Some Christians Wish to Start WW3 To Bring Jesus Back

There is an extreme sect of Christians who believe a WW3 must occur before the Messiah ( Jesus/Yesua ) returns. So they believe by supporting the war narrative they are actually doing a good thing to bring him back, but doesn't that technically means they are forcing God's hand and are actually doing something very, very bad ?? I believe that is the case. read on

Millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.

According to French President Chirac, Bush told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante said:

“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a moral cause”…

Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel – led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture. See this and this.


This all revolves around what is called Dispensationalism. So popular is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies.

Dispensationalists include the following mega-pastors and their churches:

Jerry Falwell

Pat Robertson

Billy Graham

They are supported by politicians such as:

Newt Gingrich

Joseph Lieberman

John McCain

Texas Senator John Cronyn

Former House Minority Whip Roy Blunt

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

And others

As professor emeritus of history Paul S. Boyer notes:

Abundant evidence makes clear that millions of Americans — upwards of 40 percent, according to some widely publicized national polls — do, indeed, believe that Bible prophecies detail a specific sequence of end-times events. According to the most popular prophetic system, premillennial dispensationalism … the Islamic world is allied against God and faces annihilation in the last days. That view is actually a very ancient one in Christian eschatology. Medieval prophecy expounders saw Islam as the demonic force whose doom is foretold in Scripture.

***

The prophecy magazine Midnight Call warmly endorsed a fierce attack on Islam by Franklin Graham (son of Billy) and summed up Graham’s case in stark terms: “Islam is an evil religion.” In Lindsey’s 1996 prophecy novel, “Blood Moon,” Israel, in retaliation for a planned nuclear attack by an Arab extremist, launches a massive thermonuclear assault on the entire Arab world. Genocide, in short, becomes the ultimate means of prophetic fulfillment.

Dr. Timothy Webber – an evangelical Christian who has served as a teacher of church history and the history of American religion at Denver Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL, and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in Tennessee – explains:

In a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of Americans said that since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been thinking more about how current events might be leading to the end of the world.

While only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God’s Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study,over one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.

Millions of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible’s prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They make up about one-third of America’s 40 or 50 million evangelical Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the 20th century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel’s best friends-an alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.

***

Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people who have never seen a prophetic chart or listened to a sermon on the second coming have read one or more novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most effective disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.

***

During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical religious leaders for free “familiarization” tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the Holy Land. The purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of even limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way of building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the United States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and see Israel’s story for themselves. The strategy caught on.

***

Shortly after the Six-Day War, elements within the Israeli government saw the potential power of the evangelical subculture and began to mobilize it as a base of support that could influence American foreign policy. The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalismand its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received by fundamentalistsand was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish state’s major lobbying group in Washington, D.C., started re-aligning itself with the American political right-wing, including Christian conservatives. Israel’s timing was perfect. It began working seriously with American dispensationalists at the precise moment that American fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering their political voice.

***

Probably the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a Jewish woman who learned how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI opposes “the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel.”

***

In their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists are supporting some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society. They do so because such political and religious elements seem to conform to dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups, dispensationalists are helping the future they envision come to pass.


***

Dispensationalists believe that the Temple is coming too; and their convictions have led them to support the aims and actions of what most Israelis believe are the most dangerous right-wing elements in their society, people whose views make any compromise necessary for lasting peace impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers in Bible prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the Temple Mount has already been determined by God.

Since the end of the Six-Day War, then, dispensationalists have increasingly moved from observers to participant-observers. They have acted consistently with their convictions about the coming Last Days in ways that make their prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.


***

As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has effectively conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the future and provided them with lenses through which to understand world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives of their Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.

***

For the dispensational community, the future is determined. The Bible’s prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing accuracy and rapidity. They do not believe that the Road Map will-or should-succeed. According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in Israel’s future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the best chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God’s plan for the end of the age.

***

It seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that its followers feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of God’s final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being on the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial to the game’s outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's] advertisement read, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can be part of it.”

Atheist War Hawks Manipulate Believers to Beat the Drums of War

Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.

Indeed, many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky – were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See thisand this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.) For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass. He is now a member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.

Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that:

A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured

(the quote is by one of Strauss’ main biographers).

Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:

“When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the same biographer)

Moreover, Strauss said:

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of “pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).

What does this have to do with religion?

Strauss taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.

As Wikipedia notes:

In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.

So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?

Conservative Christians were the biggest backers of the Iraq war. And the Neocons are catering to them to try to talk them into supporting war with Iran, as well.

I’ve recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim caliphate, and that they want to nuke Iran. They misquote Muslims and use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.

They are simply using the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment – even if you are personally an atheist – to create and demonize an “enemy”, to promote the war that you want to launch.

Not a Problem with a Particular Religion … But of Immaturity

Most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism. But many devout Jews are against Zionism, and Zionists can be Christian.

And as I’ve repeatedly noted, fundamentalist Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus are all very much alike, and often willing to use violence to spread their ideology … while more spiritually mature Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus are all much more tolerant and peaceful than their evangelical brothers:

As Christian writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck explained, there are different stages of spiritual maturity. Fundamentalism – whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu fundamentalism – is an immature stage of development. There are peaceful, contemplative Muslim sects – think the poet Rumi the poet and Sufis – and violent sects, just as there are contemplative Christian orders and violent Christian groups (and peaceful and violent atheists).

While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian Christian terrorist – Anders Behring Breivik’s actions.

University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

The 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. So they were not really Muslims.

And even atheists like Stalin can be terrorists, or at least genocidal maniacs.

Indeed, all religions teach compassion, love and the Golden Rule. Likewise, atheism teaches respect for the individual, the most good for the most people, and helping everyone reach their human potential.

Some within each philosophy follow these teachings, and others want to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with them. The issue is not really the label of this religion or that, but of maturity and true spirituality and compassion.

Source : http://www.globalresearch.ca/millions-of-evangelical-christians-want-to-start-world-war-iii-to-speed-up-the-second-coming/29362

Where do you stand ??

Are you for war or peace??

Share this with your Christian friends and ask them the same thing

Turkish couple feed thousands on their wedding day

Muslim couple from Turkey decided not to have guest but rather use the funds to help feed the innocent people who took shelter in turkey because of the mass rebellious factions determined to turn Syria into a blood bath. For a people suffering unjustly, I'm certain even if for a few hours they felt good to have a filled stomach for the night.

The Turkish couple may Allah grant them great blessings in this life and after and may their children be righteous and blessed for them and all people world wide

The story below

“I thought that sharing a big delicious dinner with our family and friends was unnecessary, knowing that there are so many people in need living next door,” he said, speaking to The Independent’s i100.co.uk.

“So I came up with this idea and shared it with my son. I’m very happy that he accepted it and they started their new happy journey with such a selfless action,” he added.

