossi all but dismissed.

Hasan, meanwhile, was transferred Friday to the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Rossi gave no update about his condition except to say he was "not able to converse."

Army Chief of Staff George Casey said he asked bases around the country to assess their security. He also said he was worried about a backlash against the thousands of Muslim soldiers serving dutifully in uniform.

Hasan was due to be deployed to Afghanistan to help soldiers with combat stress, a task he'd done stateside with returning soldiers, the Army said. Army spokeswoman Col. Cathy Abbott was uncertain when Hasan was to leave but he was in the preparation stage of deployment, which can take months.

In any event, the major was saying goodbyes and dispensing belongings to neighbours.

Jose Padilla, the owner of Hasan's apartment complex, said Hasan gave him notice two weeks ago that he was moving out this week.

Earlier this week, Hasan asked Padilla his native language. When Padilla said it was Spanish, Hasan immediately went up to his apartment to get him a Spanish-language Qur'an. Padilla said Hasan also refused to reclaim his deposit and last month's rent, surrendering $400 that the major said should go to someone who needed it.

"I cannot comprehend that the enemy was among us," Padilla said, as he teared up. "I feel a little guilt that I was basically giving housing to someone who is going to do so much destruction."

Neighbour Patricia Villa

Neighbour Patricia Villa said Hasan came to her apartment the day of the shooting, and before, to give her vegetables, an air mattress, T-shirts, a Qur'an and offer her $60 to clean his Killeen, Texas, apartment after he left.

Jacqueline Harris, 44, who lives with her boyfriend, Willie Bell, in the apartment next door to Hasan, said he called Thursday at 5 a.m. and left a message.

"He just wanted to thank Willie for being a good friend and thank him for being there for him," Harris said. "That was it. We thought it was just a nice message to leave."

Bell said Hasan offered a farewell, saying, "Nice knowing you, old friend. I'm going to miss you."

According to a Killeen police report in August, an Army employee was charged with scratching Hasan's car, causing $1,000 in damage. Apartment manager John Thompson said the man charged was a soldier back from Iraq, who objected to Hasan's faith and ripped a bumper sticker off the major's car that said: "Allah is Love."

Kim Rosenthal, another neighbour, said Hasan didn't seem too upset by his scratched vehicle, even though it was damaged so badly that he got a new one. "He said it was Ramadan and that he had to forgive people," Rosenthal said. "He forgave him and moved on."

Hasan appeared less forgiving to Dr. Val Finnell when they were classmates in a 2007-08 master's public health program at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.

He said that at a class presentation by public health students, at which topics like dry cleaning chemicals and house mould were discussed, Hasan talked about U.S. military actions as a war on Islam. Hasan made clear he was a "vociferous opponent" of U.S. wars in Muslim countries, Finnell said.

"He made himself a lightning rod for things," Finnell said. "No one picked on him because he was a Muslim."

Law enforcement officials said they are trying to confirm if Hasan wrote Internet postings that include his name about suicide bombings and other threats, equating suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the life of fellow soldiers.

Hasan is the Arlington, Virginia-born son of Palestinian parents who ran a restaurant and bar in Roanoke, Virginia, from 1987 to 1995 and owned a small grocery store in that city.

His relatives in the West Bank said they had heard from family members that Hasan felt mistreated in the Army as a Muslim.

"He told (them) that as a Muslim committed to his prayers he was discriminated against and not treated as is fitting for an officer and American," said Mohammed Malik Hasan, 24, a cousin. "He hired a lawyer to get him a discharge."

Mohammed Hasan said outside his home in Ramallah that he heard about the shooting from a relative. "I was surprised, honestly, because the guy and his brothers are so calm, and he, as I know, loves his work."

Nidal Hasan is the eldest of three brothers. One brother, Annas, lives in Ramallah with a wife and daughter, and practices law. The youngest brother, Eyad, lives in Virginia.

"We don't mix with them a lot," Mohammed said. "Nidal liked to stay alone, he was very calm. He minded his own business."

Hasan graduated from medical school at the Uniformed Services University in 2003, said Sharon K. Willis, speaking for the school.

He then entered a psychiatry residency program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which he completed in 2007. He returned to the university for the disaster and military psychiatry fellowship in 2007.

The first phase of that fellowship is earning a master of public health degree, which he completed in 2008. He completed the fellowship program in June.

A month later, Hasan reported for duty at Fort Hood.

Mac Clean's


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Robert Spencer discusses the Fort Hood Jihadist on the Savage Nation [Video]

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HBO takes on 'Ayatollah':TV network tackles 1979 Iranian crisis

Exactly 30 years after militant students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and began a 444-day hostage crisis that affected U.S. and global politics, HBO Films made a deal to turn the incident into a film.

On Wednesday, HBO acquired "Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam," by "Black Hawk Down" author Mark Bowden.

Andrea Berloff, who scripted the Oliver Stone-directed "World Trade Center," will adapt. William Horberg, a producer of "The Kite Runner," will be exec producer.

Some 66 Americans were taken hostage on Nov. 4, 1979, and most weren't freed until January 1981. The event began as an expression of student outrage over the U.S. decision to admit the ousted shah of Iran for medical treatment; it ended up fueling the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and his hardline Islamic supporters.

A rescue attempt ended disastrously, and the crisis haunted the Carter administration. As much as the crisis fueled a rise in fundamental Islam in Iran, it boosted the rise of the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in the election, promptly unfroze $8 billion in Iranian assets and took the bows when the hostages were freed.

The Bowden book was first optioned in 2003 by Paramount for producer Scott Rudin, with the studio making a seven-figure commitment when Bowden had written only a two-page proposal.

Variety


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Non-Muslims, like menstruating women cannot enter mosques: Malaysia

Malaysia Truly Asia .. ah .. Arabia!

PETALING JAYA: The view that non-Muslims cannot enter mosques is a narrow-minded one and gives the wrong impression of Islam, said former Perlis mufti Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin.

“If we have this kind of view, it shows that Islam is creating hostility towards non-Muslims.

“This view can even prevent non-Muslims from getting to know Islam better,” he added.

Dr Mohd Asri was responding to a statement by Selangor Islamic Affairs Department (JAIS) director Datuk Mohamed Khusrin Munawi that non-Muslims cannot enter mosques because “they were in the same category as menstruating women.”

The statement was in reference to an alleged ceramah (public talk) by Selangor executive councillor Dr Xavier Jeyakumar at a Klang mosque in August.

Asri and Jais have been engaging each other in an ongoing war of words. The progressive views of the former Perlis mufti do not gel with the views of the conservatives which make up the majority of the country's religious elite.

He claimed his views and his rise to prominence have been viewed as a threat to their authority, saying the “war” between them culminated in his arrest last Sunday while he was giving a private talk in Ampang. He was freed on bail and is awaiting charges for lecturing without a “tauliah” or permit.

Jais denied that Asri's arrest was politically motivated.

Malaysia Insider

Embattled Dr Asri to fight back after being arrested [without charge]

Mohamed Khusrin was also reported as saying that the mosque committee would be charged for letting Dr Xavier talk there.

“I would like to advise JAIS and its members to not give narrow-minded opinions that can lead to a wrong and false impression of the religion,” Dr Mohd Asri told mStar Online on Friday.

He added that he did not want to focus on Xavier’s speech so long as the mosque was not used as a tool against Islam.

“This is about seeing things with an open mind, where if they (non-Muslims) enter a mosque, they benefit from it,” said Dr Mohd Asri, who is also a lecturer in University Sains Malaysia.

He said JAIS needed to be reformed overall to reflect the maturity of Islam.

“They must show an open mind, they need to practise a matured approach to Islam in this country,” he added.

Malaysia Star

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Egypt: Women to appear on state TV without Muslim veil

Locked out ~ girls in veils were prevented from attending famous Al-Azhar school in Cairo. A part of the sweeping changes of reverse Arabization shrouding the country. Female staff are no longer allowed to wear the burqa in hospitals - schools were next and now obviously headscarves will not be allowed on state TV. On the streets of Cairo Muslim women not wearing a headscarf often face abuse. But if you see Egyptian women from the 70's there is hardly a headscarf in sight.

Undoubtedly this will be welcomed support for EU governments dealing with the challenge of Islamic radicalization.


Cairo, 6 Nov. (AKI) - Female presenters will no longer appear on Egypt's state television channel wearing the Muslim veil, according to the head of the public station, al-Masriya. Osama al-Sheikh said: "You will not see any veiled female TV presenters on air on the screens of Egypt's state TV any more."

The channel's director made the remarks during a seminar at the faculty of science and communications at Cairo University, according to a report in Egyptian magazine al-Youm al-Saba.

"It is part of our society's culture to show hair. Now I am not saying it is a bad thing to wear the veil, but because this is state TV, everything that is seen must be official," he said.

"The TV presenters who are veiled will be able to continue to work in private satellite TV stations," he said.

His remarks provoked uproar in the Egyptian parliament by members who are close to the banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement.

"The director of the TV station should be bound by the laws of the state when he makes decisions, however his words seem to be based on customary practices. The courts have already reaffirmed the legitimacy of veiled presenters to appear on TV," said Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood MP Muhsin Radi.

The Muslim Brotherhood organisation, founded in 1928, was officially banned in 1954.

Using sympathisers running as independents, the group won one-fifth of seats in Egypt's 2005 parliamentary elections.


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Bangladesh arrest three in madrassa for US attack plot: police

DHAKA (AFP)— Bangladeshi police said Friday they had arrested three suspected militants in the southeastern city of Chittagong who were planning to attack US targets in the country's capital.

Deputy Police Commissioner Monirul Islam said Bangladeshi authorities were given intelligence reports concerning the men's whereabouts following the arrest of two other suspected militants in the United States last month.

"We raided a madrassa in Chittagong and arrested three Bangladeshi men late Thursday evening," he told AFP.

"We believe they have links to the banned (Islamist) group Harkat-ul Jihad al Islami (HuJI) and were planning to attack American interests in Dhaka."

A spokesman for the US Embassy in Dhaka said he could not comment on security matters.

Islam said information about the Bangladeshi suspects had come from the United States following the arrests last month in Chicago of David Coleman Headley, 49, a US citizen, and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan.

US authorities have charged the men with plotting terror attacks abroad, including on the Danish newspaper which published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005.

Headley, 49, a US citizen who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006, was arrested by the FBI on October 3 at Chicago's O'Hare airport before boarding a flight to Philadelphia en route to Pakistan.


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Danish student 'arrested in Iran'

A Danish journalism student has been arrested in Iran after covering anti-government protests, unions say.

The Danish Union of Journalists named the student as Niels Krogsgaard, 31.

Wednesday's Tehran protests coincided with an official rally to mark 30 years since the storming of the US embassy during the 1979 Islamic revolution.

A Canadian, a Japanese and an Iranian journalist are also being held for covering the protests without permits, the semi-official Fars agency reports.



Iran has tightened reporting rules since protests flared in the days following a disputed presidential election in June.

Opposition supporters say the elections were rigged to ensure the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

At least 30 protesters have been killed in clashes since the elections. Thousands have been arrested, and some 200 opposition activists remain behind bars. Three have been sentenced to death.

Batons and tear gas
Mr Krogsgaard was in Tehran working on an academic paper about Iranian politics, said the Danish Union of Journalists.

He was "apparently arrested in connection with a demonstration on Wednesday", the union was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

Security forces had used batons and tear gas to disperse protesters and there were unconfirmed reports the authorities had also opened fire.

Video footage and photos showed what appeared to be large crowds of opposition supporters being chased by security forces in riot gear.

Many of the opposition demonstrators wore green scarves or bands, which have been used in repeated protests since Iran's disputed presidential elections in June.



Thousands were present at the anti-American rally, about 1.5km (1 mile) from where opposition supporters gathered in Haft-e Tir square.

In November 1979, 52 US diplomats were taken hostage at the embassy and held for 444 days by Islamist students in support of the Iranian revolution.

BBC


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Somali adulterer stoned to death

Islamic perfection ~ what a cut-throat business!

Islamists in southern Somalia have stoned a man to death for adultery but spared his pregnant girlfriend until she gives birth.

Abas Hussein Abdirahman, 33, was killed in front of a crowd of some 300 people in the port town of Merka.

An official from the al-Shabab group said the woman would be killed after she has had her baby.

Islamist groups run much of southern Somalia, while the UN-backed government only control parts of the capital.

This is the third time Islamists have stoned a person to death for adultery in the past year.

l-Shabab official Sheik Suldan Aala Mohamed said Mr Abdirahman had confessed to adultery before an Islamic court.

"He was screaming and blood was pouring from his head during the stoning. After seven minutes he stopped moving," an eyewitness told the BBC.

The BBC's Mohammed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu says that if the woman is also killed, her baby would be given to relatives to look after.

Meanwhile, President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has accused al-Shabab of spoiling the image of Islam by killing people and harassing women.

"Their actions have nothing to do with Islam," said the moderate Islamist during a ceremony at which he nominated a new administration for the capital, Mogadishu.

"They are forcing women to wear very heavy clothes, saying they want them to properly cover their bodies but we know they have economic interests behind - they sell these kinds of clothes and want to force people to buy them."

Last month, two men were stoned to death in the same town after being accused of spying.

A 13-year-old girl was stoned to death for adultery in the southern town of Kismayo last year.

Human rights groups said she had been raped.

Another man has also been punished in this way in the Lower Shabelle region.

Mr Sharif, a former rebel leader, was sworn in as president after UN-brokered peace talks.

Although he says he also wants to implement Sharia, al-Shabab says his version of Islamic law would be too lenient.

The country has not had a functioning national government for 18 years.

BBC


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Fort Hood shooting: gunman shouted 'Allahu Akbar' before opening fire

Soldiers who witnessed the shooting rampage that killed 13 people at Fort Hood military base in Texas have reported that gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar" - God is great - before opening fire.

General Robert Cone, the base commander, said officials had not yet confirmed that the suspected gunman made the comment before the rampage which left 30 people wounded, including Hasan.

A woman police officer shot Hasan four times but was herself wounded in the gun battle. Her condition is now stable, according to military officials.

Gen Cone said Hasan was not known to be a threat or risk. He acknowledged that it was "counterintuitive" that a single gunman could kill and injure so many people. But he said the massacre occurred in "close quarters."

Gen Cone said Hasan was in hospital in a stable condition and that investigators hope to interrogate him as soon as possible. In the early chaos after the shootings, authorities believed they had killed him, only to discover later that he had survived.

Authorities are investigating whether Hasan's weapons were properly registered with the military.

The motive for the shooting wasn't clear, but Hasan was apparently set to deploy soon and had expressed some anger about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hasan attended prayers regularly when he lived outside Washington, often in his Army uniform, according to said Faizul Khan, a former imam at a mosque Hasan attended in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said Hasan was a lifelong Muslim.

"I got the impression that he was a committed soldier," Mr Khan said. He spoke often with Hasan about Hasan's desire for a wife.