The family were helped out by the charity Kimse Yok Mu, who provided a tuck to provide the food to the refugees. All the members of the wedding reception pitched in, to help serve the meals to those in need. Hatice Avci, a spokesman for the charity, said that the couple had used the money they had received from their families to pay for all the food.

The bride was at first slightly surprised by the proposal by her now father-in-law, however, she soon came onboard and said it was a wonderful experience.

“I’m happy that we had the opportunity to share our wedding meal with the people who are in real need,” Polat said.

All good couples think alike, and her thoughts were shared by her husband.


SOURCE

Hope this story have brought inspiration and further faith in mankind and the good in mankind.

Peace be with you all.

comment and share your thoughts.

Albanian Muslims Saved Jews during WW2

Muslims putting their lives at risk to save Jews during Hitlers insanity in Europe.



The Persecution of the Jews has existed for thousands of years. This act in Europe was not the first and won't be the last. When hate is the core driving force that wishes to enforce it's way of life, then well most of us see the suffering globally.

Muslim's have had a very long history of living with Jews and Jews living amongst Muslims openly. This has been ongoing for thousand plus years as well. Interesting enough and very important to point out is that the Albanian Muslims did what history teaches us that a vast majority of Muslims did the same thing and that is gave a shelter to the displaced Jews, regardless of where they were forced to leave from.

The Albanian people did something that was truly heroic, by actually putting their own lives, even their own families as well. How much will does that take ? does anyone think even to tamper with a Nazi soldier, they took a major risk and many Jews live today because of their good deeds/action.

Iran second to only Israel in the region, has the next highest concentration of Jewish population. Hmmm and they want to do what to Jews ?? Never believe the lies about Iran's relationship with the Jewish identity for it existed for hundreds of years, before Iran was even Iran. The relationship is very deep amongst the communities.

Islam and the Quran are crucial to understanding how deep giving and sacrifice can lead to. The Jihad the Albanian Muslims was extra ordinarier, but to them it was a duty.

"Whoever saves a human life has saved the life of all mankind"(Quran S5:A32)

Source

Islamophobia on rise since Osama's Execution

Islamophobic tendencies have risen since the US decided to kill off the myth of Osama Bin Laden. BBC news reporter, Mishal Husain’s, children being racially abused in a supermarket is just another of the latest “acceptable forms of bigotry” left.

In America, the “USA, USA” chants have led to a rise in hate crimes against Muslims.

From having graffiti sprayed across Masajids, to having a teacher telling her student in front of a packed classroom that “You must be sad that they killed your uncle,” racist tendencies are beginning to peak yet again.

It’s not just the public who seem to have this problem, as evidenced when two Muslim religious leaders, on their way to a Charlotte conference on “Islamophobia,” were removed from a commercial flight because the pilot refused to fly with them on board.

You can see the irony, two people on their way to a conference to discuss Islamophobia, get stopped on their way, because of….Islamophobia.

It’s not exclusively America’s problem either.

Here, in the UK, Zonist smut peddler Richard Desmond’s Express got the ball rolling with crazed accusations that the police had seized a small container of “suspicious material” at one of the suspects’ homes.

Which of course turned out to be left over chicken curry in the fridge. True to form, there was no proportional coverage by the media of the men being released without charge.

Buried at the bottom of page 7 in a later issue of the Express we find a single paragraph which read:

“The five students who sparked an Al Qaeda terror alert near the Sellafield nuclear power station were there because of a satnav error. Rather than being terrorists avenging the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Bangladeshis from London were enjoying a picnic on Monday after putting CA20 in the satnav instead of CA12 for a hike on Scafell Pike, Cumbria, England’s highest peak. They were freed without charge.”

Right wing media and commentators alike must be responsible for their reporting, when you state:

“One down….1.8 billion to go”

Effectively calling for the wholesale slaughter of a fifth of the world’s population, then the wider community needs to do more to shut their extremists up, or is that a false charge that can only be attributed to Muslims?

When you have such irresponsible bile, it only leads to one conclusion, the neo-con inspired “Clash of Civilisations”, as can be described by last Friday’s events in London, with Anjem Choudry and his followers protest in front of the US Embassy.

But this is what we have come to expect from the right wing, Zionist owned, tabloid press.

They repeatedly boost the importance and significance of Anjem Choudary and his tiny group, suggesting to their readers that he represents substantial forces within Britain’s Muslim communities, when in reality he represents next to nothing.

This in turn feeds the paranoid far-right fantasies of the English Defence League, who organised a counter-protest against MAC yesterday. EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon recently predicted, with an entirely straight face, that “there’s going to be a hundred thousand Anjem Choudarys”.

We’re constantly told that now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, it’s a great victory for the “moderate” Muslims, it doesn’t seem to me that memo reached the racists out there.

After 9/11 & 7/7 there were huge attacks against Muslims, which one, if hard pressed can understand the retarded logic in.

But if you’ve succeeded in your mission to kill your #1 enemy, then why is it that Muslims are still being targeted?

Read more: http://www.mpacuk.org/story/090511/islamophobia-rise-osamas-execution.html#ixzz1Lus2FFNL

Muslim group asks FBI to investigate ‘KKK’ and swastika graffiti

The Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations is asking the FBI to investigate “KKK” and swastika graffiti on the home of Somali family in Rochester as a possible hate crime.

“We urge the FBI and state law enforcement authorities to treat this incident as a civil rights violation and to send a strong message that incidents of hate will not be tolerated in our community,” said Lori Saroya, CAIR’s Minnesota president.

The graffiti was written on the side of a home in northwest Rochester with black spray paint on Wednesday night.

“It’s kind of a scary thing to look at,” said Ayan Hilowle, 23, whose mother and father live with six children in the house. “In the beginning, we thought it was kids joking around, but this was a very hateful thing to do. It was like, ‘What’s next? Are they going to burn our house down?’”

Hilowle’s family moved to the United States from Somalia in 1996. They lived in Owatonna until 2004, then moved to Rochester. Hilowle said they’ve had some negative comments from people since moving to the U.S. but have encountered nothing like the recent vandalism.

Hilowle’s mother, Zainab Hassan, said that she would tell the vandals if she could that the family has been in the U.S. for 15 years and it’s their home now. “We’re not going anywhere,” she said.

Neighbors rallied around the family Thursday night, helping scrub the paint off the side of the house.

Saroya said her organization is reaching out to the Rochester Muslim community and will be conducting safety trainings and outreach sessions there.

Hilowle, who considers the spray paint vandalism a hate crime, said her family’s house has been targeted before.

In the first incident last fall, a woman threw a beer bottle from a passing vehicle at a car parked in the driveway and broke a window, Hilowle said. The house was shot by a paintball gun soon after, and a month later Hassan mother noticed slit marks in the mailbox. A police officer said the holes appeared to have been made by a knife, Hilowle said.