On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Virginia, but his nationality as Palestinian, Khan said.

"I don't know why he listed Palestinian," Khan said, "He was not born in Palestine."

Hasan's aunt Noel Hasan of Falls Church, Virginia, told the The Washington Post that her nephew had been harassed about being a Muslim in the years after the September 11 attacks and he wanted to leave the Army.

"Some people can take it and some people cannot," she said. "He had listened to all of that and he wanted out of the military."

At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades.

Investigators had not determined for certain whether Hasan was the author of the posting, and a formal investigation had not been opened before the shooting, law enforcement officials told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The FBI, local police and other agencies searched Hasan's apartment in the hours after the shooting.

Telegraph

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What Nidal Hasan said about suicide bombers

Following is the full text on the 'social publishing' site Scribd.com:

"There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy if you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that "IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE" and Allah (SWT) knows best."

The person [Nidal Hasan]who posted this comment was actually responding to an article 'Martyrdom vs Suicide Bombing' which was rallying against suicide bombings - in a sense the Major uses the argument's loopholes to justify his actions [if it is indeed the Maj.] of the attack against soldiers at the base:

In any case, none of the scholars permit any act of suicide against non-military targets. This is in sharp contrast to the most vociferous proponents of suicide bombings, such as al-Qaeda and other takfeeri-jihadists, who almost exclusively encourage and justify the murder of non-combatants, regardless of the religion, age or gender. [..]

Major Hasan got around this by making his targets military ones. He worked on a base as a psychiatrist.

The person arguing against suicide actions in the name of Islam - further points out that al-Qaeda goes after non-combatants of any religion. Suggesting again that the targets are more acceptable if the are military - as well as non-Muslim. Which the gunner likely concluded as well.

Firstly, there is not a single narration the essay cites relating to battlefield jihad - whether the ghazawat (the military campaigns of the Prophet) or otherwise - except that it clearly extols the virtue of the mujahid fighting the enemy until he is killed by them. Pay attention here: the narrations are praising the one who fights until he is killed by his enemy = not the one who kills himself in order to fight the enemy. Hence, Allah's saying: [...]

Again - the argument against such actions were overcome - 'one who fights until he is killed by his enemy' - the Maj. simply goes out with a gun - fighting - the enemy - until his is shot but not killed - and hospitalized.

There is no valid restriction within these arguments - that bars him from his actions.



The internet post seems to be a response to an article which has an Arabic link to the following online book[.pdf]

Al Alwaan = Sheik Nasir Al Alwaan
Eeman >> "Eeman is to believe in Allah, His Angels, His Books, His Messengers, the Last Day and to believe in the Predestination; the good and the bad."

Eeman is a combination of Belief and Actions. AHYA.org

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Fort Hood shooting: imam says Nalid Malik Husan 'didn't seem like an extremist'

At the mosque Maj. Nidal Hasan listed himself as Palestinian - not American - the place of his birth.

Imam Faizul Khan said he knew Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for more than 10 years. They met at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring.

Mr Khan said he was shocked and dismayed to find the person suspected in the incident was his old friend.

"I keep asking what could have made him do something like that? I was stunned and very surprised," he said.

"These are not the actions of a good Muslim at all."

Mr Kahn said Maj Hasan was quiet and reserved. The pair mostly discussed religious matters and rarely talked about politics, but Hasan never seemed controversial, he said.

He said Maj Hasan often talked about wanting a wife.

On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Mr Kahn said Maj Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Va., but his nationality as Palestinian.

Mr Khan also said the psychiatrist applied to an annual matrimonial seminar that matches Muslims looking for spouses. "I don't think he ever had a match, because he had too many conditions," Mr Khan said.

Maj Hasan was a lifelong Muslim and attended prayers regularly, often in his Army uniform, he said.

On its website, the Muslim Community Center advertises Hajj workshops, Arabic language classes and lectures.

Telegraph

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Officers raid Texas home of suspect in Fort Hood shootings [Video]

Fort Hood, Texas (CNN) -- Officers raided the apartment of the soldier suspected in the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, early Friday, searching for clues as to what caused the military psychiatrist to allegedly gun down soldiers he had taken an oath to help, a police spokeswoman said.

The alleged gunman, identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire at a military processing center at Fort Hood, killing 12 and wounding 31 others, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone said.

** Update 13 dead.

Hasan, a psychiatrist practicing at Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, was shot multiple times and was taken into custody, ending the shooting rampage Thursday afternoon, Cone said.

In the nearby town of Killeen, a SWAT team and FBI agents were searching Hasan's apartment to help determine what caused the shooting, which military experts called the worst mass shooting at an American military base, Carol Smith, a Killeen police spokeswoman, said early Friday.





See pictures, map from Fort Hood

As investigators gathered evidence, details began to emerge about the alleged shooter.

Hasan, 39, is a graduate of Virginia Tech and a psychiatrist licensed in Virginia. He previously worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A federal official said Hasan is a U.S. citizen of Jordanian descent. Military documents show Hasan was born in Virginia and has never deployed outside the United States.

An owner of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Fort Hood said Hasan, whom he knows as "Major Nidal," came in for coffee and hash browns most mornings, including the morning of the shootings.

Surveillance video from the store obtained by CNN shows a man, who according to the store owner is Hasan, at the cashier's counter at about 6:20 a.m. Thursday carrying a beverage and dressed in traditional Arab garb. That was about seven hours before the mass shooting.

"He looked normal, came in, had his hash browns and coffee as you see in the surveillance video," the owner told CNN.

Other surveillance footage from Tuesday showed him wearing hospital scrubs.
Hasan's first cousin, Nader Hasan, issued a statement late Thursday on behalf of their family, saying they are "shocked and saddened" by the shootings.

"We are filled with grief for the families of today's victims," the statement says. "Our family loves America. We are proud of our country and saddened by today's tragedy. Because this situation is still unfolding, we have nothing else that we are able to share with you at this time."

The shooting occurred in a building called the readiness center, one of the last stops before soldiers deploy and one of the first places soldiers go upon returning to the United States.

Some of the victims were headed to Iraq or Afghanistan, said Col. Benton Danner.
At a news conference earlier in the day, Cone said the shooter had two handguns, one of them a semi-automatic.






"All the casualties took place at the initial incident, that took place at 13:30, at the soldier readiness facility," Cone said, referring in military time to 1:30 p.m.
A witness in a building adjacent to where the shooting happened said soldiers were cutting up their uniforms into homemade bandages as the wounded were brought into the building.

"It was total chaos," the witness said.

Cone noted that a graduation ceremony was being held in an auditorium about 50 yards away from where the shooting took place.

"Thanks to the quick reaction of several soldiers, they were able to close off the doors to that auditorium where there were some 600 people inside," he said.

President Obama called the shootings "tragic" and "a horrific outburst of violence."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said earlier that officials were monitoring the incident in the Situation Room. The Department of Homeland Security said it was in the process of obtaining information.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been informed as well, and is "greatly disturbed" about the incident, his spokesman told CNN.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry ordered that all flags in the state be lowered to half-staff until Sunday as a tribute to the victims.

"We are deeply saddened by today's events but resolve to continue supporting our troops and protecting our citizens," he said.

In the aftermath of the incident, Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Texas, posted an online appeal for blood as it began receiving victims.

"Due to the recent events on Fort Hood, we are in URGENT need of ALL blood types," it said.

Fort Hood is the Army's largest U.S. post, with about 40,000 troops stationed there. It is home to the Army's 1st Cavalry Division and elements of the 4th Infantry Division, as well as the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 13th Corps Support Command. It is near Killeen, Texas. The Headquarters Unit and three brigades of the 1st Cavalry are deployed in Iraq.

The fort is home to the Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program, which helps soldiers returning from war with combat stress and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In June, Fort Hood's commander, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, told CNN that he was trying to ease the kind of stresses soldiers face.

He has pushed for soldiers working a day schedule to return home for dinner by 6 p.m. and required his personal authorization for anyone working weekends. At the time, two soldiers stationed there had committed suicide in 2009 -- a rate well below those of other posts.

Nearby Killeen was the scene of one of the most deadly shootings in American history 18 years ago when George Hennard crashed his truck into a Luby's cafeteria and then began shooting, killing 23 people and wounding 20.

Hennard's spree lasted 14 minutes. He eventually took his own life.


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Muslim doctor - NOT DEAD! in custody stable condition, guns down 12 in US military base Fort Hood

**Update: The number of dead keeps rising 11 servicemen and one policemen.

**Update: SHOOTER NOT DEAD !!

(CNN) -- Eleven people plus a gunman were dead and 31 wounded after the gunman opened fire Thursday on a soldier-processing center at Fort Hood, Texas, officials said.

The gunman was a soldier, and two other soldiers have been detained as suspects, Army Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said.

The slain gunman was identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, a law enforcement source told CNN. Licensed in Virginia, Hasan was a psychiatrist who previously worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center but more recently was practicing at Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, according to professional records.

Ten of the other dead also were soldiers, while the remaining one was a civilian police officer who was working as a contractor on the base, Cone said.

Two of the injured were in "very serious" condition, Fort Hood spokesman Christopher Hogue said.

More than one shooter may have been involved, Cone said.

"All the casualties took place at the initial incident, that took place at 13:30 [1:30 p.m. CT], at the soldier readiness facility," Cone said.

he primary shooter had two weapons, both handguns, he said.
"The local police response forces were there relatively quickly and killed the confirmed shooter," Cone said.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said she was told that the soldiers at the readiness facility "were filling out paper processing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan," according to CNN affiliate KXAN in Austin, Texas.

A senior officer who was playing golf Thursday about 2.5 miles from the attack said he witnessed the arrest of one of the two surviving suspects.

Shortly after the shooting, military police told him to clear the course, and he saw other MPs surround the building that held the golf carts, he said. He ducked into a nearby house for cover as 30 to 40 cars carrying MPs approached, he said.

A congressional aide said he was on the post to attend a graduation service when he saw a soldier with blood on his uniform near the building where the service was being held, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Greg Schannep, an aide to U.S. Rep. John Carter, said the soldier ran past him and said a man was shooting. He said the soldier appeared to be injured in a shoulder, the American-Statesman reported.

President Obama called the shootings "tragic" and "a horrific outburst of violence." He expressed his condolences for the shooting victims.

"These are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk, and at times give, their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis," Obama said. "It's difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil."

Officials at Fort Hood, which is the Army's largest U.S. post, were asking people there to stay away from windows, CNN affiliate KXXV said. The incident took place at the sports dome, now known as the soldier readiness area, the station reported.

The Army has asked the FBI to look into the background of the suspects, Cone said.
On the Fort Hood Web site, the word "closed" is posted with the statement, "Effective immediately, Fort Hood is closed. Organizations/units are instructed to execute a 100 percent accountability of all personnel."

Fort Hood, with about 40,000 troops, is home to the Army's 1st Cavalry Division and elements of the 4th Infantry Division, as well as the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 13th Corps Support Command. It is located near Killeen, Texas.

At least 25,000 people are at Fort Hood on any given day, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon said.

Fort Hood is home to the Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program, which is designed to help soldiers overcome combat stress issues.

In June, Fort Hood's commander, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, told CNN that he was trying to ease the kind of stresses soldiers face. He has pushed for soldiers working a day schedule to return home for dinner by 6 p.m., and required his personal authorization for anyone working weekends. At the time, two soldiers stationed there had committed suicide in 2009 -- a rate well below those of other posts.


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Islamists impose sharia by stealth

Though to add... One of the things Islamists violence does achieve is a kind of capitulation which lends itself to Islamization. After an attack - on the surface perhaps society may not appear to be changed radically - but there are often shifts towards further [undue] respect for Islam. There is good evidence for this - for ex. in the Maldives - after their little bomb [small improvised explosive] placed in tourist area - they moved towards Islamizing the whole country - their reasoning is likely that they don't want to give the terrorist a reason to attack - being more Islamic - acts as a guard - why would a 'true' Muslim attack a country which has only Muslim citizens [non-Muslims are barred from holding citizenship]. The reason differs for the Islamization in western society - mainly Europe - after attacks on Madrid and London and the numerous thwarted attacks - that hardly make the news - was at first down to the fear of more attacks - before it turns into some sort of strange policy that like Islam can't be questioned. This is still being exploited by moderate Muslim leaders - in a signed letter to Gordon Brown - over British gov. support for Israel during the Gaza assault - they threw in 'we can't guarantee what the young Muslims might do' - doubtful they weren't talking about peaceful protest. The logic has been 'If you offend Islamic sensibilities - then you risk attack' so lets call off that play, let's arrest that artist, let's not say this or that. Before the bombings - no one listened to what 'offended' Muslims - but since the bombings and stabbing of Van Gogh - a new group of moderate Islamists have been empowered - to advise governments. Obama's adviser for example misses no opportunity to promote Sharia law, 'its simply misunderstood' she says. Tariq Ramadan another adviser who believes in the supremacy of Sharia law - brought in to help with Muslim integration in Holland - had envisioned instead how to best augment the whole of Dutch society, teachers, journalist, lawmakers around Islam. And not the other way around - which is what the Dutch government asked him to do. In the UK an Islamic think tank offered its pearls of wisdom on how best to Islamize the entire school system - when only 3% of British people are Islamic. My addition... is that terrorism can become the impetus for Islamization - by empowering 'Islamists who seek to impose Sharia by stealth' after the event.




Daniel Pipes

TO borrow a computer term, if Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden represent Islamism 1.0, the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the French intellectual, Tariq Ramadan, represent Islamism 2.0. The former are more deadly but the latter will likely do greater long-term damage.

The 1.0 version presents a potentially mortal danger to those unfortunate enough to get in its way. From totalitarian rule to mega-terrorism, Islamism's original tactics present a potential for unlimited brutality. Three thousand dead in one attack? Bin Laden's search for atomic weaponry suggests the murderous toll could be a hundred or even a thousand times larger.

But Islamist violence, a review of the past six decades suggests, proves generally unsuccessful in attaining the goal of a society fully regulated by the sharia (Islamic law), much less does it help establish a global caliphate.

Survivors of mass murder tend not to capitulate to radical Islam. Victims did not raise the white flag after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bali bombings of 2002, the Madrid bombings of 2004, the Amman bombing of 2005, or the latest bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Extrapolating from these and other failures suggests terrorism does damage and causes human suffering but rarely changes the existing order. Imagine the devastation done by Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami of 2004 had been caused by Islamists: what could they have lastingly achieved?

Non-terrorist attempts from the outside to apply the sharia are hardly easier to accomplish. Revolution (meaning, a wide-scale social revolt) took Islamists to power in just one place at one time: Iran in 1978-79. Coup d'etat (a military overthrow) also carried them to power in just one place at one time: Sudan in 1989. Same for civil war: Afghanistan in 1996.

If Islamism 1.0's violence rarely overthrows governments, Islamism 2.0's working through the system serves significantly better. Islamists, adept at winning public opinion, have enjoyed electoral success in various Muslim-majority countries, including Algeria in 1992, Bangladesh in 2001, Turkey in 2002 and Iraq in 2005. In many other countries, such as Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Kuwait, Islamist political parties represent the main opposition force.

(What one might call Islamism 1.5 also works, that being a combination of hard and soft means, of the external and internal approaches. In it, Islamists soften up the enemy with lawful means and then use violence to seize power. The Hamas takeover of Gaza offers one case of such a combination, first winning the elections in 2006, then staging a violent insurrection against Fatah in 2007, and similar processes may be under way in Pakistan.)

At least one leading Islamist thinker with close ties to al-Qa'ida has publicly repudiated terrorism and adopted political means. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (also known by the nom de guerre Dr Fadl) was born in Egypt in 1950 and trained as a medical doctor. He emerged as a leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group in the 1980s and came to public attention with the 1988 publication of his book, Al-'Umda fi I'dad al-'Udda (The Essentials of Preparation), in which he argued for perpetual violent jihad against the West.

With time, however, Sharif shifted gears: observing that violent attacks are counterproductive he instead advocated a strategy of infiltrating the state and influencing society.

In a recent book, At-Ta'riya li-Kitab at-Tabri'a (Exposing the Exoneration), he condemned the use of force against Muslims ("Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers") and against non-Muslims (9/11 was immoral and counterproductive, for "what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy's buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?").

Sharif's evolution from al-Qa'ida theorist to advocate of lawful transformation echoes a broader shift as Islamists notice that while bin Laden, for all his notoriety, cowers in a cave, Erdogan remakes the Republic of Turkey.

In conclusion, fascists never developed a 2.0 version, nor did communists; only Islamists have done so. Because it threatens our values and our civilisation, this evolution represents perhaps an aspect of their movement no less frightening than their brutality.

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

The Australian

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Are There Muslim Reformers?

Ibn Warraq

MUSLIM REFORMERS
I. AHMAD AL-BAGHDADI

During the question and answer sessions at my talks to various Humanist groups ( most recently CFI Indianapolis, CFI Arizona, and CFI Los Angeles), I am often asked about the possibility of reform within Islam, and of the existence of moderate Muslims. These are not easy questions to answer. There are said to be 57 Islamic countries, and the situation obviously varies from country to country, from year to year. Even countries trumpeted as "moderate", "liberal" or "tolerant" have, in reality, a mixed record as far as Human Rights are concerned. Criticism of Islam is well-nigh impossible in all fifty-seven countries. Nonetheless, some courageous individuals living in the latter have found a way of indirectly casting doubt on Islam as the solution to every problem in the modern world, namely, by advocating Secularism. In the next four of five blogs, I intend to look at some brave, intrepid, articulate champions of Human Rights in the Islamic World- often putting their lives in danger for that most noble of causes, Freedom.

Kuwait is an Arab Emirate just north of Saudi Arabia and south of Iraq, with a population of just under three million. With its large oil reserves it is the considered the eleventh richest country in the world. Though Kuwait is a constitutional monarchy, with a parliamentary system of government, its Human Rights record is decidedly mixed, and this was made plain when in October 1999, Professor Dr. Ahmad al-Baghdadi-first of our three Kuwaiti secularists whom I shall be discussing here- was sentenced to one month in prison for allegedly defaming Islam and the prophet Muhammad in a 1996 article that he wrote for the Kuwait University student magazine Al-Shoula. However, the emir of Kuwait pardoned him a few weeks later, and he was released.

Ahmad Al-Baghdadi [not to be confused with Ayatollah Ahmad Al-Baghdadi], a political science lecturer at Kuwait University, was in trouble once again when he published several articles in November 2004 in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa, dismissing religious thought as no longer relevant or adequate, and extolling the virtues of secularism. A few excerpts from his articles- superbly translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI, Special Dispatch 823]- will suffice to show the courage of al Baghdadi's thorough critique of religion, and the need for a separation of state and mosque:

"Muslims Have no Future as Long as They are Subjected to Religious Thought."

In his article, ‘Secularism and Life,' Al-Baghdadi argued that only a society free of religion could make progress and develop; Islamic religious thought merely prevents progress and development:
"... Secularism as a [world] view and as a way of life was not formed in a vacuum, but is the outcome of the painful life experience of human beings which has continued for close to a millennium and in the course of which the religious thought of the Church, devised by the religious clergy, was abolished... During this experience, Western man lived in intellectual darkness and [endured] devastating wars in a period called ‘the Dark Middle Ages.'

"For the person educated in sciences, industry, finances, politics, and culture there was only one solution, which constitutes a refuge for the poor societies. That [solution] is: distancing the man of the cloth from life...From that moment on, the Western world became the only world to develop, progress, and flourish in all spheres of life.

"In order [to avoid] being accused of subjectivity against the religious way of thought, let us present examples from the reality of life in the Muslim and Arab countries:

"1. Religious thought is the only way of thought nowadays that refuses to accept the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights' on religious grounds, and this constitutes an obstacle to [the realization of] these rights in the Islamic countries, not only in the matter of inheritance, but also in matters such as equality, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech.

"2. Islamic religious thought is the only way of thought nowadays to persist in [accusations] of ridda [apostasy]... Unfortunately, this persistence [leads to] the killing of human beings, even without trial.

"3. Religious thought objects to freedom of thought and freedom of speech when religion is criticized. Moreover, religious thought reveres things that religion itself does not instruct [us] to revere. Thus, for example,regarding [the immunity from criticism of] the Prophet's companions, who are not considered part of the principles of religion or of the roots of belief. Religious thought does not distinguish between religion and its believers.

"4. Religious thought is still anti-woman even if the religious clerics claim otherwise.

"5. Religious thought is opposed to human health in matters of treatment and medicine. The prohibition of including alcohol in most medicines leads to their reduced effectiveness... [Moreover,] the Muslim doctor nowadays does not dare to instruct a patient not to fast [during the month of Ramadhan],and the hospitals therefore become full of patients who fasted.

"6. Religious thought supports political tyranny, because it opposes democracy and the constitution. [For example,] in Kuwait [some] strive to destroy the constitution and the constitutional state, and in Saudi Arabia there is complete opposition to democracy.

"7. If we were to imagine that an [Arab] regime adopted a certain religious school of thought, what could happen to the other schools of thought?

"8. Religious thought opposes the Other, accuses him of heresy, and objects to living by his side. Proof of this are the supplications and appeals [to Allah] that we hear in the mosques to destroy all non-Muslims and harm them,rather than requesting guidance for them on the straight path, [as would have occurred] had there been an ounce of human tolerance.

"9. Religious thought is the main reason for the production of terror,because of the negative interpretations of the [Quranic] verses regarding Jihad.

"10. Religious thought opposes any kind of creativity and art...

"The West did not make progress until it became free of this way of thinking. This is the only solution facing the Muslims. They have no future as long as they are subjected to religious thought."

TO BE CONTINUED.

Ibn Warraq is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry, and the author of What the Koran Really Says, and more recently, Defending the West.

Center for Inquiry


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Egypt: Terror suspects arrested by police had arsenal of arms and explosives

Cairo, 5 Nov. (AKI) - Egyptian authorities have arrested 17 suspected Islamist militants accused of being part of an illegal Jihadi organisation. According to the Arab TV network, al-Arabiya, the suspects were arrested with arms and explosives that were to be used in a series of planned terror attacks.

The alleged militants were arrested in the area of Dakhiliya, in the Nile delta.

Police found an arms cache at the home of one member of the group in the village of Mait Ghamar, while other items were found in a house of another suspect in the city of Mansoura.

The house was believed to have been used as a location for meetings of the same illegal group allegedly responsible for the assassination of the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat during a military parade in 1981.

Police claimed to have found flyers supporting Islamic jihad in three areas in the Nile delta.


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Mauritania: Foreign tourists and local women arrested over 'sex' video

Get back in your burqa girl!!

Nouakchott, 5 Nov. (AKI) - Five foreign tourists and four Mauritanian women were arrested after being caught allegedly filming a pornographic video in a tent on the outskirts of Akjtout, located in western Mauritania.

Mauritanian police arrested the foreigners and the local women during a night patrol in the area and after seeing electricity generators and a videocamera, said news agency Al-Akhbar on Thursday.

The five tourists, who have not been identified, were described as "western tourists" and were reportedly arrested "in flagrancy of the crime".

All the material at the tent - located two kilometres off a main road - was confiscated by police and all those arrested were interrogated by police.

They are reported to have confessed that they were filming a pornographic video with Mauritanian women.


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Diplomats: Saudi forces attack rebels in Yemen

SAN'A, Yemen (AP)— Arab diplomats say Saudi Arabia has launched a large military incursion across the border into northern Yemen, aimed at ending a Shiite rebellion inside its troubled southern neighbor.

Two diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity Thursday, say Saudi Tornado and F-15 warplanes have bombarded targets inside Yemen since Wednesday afternoon, inflicting significant casualties on the Yemeni rebels. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to the media.

A clash between Saudi forces and Yemeni rebels left one Saudi and one rebel dead, the two sides said on Wednesday, as Yemen's five-year-old insurgency spilled over the frontier for the first time.AFP

The Arab diplomats say army units and special forces have been sent to northern Yemen, and that several Saudi towns on the border have been evacuated.

Neither Saudi Arabia nor Yemen have confirmed the offensive. But a rebel spokesman told The Associated Press that Saudi warplanes and artillery hit several areas Thursday.

The Zaidis form the majority community in the far north but are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen.

The Yemeni authorities accuse the rebels of seeking to restore the Zaidi imamate that ruled in Sanaa until its overthow in a republican coup in 1962 that sparked eight years of civil war. The rebels deny the charge.AFP

SAN'A, Yemen (AP) — The spokesman for Yemen's Shiite rebels says Saudi fighter jets have bombed the group's northern stronghold a day after Saudi Arabia accused the fighters of killing a soldier in a border skirmish.

The northern rebels, known as Hawthis, have been battling Yemeni government forces intensively over the past few months in the latest flare-up of a sporadic conflict over the last five years. The Hawthis are based in a northern province that borders Saudi Arabia.

Hawthi spokesman Mohammed Abdel-Salam told The Associated Press the Saudi offensive early Thursday hit at least four areas inside Yemeni territory. There was no immediate word on casualties.

Saudi and Yemeni government officials could not immediately be reached for comment.


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Allah versus God in Malaysia [Video]

Taking the Christians' bibles away I think is wrong. But as for Allah ~ the Muslims can have it. This Allah was The God of the Kaaba both before and after Islam. This Allah of the Arabian Kaaba had Three Daughters, known as the Trinity or Desert Goddesses - whom Muhammad's own father would have worshiped. Indeed in Sura 53:19 Muhammad is shown to have called out to the Goddesses [now called the Satanic Verse, because in it he was seen to have been deceived and quickly changed his mind back... soon after], but according to the Hadiths and other Islamic historical writings Muhammad was committed to the idea for an extended period - so long they rejoiced about the restoration of their beloved Goddesses as far away as Ethiopia. There is a great set of youtube videos where some Christian scholars really looked into this - but the following video is also informative - it helps to demonstrate that Islam is a Meccan Kaaba based religion.



In today’s culture, the name Allah is used in reference to God by many Christians, Jews and Muslims across the world, however, recent reports are stating that Malaysian Christians are banned from using the name Allah for their God. Over the past few years the ban was extended from verbal use to written use of the word by Christians and especially for use in the Bible.

The word Allah is the standard Arabic word for God. It is actually a pre-Islamic name referring to The God and its use dates back before the time of Mohammad. Allah was a common name for many male idols or god-like figures and Allat was a common female name used similarly. Today, Allah is used by Muslims in reference to whom they believe is The God of Islam and is also used by Jews and Christians in the same manner. With the name Allah dating back to pre-Islamic centuries, the name holds significance for many religions.

CBN News and other News sources are reporting that over 15,000 Bibles that use the name Allah in them have been confiscated by Malaysian authorities so far this year. Malaysian authorities forbid the use of the name Allah by Christians because they fear it will upset or even confuse the Muslim population there.

Some Christian sources within the territory have speculated that Muslims might think the Malaysian government is suggesting that their Christian God is on the same level as their Muslim God if they allow Christians to use the term Allah. Malaysia, previously celebrated for its’ multi-ethnic and open Muslim culture is currently made up of approximately 60 percent Muslim with over 30 percent of the country practicing Christianity, Buddhism and other faiths.

The Roman Catholic Church has decided to take the issue up via legal measures, pressing the Malaysian government to change its’ policy. Recent shipments from Indonesia, containing thousands of Bibles, have been blocked and confiscated by Malaysian authorities, who are standing on their decision to block entry of all Bibles using the word Allah in them.

For Christians everywhere, there are many names we can call The Father besides God or Allah:

Father, our heavenly Father
Emmanuel, God with us
Elohim, or Mighty
El-Shaddi, meaning God Almighty
El-Elyon, meaning God most high
M’Kaddish, the Lord who sanctifies
Shammah, the Lord is present
Jehovah, the Lord or The One Who Is
Jehovah-Raphe, the God who heals

As Christians we are blessed to communicate with God via prayer and meditation so please be in prayer for those who are being denied the ability to read God’s Word in their own language…and be thankful that, at least as of the writing of this article, those who live in the United States are free to read their Bibles, call God by any name they wish and worship freely.

Examiner




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SAS hunt for Taliban assassin who shot dead five British soldiers after infiltrating Afghan police force

'It is absolutely right to say that the Afghan police are infiltrated by the Taliban at every level, from the very lowest to the very highest,' he said.

Five British soldiers have been killed by a "rogue" policeman in Afghanistan. The officer turned on them and started firing inside a military compound.

The soldiers, three from the Grenadier Guards and two from the Royal Military Police, died in the Nad-e'Ali district of Helmand Province on Tuesday afternoon. Their families have been informed.

Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Wakefield said: "The soldiers concerned were mentoring Afghan police. They were working inside and living inside an Afghan national police checkpoint."

He said: "It would appear, and it is our initial understanding, that an individual Afghan policeman possibly acting with another started firing within the checkpoint before fleeing the scene."

He stressed that the attack did not come as a result of any breakdown or fight between British and Afghan forces. The gunman's whereabouts are unknown but British forces are hunting him.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown paid tribute to the soldiers describing their deaths as a "terrible loss". Britain's Armed Forces have suffered the bloodiest year of action since the Falklands War. The death toll for this year in Afghanistan now stands at 92. ITN

INFILTRATED AT EVERY LEVEL

Afghanistan's police are poorly trained, plagued by drug addiction and infiltrated by the Taliban 'at every level', a former British soldier said today.
The Afghan National Police (ANP) is actually a militia made up of local men whose allegiances are to their tribes rather than the national or local governments, according to Captain Doug Beattie.