“They thought it was a knife because it was really sharp and it had a weird edge to it,” she said.

Shortly after the mailbox incident, the family found a strange set of footprints through the snow that led to a patio door. There was no sign anyone tried to enter the house, Hilowle said, but “it was like, ‘Who would creep up there in the middle of the night?’”

The house of Hilowle’s family was the only one hit by spray-paint vandalism in the area Wednesday night, said Rochester police Capt. Brian Winters. Police canvassed the neighborhood Thursday and looked for evidence, Winters said. It will take further investigation to conclude whether the vandalism incidents are connected, he said.

http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/2011/05/06/muslim-group-asks-fbi-to-investigate-kkk-and-swastika-graffiti/

Palestine and the Egyptian revolution: a view from Gaza

When I was asked by a solidarity activist about the impact of the end of the Mubarak regime on the Gaza Strip, my immediate answer was that it would definitely mean the end of the deadly siege that has been imposed on Gaza since 2006. Yet, we in Gaza are still waiting.

The deposed Egyptian regime made it its duty to make sure that the Palestinians of Gaza be kept within the walls of the Israeli-guarded concentration camp. The foreign minister of the former regime, Ahmed Abou Elgheit, in whose presence Israel's winter December 2008-January 2009 war on Gaza was symbolically declared by the presence in Cairo of his then Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni just days before the attack, became obsessed with "breaking the bones of those who trespass against Egypt's national security."

He was referring to the starving children, men and women of Gaza who, in an act of unprecedented heroism in January 2008, tore down the wall on the Egypt-Gaza border and flooded the streets of the Egyptian town of al-Arish to buy food, milk and medicine, and then went peacefully back to their homes. The old regime's spokespersons and political analysts shamelessly made it their duty to demonize Gazans in order to justify the closure of the Rafah Crossing, the only official border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Accusations of "terrorism,""vandalism" and "threats to national security" were thrown around.

So fearful of his Gazan neighbors was Egypt's ex-minister of interior Habib el-Adly, who is now behind bars, that he indulged in the hysterical charge that the recent popular Egyptian revolution was caused by "some Hamas infiltrators." The same ruthless minister had also accused Palestinians from Gaza of being behind the bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria on New Year's Eve, which killed 21 persons. Indeed now it is el-Adly himself, and Egypt's state security police, who are under suspicion and investigation of carrying out that and other sectarian attacks.

The Egyptian revolution has brought that political farce to an end. No one can deny that this uprising is a social revolution par excellence, one against corruption, despotism and tyranny. But this is Egypt after all, the heart of the Arab world, the pole of pan-Arabism. If Egypt revolts, then the Arab world holds its breath: the repercussions are immeasurable and will be felt for decades to come.

But Egypt itself is also "haunted" by the Palestinian question. One here tends to disagree with the prevailing view that the Tunisian revolution was the only catalyst inspiring the revolt in Egypt. This ahistorical approach ignores some social and geo-political facts about the cumulative nature of the factors leading to revolutions. The protests and strikes by workers at Mahalla undoubtedly played a crucial role in revolutionizing Egyptian consciousness, a consciousness that is known to be characterized by a very rich legacy of rebellions against oppression.

And the Mubarak regime relied heavily on tools of oppression provided by the United States. Not a single pro-democracy movement in the Arab world had been supported by the US, hence the confusion and contradictory statements made by US officials about the Egyptian revolution. It is, then, a revolution for democracy, personal and collective dignity, and against notorious levels of corruption and nepotism.

And yet, no matter how much the Mubarak regime and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority tried to silence and suppress the links of sympathy and affinity between the Palestinian and Egyptian peoples, these links have always been there.

And here is where I part company with those analysts who take the great Tunisian revolution as the catalyst behind the Egyptian uprising. When one-third of the Palestinian people -- those living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank -- went to the polling stations in 2006, and voted against the Oslo accords and the racist two-state solution, and against the deformed mini-Arab regime to be created by these accords, in what most international observers considered the most fair and transparent elections to take place in the Middle East, bringing Hamas into office, questions were raised about the long-held orientalist idea of the incompatibility of democracy with Arab culture.

In a revealing climb-down from his June 2009 Cairo speech, US President Barack Obama has since spoken of democracy without ever affirming the right of the Palestinians to freely choose their leaders. But more serious debates and soul-searching questions had started in the Arab world itself, especially in the surrounding countries: if Palestinians, under occupation, could vote freely, why not us, then?

Needless to say, the outcome of the 2006 Palestinian elections was not what Israel, the US and their Arab allies were hoping for. Hence the imposition of an unprecedented tight siege on Gaza, out of existential fear of the spread of real democracy a la Latin America -- a democracy in which people are free to elect parties whose ideologies do not necessarily coincide with US and Israeli interests.

The fiercest rejection came from so-called "moderate" Arab regimes headed by the deposed Egyptian government. Israel decided to close the six gates to Gaza, and the Egyptian regime followed suit by closing Rafah, the only exit Gaza has to the external world. This blockade has, so far, caused the death of more than 600 terminally-ill individuals whose lives could have been saved had they been allowed entry into Egypt, not to mention the devastation it has caused to Gaza society and economy in so many ways.

But the siege failed to force the Palestinians of the Gaza open-air prison to surrender, leading Israel to launch the genocidal war that was foreshadowed by Livni's presence in the heart of Cairo. None of the objectives of the war were achieved, to the dismay of "moderate" Arab regimes.

After the war, Egypt began to build with American supervision a monstrous underground steel wall blocking tunnels beneath the border, the only lifeline Palestinians of Gaza managed to create.

Attempts by the Egyptian regime to cover its collusion with Israel and the US were, alas, supported by the Palestinian leaderships' acceptance to start endless rounds of national dialogue in Cairo, again, sponsored by the Egyptian government. The failure of the Palestinian leaderships of all factions to dissociate themselves from the Egyptian regime and stick to the demands of the Palestinians of Gaza by declaring that, after the end of the war on Gaza, any national dialogue should be held in Gaza as long as it is under siege, helped, indirectly, to prolong the Egyptian regime's life.

This is a reflection of the elitist nature -- not to say short-sightedness -- of the Palestinian leaderships with their long-held belief that ties with regimes, rather than popular forces and civil society, are the way forward. Hence the suppression of all signs of solidarity with the Egyptians in both Ramallah and Gaza in the early days of the revolution.

The Mubarak regime did not only close the Rafah crossing and erect the Wall of Shame, but also prevented any sign of solidarity and support coming from international solidarity activists determined to break the siege. The Viva Palestina convoy and the Gaza Freedom March were treated brutally by Egyptian security.

The only way for some supporters to reach Gaza was by sea, and nine Turkish activists lost their lives as a result of the cold-blooded massacre committed by Israel last May aboard the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

But the question raised was about Egypt's indirect responsibility: had the crossing been open for all, those nine precious lives would have been saved. The massacre led to the Egyptian decision to "partially" open the Rafah gate without ending the siege altogether. This step, ironically, coincided with Israel's decision to "ease" the blockade by allowing more Swiss chocolate into Gaza!

The Egyptian people, with their lively grassroots movements, youth, syndicates and unions watched helplessly and with dismay as their Palestinian brethren endured a siege that UN Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, described as "a prelude to genocide," with the complicity -- if not direct participation -- of the Egyptian regime. But they also saw Palestinian steadfastness in the face of this assault.

The Egyptian regime's complicity undoubtedly played a crucial role in radicalizing Egyptian consciousness. The catalytic nature of Mubarak's collusion with Israeli oppression has, for understandable reasons, been ignored by mainstream media. The concept of dignity, collective and personal, as we grew up understanding it, was inspired by the fiery sayings of the late Egyptian revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser after the 1952 revolution against a corrupt monarch, King Farouk, and his allies, British colonialism.

The slogan "Raise your head, brother, for the age of subjugation is over," formed not only modern Egyptian consciousness and sense of national dignity, but that of the entire Arab world, in general, and of Palestinians in particular. Moreover, Palestine, for most Egyptians, is part of Egypt's national psyche, a deep wound that is yet to heal, in spite of all the babble about "peace" and "reconciliation," a fundamental part of the national self.

That, however, was supposed to change with former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's gamble -- the 1979 peace treaty with Israel -- that left Egypt firmly in the American camp. Official Egyptian discourse laid the blame for many of Egypt's problems at the door of Palestinians, hence the unprecedented maltreatment of Palestinians, Gazans in particular, at the hands of Egypt's notorious state security. No wonder, then, that the last decision taken by the deposed government was to ban all Palestinians from entering Egypt.

Now the question that begs for an answer is about the future of the Egyptian-Palestinian relationship. The Rafah Crossing is "partially" open for a few passengers but no goods, food or medicine are allowed. Some Palestinians are turned back every day, and the decision taken by the previous government not to grant Gazans entry via Cairo airport is still in force. The sentiment on the streets of Palestine has, naturally, been supportive of the revolutions in the Arab world and this is in spite of the position taken by the two controlling parties in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to ban all solidarity demonstrations.

Radical change in Egypt should mean radical change in Palestine as well: a pro-Palestine Egypt should mean the end of the siege. But when will we see that? Is it too much to ask? Do we have to "understand" the difficulties the new rulers of Egypt have to deal with, while we are starving and still besieged in Gaza? If this is the case, why do we, Palestinians of Gaza, have to pay the price? Are all other Egyptian crossings and border posts "partially" open like the Rafah gate? And are we, by posing such questions, still considered "a threat to Egypt's national security?"

Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza's al-Aqsa University and a policy advisor with Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11874.shtml

Australia fears Israeli military strike on Iran: cables

SYDNEY — Australian intelligence agencies fear Israel may launch a military strike on Iran to knock out its nuclear facilities, which they said could lead to nuclear war, leaked US diplomatic cables showed on Monday.

Secret cables from the US embassy in Canberra, provided exclusively to The Sydney Morning Herald by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, reveal that Australian officials raised the issue with their allies on several occasions.

“The AIC’s (Australian intelligence community’s) leading concerns with respect to Iran’s nuclear ambitions centre on understanding the timeframe of a possible weapons capability, and working with the United States to prevent Israel from independently launching uncoordinated military strikes against Iran,” an embassy official wrote to Washington in March 2009.

“They are immediately concerned that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities would lead to a conventional war — or even nuclear exchange — in the Middle East involving the United States that would draw Australia into a conflict.”

Another cable sent four months earlier reported on Australian concerns about a unilateral Israeli military strike against Iran and “the likelihood of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities”.

The leaked letters also reveal that Australian intelligence agencies see Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a strategy to deter foreign attacks and argue it would be wrong to view Iran as a “rogue state”, the newspaper said.

The cables were prompted by a US initiative to solicit responses to Washington possibly engaging Tehran in a security dialogue, and concluded that Australia would likely not object to the United States if it chose to do so.

The correspondence shows that the Australian government, under both former prime minister Kevin Rudd and his successor Julia Gillard, is generally supportive of Israel.

Source : http://www.khaleejtimes.com/displayarticle.asp?xfile=data/international/2010/December/international_December490.xml§ion=international&col=

In our modern societies, preemptive war acts cannot be accepted and any attacks done by Israel should be condemned by the world. Israel cannot bully it's neighbors over allegations and illegitimate factual evidence. It's clear Iran is following what they are asked in regards to the inspections, yet they still get accused of ill doing.

Israel must not take such a bold step, the world can change and peace can be achieved through other means then war.

War is never the answer unless in defense, defending against occupiers.

Collapse in Living Standards in America: More Poverty By Any Measure 15 million unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities

More than 15 million Americans are unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities, and 38 million people are receiving food stamps, more than at any time in the program’s almost 50-year history.


Evidence of rising economic hardship is ample. There’s one commonly used standard for measuring it: the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty rate. It guides much of federal and state spending aimed at helping those unable to make a decent living.

But a number of states have become convinced that the federal figures actually understate poverty, and have begun using different criteria in operating state-based social programs. At the same time, conservative economists are warning that a change in the formula to a threshold that counts more people as poor could lead to an unacceptable increase in the cost of federal and state social service programs.

When Census publishes new numbers for 2009 in September, experts predict they’ll show a steep rise in the poverty rate. One independent researcher estimates the data will show the biggest year-to-year increase in recorded history.

According to Richard Bavier, a former analyst for the federal Office of Management and Budget, already available data about employment rates, wages, and food stamp enrollment suggest that an additional 5.7 million people were officially poor in 2009. That would bring the total number of people with incomes below the federal poverty threshold to more than 45 million. The poverty rate, Bavier expects, will hit 15 percent — up from 13.2 percent in 2008, when the Great Recession first started to take its toll.

Still, the U.S. Census Bureau’s new numbers will offer only a partial picture of how the nation’s sputtering economy is affecting the poorest Americans — a problem state officials and the Obama administration want to address.

Overestimating food costs

The current formula for setting the federal poverty line — unchanged since 1963 — takes the cost of food for an individual or family and multiplies the number by three, under the assumption that people spend one-third of their incomes putting meals on the table. While the formula may have been a good way to estimate a subsistence cost of living in the early 1960s, experts say food now represents only one-eighth of a typical household budget, with expenses such as housing and child care putting increasing pressure on struggling families.

In addition, the official measure fails to account for regional differences in the cost of housing, it doesn’t include medical expenses or transportation, and at $22,000 for a family of four, the poverty line is considered by many to be simply too low.