Mr Beattie, who worked with the ANP during tours of Afghanistan in 2006-07 and 2008, said Afghan police officers were often paid off by insurgents.
But he suggested that the horrific shooting, in which five British soldiers were killed by a rogue Afghan policeman, could have been sparked by a cultural misunderstanding.

'The Grenadier Guards have only just arrived there. They are getting to know the Afghan police,' he said.

'It could be somebody has said or done something and there's a general grievance.
'It could be that they have offended him without realising it, with them being new in country.'

Mr Beattie has had his own run-ins with the Afghan police - he believes an ambush of his unit in Garmsir in Helmand Province in 2006 was set up between the Taliban and the ANP.

He also alleged that a former chief of police in Helmand was caught talking directly to the Taliban on his personal phone on several occasions.

'It is absolutely right to say that the Afghan police are infiltrated by the Taliban at every level, from the very lowest to the very highest,' he said.

Mr Beattie added: 'Fears about the police are really well founded and they have been known about since 2006.

'They're really a militia, a tribal police whose allegiances are not necessarily to the government or even to the provincial governor. It is normally to their village or tribe or the area they come from.

'Because they're militia they can be bought and paid off at will. If the government's paying them they're reasonably happy. But if they don't get enough money they're quite happy to be paid by the insurgency."

He also raised concerns about drug abuse among Afghan police officers, large numbers of whom are said to be habitual users of heroin or cannabis.

Mr Beattie, from Portadown in Northern Ireland, retired this year after 27 years in the Army.

Daily Mail

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Rebels ban musical ringtones on phones, only tones of clerics singing Koranic or Hadiths allowed

Sacdiyo Sheeq used to love listening to Bollywood movie songs on her mobile telephone.

But since hardline al Shabaab insurgents seized the southern Somali port of Kismayu, the 25-year-old's life has changed.

"Al Shabaab wants our ringtones to be only a Muslim cleric reading the Hadith or Koranic verse," she told Reuters.

"I used to listen to my favorite Indian songs on my cell phone, but now I have just thrown that memory away."

Al Shabaab, which Washington says is al Qaeda's proxy in the failed Horn of Africa state, wants to topple the U.N.-backed government and impose its own strict version of Sharia law.

The heavily armed group controls much of the south and parts of the capital Mogadishu, and courts run by its clerics have ordered executions, floggings and amputations in recent months.

It has also banned movies, dancing at wedding ceremonies and playing or watching soccer in the areas under it control.

"We do not tolerate anything that may corrupt the people," al Shabaab's spokesman in Kismayu, Sheikh Hassan Yaqub, told Reuters by telephone. "We don't allow anything that goes against our religion, especially music and sexy videos."

Ali Mahamud Yusuf, 19, fled his home in Kismayu after he was whipped in public last week by al Shabaab gunmen who had caught him listening to music and watching videos on his phone.

"I am still suffering from the 25 lashes," Yusuf said. "They accused me of rejecting religion. I don't want to tell you where I am now for security reasons. I am scared."

Fighting has killed 19,000 Somalis since the start of 2007, and while some residents credit the insurgents with restoring a semblance of order in some areas, al Shabaab's strict rules have alienated many Somalis who are traditionally moderate Muslims.

But Kismayu residents said the rebel group's latest rules on mobile phone ringtones posed yet another dilemma -- since the faithful are not supposed to interrupt the Hadith (the word of the Prophet Mohammed), how are they supposed to answer calls?

NY Daily


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Will Aceh Dominate Indonesia?

A Sharia policeman speaks to two youths about the rules of Sharia law at the seaside of Uleelheu in Banda Aceh, October 28, 2009.

A province's embrace of stricter Shariah law is part of a worrying trend.

In September, the legislature of Indonesia's semi-autonomous province of Aceh unanimously passed a law that would punish adulterers by stoning them to death. Last week, the district head of West Aceh announced a new ban on women wearing tight trousers and men wearing shorts—under penalty of having the offending garment cut up and replaced with government-issued wear.

Now the question that confronts Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is whether Aceh, which adopted Sharia law in 2001 as part of efforts to broker a peace agreement, will remain a part of Indonesia. The alternative is for Indonesia to become, in effect, an extension of Aceh.

The trends aren't encouraging. Despite its reputation as one of the world's most inclusive Muslim-majority democracies, Shariah-inspired bylaws have been multiplying across the country in recent years. These laws do things like restrict women from leaving the house at night or mandate that Muslims seeking marriage be able to read the Koran in Arabic. They can be unilaterally imposed by local politicians even if they don't enjoy widespread popular support.

These edicts would appear to violate Indonesia's secular constitution, which guarantees "all persons the right to worship according to their own religion or belief." That makes it odd that so far, President Yudhoyono seems to have turned a blind eye. A U.S. government report noted last week that Jakarta did not make any efforts to investigate the constitutionality of these Shariah-inspired bylaws in the last year.

President Yudhoyono has bowed to Islamists in other areas, too. He has banned the Ahmadiyya, a peaceful Muslim sect, from proselytizing; signed into law a restrictive antipornography bill that limits free speech; and awarded the minority, hardline Islamic Prosperous Justice Party with four cabinet seats.

President Yudhoyono has been a fierce opponent of terrorism. But allowing these local bylaws to proliferate chips away at the country's secular foundation. As Indonesians look toward the future, Aceh is probably not what most of them have in mind.

WSJ


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Dubai to appoint female muftis in 2010

Women oppressing women??


AFP - The Gulf emirate of Dubai plans to appoint female muftis by the end of next year in an unprecedented step that could trigger opposition from Muslim conservatives, The National newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Six Emirati women are being selected for a training programme that starts early next year, the newspaper quoted the emirate's grand mufti Ahmed al-Haddad as saying.

Haddad issued a religious edict or fatwa in February authorising women to become muftis and in May he called on qualified candidates to apply for a training programme that includes instruction in sharia law and legal thought.

"A woman who is learned and trained in issuing fatwas is not limited to her role of issuing fatwas that relate to women only, but rather she is qualified to issue on matters of worship, jurisprudence, morality and behaviour," the paper quoted him as saying.

Haddad played down the prospect of a major backlash from religious conservatives.

"The controversy over female muftis is not necessarily over this point, but about whether or not a woman should be appointed as the grand mufti of a state," he said. "And this is not what we're trying to do at this point."

Last year, Egypt appointed its first female Islamic notary with the ability to perform marriages and divorces.

Since 2006, Morocco has trained female guides known as "mourchidates" who advise Muslims, especially in prisons, hospitals and schools.


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Al-Qaeda up in arms over Saudi's first mixed university, blasts King

The Saudi authorities have created a protected area within Arabia so that the country's young can get a modern education. Here the country's religious police as well as fire breathing clergy hold no sway. Other women/girls are also pictured at the university without headscarves - this is the sighting of a woman's face there. The clerics object to among others - [like mixed classes] students may have classes which discuss subjects such as evolution.

RIYADH (AFP)— The Yemen-based branch of Al-Qaeda has accused Saudi King Abdullah of violating Islam by launching the kingdom's first public university where men and women can mix, SITE Intelligence reported.

Ibrahim al-Rubaish, a Saudi member of Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said in an audio message posted on the internet that the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, where post-graduate science students and researchers will work together, violated Islamic shariah law.

"The father of the daughter or the brother of the sister or the husband of the wife, how can they accept that these (women enroll) in this university, this university that violated Sharia, violating even the system that this government claims to apply?" Rubaish said, according to a transcript issued late on Tuesday by SITE, a US-based monitoring group.

"What (does one think) of a woman who studies with a Christian or a Jew, whose study is being supervised by an atheist or a pagan?" said Rubaish, a former Guantanamo prisoner who fled to Yemen after being repatriated to Saudi Arabia.

In a direct attack on the Saudi monarchy, Rubaish blamed King Abdullah, saying he is moving the country toward "secularism".

"If he is not able to distinguish between good and evil and what is good and harmful, then how can he be put as the ruler over millions of people?"

"I call upon every Muslim to (distance themselves) from this agent apostate government, that has clearly demonstrated that it prefers infidelity to faith, and that all it wants from Islam is the the parts that do not affect its secularist method," Rubaish said.

Rubaish's statement came in a 17 minute audio message posted to internet jihadist forums on November 1, SITE added.

On September 23 Abdullah presided over the launch of the new research-focused science university on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah, whose student and faculty body mixes men and women from all over the world.

While Saudi officials played down the issue, they admitted the new seven billion dollar campus aims to break through the Saudi religious establishment's prohibition against the mixing of unrelated men and women in public.


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Malaysian Christian group slams government seizure of 15,000 Bibles

Kuala Lumpur - A Christian group in Malaysia on Wednesday criticized the government's confiscation of some 15,000 Malay-language Bibles which contain the word "Allah," or God in Arabic. In a statement, the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) called for the immediate release of the Bibles, saying that withholding the holy books would be denying Malay-speaking believers the right to practise their faith.

The government in March banned the use of the word "Allah" in non-Muslim publications, sparking fierce condemnation from religious groups who argue that the government had no legal right to ban the use of a word that predated the Koran and Islam.

Earlier this week, Christian groups said that the government seized 15,000 Bibles, most of which were to be sent to the eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak, where the Malay language is most commonly used among people of all religions.

The CFM said in its statement Wednesday that the reason given by the authorities, which was that the Bibles were "prejudicial to public order," was ridiculous and offensive.

"Bibles in (Malay) have been used since before the independence of our country and have never been the cause of any public disorder," said Bishop Ng Moon Hing, chairman of the group.

"It is this action by the authorities themselves which is an affront to good public order," he said in the statement.

"We call on the relevant government officials who have neither the authority nor the right to act in this unconscionable manner to explain their action to the church leaders and to the public."

Malaysia's constitution declares it a secular state but with Islam as its official religion. About 60 per cent of Malaysia's 25 million people are Muslims.

Minority religious groups have often complained that their constitutional right to practise different faiths have come under threat by what is seen to be an ultra-Islamisation move by the government in recent times.

Earth Times


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Iran protesters defy government request not to turn anti-US rally into anti-government [Video]

Anti-government Iranian protesters ignore government orders - to make today's rally all about the US and not about - the disputed election and following brutal crackdown.


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Yesterday Communism, Today Radical Islam

This is not about hate - we must confront the ideology! The Muslims in the Islamic world don't understand the politically correct version of Islam. The same Islam - they are given no choice but to follow and which they believe you [those in the west] should have no choice but to follow. The religion has been forced on Muslims - and they literally feel that it should be imposed on you!!

The Berlin Wall

As we mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emphasis should not be on speeches and ceremonies but rather on the lessons of the fall of communism for the war on terror.

Although they seem different--one claims to be religious whereas the other was, supposedly, a perfect science--communism and political Islam are essentially the same. Both are radical ideologies that divide the world into the elect and the profane. Both deny individuality and suppress free will. And both treat man-made dogma as infallible truth and seek to impose it by force.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently reacted to a question about ideology by saying, "That's so yesterday." Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The drive of an ideology to apply a false idea on the basis of its own inner logic independent of external reality is a mortal threat to the West and will be for generations to come. Accordingly, the experience of communism can do the world some good--if its implications are understood.

The following lessons of communism could prove vital to the West in the war against radical Islam:

The challenge must be confronted at the level at which it is posed.

An ideology is a system of total explanation. It rejects universal morality and insists that right and wrong are determined by the interests of a specific group--the proletariat, the master race or the ummah. In effect, the adherents of totalitarian ideologies deify themselves, even if they pretend to be "religious."

Our response to the claims of totalitarian ideology is traditionally to defend freedom. By answering an ideology that claims infallibility and promises to create heaven on earth by defending "freedom," however, we immediately raise the question of "freedom for what?" We also leave the contents of the ideology completely unchallenged. The failure of the West during the Cold War to challenge the claims of communist ideology was always taken by the communists to mean that the West did not believe in anything.

In fact, it is necessary to confront the terrorist ideology directly. Instead of treating freedom as an alternative to ideology, we need to attack radical Islamic ideology as an insult to sanity. It needs to be pointed out that supposedly religious Islamic radicalism is based on man-made dogma and that it relies on the same psychological mechanisms and has the same results as atheistic Communism and Nazism. It is only by attacking Islamic radicalism as an idea that we avoid the impression that the terrorists' interpretation of themselves is implicitly accepted. At the same time, by attacking radical Islam as based on false values, we automatically call attention to our own. In the Soviet Union, it was often noted by pro-Western Soviet dissidents that "it is difficult to beat something with nothing." Our task is to make explicit that the West stands for universal values, and those values are "something."

Forget about "right" and "left."

For years, attitudes toward communism in the West were heavily dependent on considerations of domestic policy. Those who liked the idea of free medical care and guaranteed employment tended to sympathize with communism. Those who were opposed tended to be anti-communist. But in both cases there was little awareness that the real issue was not the communist social system but the attempt to redefine morality and zombify the personality. The split between left and right in the West in relation to communism was manipulated by the Soviets and left us divided in facing a common threat.

There is little risk that radical Islam will evoke sympathy from either the right or the left in the U.S. But there is a danger that tactical disagreements on how to wage the war on terror will take on a partisan coloring. As the experience of communism shows, venomous internal disputes weaken the resolve of the country as a whole.

Treat the war on terror as the nation's highest priority.

Nazism and communism were defeated with comparatively little loss of American life. The reason was that it was the Soviet Union, not the Western allies, that defeated Nazism at a cost of 27 million dead. The Soviet Union then collapsed without having to be fought. The worldwide cost of the communist "experiment," however, was about 100 million lives--and this does not include those killed by the Nazi regime, which appeared, at least in part, as a response to communism.

Under these circumstances, the U.S. cannot afford to underestimate the potential of the totalitarian ideological mentality. Voices in the U.S. have warned that the cost of fighting Islamic extremism threatens President Obama’s reform program. History, however, shows that no reform Obama can envisage is remotely as important as neutralizing ideological fanatics who could get access to weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. cannot count on being lucky again.

Don't lose--ever.

Man-made ideologies, lacking genuine spiritual roots, depend on success for their credibility. This applies also to radical Islam, which claims to have a long time perspective. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet citizens, despite their poverty, viewed the world with great equanimity. Eastern Europe was socialist and the revolution had triumphed in Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada and, so it seemed, Afghanistan. The worldwide victory of socialism appeared to be only a matter of time.

In 1983, however, the U.S. overthrew the communist regime on Grenada, an island of 100,000 persons. The action was widely ridiculed at the time, but it represented the first time that a communist regime had ever been displaced. The unthinkable had become thinkable. It was followed by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union itself.

Like the Soviets, the Islamic radicals promise their adherents an inevitable eventual victory. Their confidence was shaken in Iraq but has been renewed in Afghanistan. In this respect, the argument over the link between the Taliban and al-Qaida is irrelevant. They share the same ideology and a victory for the Taliban is a victory for the system of thought that was responsible for the terrorist attacks on the U.S. It will also lead to a surge in support for radical Islam in the Muslim world, which, at the moment, has very few psychological defenses against it.

In dealing with an ideological opponent, haggling and temporizing will not work. We must show the fanatics that they cannot win because we will not lose. In the long run, it is determination as much as military power that will make our victory possible.

David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale), which is being made into a documentary film.

Forbes


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'51% in Pak support war on terror'

ISLAMABAD: A majority of Pakistanis support military action against Islamist militants although more people blame the US for the violence than

blame the Taliban, a poll released on Tuesday showed.

Many Pakistanis are suspicious of the government's support for the US-led global campaign against violent militancy. But political analysts say the numerous bomb attacks in towns and cities over recent months have convinced many that action is necessary.

According to a Gilani Research Foundation poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan, 51% of people support the governmen offensive.


REUTERS

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Big Brown Bear kills Islamic militants in Kashmir

A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say.

Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar.

The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise - police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

It is thought to be the first such incident since Muslim separatists took up arms against Indian rule in 1989.

Bodies found
The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear's den, said police officer Farooq Ahmed.

The dead have been identified as Mohammad Amin alias Qaiser, and Bashir Ahmed alias Saifullah.

News of the attack emerged when their injured comrade went to a nearby village for treatment.

"Word spread in the village that Qaiser had been killed by the bear," another police officer said.

A joint party of the police and army personnel went into the forest and collected the bodies of the two militants.

Police say they also recovered two Kalashnikov assault rifles and some ammunition from the hideout.

Animal attacks
Wildlife experts say the conflict in Kashmir has actually resulted in an increase in the population of bears and leopards.

Following the outbreak of the insurgency people had to hand in their weapons to police - which put a halt to poaching.

As a result, there has been a greater incidence of man-animal conflict, say experts.
There have been many reports of bears and leopards killing or mauling humans in different parts of the Kashmir valley in recent years.

Three years ago, residents of Mandora village near the southern town of Tral, beat a black bear to death which had strayed into the village.

BBC



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Are Israeli Bedouins of Jewish descent?

In Egypt a similar thing has happened ~ once you convert to Islam then you become an 'Arab'. But the Arabs did not build the pyramids.

The head of an Israeli Arab Bedouin tribe in southern Israel claims that his and possibly other tribes in the area have Jewish ancestry.

In an effort to strengthen ties to Israel’s Jews, Sheikh Salem al-Huzeil met with area Jewish leaders and told them that his ancestors were Jews who were forced to convert to Islam following the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land 1,300 years ago. Many Bedouins in Israel maintain customs that are foreign to other Muslims, but which bear a distinct resemblance to Jewish practices.

The sheikh said his tribe has no intention of converting back to Judaism, but demonstrated that he views the Jews of Israel as family, not enemies. He has even campaigned for the immediate and unconditional release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Many of his neighbors strongly oppose al-Huzeil’s views and positions and have called for his death.

Israel Today

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Somali rebels close women's organisations

NAIROBI, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Somalia's hardline al Shabaab insurgents closed three grassroots women's organisations in the rebel-held town of Balad Hawa on Monday to stop women from going to work, a rebel leader said.

The group wants to impose its own version of Islamic law on areas it controls, and Washington says it is al Qaeda's proxy in the Horn of African nation.

"We have taken this step after we recognised that women need to stay in their homes and take care of their children ... Islam does not allow women to go to offices," Maalim Daaud Mohmed, the chairman of Balad Hawa, told Reuters by telephone.

Balad Hawa is located on the Somali border with Kenya, near the Kenyan town of Mandera.

The organisations closed by al Shabaab are the Halgan Businesswomen's Organisation, the Sed Huro Human Rights Organisation and Farhan Woman for Peace, he said.

The insurgents have banned movies, musical ringtones, dancing at wedding ceremonies and playing and watching soccer.

Courts have ordered executions, floggings and amputations in recent months, mostly in the southern Kismayu region and rebel-held districts of the capital.

The rebel leader said they would also close five non-governmental organisations in the region. He did not name them.


EXECUTIONS

In the capital Mogadishu, the U.N.-backed government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed sentenced six soldiers to death for the murder of a fellow soldier.

"We have sentenced six military men to death for killing a government soldier," Ali Hassan Isak, the chairman of Somalia's military court, told Reuters on Monday.

He said three of the men had been sentenced in absentia because they escaped arrest immediately after the incident. The six were accused of opening fire on a soldier who was in a car on Sunday, killing him.

"We are applying both Islamic sharia law and the military Act 19 which states one should be killed for killing another," he said.

Somalia has been mired in chaos for nearly two decades and the latest attempt to establish a government has been hampered by insurgents who control most of south and central Somalia.

The chaos has also allowed pirate gangs to operate with impunity, hijacking merchant ships, fishing vessels and yachts and demanding hefty ransoms for their return.

On Monday, two men tried to hijack a plane flying to Djibouti from Bossaso airport, aviation officials said.

"The pilot saved the plane by landing it at the same Bossaso airport," Mohamud Sheikh Ali, general manager of the Civil Aviation and Meteorology Authority, told Reuters.

On landing, police arrested the hijackers after an exchange of fire which injured one of the attackers. Officials said the hijackers' aim was to land the plane in the pirate-infested town of Lasqoray and kidnap two German passengers.


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India: Muslim clerics support fatwa against singing country's 100yr old national anthem_ calling it offensive to Islam

Clerics contend that the anthem line:

"Vande Mataram" which means "Mother (India), I bow to thee!"

...was "against the religious principles of Islam"

Unbelievable !!

Deoband/Lucknow: The Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind Tuesday supported a decree against the national song "Vande Mataram" on the grounds that some of its lines were "against the religious principles of Islam". The move drew fierce criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which termed the move "anti-national".

The resolution asking Muslims not to sing the national song was passed at the national convention of the Jamiat, one of the largest groups of Muslim clerics in India, held at Darul Uloom Deoband, one the largest Muslim seminaries in South Asia, about 150 km from the national capital.


Home Minister P. Chidambaram was present at the convention, which was also attended by some Hindu priests.


Muslim clerics had issued the fatwa, or decree, against the song in 2006. They contended that "Vande Mataram" means "Mother (India), I bow to thee!".


Terming the decree against the singing of the national song as "anti-national", the BJP said Islamic organisations should desist from issuing such fatwas that are against the nation's interest.

"We oppose the fatwa and will not tolerate such religious decrees at any cost. They are against our national values," BJP national general secretary Kalraj Mishra told reporters at a press conference in Lucknow.


"As such fatwas stand against national integrity, we all should stand united against them," he added.


The BJP also strongly criticised the Congress ministers for participating in such a convention where the fatwa against the national song was issued.


"Participation of Congress ministers like Home Minister P. Chidambaram is unfortunate. It clearly reflects approach of the Congress party that it doesn't mind compromising with anti-national organisations just to appease the minority community," said the BJP's state unit president Ramapati Ram Tripathi.


"Interestingly, the Congress leaders are singing the national song since 1896 and had even organised a programme in 2006 on its 100th anniversary, but now it's truly shocking and surprising as they themselves are supporting anti-national organisations that are against Vande Matram," he added.


However, Muslim clerics were firm on their stand.


"Some of its lines are of course against the religious principles of Islam. We cannot bow before anybody other than the Allah. It is un-Islamic," Moulana Muizuddin of the Jamiat said.


"Islam teaches us to worship only one god, Allah. We are Indians and there are other ways to express our feelings for the nation rather than bowing before it. Loving your country doesn't only mean worshipping it," Muizuddin told IANS.


"We love our mothers. Islam doesn't even permit bowing before mother. We love the Prophet but we cannot even bow before him."


Maulana Salman, who teaches at the Deoband seminary, said: "We are true Muslims and true Indians. There is no doubt about that. But we no longer remain Muslims when we offer our prayers to anybody else than the Allah. Patriotism is not only about singing songs. We are and will remain Indians without singing Vande Mataram."

Samay Live

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Woman Hit With Car by Iraqi Father For Being Too "Westernized" Dies [Video]

It is popular to say the father killed his daughter because she had become too Westernized - but look there is a marriage involved - and almost certainly it was an arranged marriage. She does as her father requests and goes to Iraq marries the guy but then returns immediately after to live with her boyfriend - who we can gather she was in love with.

So it appears what has been happening in Europe - and what EU governments have sought to crack down on - is now happening more frequently in the US. And this is the fishing out of children into these sham marriages - with often relatives from the old country - to facilitate chain immigration from one generation to the next. But when the child whose mind is now in the west - doesn't want to go along with it... enormous pressure is placed on them and we may never know how many of them are killed as a result of their refusal.

There was another US honor killing where the daughter did not want to go through with an arranged marriage to a Pakistani man - which took 5 yrs to complete. She got a job and tried to do something for herself and her father killed her - for shaming the family.

The US is going to have to start paying close attention to these marriages - especially those between family members. Many are likely to be forced marriages.


LOS ANGELES (AFP)— A woman who US police say was run over by her Iraqi immigrant father because he thought she had become "too westernized" has died from her injuries, local media reported.

Noor Almaleki of Surprise, Arizona, died Monday from injuries sustained after her father hit her and her boyfriend's mother in a parking lot on October 20, Mike Tellef of the Peoria Police Department told KPHO television.

Prosecutors have called the incident an "honor killing". The 20-year-old had earlier undergone spinal surgery.

In some cases of such killings, relatives convene a so-called family council and task a clan member to murder a female relative accused of staining their honor, usually by having an affair outside marriage.

"By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family," county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a Maricopa County judge over the weekend.

"This was an attempt at an honor killing."

Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, currently held at a county jail on two counts of aggravated assault, will face upgraded charges, The Arizona Republic said, citing Peoria police.

Relatives told local media that Almaleki, who immigrated with his family from Iraq to Peoria in the mid-1990s, became infuriated when his daughter married a man in Iraq but returned to Arizona to live with her boyfriend and his mother, 43-year-old Amal Edan Khalaf.

Family members told KPHO that Khalaf was in serious but stable condition.

Police said Almaleki fled the United States after the attack, first driving to Mexico before flying to London. British authorities detained him and he was extradited to Atlanta, Georgia last week.

Other relatives may have been involved in helping Almaleki flee, Low said.

"We can't be naive and ignore that there's a cultural aspect to this and there may be people who would support him, including his family, but also others who share his beliefs," she said.

Bail for Almaleki was set at five million dollars.


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Peaceful protest against Geert Wilders, on release of Dutch government report

Interesting - a Dutch government study finds Wliders' Freedom Party 'islamophobic' and that it 'is mobilising systematic hatred against the authorities'. 'The authorities' - the report's findings seems almost a direct challenge to Dutch democracy. Firstly I thought Wilders was being accused of being racist and hateful towards Muslims. Now that seems to have shifted to 'directing hatred towards the authorities' and this would be the Dutch 'elected' authorities.

Now that the Freedom Party has an ex-Muslim representative - the racist charge has to be torn away. As for 'islamophobia' - you have sections of the followers of Islam saying - very vocally - we are in Holland to take over - and bring it under Islamic law. And contrary to popular belief - it is not only the 'hate preachers' and crazies who believe this.

Where the Dutch authorities / leading political party is rightly being challenged is where people object to the Islamization of their country - of which prior to Wilders and others' outspokenness - the 'authorities' were happy to allow - preferring to duck out on issues of freedom of speech and expression - that might offend 'Islam' [even builders in shorts offended] - and siding with Muslims calling for Islamic restrictions to be imposed on the whole of Dutch society. So fearful of being called racist - they were reluctant to suggest sensible changes to immigration policy - though they know it was being widely abused.

It is easy to compile a report that that blames Wilders for objections to policies and to further label these as hatred. It is probably harder to accept that you are not hearing the people.

You do get the impression - that some believe that if you - wave words like 'islamophobic' and 'racist' around like a magic wand and you can scare people off from the debate - that is just not going to happen.


A protest demonstration against Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders passed without incident in the city of Arnhem on Monday evening. Some 200 protesters carrying torches marched through the city where Mr Wilders' Freedom Party was meeting behind closed doors.

Arnhem's mayor Pauline Krikke had given permission for the protest on condition that the march would not be held near the hotel where the Freedom Party meeting was taking place.

Racist
Earlier on Monday in The Hague, Housing Minister Eberhard van der Laan (Labour) described Mr Wilders as a danger to the rule of law, should he get the 1.5 million votes that polls are predicting. "A single man saying crazy things won't undermine the constitutional state, but if countless people agree with him, you can't ignore it." Opposition leftwing liberal leader Alexander Pechtold called Mr Wilders a racist, in response to government-sponsored research by three academics into radicalisation. The researchers said in their report that the Freedom Party is "islamophobic" and "is mobilising systematic hatred against the authorities".

Idiocy
Geert Wilders, an opposition MP, responded to the accusations by a text message to the Volkskrant daily. Borrowing words often used by assassinated politician Pim Fortuyn, he wrote "These researchers are barking mad. This is idiocy. It's the umpteenth pathetic attempt by the elite to demonise us and to try and silence the Freedom Party and all of our voters."

Indecent
Mr Wilders described his attackers, minister Van der Laan and liberal leader Pechtold, as "political associates of Mohammed B.", the radical Dutch Muslim who murdered filmmaker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh in November 2004. Mr Van der Laan, a former lawyer, told Dutch public broadcaster NOS that he had been a personal friend of Mr Van Gogh. "Mr Wilders' attempt to associate myself and Mr Pechtold with that terrible event, on the very day that it happened five years ago, is indecent. Mr Wilders is entitled to his views, but we are entitled to respond to them."

Radio Netherlands


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Dutch mark 5th anniversary of filmmaker Theo van Gogh's murder by Muslim fanatic

AMSTERDAM (AP)— The Dutch marked the fifth anniversary Monday of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic, a brutal killing that continues to shape politics in the Netherlands.

Van Gogh, a distant relative of the famous painter, was shot and stabbed on an Amsterdam street Nov. 2, 2004, setting off a spate of mosque burnings in a country once renowned for its tolerance.

His killer Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born man of Moroccan descent, said he did it because Van Gogh insulted Islam in his films. Bouyeri is serving a life sentence for the killing, which was ruled a terrorist act.

The effects of the murder were far-reaching, and Dutch debate about the integration of Muslims — who make up 5 percent of the 16 million population — continues into the present.

The murder aided the rise of Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant politician whose party leads in recent polls.

Television stations were running documentaries and films Monday about the killing, and politicians, fans and members of Van Gogh's family were to gather later at a monument in a park near the spot where he was killed.

"We learned from it," Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen said of the murder on NOS radio Monday.

He compared its effect on the Netherlands to that of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States — noting that while the scale of destruction was different, the attackers' ideology was the same.

A dozen members of Bouyeri's circle were arrested later for terrorism-related crimes such as throwing explosives at police or plotting attacks on landmarks.

Cohen said his role has been to "just try to hold things together" in a diverse city where tensions between various groups continue to run high. "Every day it's a new challenge all over again," he said.