Equally worrisome for policy makers is the Census Bureau’s failure to consider in-kind federal and state aid in calculating income. The existing formula counts only pre-tax cash income, leaving out such benefits as food stamps, housing vouchers and child-care subsidies, as well as federal and state tax credits for the working poor.

As a result, the nation’s official poverty count is unaffected by the billions spent on safety-net programs. Yet it remains by far the most frequently used measurement of how well governments are taking care of their most vulnerable citizens.

Conservatives have consistently argued that if safety-net programs were taken into account, the poverty rate would be much lower. At the same time, advocates for the poor have argued that poverty counts would be much higher if the cost of housing, child care and other expenses were factored in.

Nearly two decades ago, Congress asked the National Academies of Science (NAS) to revisit the official poverty measure and come up with recommendations for a new measure that would satisfy critics on both ends of the spectrum.

This past March, the Obama administration said it would use the NAS 1995 guidelines to update the federal government’s poverty calculation and promised to unveil the first new “supplemental poverty measure” in September of 2011.

“The new supplemental poverty measure will provide an alternative lens to understand poverty and measure the effects of anti-poverty policies,” Under Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank said. “Moreover, it will be dynamic and will benefit from improvements over time based on new data and new methodologies.”

Under the NAS recommendations, Commerce Department expenditure data for food, clothing, shelter and other household expenses would be used to set a poverty threshold for a reference family of four — two adults and two children. Then a family or individual’s resources would be compared to that line by including income and in-kind benefits, with taxes and other non-discretionary expenses, such as medical expenses and child care, excluded.

Because many expect the new calculation will result in a higher poverty count, the March announcement met with fiery criticism from some conservatives who charged the federal government could ill afford to increase its safety-net spending.

State experiments

But state and local policy makers applauded the move because they said it would give them the tools they need to assess the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs.

In New York City, for example, where an NAS-type poverty measure was adopted three years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the new data would allow the city to pinpoint who needs assistance most and which of the city’s social services have been most effective at improving its residents’ standard of living

Using an updated measurement, New York City found that children — the recipients of a broad range of social welfare programs — were less poor than originally thought, while elders, who were struggling with previously unaccounted for medical expenses, were poorer.

As states become increasingly challenged by shrinking revenues and rising numbers of people in need, more than a dozen have set up commissions to help low-income families and many have set poverty reduction goals.

Among them, Minnesota and Connecticut have used NAS-like formulas to assess the effectiveness of current and proposed anti-poverty measures.

With technical assistance from the public policy research group The Urban Institute, both states used the results to support aggressive anti-poverty campaigns. Minnesota has a Legislative Commission to End Poverty in Minnesota by 2020, and Connecticut created a Child Poverty and Prevention Council with the goal of cutting child poverty in half by 2014.

Connecticut found only a slight increase in the number of people living in poverty when using the updated calculation — 21,000 people in 2006, compared to 20,000 using the existing Census measure.

But it got very different results when determining which public assistance programs did the most to reduce poverty. Under previous assumptions, child care subsidies and adult education and job training were seen as the most highly effective at moving people out of poverty over time. But the new formula showed that increasing enrollment in programs such as food stamps, energy assistance and subsidized housing was a more effective way to reduce child poverty in the near term. As a result, the state redoubled its outreach efforts to sign up as many low-income families as possible for these federally-funded programs.

In Minnesota, where the results were similar, a bipartisan legislative committee recommended the state refine its definition of poverty, build public awareness, and carefully monitor the impact of all major legislation on existing anti-poverty programs.

Both states joined 12 others earlier this year in calling on the federal government to adopt an NAS-like formula that would “consider the increased financial burden of housing, child care, and health care on the modern American family while recognizing the benefit of critical work supports such as tax credits, food stamps, and other non-cash subsidies.”

The administration’s supplemental poverty measure remains controversial, and some leaders on both ends of the political spectrum are urging Congress and the administration not to adopt the new formula for purposes of allocating federal funding or determining individual eligibility anytime soon.

If used to parse federal grants among states, it could radically change the amount of money each state receives. It stands to reason, for example, that a family of four trying to make it on $22,000 would have an easier time in rural Alabama than they would in suburban Massachusetts. And should the new measure be used to set individual eligibility for safety net programs, some are fearful that current recipients would be disqualified if all of their federal and state benefits were counted.

For the Obama administration, the Census Bureau’s current measure is problematic because it will fail to show the benefits of at least $100 billion in 2009 stimulus money spent for low-income families. Even so, as those direct subsidies and other job-creating federal funds are phased out, advocates expect the poverty rate will shoot up again next year, when the data is in for 2010.

Contact Christine Vestal at cvestal@stateline.org

Global Research Articles by Christine Vestal

Corpulent Country: Obesity in the USA

"Over the past three decades, obesity has been recognized as a public health problem in America. Yet despite much publicity, talk, and effort, a recent report claims that obesity rates jumped in 28 states. The CDC has reported that America is home to the most obese people in the world. On June 29, ABC's Nightline (or should I write 'Nightlie'?) aired a piece on the problem during which one of its 'investigative' reporters cited about a half-dozen 'theories' that have been suggested by 'experts' to explain the problem. Unfortunately, all were hocus, even though its cause is easy to discern. To find it, like finding the causes of most American social problems, one merely has to follow the money.

A long time ago, the processed food industry discovered that fat, salt, and sugar enhanced the flavor of their products, and flavorful products, as opposed to bland ones, are not only much easier to sell, they are addictive and cheap to make. The processed food industry swelled with bloat. The amount of money made is gigantic. No one cared whether people were being made unhealthy."Corpulent Country: Obesity in the USA:

US Ambassador wife to Afghanistan fell in love with Kabul.

As the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan comes under fire, his wife, Ching Eikenberry, says she’s grown to love her life in Kabul—and writes about the Afghanistan that few Americans see.

Generals and diplomats come and go, armies attack and inevitably retreat, insiders indulge in political intrigue. But Afghanistan remains its indomitable, ornery self. There is much more to the hard-scrabble, poverty-stricken and largely illiterate country than the latest media firestorm—which is why The Daily Beast invited Ching Eikenberry, wife of U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry, to share her perspective.

***

When Karl was picked by President Obama to be the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan in January, 2009, we both were extremely honored. At the time, Karl was a career Army officer serving our country as the Deputy Chairman of the Military Committee at NATO headquarters in Brussels; I was a freelance journalist who had been following this man, to whom I said “I do” decades ago, wherever in the world his career took him.

I never thought I would come to a war-torn Afghanistan and gain a family here. But this is what has happened.