In the aftermath of the killing the government ordered citizenship tests for resident aliens and language tests for would-be immigrants. The latter was one of several measures intended to make it difficult for Muslim men to marry foreign brides.

The government made it a crime to not carry an ID card, and authorized police to stop people not suspected of any wrongdoing on the street and frisk them. Prosecutors and intelligence agencies were also given greater powers.

In some ways the anti-immigrant politician Wilders has tried to assume Van Gogh's mantle, creating his own provocative film, "Fitna" which linked Islam and violence.
Van Gogh fans say Wilders lacks the filmmaker's sense of irony.

There have been some positive developments in race relations in the Netherlands since 2004, not least because no new terrorist attacks have taken place.

Many Dutch are weary of debates over Islam, and other issues sometimes force immigration and terrorism off the front page — notably the financial crisis.

Still, public interest in any crime escalates if it involves ethnic Moroccans or Turks. And immigration issues dominate politics.

One leading story in papers Monday features allegations illegal immigrants are delaying their deportations by faking illness. Another is about a report by a government think-tank labeling Wilders a "right-wing extremist."

Wilders rejected the term, and shot back that his political opponents are "accomplices" of Bouyeri.


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USS New York made with steel salvaged from Twin Towers makes maiden voyage up the Hudson River [Pics.]

Sailors stand on the deck of the USS New York as it sails up the Hudson River past lower Manhattan in New York November 2, 2009. Steel salvaged from the World Trade Center is forged into the bow of the ship, which bears a crest featuring a phoenix rising from the Twin Towers and the words "Never Forget".

The USS New York makes its way up the Hudson River in New York, November 2, 2009. The bow stem of the Naval warship contains seven and half tons of steel recovered from the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.

Reuters images

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Suicide Bomber Kills 35 People At Bank Near Pakistan's Army Headquarters

Police in Pakistan say a suicide bomber killed at least 35 people Monday near the country's army headquarters in Rawalpindi, where gunmen kept up a nearly 24-hour hostage-taking assault last month.

Monday's blast occurred in a parking lot outside a government bank, just a few kilometers from the capital, Islamabad.

On the first business day of the month, many people - especially government employees - line up at the bank to collect their monthly salaries or pensions.

Mohammad Saleem says he was going to the bank to get his salary when a blast occurred near the gate. He said he ran out from the building and saw many dead bodies.

Saleem said his child - who was sitting in his car parked in the bank's lot - is still missing.

Last month, the number of attacks across the country increased, starting with a suicide bombing in a United Nations office in Islamabad and ending with a massive bombing in a Peshawar market that was the single deadliest act of terrorism since 2007.

Also, militants launched an assault on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, which killed the nine attackers, more than a dozen soldiers and several civilians.

The Pakistani government has offered up to $5 million for the capture, or any information leading to the capture, of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud and more than a dozen other Taliban leaders.

The military has pushed deep inside the South Waziristan tribal region, bordering Afghanistan. The area is a stronghold for Mehsud's fighters, and army officials have pledged to completely wipe out the militants in the region.

VOA

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Woman in burqa who dropped memory stick at airport admits terror charges

I see - a new tactic - if the police seize your computer - they will find nothing as you will be carrying your jihadist material around with you on a memory stick. Just that this one was caught.

A woman who accidentally dropped a computer memory stick containing "a mini-encyclopaedia of weapons-making" from beneath her burka while she was being interviewed at an airport admitted two terror charges today when she appeared in court.

Houria Chahed Chentouf, 41, a mother of six from Manchester, entered the guilty pleas at Manchester crown court to charges under the Terrorism Act 2000 of possessing an article which gave rise to suspicions that "the possession was for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism".

The court heard she accidentally dropped a memory stick containing the documents when she was being questioned at Liverpool John Lennon airport on October 16 last year after arriving on a flight from Amsterdam. The memory stick, which had been concealed in her clothing, contained more than 7,000 files including an explosives manual for "The Brothers of the Mujahadeen". The device had been tied to an inner sleeve of her burka, but fell out as she reached down to scratch her leg, prosecutor Simon Denison told the court. The following day she was arrested at her home in Longsight.

A search of the rented property unearthed a handwritten note in which she said she and her children would be "bombs for the sake of this religion". Another document contained information about the military use of electronics, the court heard.

Evidence was also uncovered from internet chatroom sites which indicated her support for those seeking martyrdom. Chentouf, who is a Moroccan national, has previously lived in The Hague, Netherlands, for more than 20 years.

She was sentenced to two years in prison but was freed from court having served 382 days on remand since her arrest.

Judge Michael Henshell told Chentouf she had "developed an obsessive interest in jihad and the more extreme forms of Islam". He said: "Offences of this sort must be sentenced to immediate custody to deter others from behaving as you have."

Although a huge of material was found on the memory stick the judge told Chentouf there was "no evidence you intended to pass it on to anybody". He said the crown accepted there was no intention of putting it to practical use.

The court heard that Chentouf suffered from a mental illness, triggered by the death of a family member, and had previously self-harmed. Her behaviour may have been affected by this and her culpability was at the lower end of the scale for this offence, the judge added.

Guardian

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Indonesia: Men join in the fight against polygamy

Jakarta, 2 Nov. (AKI) - Indonesian pro-polygamy groups are not only facing protest from angry housewives and women's rights activists; a new group of men calling themselves the Men’s Coalition against Polygamy (Kolmi) has also joined the struggle.

Kolmi spokesman Abdul Hamim Fauzie said via a statement in the capital Jakarta on Sunday that the coalition considered the practice of polygamous marriage degrading, not only to women, but to men as well.

“Facts show that polygamy leads to nothing but domestic violence, discrimination and the abuse of human rights,” he said.

“However, polygamists often argue that polygamy is necessary to avoid infidelity and love affairs. They also claim that polygamy is a part of their religious beliefs. Men use these arguments to justify their polygamous practices,” he added.

The coalition also said that it regretted a number of discriminative articles in the current marriage law in Indonesia.

“The law legalises men to have more than one legal wife when their spouses are seriously ill or sexually incapable.

“This is very unfair, especially to women, because the law only accommodates the needs of men,” Abdul said.

Meanwhile, Muslim scholar Siti Musdah Mulia said that people practising polygamous marriages who quoted verses from the Muslim holy book or Koran to justify their behaviour were misinterpreting the message.

“Those people must not quote the Koran by verse. They need to read the whole context and understand its real essence before saying the Koran endorses polygamy,” she said.

Musdah said the Koran actually says that Islam aimed to eradicate polygamous practices, not to endorse them.

“Islam considers polygamy an unjust practice that originated in the dark ages. Therefore, Islam sought to eradicate such practices, but due to the severe reaction it caused, it took some time to fully eradicate the practice from the culture at that time,” she said.

Musdah said that she was not surprised to see that a number of men decided to bond together and fight against polygamy.

“Actually, anti-polygamy figures in the past were mostly prominent male clerics. The Prophet Muhammad himself was very angry when one of his son-in-laws planned to engage in polygamy,” she said.

Recently, controversy has sparked following an official launch of a polygamy club, dubbed the Global Ikhwan, in Bandung, the capital of West Java province.

The club, originating from Malaysia, cites the noble aim of helping single mothers, reformed prostitutes and aging single women find spouses. As soon as the club was established, condemnation poured in, especially from housewives and women's activists.

Ironically, the club is chaired by a woman named, Hatijah Binti Am, who has insisted the club could introduce people to the 'beautiful' side of polygamy.

Previously, a number of polygamy scandals have reduced the popularity of public figures engaged in the practise.

Over 85 percent of the 240 million Indonesians are Muslim and most of them practice a moderate version of the religion.


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How Arab donations to prominent Universities influences what kids learn in western schools [Video]

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Somali women beaten for violating Islamic law.. ah not wearing socks

Women sell goods on the street in Eastleigh, a predominantly Muslim Somali neighborhood on August 18, 2009 in Nairobi, Kenya. Referred to locally as 'Little Mogadishu', Eastleigh is home to thousands of Somalis who have fled war-ravaged Somalia in recent years. Over 300,000 refugees have left Somalia and have headed to neighboring Kenya, with most residing in the overcrowded Kenyan camps of Dadaab. Kenyan officials and western security services are becoming increasingly concerned that radical Islamists, specifically members of Al-Shabaab, are also settling in the Eastleigh neighborhood where they could use it as a base to plan future attacks throughout the Horn of Africa.

In Iraq the Al-Qaeda group was driven out for demanding such things as women should not be allowed to buy 'male' vegetables at the market. Whereas the Somalian Al-Qaeda branch focuses on socks - not covering one's feet sufficiently - and on young women wearing bras. All too ridiculous to analyse.


(CNN) -- Militants who control parts of Somalia's capital city are beating women in broad daylight for violating their radical brand of Islamic law, according to local officials and witnesses in Mogadishu.

"Just today, Al-Shabaab dispatched men with whips to the streets around Bakara market and they are flogging any woman who is found not wearing socks," according to a female maize trader at the Mogadishu market, who spoke Thursday.

She did not want to be named for security reasons.

In the past two days, more than 130 people, including women who were not wearing headscarves and men chewing dried khat leaves, have been detained for violating Al-Shabaab's interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, according to witnesses and officials.
Hooded Al-Shabaab gunmen rounded up 50 women on Wednesday from Mogadishu's Bakara market for not wearing the veil that is required for women under some interpretations of Islamic law, according to the maize trader.

"Most of these women were vegetable traders, so they are poor and can't afford to buy veils for 600,000 shillings [about $23 U.S.]," she said.

She said she saw more women being detained Thursday.

Another 80 Somali civilians were detained in the southwestern town of Luuq, near the Kenyan and Ethiopian border, "because they turned deaf ear to orders we imposed on the town," said the local Al-Shabaab commander Sheikh Hussien al-Iraqi.

Al-Shabaab is considered a terrorist organization by the United States because of its ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

It has been imposing stricter rules on Somali civilians living in the areas it controls.

Earlier this month, Al-Shabaab militants whipped women for wearing bras in an area of northern Mogadishu that they control, shocking residents who have been besieged by the ongoing insurgency. The militants believe the female undergarments are a deception to men.


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Package causes Mohammed cartoonist evacuation

Police cordoned off the Århus home of the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and evacuated the area after a suspicious package was observed outside his home.

Eastern Jutland police say that the package measured 20 by 40 was on the stairs in front of the artist’s home.

“Kurt Westergaard has been evacuated,” says Superintendant Mogens Brøndum adding that neighbours to a distance of 100 metres - some 25 households - had also been evacuated.

After the bomb squad had dealt with the package, police cordons were removed from the area. It is not yet known what the package contained and investigatioins continue.

Army bomb experts despatched to Westergaard's home in Arhus, eastern Jutland decided to destroy the parcel.
A police spokesman said a letter found in the parcel was to be analyzed.ET

The incident comes in the wake of recent disclosures of the arrests in Chicago, IL. earlier this month of two men who are alleged to have conspired to carry out attacks in Denmark. Among other targets, the conspiracy is said to have included attempts on Westergaard and the Culture Editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper Flemming Rose, who commissioned a series of cartoons, some of which depicted the Prophet Mohammed. Publication of the cartoons caused widespread condemnation, and in some cases violence, in the Islamic world.

Politiken

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Pakistanis light candles for Peace - but Peace with or without Islamic supremacy

Pakistani human rights activists light earthenware lamps during a peace rally in Karachi on October 31, 2009. A massive car bomb, killing 118 people on October 28 in Peshawar and trapping victims under the rubble for days, overshadowed talks and underscored the gravity of the Islamist threat, considered a backlash against the government's alliance with the US.


One must question Islamic 'peace'. A peace that includes bringing the entire world under Islam - or into Dar al-Islam realm of peace and out of Dar al-Islam realm of war. This can be done either by force / as the Taliban are doing in their Jihad or Islamic struggle or by peaceful means - by example something Muslims call Dawa. The aim is to ultimately bring non-Muslims peacefully under Islam in the subjugated status of Dhimmihood. Where non-Muslims are required to pay the jizya tax willingly, convert to Islam or be killed.

It is okay to argue that people should respect your religious beliefs - because they mean a lot to you - but how could others fully respect a set of religious beliefs that calls for their annihilation, subjugation or conversion.

Islamic peace must be put into another framework.

Because the average radical Muslim - taught in the maddrasses - sees the Muslim who doesn't join jihad - doesn't hold to fundamentalist views as - a non-Muslim - they attack Muslims they deem as infidel.

So while Muslims feel it is their right or duty to hold [even if privately] this violent and degrading thought against others - it is now being turned against them by Muslim hardliners. It is the sad story of our times ~ that Muslims are most likely to suffer at the hands of Islamic believers.

A woman arranges candles with others at the site of Wednesday's bomb blast during a memorial service in Peshawar October 31, 2009. A car bomb ripped through a crowded market killing 105 people in Pakistan's city of Peshawar on Wednesday in the deadliest attack to hit the country in recent years.


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Muslims Threaten New York Restaurant [The Breslin] Owner After He Laughs Off Demand To Move Bar

He said the mosque had suggested it couldn’t control the behavior of “a few bad eggs”; i.e., “we could get a brick through our window.” Mr. Friedman said he made the police aware of this threat.

This type of threat is becoming more common with Muslims [leaders] - for ex. when UK Islamic leaders and spokespersons presented a signed letter to the British government requesting that it withdraw its support for Israel - during the Israeli assault on Gaza - they added that they could not guarantee what the young Muslims would do - if the British gov. did not do along with their request.

The much-hyped, soon-to-open Breslin restaurant, situated in the 12-story Ace Hotel on Broadway and 29th, is giving members of the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street some agita. “Five times a day, there’s a hundred cabs on the street—the good news is you can always get a cab,” co-owner Ken Friedman told the Transom the other evening. He said some mosque visitors “object to seeing people drink alcohol.”

After the recent FergusStock, a festival during which famed British chef Fergus Henderson cooked whole pigs for a rapt crowd of New York chefs and foodies, Mr. Friedman said the mosque’s leaders called a meeting with the hotel. “They said, ‘Can you move the bar?’” he said. “And I laughed. And the guy said, ‘Oh, you think that’s funny?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that is funny, that is really funny, because we’re not going to move the bar just because you discovered we’re serving booze.’ Can you name one restaurant in New York that doesn’t serve booze?”

Mr. Friedman and his partner, Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield, did agree to nix plans for a dive bar in a townhouse next door, but as for the restaurant, “I said, ‘This is the United States of America and we’ll do whatever the fuck we want.’” He said the mosque had suggested it couldn’t control the behavior of “a few bad eggs”; i.e., “we could get a brick through our window.” Mr. Friedman said he made the police aware of this threat.