Being a Chinese-American, I have often said I have two mothers: Mother China gave me life and Mother America gave me soul. Coming to the United States in the late 1960s, I witnessed the greatness of this country, its democracy and liberty available to all. So when my husband accepted the nomination, I raised my hand to accompany him and became the first ambassador’s spouse to live in Kabul since the fall of Taliban.

Before we departed for Afghanistan, I said goodbye to our families and updated my will. I told our two grown daughters that, should something happen to me, they shouldn’t grieve but instead burn red candles to celebrate my life. “You can take my daughter to Afghanistan, but bring us back bin Laden,” my 88-year-old mother told Karl in Mandarin.

“Mom, he is not a soldier now!” I reminded her.

“I know,” Mom said, winking. “But I don’t like bin Laden.”

According to State Department policy, spouses of those assigned to Kabul can accompany their mates if they are hired as an “Eligible Family Member.” As a former journalist, I was allowed to work in the Public Affairs office at USAID, and my life suddenly swung from living in leisurely European contentment to an intense war-fighting environment. But as a colleague said, “We don’t come to Afghanistan for comfort.”

The work in the U.S. Embassy is enormously demanding. We grew from an embassy of around 300 Americans to over 1,000 in just a few months, and we are constantly building and expanding to accommodate the mounting needs.

It didn’t take long for me to discover that Karl actually has two jobs: One is Kabul, one is Washington, and I am constantly brewing coffee in the kitchen for him at one or two in the morning while he is on the phone with Washington, watching his once-dark brown hair turn grayer by the week.

In other ways, too, life has changed. This is the first time since our two daughters left home that we’ve had such a full house. We have turned our living room into a dining hall, and the kitchen constantly cooks up breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and numerous Afghan tea shuras for our steady stream of visitors.

I never thought I would come to a war-torn Afghanistan and gain a family here. But this is what has happened. Among the family members are Jawid, resident manager, Jamshid, the chef, and Hassan, the housekeeper.

“KoKo” Hassan has earned his title—uncle—because of his age and seniority. He has served five ambassadors, and is an honest, diligent, dependable man. His thin, white hair and missing teeth make him look much older than the age he claims, which is closer to 50.

When we moved to Afghanistan, I brought the book, Obama, the Historic Journey, figuring our Afghan friends would be interested to learn more about our new president. As I was taking the book out of the box, Koko Hassan walked by.

“Do you know who this person is?” I asked him.

“Yes, he is Mr. Obama.”

Read More

Muslim Students No Terrorists: UK Court

CAIRO — A British court has quashed terrorism charges against five Muslim students accused of downloading "extremist" materials, the Guardian reported on Thursday, February 14.
"The basis upon which the appellants were convicted is shown to have been unsound," the Court of Appeal ruled.

The Muslim students were arrested in July 2006 on charges of downloading "extremist" materials and were sentenced to between two and three years in prison.

The prosecution claimed they had been "intoxicated" by extremism and were planning to go to Pakistan for training before fighting in Afghanistan.

The students denied the charges, saying they were researching ideology, including visiting websites about violence.

The students were prosecuted under section 57 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, which makes it an offence to have books or items inciting terrorism.

The appeal court said the prosecution's case against the Muslim students was weak.

"While they lent support to the prosecution case that the appellants had formed a plan to go to Pakistan to train and then to Afghanistan to fight, there was nothing that evidenced expressly the use, or intention to use, the extremist literature to incite each other to do this."

The ruling was the first to be quashed by the court of appeal since Washington's so-called "war on terror" in 2001.

The Home Office said it would study the ruling carefully.

Nightmare

Usman Malik, one of the student, said his arrest had made his life a hell.

"The last 18 months have been worse than a nightmare," he said through his lawyer, denying charges of supporting violence.

"I was away from home for the first time when I was arrested and accused of being a terrorist.

"I was never a terrorist and have never supported violence."

Imran Khan, the lawyer of student Aitzaz Zafar, said young Muslims seeking to explore the world of their religion should no longer be victimized.

"My client is over the moon. He says it is surreal and cannot see why he has spent the last two years in prison for looking at material which he had no intention of using for terrorism," he said.

"Young people should not be frightened of exploring their world."

The Muslim Council of Britain, the umbrella representation body of British Muslims, has complained that some Muslims are being criminalized under the draconian anti-terror measures in Britain for "silly thoughts."

British Muslims, estimated at nearly two million, have been in the eye of storm since the July 2005 bombings, which killed 56 people, including four Muslim bombers.

The sizable minority has vehemently condemned all terrorist attacks and offered full cooperation with police.

A recent Populus survey found a whooping 98 percent of British Muslims would feel shame if a family member decided to join Al-Qaeda.

Read more: Islam online

Friedman Wrong About Muslims Again

Tom Friedman is a Middle East expert who knows a lot about Islam. Why, then, does he keep saying misleading things? He wrote in his latest column, "To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden."

A "fatwa" is simply a considered opinion of a Muslim jurisconsult. Such opinions are numerous. First of all, almost all the major Shiite Grand Ayatollahs have condemned Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. You could say that is easy, since Shiites don't generally like Wahhabis. But they are the leaders of 120 million Muslims (some ten percent of the 1.2 billion). So that is one. Tracking these things down is time-consuming, but this should do:
Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah of Lebanon condemns Osama Bin Laden.

So then what about the Sunni world? The leading moral authority for Sunnis is the rector or Grand Imam of the al-Azhar Seminary/ University in Cairo, Egypt. Al-Azhar is perhaps the world's oldest continuous university and has been since the time of Saladin a major center of Sunni religious authority. The current incumbent is Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi. So what about Tantawi and Bin Laden?

Grand Imam of Al-Azhar seminary, Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, condemns Osamah Bin Laden. And:

The Grand Imam of al-Azhar Seminary, Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, condemns Osamah Bin Laden.

What about Pakistan? Admittedly, it has some clerics who are fans of Bin Laden, or at least who would avoid condemning him. But the allegation Friedman is making is that no major cleric has condemned him. Try this: Prominent Pakistani Cleric Tahir ul Qadri condemns Bin Laden.

I don't personally care for Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is an old-time Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood preacher who fled to Qatar and now has a perch at al-Jazeera. But he does have some virtues. He is enormously popular among Muslim fundamentalists. And, he absolutely despises Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Al-Qaradawi has repeatedly condemned the latter. He even gave a fatwa that it was a duty of Muslims to fight alongside the US in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda! See also:
Yusuf al-Qaradawi condemns al-Qaeda.

There are also substantial Muslim communities in Europe with leaderships that have explicitly condemned Bin Laden. E.g.:

Spanish Muslim Clerical authorities Issue Fatwa against Osamah Bin Laden. There are on the order of 250,000 Muslims in Spain.

High Mufti of Russian Muslims calls for Extradition of Bin Laden. The Russian Muslim community is about 20 million strong, or 15 percent of Russia's 143 million population, and is growing rapidly, so that in a century Russia may be 50 percent Muslim. So this is not a pro forma thing here.

A good round-up on this sort of issue has been put up by al-Muhajabah.

See also Charles Kurzman's page.

Friedman also does refer to a major conference of Muslim clerics, thinkers and notables wound up just Wednesday that made a powerful statement about religious tolerance and condemned everything Osama Bin Laden stands for. But he seems oddly unaware of the significance of having Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Grand Imam of al-Azhar Seminary Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, and many other great Muslim authorities sign off on this epochal statement of Muslim ecumenism.

The statement forbids one Muslim to declare another "not a Muslim" if the believer adheres to any of the mainstream legal rites of Sunnism and Shiism. The whole basis of al-Qaeda is to call the Muslim leaders of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as Shiites, "not Muslims." The statement also demands that engineers should please stop pretending to issue fatwas, which should be left to trained clerical jurisconsults. This para. is also a slam at Bin Laden.

PS As for Friedman's main point, that Muslims haven't done a good job of fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism, it is bizarre. The Algerian government fought a virtual civil war to put down political Islam, in which over 100,000 persons died. The Egyptians jailed 20,000 or 30,000 radicals for thought crimes and killed 1500 in running street battles in the 1990s and early zeroes. Al-Qaeda can't easily strike in the Middle East precisely because Syria, Egypt, Algeria, etc. have their number and have undertaken massive actions against them. What does Friedman want? And, besides, he is wrong that this is only a Muslim problem. In the global age all problems are everybody's. That's part of flat world, too, Tom. SourceInformed Comment

Islam, Europe and the Political Elite

The European elections draw closer, but we have very few real political choices. It seems to me that Islam, Europe and extreme left all share the same warped values and are determined to force them upon us — whether we want them or not. And whatever party we vote for, citizens seem to get the very same soul-destroying policies with only a slightly different wrapper!

Take the issue of democracy, for example. Islam, the European Union and our political elite all declare their support for freedom of speech — but what they really mean is they support leftist speech. What they really mean is that anything they don’t agree with is not “free speech” but “hate speech” — and this subterfuge allows them to act claiming they are “protecting society” from racism, xenophobia or hate-mongers. So whether we vote Labour, Liberal, Conservative, Green or UKIP we will always get the same! More immigration, more Islamization, more European interference and less and less freedom to decide what we really want.

Islam, the European Union and our political elite all share the same values — they all despise fairness, democracy and justice. Today, Tories as well as Labour, Liberal and the other mainstream parties claim they are “centrist” parties, but this thin wrapper of respectability covers a dangerous neo-Marxist core which lies at the centre of mainstream politics today. Our political elites, whatever the colour of their political wrapper, truly believe that only they are worthy to be the true judges of fairness, justice and law. So when such “liberals” (of whatever party) win an election it is declared “fair”; yet if they lose one it must be due to “xenophobic elements”, “racists”, “fascists” or similar antisocial types sabotaging their rightful inheritance.


Muslims, the European Union and our political elites all wrap themselves in the cloak of liberalism, equality and fairness — but underneath, they all share the same contempt for citizens, abhorrence of duty to their constituents and loathing for the democratic process; they all hate anyone who disagrees with them. The EU, for example, learning in a poll that 60 percent of European citizens (as well as 60 percent of Turks) were against Turkey joining the EU — decided to speed up the process and keep it quiet so as not to attract the attention of citizens. And as you know, this is only one example in many ongoing acts of contempt by the EU for its own citizens.

Muslims, the European Union and modern, left-wing elitist politicians have indoctrinated themselves to believe in their own superiority. They think of themselves so much, and so often, that the idea anyone could hold opposing views seems somehow ridiculous. Likewise, Islam believes, and has always believed, it is above all other religions and openly says so in the Qur’an. And such supremicism easily leads to the justification of violence and hatred for non-Muslims as European political elitism has led to an institutionalized contempt for EU citizens.

The EU believes it has a destiny to implement its vision of a united, federal Europe where the leftist elite sit at the helm dispensing equality, freedom and justice for all. They must do this irrespective of “wrong” referendum results and “meaningless” opinion polls because European citizens are too short-sighted to “see the big picture”, and benefits which will clearly be reaped by all!

Our elitist leaders believe that only they have “nuanced” beliefs and the “insight” necessary to see the true value of a “cosmopolitan society”. They alone have the vision to move beyond outdated ideas like nationalism, patriotism, and religious conflicts. In other words, only the European Union, the United Nations and the leftist elite are intellectual enough to hold objective truths. And that is why the mainstream media is right to accept their truth whilst rejecting “divisive” and “inflammatory” talk and ideas which differ from their utopian ideals.

Today, criticism of Islam, the EU and the leftist dream is treated as heresy — an attack on the very identity of the listener. And our political elites treat any such criticism with the contempt it deserves.

Anyone who challenges them, the EU or Islam does not even warrant a well argued counterargument since such ideas are so “obviously false”. There is clearly “something wrong” with the people who criticize them… so they must be xenophobic, hate-mongers or perhaps just ignorant.

I hope people will learn that a vote for Labour, Liberal Greens or Conservatives is simply a vote for the very same rotten policies in a different coloured wrapper.

Now is the time to use your vote to cause an impact, to send shudders down the spines of the political elitists and Islam-appeasing parties currently ruling over us — treating us as mindless, powerless pawns.

Source:

Mohammad (pbuh) the Praise worthy

Mohammad, the seal of all of God's Messengers and Prophets.

He preached the religion of Adam, Noah, Abraham, moses, Jesus (pbut),
He founded a state
He built a nation
He laid down a moral code
He applies social and political reforms
He established a powerful dynamic society
He helped reform society
His teachings are practice and represented by a billion and half people world wide
He completely revolutionized the arab culture.
He gave of human thought and behavior for all times to come.

"His Name is MUHAMMAD" which translates to the Praise worthy.
May Peace of God Be Upon Him (pbuh) Source

In Malta Tourists are welcome (but not them Muslims)

a couple of scores of Muslim men gathered on the Sliema front. They were not being rowdy, they weren't drinking and they weren't swearing. All they had as props were some prayer rugs. Because, in fact, they were only interested in praying together. And they had a police permit to do so.

You would think, Malta being a free democratic country, that this would be a totally non-news event. Bzzz. Wrong answer - not with the racist hysteria gripping the island. For this whole week it's been the most read, most commented and most e-mailed article. Some of the comments to this simple gathering are truly alarming, chilling almost:

"Malta is a Catholic country. They have no right to come here and pray in front of us. I don't care what they do in the privacy of their own home, but not here."

"They should go to a mosque. That is where they belong. Or in some hole somewhere. But not here where I get my children to eat and have a good time."

"I would have had no problem if they were Catholics praying... in Malta we are all Catholics, so it's not a problem, but not them."