A volunteer at the mosque returning a call from the Transom said that a law forbids serving liquor within 200 feet of a place of worship and that “not more than 200 feet is between the mosque and the bar.” To which Andrew Zobler, the hotel’s developer, responded: “The law is clear that in order for that to apply it has to be an exclusively dedicated house of worship, and at their space they have both residences and a restaurant, so basically, because of those uses the law allowed there to be a bar within 200 feet. Everyone was aware of that when the liquor license was granted.” He added: “Out of neighborliness and respect we’ve voluntarily acquiesced to covering the window with a curtain.”

The Breslin will serve breakfast and lunch beginning Thursday, Oct. 29, and add dinner a week or so later. U2 hosted a party there earlier in the month, and Alain Ducasse recently named its fries the best in New York. The restaurant was named for James Breslin, who originally opened the hotel as the Breslin in 1904 and hosted the longest boxing match in history in a special ring he built in its basement (he also once dated an Andrews sister). “He was the Andre Balazs of his time,” Mr. Friedman said.

He added that he and Ms. Bloomfield are optimistic about the restaurant’s prospects, despite the recent shuttering of another venture, the pricier John Dory on 10th Avenue. He said they plan to reopen the John Dory in a space four times as large (he would not reveal the location), and make it more casual, “like the Spotted Pig with fish.” They further hope to do some “weird things” like a bakery, a bar and perhaps “a country inn.” (This in addition to the Rusty Knot, which Mr. Friedman owns with Taavo Somer, and Locanda Verde, a restaurant he opened in the former Ago space with Robert De Niro, Ira Drukier and Richard Born of the Greenwich Hotel)

When the Transom visited, the “doily curtain” covering had not yet arrived, and paper has been taped to the windows to shield the mosque’s worshipers from the sight of a gay wedding over the weekend. “They can threaten, but they can’t really stop us,” Mr. Friedman said.

Copts Untied


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Theo van Gogh: Trailblazer for Geert Wilders

On 2 November 2004, almost 5 years ago today, Mohammed Bouyeri gunned down Dutch film director, writer and opinion maker Theo van Gogh in broad daylight. In the years leading up to his murder, Van Gogh had been a scathing critic of what he liked to refer to as "fascist" Islam. The debate on the influence of Islam on Dutch society has continued to rage ever since, with right-wing politician Geert Wilders now taking central stage. What role would Theo van Gogh have played in the current debate? And is his murder the reason that Geert Wilders has attracted such a following in the Netherlands?

"Wilders and Van Gogh share a massive, inexplicable and irrational fear of Islam. What Wilders is saying now can be traced right back to what Theo said."

The politically correct version of Islam is so dominant - it supersedes logic. Van Gogh's fears of Islam were realized - when he was stabbed to death by a Muslim fanatic - who stuck a knife with a rambling note through his chest - which included Koran verses and death threats against - Geert Wilders and Hirsi Ali both critics of Islam. Wilders now lives under 24hr police protection - from the same kind of Islamic attack. How could anyone say in all honesty - that their fears are irrational.


The Netherlands was in shock when Theo van Gogh was shot dead in the streets of Amsterdam, the second politically motivated murder to hit the country in a relatively short time. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, was a Muslim of Dutch-Moroccan origin. He was so deeply offended by Van Gogh's comments about Muslims that he decided to take action against him. Van Gogh liked to be provocative in order to make sure his message was heard, notoriously referring to Muslims as "goat shaggers". He warned that Islam would come to dominate Western culture in the future and would stifle freedom of speech:

"If there's one movement I would still take part in, it would be a broad coalition against religious fascism, particularly in Europe. Religious fascism as propagated by Islam. (...) That seems to me to be the only cause worth fighting for. I'm not bothered about the rest."

Politician Geert Wilders appears to have followed in Theo van Gogh's footsteps. His Freedom Party already has a considerable parliamentary presence, but if the opinion polls are to be believed, it could become the biggest party in the country come the next elections.

Minority view
If he were still alive today, would a relative outsider like Theo van Gogh vote for the popular - and many would argue populist - Geert Wilders? "No doubt about it," exclaims Tomas Ross, writer and friend of Theo van Gogh. "I don't think so," counters Dutch-Moroccan writer Mohammed Benzakour, who crossed swords with Van Gogh on many occasions.

"Wilders is being taken very seriously and is very much in the limelight. Theo would have turned away from that spectacle in disgust," explains Benzakour. "Theo always adopted the minority view. He couldn't help it. He was a provocateur through and through. He hated following the mainstream. Wilders is far from being an underdog these days. So no, Van Gogh would not have voted for him."

Two and a half years before Van Gogh was murdered, the Netherlands was shaken to its foundations by another political murder: the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. A politician only weeks away from a major electoral breakthrough, Fortuyn was an immensely popular figure who was also dedicated to combating the influence of Islam on Dutch society. Theo van Gogh was a friend of Pim Fortuyn's. "In fact, Theo thought Fortuyn was too soft on Islam," insists Tomas Ross. "Wilders and Van Gogh share a massive, inexplicable and irrational fear of Islam. What Wilders is saying now can be traced right back to what Theo said." Ross has no doubt whatsoever: Wilders is Van Gogh's true heir.

Clever exploitation
Sociologist Dick Pels believes that is going too far. "They fit into the same movement of 2002: the voters' revolt, the rise of Pim Fortuyn. They share the same fear of the 'Islamification' of Dutch culture. But it is true that Wilders' success was made possible by Theo van Gogh's murder. Since then, many people see Islam as a threat and that is something Wilders cleverly exploits."

Of course, much has changed in the Netherlands in the five years since Theo van Gogh's murder. But the immigration and integration debate rumbles on unabated. Does Theo van Gogh's absence leave a gaping whole in that debate? "Once thing I definitely do not miss is his insulting tone," says Dick Pels. "But I do miss his non-conformism. It is always fine when a culture spawns characters like Theo van Gogh, people who swim against the current. There are far too few of them around."

A discussion with depth
"I miss him, most certainly," says writer and friend Tomas Ross. "He would have been an incredibly fanatical advocate of Wilders. And because he was so smart and intelligent, he could have argued the case better than Wilders himself. When Wilders talks it all sounds so very simple and rigid. Theo was capable of approaching the same issues from a philosophical perspective, drawing on his knowledge of Western history and religion. He would have given the discussion depth."

Even Mohammed Benzakour misses Theo van Gogh: "No matter how offensive he could be, Theo always retained a note of humour. Wilders' insults are grim and hateful. Imagine that Wilders' party won the elections and he started sending all Muslims back to their homeland. [*Wilders has called for Muslims to be returned home for committing terrorist acts/ and also for trying to bring about the overthrow of the gov. to install Sharia] If Theo had still been alive, I'm sure he would have given me a warm place of refuge under his roof."

Radio Netherlands


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Iran: Walking Away From Islam

Iranian women dress in their traditional clothes as they celebrate Yalda the longest night of the year in Tehran, Saturday Dec. 20, 2008. Iranians recited poetry and shared stories and food Saturday in all-night celebrations of the longest night of the year, a tradition going back several thousand years to a time when Zoroastrianism was the predominant religion of ancient Persia. For many Iranians, the celebration, known as Yalda, offers a link with ancient traditions and heritage as well as a chance to gather with family.


November 1, 2009: Opposition to the clerical dictatorship continues to grow, both from inside the leadership, and at the grassroots. An increasing number of senior clerics are openly criticizing the "Islamic Police State" that has become increasingly harsh in the way it suppresses real, or imagined, opposition. Many senior clerics are aghast at the growing corruption among the clerics who run the government, and the pretense of democracy, with elections rigged so that only pro-dictatorship candidates can even run. At the grassroots, most young Iranians are fed up with the dictatorship. It offers no jobs for the poor, and few opportunities for the educated and ambitious. Most worrisome to the clerics is the growing number of young Iranians who are giving up on Islam. Many of these kids are saying that Islam is "un-Iranian" and that everyone should return to the pre-Islam Iranian religion. The odd thing is that Christianity was never really big in Iran. Iran’s pre-Christian religion, Zoroastrianism, survived until it was largely replaced by Islam 1,400 years ago, after dominating the country for about 1,500 years. The government has been blocking Farsi language sites about Zoroastrianism, which have been growing in popularity over the last few years, apparently in response to the seemingly dreadful impact of Islam. Many Zoroastrianism customs survived the arrival of Islam, much to the chagrin of Moslem clerics. Efforts to stamp out these customs only makes them more popular. The only surviving Zoroastrians (about 150,000) are found mainly in India (about half of them), with small communities in Pakistan and other Central Asian nations. There are also thousands living in the West. There are believed to be over 10,000 still in Iran, where they maintain a very low profile. Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion (worship of only one God) that appeared about the same time as Judaism, in a period when monotheism was rare. The oldest major religion is Hinduism, which is polytheistic (with thousands of Gods).

Many clerics believe that the current government is not only ruining the nation with their corruption and bad management, but also with their effort to develop nuclear weapons. This is seen as putting the nation at greater risk of nuclear attack. But developing these weapons is very popular with most Iranians, who believe that Iran, which has been the local superpower for thousands of years, needs nukes in order to regain the respect they have been denied for the last century (as Western nations came to dominate this part of the planet.)

The UN officially recognizes Iran has a human rights disaster, where freedom of speech, religion, and just about everything, is severely restricted. Iran believes this is all part of a Western plot to bring down the Islamic Republic in Iran.

The student protest movement in Iran is still functioning, despite months of aggressive efforts by the government to destroy it. More large demonstrations are being planned.

The government insists that the U.S. and Britain is behind the recent Islamic terror attack that killed over three dozen Revolutionary Guard personnel. The attack was carried out by Pakistani based Baluchi tribesmen belonging to the Jundallah group. Pakistan said that the Jundallah leaders had fled to Afghanistan. The Baluchi tribes have provided refuge for al Qaeda personnel for the last eight years, and helped the Baluchis form Jundallah. The Baluchis are not much interested in the Taliban war in Afghanistan, but assisting fellow Baluchi in Iran is another matter. Iran has long accused the U.S. and Britain of being behind Jundallah, but has never been able to provide any proof. There has been official U.S. support for Iranian pro-democracy groups. But leftist politicians in the U.S. and Europe has succeeded in cutting off a lot of that funding, because it annoys the Iranian government. Many in the West believe that the Islamic clerics that run Iran can be reasoned with, and that it's best not to annoy them in the meantime.

In the U.S., a recent poll showed that 88 percent of Americans believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Some 78 percent believe direct negotiations with Iran are necessary to deal with this problem, while 77 percent favor economic sanctions to motivate the Iranians to halt their nuclear weapons program. Finally, 54 percent favor a military strike, if all else fails.

Iran has rejected a proposal, whereby it would ship its uranium to Russia for processing into reactor fuel. Currently, Iran has enriched its nuclear material to about five percent, and moving to raise that higher. Russia is willing to enrich it high enough for fuel, but not for nuclear weapons. For weapons, you need to increase the content of Uranium 235 in uranium ore to 54 percent (producing uranium that contains that percentage of the more volatile U-235 form of the nuclear material). This is far above the 5-10 percent minimum needed for nuclear power plants. Normally, Uranium ore is only about .7 percent U-235. Anything over 20 percent enriched can be used for a nuclear bomb. But the most effective and reliable nuclear weapons use 80 percent enriched nuclear material. Iran wants to do the enriching itself, and believes that depending on other nations to do it would be "unreliable."

A growing number of the pilgrims headed for the annual pilgrimage (the "Haj") are being arrested for taking illegal drugs with them. Last year, 336 pilgrims were caught with a total of seven kilograms (245 ounces) of opium or heroin. So far this year, about a thousand have been arrested, and were carrying twice as much. Saudi police arrested 160 Iranian pilgrims so far this year, for drug trafficking. Iran is the biggest consumer of opium on the planet, despite having only about two million addicts. Nearly all the opium comes from Afghanistan, and is cheap enough for even petty criminals, or working class Iranians, to support a drug habit. Saudi Arabia has asked Iran to do more about stopping the drugs coming in with Haj pilgrims. But the drugs are popular, and fetch much higher prices, in Saudi Arabia, so the temptation is always there. The Saudis also warned the Iranians to stop sending political agitators with the nearly 800,000 pilgrims Iran is allowed each year. Many Iranian clericals are talking openly about how Iran should be running the Islamic holy places, not Saudi Arabia. This sort of talk does not go down well with the Saudis, who see an Iranian government conspiracy to cause trouble during the Haj, to make the Saudis look bad.

October 26, 2009: Eleven Revolutionary Guards crossed into Pakistan, were detected and arrested. It was a navigation error by the troops, and they were released within 24 hours. Off the coast of Yemen, a small Iranian cargo ship, and its seven man crew, were seized by Yemeni navy. The Iranian ship was loaded with weapons, which, it was suspected, were destined for Shia rebels in northern Iran. Yemeni officials later claimed they had proof that the weapons were meant for the rebellious Shia tribesmen in northern Yemen.

October 23, 2009: Russia announced that it will continue to sell "defensive weapons" to Iran, and that it not shipped S300 anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran. Not yet, but maybe eventually, as Russia declares these to be defensive weapons.

October 19, 2009: Iranian military officials called their Pakistani counterparts and demanded that those responsible for the recent suicide bombing in Iran (that killed 40 Revolutionary Guard commanders and troops) be arrested. Iran blames the attack on Islamic terror group Jundallah, which is composed of Baluchi tribesmen fighting back against Iranian oppression of Baluchis living in Iran. Most Baluchis live in southwest Pakistan ("Baluchistan") and are Sunni Moslems. Most Iranians are Shia and consider Baluchis a bunch of tribal troublemakers who pray the wrong way. There has never been much love between Iranians and Baluchis.

Strategy Page


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UK: Council suspends funding to schools linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir - group hopes to create global Islamic super state

Government grants totalling £113,000 were paid last year to the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation, which runs a nursery and a primary school in Tottenham, north London and a primary in Slough, Berkshire. The grants continued this year, although no figures are available.

The foundation's lead trustee and "proprietor" of the Slough school is Yusra Hamilton, a leading member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and wife of the group's main press spokesman, Taji Mustafa.

The public money – from the Government's Early Years Fund – was paid to help run the nursery school and two Islamic primary schools where children are taught key elements of Hizb's ideology from the age of five. It was administered by the local authority, Haringey.

In a statement, the Home Office said: "Haringey Council has decided to suspend its allocation of Early Years Funding, to the schools concerned, pending an investigation."

Hizb regards integration as "dangerous", says that British Muslims should "fight assimilation" into UK society and opposes all involvement with the "corrupt" state. It wants to create a global Islamic superstate, or "caliphate", initially in Muslim-majority countries and then across the rest of the world. The former prime minister, Tony Blair, proposed to ban the group and the Conservatives have said that they will do so if they win power.

Other trustees of the Shakhsiyah Foundation who are Hizb members or activists include Farah Ahmed, the head teacher of the Slough school, who has written in a Hizb journal condemning the "corrupt Western concepts of materialism and freedom".

On their website, the schools say their "ultimate goal" and "foremost work" is the creation of an "Islamic personality" in children. The creation of an "Islamic personality" is a key tenet of Hizb's ideology. The schools' history curriculum states that children are taught that "there must be one ruler of the khilafah [caliphate]". The schools' website says that "in the glorious history of Islam... the Sharia was the norm". Children are taught Arabic from the age of three.

A former teacher at one of the schools told yesterday how they were set up as a "great way of creating Hizb ut-Tahrir propaganda". She said the schools were started by a group of female Hizb members and activists but that the group had also brought in some non-Hizb staff.

The former teacher said: "The concept behind it was to allow the school to speak for itself and then to lure [pupils] in through that doorway."

Houriya Ahmed, of the Centre for Social Cohesion think-tank, said: "This suspension of funding is very welcome. It is quite wrong for the British state to be funding groups that want to destroy it."

The Shakhsiyah Foundation was unavailable for comment last night. However, spokesmen for the foundation have previously denied that it is a Hizb ut-Tahrir operation and have said it involves "Muslim women from a wide variety of backgrounds." Ofsted has given the Slough school a positive report.

Telegraph


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Muslim unrest hits US homes

Its sadly - welcome to the club!! Europe has heard Obama and other US journalists - going on about how much better Islam is in the US than in Europe. We are told their Muslims are 'better adjusted' and Europe should find out why! But what they don't fathom - for ex. with the beheading of the wife of the Islamic Bridges TV station owner - is that - largely it in not what people do to Muslims - but what Muslims do to each other - and further wish to impose on the rest of society in the name of their religion.

The majority of American Muslims are Black Muslims - and former Christians - and continue to live in Christian society - it would probably be a culture shock for them to spend time in any Muslim country. There are several real differences - for ex. the average Black Muslim American would not marry their cousins. Thereby that family pressure that exists in almost all of the Muslim world would not be there. Making things like leaving Islam - easier or more acceptable.

The trouble is coming from the Muslim immigrants from the Middle East/ North Africa and Pakistan - where what we call radicalization - but is really more of an Islamic fundamentalism - puritanism - that these newcomers are bringing with them. Then once in the society - then instead of jumping into the melting pot - they seek to radicalize others - as we have seen

Further Muslims from the Islamic world [or their parents] were used to living in societies where Islam dominates - also where they dominate - or are given privilege as Muslims - hence the push for Sharia - which aims to bring this social structure about.


In what may be the first recorded instance of a Muslim wife attempting to murder her husband for not being pious enough, a Staten Island woman was charged this week with attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon. Rabia Sarwar, a 37-year-old Muslim, said she did it because her husband, a 41-year-old Pakistani native, enjoyed booze and pork and wanted her to dress in revealing clothes. (She held fabric over her face and threw a shawl over her head before leaving court on Thursday.)

While the Sarwar case is sensational by dint of the role-reversal and the method of attempted murder (throat-slitting), it’s also pedestrian: Over the past two years, there have been about a dozen attempted or successful honor killings committed in the US.

Last week in Arizona, an Iraqi-born man tried to kill his 20-year-old daughter because she wanted out of her arranged marriage; he escaped.

In July, a 17-year-old named Rifqa Bary ran away from home because, she said, her Muslim family would literally kill her for converting to Christianity. (She has been ordered by a Florida court to return to her home state of Ohio, where she will appear before another judge.)

So: Why is there such a recent spate of honor killings in America? What does it mean when a woman tries to exact the same vengeance that’s been wreaked upon her gender by men for centuries?

“This is not a reverse honor-killing — it’s martyrdom,” says Islamic apostate and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself the target of death threats. “It’s a ticket for heaven for her, to clear her books. The only exception that’s made for a wife or daughter to disobey her husband or father is if he forces her to do something that’s un-Islamic. This is a message to other Muslims: ‘This man is defying God. What am I supposed to do?’”

“The vast majority of honor killings do appear to be cases where there is some attempt to violate or leave [Muslim] cultural norms,” says David Bryan Cook, associate professor of religious studies at Rice University. “They’ve been going on in the US and Britain for a number of years, but in the recent past they’ve gotten a lot more publicity.”

Barring terror attacks, independent Muslim expression of anti-Western sentiment seems to be more virulent in Europe. There was the 2004 daylight assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by the same Muslim extremist who also targeted his collaborator Hirsi Ali; the riots and death threats issued after the publication of a cartoon that was critical of Islam in a Danish newspaper in 2005.

Some believe that the sheer vastness of the US has kept such incidents largely off the radar. “We’ve not been seeing it yet because our country’s so big,” says Amil Imani, who was born in Iran but raised in the US, and is the founder of Former Muslims United.

He points to the recent killing of a radical imam in Michigan, who hoped to carve out a separate Islamist state in the Midwest, as evidence that America has more to worry about than it may be aware. “Look at what is going on in England, which is almost identical to our culture,” he says. “Stealth jihad is happening in America before our eyes.”

Does Hirsi agree with this assessment?

“Oh yes, oh yes,” she says.

“Believe me. Yes. The kind of American Muslim you’re seeing now is changing — not because America is changing, but because the world is. Someone from Pakistan is coming here not for freedom, but to escape a horrible situation. [Once here], they are being radicalized.”

Imani also believes that the fear and loathing of the West tends to be a generational thing; kids born and raised in America by Muslim immigrants tend to reject such orthodoxy, while older Muslims embrace it.

“In the privacy of their home, Muslim parents will call every American woman a prostitute, every man corrupt,” Imani says. “People who are 20 and over, who have lived in Muslim countries — they cannot handle American culture. This case is very new, very rare. But you haven’t seen anything yet.”

New York Post

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Anti-Sharia demonstrations in Leeds and London

Pictured on the newspaper being held up - is Anjem Choudary of Islam4UK - who would have also held a protest today - March4Sharia - which was called off. That's the same Choudary - when he was better known as 'Andy' laughing it up over 6 pints of beer and a girly mag.

Members of the English Defence League demonstrate in Leeds town centre on October 31, 2009 in Leeds, England. The English Defence League (EDL) whose slogan is that they are Peacefully Protesting against militant Islam and claim that 'it is not an act of Fascism to oppose Terrorists and Sharia'.

LONDON - OCTOBER 31: Members of the English Defence League and other pro-English organisations stage a demonstration in Piccadilly Circus on October 31, 2009 in London, England. The EDL describes itself as a 'non-political social movement' and is staging protests in London and Leeds against 'extremist organisations that promote terrorism or those that seek to oppress others whether through religion or politics'.

Here is more help in London - a softly softly approach to dealing with Islamic supremacists - more hands make the load lighter.



United Against Fascism (UAF) strangely absent - in the protest FOR Sharia law!! But go out of their way to target those who are AGAINST Sharia law. UAF is a Leftist organisation. It appears that this time - at least they got the signs right - there was one sign in the video that actually named EDL.



You wonder why it is that the English are out protesting AGAINST Sharia law. There is definitely the sense of a controlling hand - that is aloof - not connected with the people - who seems to feel Sharia law - in a measured amount - would be good for the British people. And there is no sense that the average person - needs to be consulted in anyway. As with other parts of Europe - the push for Sharia is predominately coming from the Left - but then in the UK it is also coming form the church - the Anglican Church - and besides the Queen - the next person to have that much sway over the top clergy - would have to be Prince Charles. Who has already said he wanted to be Defender of Faith(s) - it would seem his distant hand is really behind the push for Sharia. That would explain why there is no sense of reality - connected with Sharia law in relation to how it is practiced throughout the world. This approach to Sharia law in the UK seems to border on fantasy.

More than 2,000 demonstrators gathered in Leeds city centre amid a heavy police presence as a group staged a protest against Islamic extremism.

Police said about 900 English Defence League (EDL) supporters joined the rally in City Square. They were penned in by a ring of officers.

A rival protest of up to 1,500 Unite Against Fascism (UAF) supporters took place nearby in Victoria Gardens.

Five people were arrested for minor public order offences.

The EDL supporters were escorted back to the nearby railway station once the rally ended.

However, about 500 UAF supporters remained under police observation in the Victoria Gardens area.

Hundreds of police officers were brought into the city to act as a barrier between the rival protesters.

Officers feared there could be disorder and urged young Muslims and students to avoid getting involved in any trouble.

BBC

Fears of widespread disorder in Leeds city centre proved unfounded after a huge police presence kept rival demonstrators apart.

Up to 1,000 protesters gathered in Victoria Gardens on Saturday to demonstrate against a protest by far right-wing group the English Defence League (EDL).

Minor scuffles broke out between police and protestors as Unite Against Fascism (UAF) activists tried to reach the EDL supporters at City Square.

But the two groups were kept apart by a large police operation, including hundreds of officers, a dog section, mounted officers and a helicopter.

UAF demonstrators carried placards and banners and shouted "Nazi scum off our streets" and "smash the EDL" during their protest.

At one point, around 300 protestors broke away and ran through the Park Square area in a bid to reach the EDL supporters nearby.

But dozens of officers, including a mounted team, managed to contain the protestors and they were shepherded back to Victoria Gardens.

Over at City Square, EDL supporters were seen surging forward in a bid to run through the entrance but were blocked off by a wall of officers.

This pattern was repeated throughout the protest, where around 300 supporters chanted "EDL", "England" and sang the National Anthem.

Police officers from forces across the UK came to Leeds to control the two protests and keep the rival groups away from each other.

Police made eight arrests for minor offences and there were no reports of any injuries.

Assistant chief constable Mark Gilmore, commander in charge of the policing operation, said: "A great deal of West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council time was invested in planning and negotiations and we believe that investment paid off in the peaceful outcome today."

Yorkshire Evening Post

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US: Iraqi man accused of running down westernized daughter found in Atlanta

(CNN) -- Authorities said Friday that an Iraqi man accused of running down his daughter in Arizona because she had become "too Westernized" has been taken into custody in Atlanta, Georgia.

U.S. Marshals arrested Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, in Atlanta, according to spokesman James Ergas.

Police in Peoria, Arizona, say Almaleki struck his 20-year-old daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, and her friend Amal Edan Khalaf with the Jeep Laredo he was driving in a parking lot in Peoria on October 20.

After the incident, Almaleki drove to Mexico, abandoning his vehicle in Nogales, Peoria police said in a statement Friday.

He then made his way to Mexico City and boarded a plane to London, England. British authorities denied him entry into the country, and he was put on a plane back to the United States, police said.

Authorities arrested him late Thursday afternoon when he arrived at Atlanta's airport, police said, and he is awaiting extradition to Arizona.

He will face two counts of aggravated assault, police said.

Almaleki was angry with his daughter "as she had become too 'Westernized' and was not living according to [the family's] traditional Iraq[i] values," Peoria police said in a statement last week.

The daughter was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries and remains "unresponsive," Peoria police said Friday.

Khalaf, 43, with injuries that are not life-threatening, is in serious but stable condition, police said.

Noor Faleh Almaleki lives with Khalaf, Peoria police said. They did not elaborate on how the two women knew each other.

Peoria is about 13 miles northwest of Phoenix.



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EDL Anti-Sharia Protest - Leeds October 31st 2009 [Video]

The English Defence League is a non-political social movement that stands for the following values:

1. Free speech.
2. Democracy.
3. Equality in law.
4. Cultural tolerance.

In pursuit of those values the EDL is conducting a series of peaceful protests against extremist organisations that promote terrorism or those that seek to oppress others whether through religion or politics.

We also protest against individual Islamic fanatics like Anjem Choudary who has stated:

“Not being a Muslim is a crime against god”
“If you are a non-Muslim you are guilty”
“I must have hatred for everything which is non-Islam”

Source: BBC World.
Anjem Choudary has also stated that it is his aim to fly an Islamic flag over 10 Downing Street and to enforce Sharia law over our country. His hatred for freedom, democracy and our culture is clear to see.

Unfortunately others share Anjem Choudary’s view. Extremists like him, use their influence in the Islamic community to spread the seed of hatred among disillusioned Muslim youth.

For years we have looked to the government to resolve the direct and indirect causes of Islamic extremism in our country. They have failed us. And they have failed our troops who fight for our freedom from terrorism and tyranny.

Whilst British troops have been fighting and dying, your Members of Parliament have submitting inappropriate expense claims for duck islands, porn films and luxurious second homes. Their obscene behaviour had to be leaked to the press before some of them reluctantly repaid the money taken from tax-payers.

They have also bailed-out the fat-cats, the privileged few, in the City with hundreds of billions of pounds of tax-payers money whilst leaving 2.47 million British people to rot unemployed, or on unliveable wages.

In the absence of effective Government the English Defence League has been forced to rise up.

If you share the EDL’s values please attend the peaceful demonstrations at Leeds City Square at 1pm on Saturday 31st October 2009, and also at London Piccadilly Circus at 12pm on the same day.

EDL


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London pro-sharia law event - March4Sharia is cancelled over 'security concerns'

Interesting !!

Security concerns or sheer embarrassment ~ all those 'community harmony' images beamed around the world.

In any case - isn't Islam4UK's motto ~ Freedom Go To Hell. It seems they got their wish today. Maybe they can better understand why the rest of us feel that freedom is an important and even sacred right.

A planned march by demonstrators calling for sharia law in Britain has been cancelled, police said.

Scotland Yard said it would now be contacting organisers of a wave of counter-protests in central London and Leeds, West Yorkshire, to inform them of the decision.

Anjem Choudary, leader of the radical Islamic sect Al Muhajiroun, said organisers Islam4UK had been forced to cancel the planned march from the House of Commons to Trafalgar Square because of security concerns.


Channel 4 News

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Displaced Pakistan In Pictures

This is definitely - the I want to go home look!

Nida, an internally displaced girl, sits while waiting for handouts at a distribution point for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Dera Ismail Khan, located in Pakistan's restive North West Frontier Province, October 30, 2009. Pakistani soldiers are zeroing in on two major Taliban sanctuaries in South Waziristan as the army presses ahead with an offensive in the lawless tribal region on the Afghan order.

The Pakistanis should start teaching their people tolerance - the last time 200,00 internally displaced people fled from the SWAT Valley - the camps - most UN operated - did not allow in Christians - Christians were told that their food was 'unclean' - and that they would be better off finding separate shelters and cooking arrangements [in a war]. Think - how much western money went into those camps.

No doubt the Pakistani president will be on another shopping expedition to collect more money - expect Christians and other non-Muslims of the internally displaced to get naught.

What this indicates is that the mindset of the Taliban is an extension of the people's. Their intolerance is personified in the Taliban militia.

You don't have to respect a Christian, don't have to respect the polytheist Hindus and you don't have to respect the 'infidel' Pakistanis who don't practice Islam the way you do...

A man, who has fled a military offensive in South Waziristan, waits for handouts outside a distribution point for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Dera Ismail Khan, located in Pakistan's restive North West Frontier Province, October 30, 2009.