"If this happens again there will be trouble."

"I bet that their next step will be to make us remove our icons/crosses and statues from our streets or from schools."

"The authorities should never have given permission, much less protection, at the cost of the Maltese taxpayer."

"This is clear case of arrogance by a small group of men."

I'm sorry? Arrogance? Arrogant was the woman who insisted on walking her dog in front of them, twice. The comments get harsher and harsher. You would think that these men were planning a coup d'etat rather than reciting their Qur'an, or that their prayer beads were weapons of mass destruction.

The reaction, were it not in the context of our society's dark skin paranoia, would have been perplexing. These men simply prayed and then went their way: "We are not here to protest or threaten violence but to express our fundamental human right to gather in prayer," one of the leaders, Bader Zina, said.

They resorted to the Sliema front because the Planning Authority sealed off the Sliema flat where they normally gathered as it did not have a licence to be used as a place of worship. Fair enough. But then, they have every right to get a permit and hit the front.

It's not as if it's never been done before by religious groups. Didn't that touchy-feely, hand-clappy charismatic Edward Spiteri guy and his followers hog the Birzebbuga front for summer weekends on end?

Religion is being used as a poor excuse, a cover-up if you want, for racism. Yet again, the Catholic leaders have chosen to remain silent on the matter. They who should be encouraging the embracing of different religions, they who should be at the forefront of promoting tolerance and acceptance, they who should be reminding all and sundry that Christ after all said 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'

Where is the Church when it needs to voice its disapproval of this unacceptable prejudice? More on this

Message from Musa Sadulayev. Chechnya Iam with you

For more than a month I was at home in Chechnya, first I was ill and then I was nursing my son who had influenza, so I had no opportunity to check up e-mail. Only yesterday, having received all mail for 3-4 weeks, in total more than 160 messages, I was surprised to learn that the radicals during this time had carried out so much work to attract attention to the genocide happening in Chechnya. I can't call in other way what the federal army does in my land. Because it isn't considered a crime to kidnap a peaceful civilian and then for a big sum to sell to his relatives his corpse with traces of violent death (having bragged beforehand in the Russian mass-media about one more killed field commander). As it isn't considered a crime to fire at peace houses from sub-machine guns, grenade discharger cups, mortars. Anyway, I'm not aware of any fact of punishment of a criminal for similar act. And there is a lot of facts when criminal proceedings aren't instituted for above mentioned crimes.

Also I was surprised to learn that our party comrade and colleague Olivier Dupuis had been fasting for more than 2 weeks to protest against the war in Chechnya and attracted thus to the Chechen problem the attention of many international politicians who after monstrous acts of terrorism of last September 11 preferred not to speak about my republic and thus untied the hands to the Kremlin. With great pleasure I'll join the initiative "Two days of the world hunger-strike for Chechnya". Not only me. My brothers Havazh (43 years), Rezaudi (42), Magomed (38) Sadulayev, and also my friends Aslan Zugayev (34), Mamed Khazhmuradov (34) and Selima Gapayeva (29). Though only our familiars and neighbours will know about our action, we consider it our duty to join the mass two-day hunger-strike from March 12 till March 14, against the war in our republic. It is a pity that I learned about this action only in the evening on March 11. I'm sure that there could be much more people wishing to take part in it.

Since the end of 1994, a genocide has been carried out against all inhabitants of Chechnya, the leaders of Russia call it an antiterrorist operation. It isn't known the exact death-roll and the number of disappeared among the peace population during this period. Official figures of the lost Russian militarians cause doubts. But even official figures frighten. It's more than three thousand death notifications in Russian houses during the last military campaign. There are more than 10 thousand mutilated and wounded. But the tears of victims of these two wars don't reach the Kremlin leaders, and they lack courage to repent of their sins and to stop a senseless war. But if all of us who take a sober look at what is happening, don't say "no" to the war - there won't be an end.

The people of Chechnya is tired of what is happening. Federal forces every day carry out the so-called sweeping-ups throughout Chechnya, accompanied by beatings, tortures, murders and plundering of peaceful population. Especially it happens in mountain and foothill regions of Chechnya. It's villages Alleroy, Tsotsan-Yurt, Kurchaloy, Stariye Atagi, Noviye Atagi, Chechen-Aul, Urus-Martan, Assinovskaya, Sernovodskaya, Samashki, Achkhoy-Martan, Argun, Shali, Vedeno... Speaking about all these evil deeds, the representatives of the command of federal army say that everything occurs within the framework of the Russian law. I'm not a lawyer, nevertheless I know that there is no law in the world allowing to taunt the arrested person, to torture with electro-shock, to cut off ears from alive person, to hold a person waist-deep in ice water (in order that he have no posterity - as militarians themselves said), to organize lynching and to hide carefully the traces of their actions.

In Grozny and in other settlements of Chechnya there is a lot of places where presumably the burial places are. But it's problematic and unsafe to carry out excavations and identification of bodies, because the militarians at once "find" in these places mines which are to be neutralized only by exploding them on the place, after that no corpses can be found there. Such fact took place last year in Oktyabrsky district of Grozny, near the military commandant's office.

And it would be a long story about what is happening on the Chechen roads, especially on the road from Rostov to Baku. But I'll tell a short story from my own experience. I had to spend 120 roubles in order to get from Sleptsovskaya (Ingushetia) to Assinovskaya (Chechnya) and back. The distance is no more than 20 kms. No soldier on my way would let me pass without having received "one tum" (ten roubles). Thousand people pass there every day. So it isn't surprising that having received a "tum", the soldier asked to change small coin for big notes which he got enough during the day. And these people officially enforce the order in our land, struggle with terrorism.

It is impossible to write shortly in one letter about everything happening in Chechnya. But in order that the events in our republic be not judged in the world by official propaganda of Mr. Yastrzhembsky, by the statements of Mr. Rogozin-headed Russian delegation in the PACE, and many mass-media controlled by the Kremlin, all of us as far as possible must inform the public about the essence of the arbitrariness occurring in Chechnya. Only reminding to all the world that the war in Chechnya isn't the lesser grief than the explosions of September 11, we'll be able to compel somehow the contradictory parties to sit down to the negotiating table. Otherwise the bloodshed will never stop.

And in conclusion I'd like to express my gratitude to all those who grieves over my republic and my people. At the same time I earnestly ask Olivier Dupuis whom I respect so much, to stop his indefinite hunger-strike. You did much more than all the politicians together who speak much about human rights and at the same time indifferently look how every day innocent people are killed in Chechnya, thousands of people three years live in canvas tents in Ingushetia, they are ill with hepatitis, tuberculosis, other diseases and have no means for treatment, people for ever leave their historical native land, going abroad to rescue their children.

Sincerely yours, Musa Sadulayev, member of the TRP since 1995